Towards an Uncharismatic Turn in Environmental History: How to Talk about the Boring and Forgotten Ones?

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This is the introductory post for a series about “uncharismatic” species in environmental history, emerging from a workshop at Universität Augsburg in September 2026.

What do horses, dogs, and whales all have in common? However different their anatomies and evolutionary maps, however different the significance and consequence of their histories, however different their relationships with the course of human history; all four are united — with a near universality — by one attribute: they are charismatic.1 Historians, to no less an extent than the historical actors on whose records we are reliant to tell these histories, are charmed by and drawn to these species. Our analyses are quick to recognise the power, beauty, influence, strength, domesticability, or friendliness of these and other species like them. Sandra Swart says of the anthropocentric archive that:

“Some animals, especially those of instrumental value like horses, are prominent in national archival collections. Perceived scourges of livestock dubbed ‘vermin’ (like jackal) and trophy animals in hunting are well represented in the colonial and post-colonial archive, but other animals are not recorded in the archives at all. Archives are full of references to horses as part of the colonial state’s military project, and to cattle and sheep as integral to feeding the nation, to livestock-breeding initiatives, game control and wildlife preservation from verminous threats, but references to specific animals may be hard to find.”2

Harriet Ritvo similarly observes that, “traditional archives are full of animals, as have been the societies that they — however imperfectly — reflect and preserve. But animals have tended to be segregated and subordinated in archives, often more so than they were in the flesh.”3

But can we — and how can we — invert this constraining construction and tell the histories of the uncharismatic. A two-day hybrid workshop hosted by the Universität Augsburg in September 2026 asked what happens when we bring the hideous, invasive, and forgotten species of the past to the centre. Our first task is to concretise what we are talking about when we are talking about uncharisma. The Oxford English Dictionary offers that it denotes someone who is, “lacking charisma; uninspiring.” Max Weber wrote of charisma in (male) leadership that it is a “certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.”4 Jamie Lorimer has applied charisma to non-humans in the context of biodiversity conservation, showing how it comprises “ecological, aesthetic, and corporeal charisma.”5 If charismatic people are charming and inspiring, then it follows that the uncharismatic ones are charmless and uninspiring. So, who are the uncharismatic non-humans of the past?

The workshop was an attempt at charting this new course. The presenters covered a range of topics, spanning from feelings towards mushrooms in eighteenth-century Western Europe, the mixed receptions of guava in Southeast Asia, and opposing approaches to the Sambar Deer in colonial India, to magpies in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, horses rendered invisible due to disability, and the modern trendiness of the gut microbiome. The full programme is available to read here, and a fuller roundup here.

Scholars sit in an open circle in deep conversation in the seminar room. At their feet are scattered thoughts on the theme of uncharisma in environmental history written on coloured paper.
Workshop participants ditch their slides and sit in productive conversation at the close of the workshop. Photo: Simone M. Müller, 2026

This blog series features contributions from six of the presenters at the workshop. Nancy Cushing and Kevin Markwell opened the workshop with their coauthored musing on “negative charisma.” Their research explains how charismatic humans (think David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, and Steve Irwin) rescued certain species from the undesirable uncharismatic label, and creates a handy distinction between positive and negative charisma. Kate Stevens draws on her recent article in the Journal of Global History to explain the agency of shipworm in the colonial Pacific. The bivalves’ artistic chewpoints — once the undoing of certain imperial endeavours — today are highly sought by luthiers and joiners. Erragab Eljanhaoui reexamines the Barbary captivity narratives to explore two opposing accounts of locusts in north Africa. The same locusts who awed the scientist inspired fear and repulsion in the common sailor, underscoring the subjectivity of these categorisations. White ants upset imperial expansion in Elise Milburn’s history of sixteenth-century New Spain and the Caribbean. There, the archive of the Mexica reveres ants as place-markers, while the Spanish archive fears them as invasive disruptors of agriculture. Next, David Quinche’s expertise as a scientific communicator is a heady reminder of the on-the-ground impacts of this kind of abstract thinking. Who gets labelled charismatic, all too often determines who gets funding, and whose lives are subsequently highlighted and prioritised. And finally, Claire Waddell-Wood brings environmental history back to its forest history roots with an against-the-grain reading (puns very much intended) of the timber industry’s archive in search of the hidden voices of lichens, mosses, insects, and the “more-than-tree” histories obscured by traditional historiographical bounds.

The individual papers in the workshop altogether revealed two crucial lessons. First, charisma might be thought of as a process, perhaps captured by the nominalisation, that we might call “charismatisation.” That some species are more readily charismatised due to their personalities, colourful plumages, distinctive song, or some other characteristic is only half of the story. An un/charismatic binary is needlessly counterproductive and historically imprecise here. It became obvious to us that we were working across a broad spectrum, with some species much more or less charismatic than others. While some have historically risen up, others have been demoted.

Second, we were careful to separate “uncharisma” from unattraction. While there may be some aesthetic aspect to charisma and we might thus read “attract” in a visual way, indubitably there is more to being uncharismatic than merely being ugly. Indeed, some of the least aesthetic species are among the most intriguing, invoking strong emotional reactions and powerful historical consequences; crocodiles, snakes, and spiders might be undesired or feared, for example, but that strong reaction might recalled “negative charisma” rather than “uncharisma.” What we were instead turning attention to is the uninteresting, the dull, forgotten, boring, and at times inconsequential non-human actors of history.

How to tell the histories of species made invisible in the anthropocentric archive? That theme quickly became the workshop’s biggest challenge. Certainly, some show up in times of chaos: locusts, rats, and ants in times of plague; insects in times of fire; shipworm when they sink vessels and destroy other imperial infrastructure. These show their faces in the archive and shape the course of history at pivotal moments, yet they seem perhaps benign and uninteresting at most other times, scarcely warranting a mention in the archive and often hurriedly scurrying from view. What kinds of histories are we able to tell with such a source base as that?

Alongside this NiCHE blog series, podcast episodes are also planned, and the presenters are currently writing up their papers to appear as chapters in an edited book intended for publication with a university press. Do be sure to check out the Universität Augsburg news page to stay up-to-date with the project’s progress.

  1. Of course there is a subjectivity inherent in this designation. But as far as the historiography is concerned — to say nothing of the state of research beyond the humanities — the generalisation hopefully stands. ↩︎
  2. Sandra Swart, The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past (Jacana Media, 2023), 27. ↩︎
  3. Harriet Ritvo, “Epilogue: Combinations and Conjunctions”, in Jennifer Bonnell and Sean Kheraj, eds, Traces of the Animal Past: Methodological Challenges in Animal History (University of Calgary Press, 2022), 389. ↩︎
  4. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation (trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons, Oxford University Press, 1947), 358–359. ↩︎
  5. Jamie Lorimer, “Nonhuman Charisma”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 5 (2007): 911. ↩︎
Feature Image: Hideous, Invasive, Forgotten: Some species seem to call out for attention while others are quickly overlooked. What can they teach us? Detail from plate vii, “Astroblepus Grixalvii”, in Humboldt and Bonpland, Receuil d’observations de zoologie vol. I (Paris, 1811).

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Harrison Croft

Harrison Croft is a Humboldt research fellow in global environmental history and environmental humanities at Universität Augsburg, Germany. He writes on rivers, more-than-human histories, and climate change.

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