Canadians and Canadian Environmental History at ESEH 2025

The 2025 meeting of the European Society for Environmental History will take place in Uppsala, Sweden from August 18-22. Below is an abridged portion of the programme that features Canadians, scholars working at Canadian universities, or presentations featuring Canadian environmental history. We’d like to highlight the work of NiCHE editor Nicole Miller (Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University) who served at the conference manager on the local organizing committee!

ESEH Online Program

Climate Histories Art Interventions at ESEH 2025

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

S01-13: As Above So Below: Verticality, Environmental History, and the Anthropocene
Chair(s): Erik Isberg (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Presenter(s): Signe Brieghel (University of Copenhagen), Charlotte Wrigley (University of Stavanger), Sebastian Lundsteen Nielsen (University of Copenhagen)

Panel Abstract:
The advent of “The Anthropocene” a highly contested concept, has generated a large number of disciplines to explore new avenues of analysis. Historians of various kinds have engaged in discussions by focusing on the temporal politics of the geological concept that considers deep time, urgencies, crises, historical responsibility and far futures. While place(s) are by no means unfamiliar to environmental historians, its geological connotations also gesture a turn towards space as a potential way of exploring the unfolding poly crises.
Using verticality as a starting point, this panel explores the affordances of environmental history at the intersection with spatiality. We showcase how a vertical approach might provide an attunement to things not always legible – from atmosphere to the subsurface, from infrastructure to the infra-ordinary. Research on spaces have provided a depth of examples that trouble depictions of space as depoliticized by showing their political effects despite its somewhat clandestine state.
Locating the seemingly invisible prompts questions on the politics of visuality that include models, monitoring, remote sensing, mapping, and quantification – all of which suggests methodological considerations and experimentation. As the panel aims to show, being explicitly attentive to the spatial dimensions in environmental history has crucial implications for our ways of thinking drawing from examples regarding soil, smoke, and sinks.

Fiery depths: burn restoration, zombie reanimation, and re-earthing history
Charlotte Wrigley
In Southeast Norway, fire is returning to the forest. After almost a century of suppression techniques used to prevent wildfires, the municipality of Aurskog-Høland will begin experimenting with prescribed burning as a way to regenerate forest ecosystems and increase biodiversity. This comes at a time when huge wildfires – known as megafires – are regularly burning large areas of Canada and Siberia, as well as in drier regions such as southern Europe and Australia. There is also evidence of a growing problem known as zombie fires – or overwinter fires – which occur in permafrost soils with high organic content; this organic material continues to smoulder during the winter months before re-emerging at the surface the next summer.
Attention towards fire is focused largely on its destructive effects at the surface, as it rips across the land burning housing and even killing people and animals. Similarly, the smoke it produces causes respiratory issues and can travel vast distances. Less attention is paid towards fire’s subterranean makeup, both materially and historically. The controlled fires in Norway and the uncontrolled fires in Canada have not come from nowhere: both are products of long, deep, and often violent histories that are inextricably tied to the build up of soil, seeds, pollen, charcoal, and other subsurface matter that produces a layering of time and space. I argue that we need to ‘re-earth’ fire history in a way that both encompasses its subsurface roots and reveals its buried legacies of capitalism, cultural suppression, land theft, and bureaucracy.

S02-13: Resilience in Climate History: Perspectives on the Past, Visions of the Future?
Chair(s): John McNeill (Georgetown University, United States of America)
Presenter(s): Dominik Collet (University of Oslo), Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University), Heli Huhtamaa (Universität Bern), Andrea Kiss (Vienna University of Technology), Astrid Ogilvie (University of Colorado Boulder)

Roundtable Abstract:
This roundtable commemorates the completion and imminent publication of the Oxford Handbook of Resilience in Climate History, a collection of 32 multidisciplinary essays that explore how populations across six continents coped with climate change over 20,000 years of human history. The roundtable features Handbook lead editor Dagomar Degroot, a historian of climate change and existential risk, and it is chaired by another Handbook editor, John R. McNeill, a historian of the Anthropocene. It includes chapter authors and pioneering climate historians Heli Huhtamaa, Astrid Ogilvie, and Andrea Kiss. It also includes Dominik Collet, a climate historian who did not participate in the Handbook and can comment on its themes from a distance.
The roundtable conversation will touch on several major themes that emerged in the completion of the Handbook. It will consider, for example, what is gained and lost by using the term “resilience” in historical scholarship. It will identify best practices for transdisciplinary collaboration, revealing the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to writing climate history. It will evaluate whether there were common strategies that diverse populations followed to survive and even thrive in periods of climate change. Finally, it will explore whether scholarship of the past can and should contribute to present-day efforts at climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

S04-11: Trading Ecologies: Commodity Exchange, Infrastructure and Environmental Changes
Chair(s): Stéphane Castonguay (UQTR, Canada)
Presenter(s): Stéphane Castonguay (UQTR), Jim Clifford (University of Saskatchewan), Matthew Evenden (University of British Columbia), Helena Osei-Egyir (University of Saskatchewan)

Panel Abstract:
Britain’s economic take-off during the nineteenth-century relied on a global network of commodity exchange. London was the epicentre of that network that required the importation of natural resources from abroad to supply the industries and to feed the industrious population of Great Britain, although ports, urban centres and rural landscapes across the globe participated to the overseas exchange of raw materials and manufactured goods. Environmental historians have insisted on overseas forests, sugar plantations or wheat fields that enabled British economic and population growth to overcome the ecological deadlocks that Holland, China or Denmark faced at different points between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. This insistence on the ecological footprints of British industrialization abroad has led to a neglect to changes in the domestic landscape brought about by this global trade that not only concerned the import of natural resources, but also the export of goods manufactured in Britain. Papers in this panel explore how infrastructure that supported overseas trade central to Britain demographic and industrial development introduced landscape and ecological changes at home and abroad, sometimes in synchronicity.

Ballast plants in the Age of Sail: shipping infrastructures, trade routes and the accidental exchange of flora
Matthew Evenden
In the Age of Sail, ships required solid ballast in the hull to ensure buoyancy and balance at sea. While mariners often sought out heavy trade goods to perform this function, when they travelled without cargo or only partly laden, stones and sand were often taken aboard instead. In major ports, the volume and load of ballast exported alongside trade goods was enormous. In London in the mid-18th Century, for example, about 250,000 tons of ballast were placed on to departing ships annually. Collected from river beds and beaches, such materials also hosted plants, seeds and insects. When ships arrived at their destinations, ballast became waste and mariners dumped it where they could. Most organized ports prohibited disposal in harbours and established ballast dumping grounds above the high-water mark. This incidentally created a pathway for stowaway flora and fauna to survive and propagate. As the volume of global trade increased in the mid-nineteenth century, naturalists began to publish lists of so-called ballast plants, exotic introductions collected on the heaps of ballast surrounding ports like Boston, Auckland and Newcastle. This paper highlights the scale and significance of ballast circulation in the Age of Sail as a vector of ecological introduction, and points to how the infrastructures of trade and port functions produced unintended ecological consequences.

Building Britain with Canadian Resources: the co-evolution of overseas port facilities
Jim Clifford and Stéphane Castonguay
This paper examines changes in urban environments as a result of the integration of the international economy and the densification of commercial networks in the 19th century. We aim to understand how the supply of raw materials and food resources to Britain during this period contributed to the establishment of infrastructures for the circulation, transshipment, and trade of goods in port facilities of British North American colonies and Great Britain. The study of the ecological footprint of British industrialization in the 19th century usually focuses on the consequences of natural resource extraction in overseas forests and agricultural environments. This paper seeks to explore the ecological footprint in urban environments both overseas and in Britain. It focuses on the transformation of port and fluvial infrastructures in Canada, particularly around the docks of Montreal and Quebec, which resulted from the establishment and expansion of transatlantic trade in commodities such as wood, wheat, and animal products. The development of railways, transshipment and handling facilities, as well as silos, flour mills, and cold storage warehouses, created a network of infrastructure necessary for the circulation and trade of commodities, fundamentally altering the colonial urban environment. These environmental transformations had their metropolitan counterparts in the infrastructures designed to facilitate the movement of raw materials and food resources, leading to modifications in the docks of London, Liverpool, and Bristol to accommodate larger ships and increased volumes of commodities, which sometimes necessitated special facilities for their transshipment or storage. By juxtaposing colonial and metropolitan contexts, our communication reveals the interconnected transformations of material worlds and landscapes.

Industrializing the British cocoa supply: railways, ports and cocoa extractivism in the Gold Coast
Helena Osei-Egyir and Jim Clifford
During the first decades of the 20th century, chocolate entered the diet of the working class in Western Europe. Following other commodities including sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco, the price of chocolate dropped to the point normal working people could enjoy this luxury in their diets, which in turn led to a dramatic increase in demand. Two interconnected developments made this possible. First, industrialization and technological developments significantly increased the scale of production while reducing costs. Second, an inverted form of ecological imperialism extended production from Latin America to West Africa. In 1936, the Gold Coast produced 672,409,100 lbs. of cocoa, up from 220,462, three decades earlier in 1896. Scholarship on the Gold Coast’s rise as a leading producer of cocoa has often focused on the indigenous African capitalist farmers, who through various forms of land transactions, cleared forests and cultivated cocoa in the High Forest Region. On closer examination, industrial technology facilitated the cocoa boom in the Gold Coast. Remi Jedwab and Alexander Moradi demonstrate the rapid increase in cocoa export required railways to open the forested regions to cocoa farms. The consequences were mixed: the economy grew and the Gold Coast experienced rapid urbanization, but cocoa farms significantly reduced the biodiversity of the forest regions and led to soil degradation over the longer term.

S05-03: Wine Grape as Barometer: Consumption, Climate Change and Other Environmental Phenomena
Chair(s): Kathleen Brosnan (University of Oklahoma, United States of America)
Presenter(s): Daniel Bender (University of Toronto), Kathleen Brosnan (University of Oklahoma), Julie McIntyre (University of Newcastle), Eunice Nodari (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)

Panel Abstract:
Highly sensitive to ecological conditions, grapes have served as a barometer, measuring the implications of long-term shifts in weather and temperature patterns and other environmental phenomena. Often unappreciated in the moment, climate change has shaped viticultural production for decades. It contributed to increased alcohol percentages and increased demand for white wines. It allowed new regions to enter the premium market through enhanced terroirs. It challenged established regions by undermining vignerons’ ability to produce wines that match their traditional typicity. It shifted national priorities, placing new demands on limited water supplies to produce cheap wines. It created the conditions for infestations of new diseases and pests. The four papers in this panel capture global market trends and shifting industry practices, all taking place in an era of, and intersecting with, climate change. And the papers consider the implications of larger events in specific wine regions in Italy, Australia, Brazil and the United States. The four individual paper abstracts follow below.

Typicity’s End: Tasting Wine in the Anthropocene
Daniel Bender
Even taste has a climate change tipping point. Legal regulations around geographical indications and the expectations of wine connoisseurs and professionals mean that producers make wines to match a traditional typicity. However, climate change is rapidly altering the organoleptic profile of most wines, challenging the way we make, taste, and evaluate wines. Focusing on the Roero wine region in Northern Italy, this paper suggests that the Anthropocene is also an age of taste extinction.

S05-08: Environmental Histories of Plastics (Part 2): Consumption, Pollution, Disintegration
Chair(s): Finn Arne Jorgensen (University of Stavanger)
Presenter(s): Elsa Devienne (Northumbria University, UK), Jessica Croteau (Haverford College), Jessica van Horssen (McMaster University), Borja Nogué Algueró (University of Gothenburg)

Panel Abstract:
There is not a day that passes when plastic pollution does not make the headlines. As we approach the signature of a historical United Nations global plastics treaty, slated for late 2024, plastic in all its shapes—from plastic straws to microplastics and including the most ubiquitous kind, plastic packaging—is a major topic of concern among the general public. Plastic pollution is the most obvious issue. But equally concerning is the fact that plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, contribute to our carbon emissions and act as magnets for dangerous chemicals that can leach into the environment and our bodies.
There is a vibrant scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of discard studies that examines plastics’ ubiquity in modernity. Yet most of this scholarship approaches the topic from a cultural studies, media studies or art history angle. These two panels (Environmental Histories of Plastic 1: Producers and Environmental Histories of Plastic 2: Consumption, Pollution and Disintegration) propose to add an environmental, social, cultural, and political history angle to these studies, expanding understandings of our ambiguous relationship with plastic from the 1950s until today.
Focusing more specifically on plastic consumption, pollution and (lack of) disintegration, this panel will explore marine pollution and its regulation in Europe (Nogué Algueró, Longo and York), the rise of anti-plastics activism in the US (Devienne), the strange case of the plastic Christmas tree (van Horssen), and plastics’ toxic persistence in our environments (Croteau). Ultimately, the panel will be an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which the introduction of plastics in the 20th century has fundamentally re-shaped humans’ relationship to nature.

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, How Plastic Are Your Branches?
Jessica van Horssen
Augmented Natures supplement and simulate elements of the natural world with objects that appear to coexist in the same environment. They can tell us fascinating things about culture, technology, and the social construction of the human-nature relationship, as well as how society adapts to biodiversity risk and loss. What do simulations of nature in domestic spaces tell us about how societies constructed the human-natural relationship? How can biodiversity loss be made more palatable through the manufacture and sale of more vibrant, more verdant, simulations that reject natural cycles to have eternal, mess-free lives? This paper will seek to answer these questions and raise others through an examination of the history of artificial Christmas trees.
Artificial Christmas trees first emerged in Germany during the 19th century when chronic deforestation threatened entrenched seasonal, regional traditions. The paper will explore different iterations of early simulated trees in Europe, then turn to the United States in the postwar era, where plastics revolutionized the artificial tree trade and radically changed consumer expectations of festive symbols. These symbols, once a marker of seasonal changes, quickly became physical representations of the human mastery of the natural environment, while blinding society to the wider implications of deforestation, petrochemicals, and overconsumption. This paper speaks directly to ecocritical theory and the “break-it-and-fix-it” mentality that enables innovators to capitalize on augmenting the very nature disappearing around us, under the guise of progress.

S05-11: Poster Session
Chronology of slash-and-burn cultivation on the Eastern European Plain: the first approximation
Ekaterina Ershova (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Elena Ponomarenko (University of Ottawa)

Poster Abstract:
Slash-and-burn agriculture is an ancient extensive agricultural system that was practiced in Northern Europe at least until the 17th and 19th centuries and had a major influence on the formation of modern landscapes in the forest zone. Although late slash-and-burn farming is well documented, it is not known when it was invented or how it spread in early times.
Our work complements the historical data by studying ancient soils. We obtained a set of 116 radiocarbon dates for charcoal from horizons of swidden soils in large river basins on the East European Plain. Swidden horizons were identified based on diagnostic soil morphology, pollen spectra, and accumulations of charcoal and phytoliths in the soil. The ages range from about 2000 cal. years B.C. to 1700 A.D., with frequency peaks in 1750-200 B.C., 500-250 B.C., 250-750 A.D., and in the 14th-16th centuries A.D. Each date series reflects the expansion of groups practicing swidden agriculture into new territory. This expansion may have been driven by a variety of social causes, but all the peaks in the spread of swidden agriculture that we have documented coincided with either cold climatic episodes or abrupt climatic transitions. The slash-and-burn farming is ideally suited for migrations, as it does not require special tillage tools and draft animals. It also allows the use of infertile but better warming sandy soils, which is crucial during cold climatic periods.

S05-14: Water as Witness: Rethinking Historical Water Infrastructures in the Age of Climate Uncertainty
Chair(s): Ramya Swayamprakash (Grand Valley State University)
Presenter(s): Sam Grinsell (University College London), Elizabeth Hameeteman (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany), M. Christopher Low (University of Utah), Alesia Ofori (Cranfield University), Ramya Swayamprakash (Grand Valley State University)

Panel Abstract:
As human-induced climate change and related uncertainties reshape human relationships with the more-than-human world, the histories of water offer profound insights into the interplay between environment and technology. Twentieth-century water planning adopted a reductionist and modern view of water as mere H₂O, abstracted from its local, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. This perspective fueled the technocratic ideology of the “hydraulic mission,” which emphasized large-scale, state-led engineering projects to control water flows in pursuit of economic progress. Such envirotechnical infrastructures exemplify a bias for the “mega” and “meta” at the expense of local wisdom and ecological integrity, embedding human-centered priorities in the very fabric of landscapes.
This session invites scholars to rethink these envirotechnical infrastructures not as static accomplishments but as active elements within climate and water histories, structures that have reshaped ecosystems and communities alike. By investigating water as a historical actant, we challenge the traditional narrative of infrastructure as a solely human triumph, proposing instead that water and its management technologies reflect a broader climate history—a legacy where the drive for control often marginalized local relationships and the spiritual significance of water. In revisiting these water infrastructure histories, we seek pathways toward more inclusive, resilient water practices that honor both ecological balance and cultural significance in the face of ongoing climate challenges.

S07-02: Quantitative Approaches to the Environmental History in Cold War East-Central Europe
Chair(s): Anna Olenenko (University of Alberta), Stephen Brain (Mississippi State University)
Presenter(s): Renata Popelková (University of Ostrava), Csaba Lakócai (University of Ostrava), Viktor Pál (University of Ostrava, Czechia), Petr Popelka (University of Ostrava)

Panel Abstract:
This session aims to strengthen the quantitative aspects of environmental history by including papers that employ historical datasets to reconstruct and interpret past environmental tendencies in Cold War East-Central Europe. Consequently, it aims to tackle both anthropogenic material- and energy flows, as well as trajectories of non-human agencies.
In the first paper, Csaba Lakócai analyzes how the transition from state-socialist centrally planned economies to capitalist market economies in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries has led to diverse environmental outcomes. The research aims to analyze environmental performance and wellbeing indicators from the 1990s until the early 2020s, with a comparative outlook on the 1980s in state-socialist CEE countries. In the second paper, Viktor Pál focuses on the development of beverage container recycling systems in state-socialist Hungary and Czechoslovakia and quantifies the development of complex recycling and waste utilization infrastructure, that proved to be particularly effective for beverage containers to understand better the regimes’ interaction with the natural environment. The last paper by Renata Popelková and Petr Popelka examines the water quality protection efforts of Eastern European state-socialist regimes, using the example of the Odra River. It examines a two-way more-than-human interaction through the history of pollutants from the late 1950s onward and the actions and tools used to improve river water quality.
The session is aiming to combine productive aspects of traditional panels and panel discussions to facilitate and deepen interaction between the speakers, the discussant, the chair, and members of the audience. Thus, the proposal involves paper presenters sharing their papers with the discussant, who is a recognized scholar on the field. The discussant then provides a short commentary after the papers were presented to stimulate the discussion with the audience.

S07-03: Promising Solutions. Can Nuclear Power Evolve for a Sustainable Future?
Chair(s): Fabienne Will (Deutsches Museum, Germany)
Presenter(s): Astrid Mignon Kirchhof (Deutsches Museum, Germany), Tatiana Perga (TU Berlin, Germany), Yaroslav Koshelev (TU Berlin, Germany), Markku Johani Lehtonen (University Pompeu Fabra, Spain)

Panel Abstract:
In 2022, after debates, international analyses, and political arm-wrestling, nuclear power was included in the EU taxonomy for sustainable activities boosting nuclear energy’s image as a “green“ energy source. Against the backdrop of yet another promised “nuclear renaissance,” the nuclear industry is working on novel reactor designs, like small modular reactors, and argues that nuclear is indispensable in ensuring energy security and combating climate change. Proponents portray nuclear power as a reliable and low-carbon source of baseload electricity, while others consider nuclear as expensive climate solution compared to the cheaper and flexible deployable renewable energy sources.
Yet, history presents us with evidence of inherent dangers of nuclear power, exemplified by the explosion at Kyshtym in 1957 and the nuclear accidents in the 1970s, 80s, and 2000s. Their potential catastrophic impact is profound with radioactive contamination crossing borders and persisting for centuries. Alongside economics, the unresolved dilemma of managing high-level radioactive waste remains an Achilles’ Heel of nuclear power. Moreover, uranium mining, enrichment, and fuel fabrication has major social and environmental consequences as well as geopolitical implications. In war areas like Ukraine, and in mining areas, such as in countries like Germany, Australia, Canada, Namibia and Kazakhstan, communities often face both displacement and health risks. In this panel we propose to examine the argumentative debates around the announced nuclear revival via four distinct perspectives.

Everything changes so that nothing changes: Small modular reactors (SMRs) as a safe, cheap, fast and nimble solution… to what?
Markku Lehtonen
The history of nuclear technologies is characterised by a long series of both failed and successful promises. The promises legitimising the development of nuclear power have shifted over time, from those portraying the technology in terms of ‘Atoms for Peace’ or a solution to the pressing problems of energy supply and world hunger, to the current discourses describing nuclear as an “obligatory passage point” in the fight against catastrophic climate change.
The nuclear promises have often failed to materialise but have been revived and reconfigured time and again. The latest in the series are the small modular reactors (SMRs). These reactors are described as relying on “tried-and-proven” technologies, while at the same time promising radical disruption as cheaper, safer, more financeable, flexible, multifunctional, and compatible with decentralised renewable energy sources than their large-scale predecessors.
Drawing on an analysis of SMR policies and developments in five countries (Canada, Finland, France, Sweden, and the UK), this paper examines the partly overlapping trajectories of the SMR promise in the five countries, to illustrate the multifunctionality of this promise. Externally, the SMRs envision disruptive transformation towards sustainable and economically viable atom. Internally – within the nuclear sector – they promise to ensure continuity and prosperity of the industry, independent of whether indeed the promise becomes materialised in commercial SMR projects.

Thursday, August 21, 2025

S08-06: The Little Ice Age. Boundary Object, Timespan, Narrative (Part 1)
Chair(s): Dominik Collet (University of Oslo, Norway)
Presenter(s): Dominik Collet (University of Oslo), Wanda Marcussen (University of Oslo), Martin Miles (Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen), Joana van de Löcht (University of Muenster)

Panel Abstract:
The Little Ice Age is maybe the most prominent episode in the field of climate history. It attracts both popular as well as interdisciplinary scientific interest. Since its conception in the 1930s, the concept has experienced major revisions, most recently in light of and as a backdrop to global warming. The term has been criticized for suggesting a false heterogeneity, excluding humans and for its undue focus on temperature. However, it remains a powerful ‘boundary object’ (Star/Griesemer) of interdisciplinary cooperation, science communication, and the environing of history.
This session showcases the most recent studies investigating, substantiating and challenging the Little Ice Age concept. It unites science- and humanities-led approaches on key issues ranging from global perspectives to capturing variance and from past witch-hunts to communicating climate today. Together, the papers explore how we may integrate and narrate past and future climate during challenging times.

Integrating Natural and Societal Archives to Reconstruct Sea Ice. in the North Atlantic during the Little Ice Age
Martin Miles
Previous research based on historical data on the Little Ice Age (LIA) climate across the northern North Atlantic has shown that intermittent periods of severe climate linked to heavy sea-ice conditions were pronounced and had major social and economic effects. This presentation will consider variations in sea ice in the LIA as reconstructed from novel integration of independent and complementary records from historical and natural archives. The natural archives include high-resolution marine sediments and sclerochronological records, which are based on the remains of long-lived organisms. These records span the northern North Atlantic from eastern Canada to the Barents Sea. Emphasis is on reconstructing “Great Sea-Ice Anomalies” that arose from Arctic Ocean-origin sea ice exported toward the North Atlantic. Since 1600, we find several periods of anomalously severe sea-ice conditions: early 1600s, 1680s-1690s, early 1800s, and 1880s-1910s. The mid-nineteenth century was comparatively mild, especially the decades of the 1840s-1850s. This was followed by a severe period from the 1880s-1910s, as clearly recorded in natural and historical records, the latter of which document Iceland’s final subsistence famine. From a sea-ice and marine climate perspective, the LIA in the North Atlantic region persisted until its abrupt termination around 1920. This reconstruction both substantiates the LIA as a boundary object, albeit with several mild periods between cold periods, and yet challenges a common view that the LIA ended in the 19th century.

S09-01: War, Ecocide, and Beyond: Historizing Ukraine’s Environment
Chair(s): Julia Malitska (Södertörn University)
Presenter(s): Anna Olenenko (University of Alberta), Oleksii Chebotarov (University of St. Gallen), Iryna Zamuruieva (Independent scholar), Anastasiia Khovtura (V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University), Illia Malyk (Khortytsia National Reserve)

Roundtable Abstract:
Since the onset of the war in Ukraine in 2014, and especially following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the harmful environmental impacts of the war in Ukraine and beyond have gained significant media and academic attention. This coverage has largely focused on the damage inflicted upon non-human nature, with numerous narratives lamenting the ecocide and suffering of Ukraine’s ecosystems. However, the historical relationships between humans and their environment in Ukraine have still remained invisible in these discussions. Understanding this historical context, though, is crucial to unpacking the complex ways in which people have engaged with and influenced their environment, offering a deeper understanding of the roots of current environmental issues. In response to these challenges, the EnvHistUA Research Group was founded to convene environmental historians of Ukraine in a comprehensive discourse. The group brings scholars together to explore the epistemological and theoretical aspects, as well as the practical implications, of writing Ukraine’s environmental history—a history that goes beyond themes of war, destruction, and catastrophe. By fostering dialogue and collaboration, EnvHistUA seeks to encourage more scholars to study Ukrainian environmental history. The group will present its initial findings, discuss the outcomes of recent conference, and share plans for the future, including the publication of an edited volume that will contribute to this important field.

Friday, August 22, 2025

S10-02: Colonial Climates and Environments (Part 1)
Chair(s): Petter Hellström (Uppsala Universitet), Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh (University of Cambridge)
Presenter(s): Kristin Brig-Ortiz (Washington University in St Louis), Justin Roberts (Dalhousie University), Claire Sabel (Universität Wien)

Panel Abstract:
Colonial legacies and legacies of enslavement have received belated attention in recent years; these twin panels contribute to these debates by tracing these legacies in a range of colonial environments, from the Americas to the Indo-Pacific, and from the early modern era to the modern period. Climate theories about the influence of local temperatures and weather on body and mind played an important role in the colonisers’ perceptions of such environments and in the labour force’s formation. Conversely, beliefs about the human ability to change local climates drove such environmental policies as land reclamation, forest clearance, or swamp drainage. Even the colonists’ investigation and extraction of local resources, such as mineral wealth or drinking water, were closely shaped by their evolving perceptions and understandings of the climates and environments they encountered, often vastly different from those in Europe. It is important to remember that colonisers did not act in a vacuum: their claim to have done so is problematic and itself in need of historicising. Accordingly, these twin panels will consider indigenous perspectives and frameworks of knowing colonised environments, as well as the ways these interacted with and were exploited by the colonisers’, often without acknowledgement. By focusing on different colonial contexts with different economies in various periods of history, the papers presented as part of these twin panels will also offer possibilities for cross-cultural, trans-imperial comparisons. Colonial environments will emerge as eminently suited to an environmental historical investigation seeking to understand present-day legacies of past terraforming and extractivist legacies.

Roads and Rebels: Mountains, Climate, and Imperial Domain in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and Scotland
Justin Roberts
In the early eighteenth century, the British struggled to establish imperial domain over mountainous regions with heavy rainfall in both Scotland and Jamaica. The mountain range in the interior of Jamaica and the Scottish Highlands were both deemed uncivilized landscapes in the eyes of the British imperial state; they were places where Scottish Clans and Jamaican Maroons had adapted to the environment, flourished and used the terrain to resist imperial domain. Agents of the British imperial state labelled both mountain populations as “wild,” “savage,” and “barbarous.” Imperial architects in both places imagined similar colonization and infrastructure schemes to control the Jamaican and Scottish mountains and the people in them. Road building was central to these schemes. British military officials and colonial governors encouraged Jamaicans to emulate the Highland roads that the British military was building to suppress rebels and one Jamaican governor suggested that loyal Scottish Highlanders, accustomed to mountain living and warfare, could be sent to Jamaica’s mountains to counter the Jamaican maroons. Jamaica and Scotland are strikingly different at first glance. They both experience seasons of heavy rainfall but they were in two very different climactic zones; one was tropical and the other temperate and closer to the Arctic circle than any other well-populated part of the British empire. It was the similarity in mountainous terrain and hostile weather and the ways in which those environmental factors limited mobility and fostered resistance that mattered more in the eyes of the British state than the differences in climate.

S10-05: Roads not Taken: Forest Histories of Convergence, Divergence and Emergence
Chair(s): Ryan Hellenbrand (University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States of America)
Presenter(s): Katharina Linne (BOKU Vienna), Ryan Hellenbrand (Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison), Juha Haavisto (University of Turku), Anton Sveding (University of Agder)

Panel Abstract:
At this juncture, forest history has been a major component of narrating the trajectories of imperial power and development. The German style of scientific forestry, for example, was particularly desirable for many European polities. The dialectic between extracting forest resources and the quest to place forests under “rational” scientific management has generated a large body of scholarship. However, there remain plenty of roads not taken in the historiography of forests and their management. Our panel returns to these roads not taken by examining convergences and divergences in the trajectories of forestry education, implementation, and the ecological consequences they leave behind.
Together, our papers point toward forestry’s complex transnational entanglements which emerge through insights from Finland, the United States, Canada, Austria, and Germany. We address how the story of forestry and its ascendence as a system for controlling human-environment relations has been told; how particular renderings of this story continue to resonate within current management practices that emphasize economic utility; and how they continue to shape different people’s connections to forested places.
Standing at this divergence, emerging insights in forest history offer opportunities for making different choices. Knowing more about the choices that led us here will help shape our understanding of how forest management decisions ripple out into the future.

Forestry on wheels: Travelling forest exhibitions in Canada during the interwar period
Anton Sveding
Early in the twentieth century, the global scale of deforestation sparked anxieties amongst conservationists throughout the British Empire about erosion, flooding, loss of scenery, a timber famine, and even climate change, fears which were further exacerbated after the First World War. Despite these challenges, political support for forest conservation largely remained low across the Empire, which conservationists attributed to a lack of public understanding of benefits of scientific forest management and forest conservation more generally. In response, state forest departments and voluntary conservation organisations undertook ambitious schemes to rally public and political support for their cause. Amongst the more ambitious ventures were the railway exhibitions organised by the Canadian Forestry Association which toured across the country spreading the gospel of conservation through tree planting demonstrations, cinema screenings, and elaborate dioramas. By using the railway exhibitions as a case study, and drawing upon reports, articles, and not least photographs, this paper explores the role of didactics and propaganda in Canadian forest conservation during the interwar period. Indeed, the railway exhibitions open new questions regarding how conservationists perceived the public not only as a political force, but which could be mobilised and actively involved in conservation programs during the interwar period, especially how conservationists sought to promote forest conservation to school children and tree planting to prairie farmers.

S11-02: The Anthropocene Epoch (Part 1)
Chair(s): Sverker Soerlin (KTH Stockholm), Sabine Hoehler (KTH Stockholm)
Presenter(s): Martin J. Head (Brock University), Jan Zalasiewicz (Leicester University), Colin P. Summerhayes ((Scott Polar Institute), Libby Robin (ANU)

Roundtable Abstract:
Part 1: The Anthropocene epoch: formal or informal?
In the quarter-century since it was mooted by Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene has undergone kalaeidoscopic shifts of interpretation and use. Crutzen’s rationale – that it made little sense to use the term Holocene for the present day when the stable Earth System conditions it represents has now had terminated – is now even more true than when he proposed the term in 2000. Furthermore, the data assembled by the AWG and others clearly shows that the enormous sociopolitical changes associated with the mid-20th century not only produced both major, irreversible change in our planet’s trajectory but also left striking proxy signals in the recent geological record – and that an unambiguous, quantitatively supported Holocene/Anthropocene epoch boundary can be sharply drawn on this basis. Nevertheless, the AWG’s proposal to add the Anthropocene to the Geological Time Scale was summarily rejected by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), with scant discussion of the assembled evidence and with no formal feedback. Here we explore these themes further.

S11-03: Un-inevitability and Climate Histories for the Future
Chair(s): Alexandra Evonne Hui (Mississippi State University, United States of America), Emily Pawley (Dickinson College)
Presenter(s): Laura Stark (Vanderbilt University), Gustave Lester (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Elizabeth Blum (Troy University), Samantha Muka (Stevens Institute of Technology), Benjamin Cohen (Lafayette College), Anya Zilberstein (Concordia University)

Roundtable Abstract:
What does it mean to write histories upon which better futures can be built? What roles can and should historians play in contemporary conversations around planning and amelioration? Instead of wringing our hands over whether historians should apply their skills and knowledge to planning for the future, we take necessity of historians’ voices as a departure point. Historians know that the inevitable has actually been cultural and contingent. In the past, perceptions of inevitability has obviated certain paths. This roundtable presumes the future is not inevitable. And will make the case for why and how historians are well suited, perhaps even the best suited, for dismantling doom and despair and inevitability in discussions about the future. When historians don’t talk about the future, clichés about change are left in place to harden into truths. This roundtable will demonstrate the importance of historians’ voices in the present, planning the future.

S11-04: Colonial Climates and Environments (Part 2)
Chair(s): Linda Andersson Burnett (Uppsala Universitet), Justin Roberts (Dalhousie University)
Presenter(s): Davide Martino (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Wenrui Zhao (Cornell University), Jens Amborg (Uppsala Universitet)