#EnvHist Worth Reading: November 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 November 2025.

1) Eagles, Marmots, Humans: Knowing Wildlife Through Fieldwork

In this piece for Springs, Monica Vasile traces two parallel stories of wildlife conservation efforts. In the first half of the article, Vasile describes the work of Katya Karabanina, a golden-eagle ringer in Finland and the risks and care inherent in field biology. Vasile then looks at the work of Canadian biologist Andrew Bryant who worked for decades to save the endangered Vancouver Island marmot. Together, their experiences show how conservation science relies not only on numbers but on embodied, intimate, persistent fieldwork that forges deep relationships between people, species, and landscapes.

2) How alive is the world? 5 Questions on animism for anthropologist of religion Justine Quijada

A 2021 study shows psychedelics can shift people from materialism toward panpsychism or animism—the view that nonhuman beings or places possess subjectivity. In this interview for Microdose, anthropologist Justine Quijada explains that animism extends social relationships beyond humans, treating rivers, animals, or landscapes as “other-than-human persons.” Quijada states that she thinks that people are “newly attracted and drawn to ideas of animism” … “because we’ve reached a point in the climate crisis where we can’t ignore the fact that nature does have power over us.” Quijada is critical of Western adoption of animism though, because it tends to assume nature is helpful, overlooking danger, obligation, and reciprocity; Quijada cautions that genuine animist worldviews require sustained integration, community support, and respect for the Indigenous cultural and religious contexts in which these beliefs originate.

3) Investing for ourselves, and those downstream

In this article for the The Free Press, Jocelyn Thorpe and Adele Perry argue that Winnipeg has long benefited from major infrastucture projects like the Shoal Lake aqueduct and the Red River floodway, but that these engineering successes have come at a significant cost to Indigenous communities. Writing in response to a new report that stresses the need to upgrade a sewage treatment plant in Winnepeg, they assert that the report ignores the downstream impacts of these sewage issues on Indigenous communities, including sewage spills and phosphorus pollution. Past projects displaced or flooded Indigenous communities, they write, and today’s infrastructure demands require broader responsibility and accountability.

4) ‘I have watched politicians failing yet and yet again’: lessons from a life as an environment writer

In this last column for The Guardian, longtime environmental correspondent, Paul Brown, reflects on his forty-five year career. He recalls Margaret Thatcher’s early role in elevating climate science, his own adventures covering Greenpeace actions, Antarctic expeditions, and global climate summits. He laments that he has “watched in continuing dismay what we might call the Thatcher syndrome: apparently intelligent politicians failing yet and yet again to have the courage to implement the decisions necessary to tackle the ever more imminent danger of climate change.” Brown also criticizes the renewed push for nuclear power and urges journalists to scrutinize nuclear promises and expose wasteful investments.

5) The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, 50 Years Later

November marked the 50th anniversary of sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior, and the internet was abuzz with Edmund Fitzgerald content. Our own Daniel Macfarlane, examined Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad about the event in a popular post on our site. I consumed a lot of this content last month, but I think this interview with John U. Bacon, on The New York Times’ Book Review podcast, stood out the most. Bacon recently published The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which examines the tragedy from the perspective of each of the individual men on the ship and the families they left behind.

Feature Image: “20130705_09k Hoary marmots (Marmota caligata) wrestling | Larch Valley, Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada” by ratexla (protected by Pixsy) 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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