#EnvHist Worth Reading: July 2025

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Every month I carefully track the most popular and significant environmental history articles, videos, audio, and other items making their way through the online environmental history (#envhist) community. You can read all of our past #EnvHist Worth Reading lists right here. Here are my choices for items most worth reading from July 2025.

1) The Nightmare Mess Left by One Closed Pulp Mill

In 2019, Port Alice’s century-old pulp mill was abandoned, leaving behind unstable toxic waste, broken treatment systems, and widespread contamination in Quatsino First Nation territory. Over its history, Zoë Yunker recounts in this article for The Tyee, successive owners neglected maintenance, leading to more and more pollution. British Columbia taxpayers have been left with the clean-up bill of $170+ million. Yunker writes that the province lacks strong laws to compel industrial site remediation, allowing companies to walk away from environmental liabilities. Similar risks loom as half of B.C.’s pulp mills have closed, highlighting urgent need for binding regulations to ensure polluters—not citizens—pay cleanup costs.

2) A deadly 1987 flood foreshadowed the Texas disaster. Survivors ask, ‘why didn’t we learn?

The tragedy of the Guadalupe River flood in Texas dominated the news for a couple weeks last month. In this article for The Guardian, Dara Kerr looks back at a 1987 flood on the same river that led to the evacuation of a children’s camp, during which forty-three people were swept away, ten of whom died. Reporter James Moore recalls chaotic rescue efforts and lasting trauma at the time. Hill Country’s geography makes it highly prone to deadly floods, Kerr writes, yet warning systems remain inconsistent forty years after this flood. In July 2025, Kerr County lacked sufficient warning systems due to political and funding delays. Because such events will become more frequent due to climate change, Kerr concludes that the need for effective early-warning systems will become even more urgent.

3) How We Got Here: Consumer Capitalism and the Environmental Crisis

In this article for The Montreal Review, Mark Stoll dives into his research on capitalism and the environment, focusing in on consumerism. Modern online shopping encourages impulse buying, easy returns, and high consumption, driving waste, pollution, and carbon emissions, he argues. These trends stem from a 1920s shift from industrial to consumer capitalism, fueled by planned obsolescence, disposable goods, credit, and advertising that replaced thrift with self-gratification. While this system created prosperity, it also accelerated environmental degradation—deforestation, pollution, resource depletion, and climate change. Stoll also interrogates mainstream environmentalism’s, often hypocritical, relationship to this consumerism. “Consumer capitalism is undoubtedly to blame for the environmental crisis. Just as undoubtedly, consumer capitalism has given us a good life. It cannot do so forever, unless some wizard conjures a version that uses less energy and fewer resources, because, by its very nature, consumption must grow for consumer capitalism to live,” Stoll writes.

4) William Notman and the Invention of Canada

In this piece for The Observer, Laura Cumming looks at the role of William Notman, a Montreal photographer, in manufacturing Canadian identity in the 1880s. Notman had a hand in crafting the Canadian iconography that we are familiar with today, simulating snow and outdoor scenes using props, painted backdrops, rock salt, and composites. From portraits to action scenes, Cumming explores how Notman’s flexibility enabled him to master a number of techniques and subjects. An interesting read, plue, it is fun to look at the pieces of art that Cumming includes in the piece!

5) The Food Programme – Potatoes with Poppy O’Toole

Poppy O’Toole is a chef and influencer known for her love of potatoes. In this episode of BBC’s The Food Programme, O’toole explores the history of the potato, tracing the foodstuff to its Peruvian roots and then back to a potato farm in Suffolk. She also talks with Dr. Jean Beagle Ristaino about her work on researching the pathogen that contributed to the Irish Potato Famine.

Feature Image: Pulp Mill, Port Alice, British Columbia (1978). “Pulp Mill, Port Alice, BC” by RobertCiavarro is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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Jessica DeWitt

NiCHE Editor-in-Chief, Social Media Editor at Jessica M. DeWitt: Editing and Consulting
is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States, editor, project manager, consultant, and digital communications strategist. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Saskatchewan in 2019. She is an executive member, editor-in-chief, and social media editor for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). She is the Managing Editor for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines and Associate Editor for Environmental Humanities. Closer to home, she is the President of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, a Coordinating Team member of Showing Up for Racial Justice Saskatoon-Treaty Six, and a Conservation Advisory Committee member for the Meewasin Valley Authority. She focuses on developing digital techniques and communications that bridge the divide between academia and the general public in order to democratize knowledge access. You can find out more about her and her freelance services at jessicamdewitt.com.

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