#EnvHist Worth Reading: January 2026

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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 January 2026.

1) ‘The past is an underused tool’: An Elizabethan mansion’s secrets for staying warm

I was excited to stumble upon this piece of architectural history by Graihagh Jackson for BBC Earth that intersects with climate history. During the Little Ice Age, Jackson explains, a prolonged cold period from the 14th to 19th centuries, Europeans adapted architecture to cope with extreme temperatures. Hardwick New Hall in Derbyshire, built in the 1590s, exemplifies these strategies. Its north–south orientation maximized sunlight, while strategically placed windows, thick central walls, and centrally located fireplaces improved heat retention. Thermal mass from stone and brick stored warmth, and blocked north-facing windows reduced heat loss. These passive solar and insulation techniques made the house significantly warmer than typical Elizabethan homes. The design, Jackson argues, offers lessons for modern energy-efficient housing, showing how building orientation and materials can reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

2) Newly Digitized Records Reveal How Indigenous People Shared Their Knowledge of New Zealand’s Plants With Captain Cook’s Crew

In 1769, Joseph Banks and botanists aboard Captain James Cook’s Endeavour documented hundreds of New Zealand plant species, often recording Māori names and uses with help from Polynesian navigator, Tupaia. These records, long stored in London, have now been digitized, shares Donna Ferguson in this article for Smithsonian, revealing an overlooked exchange between Māori and European knowledge systems. The documents include the first written and illustrated records of many native plants, some now rare or extinct, and preserve early Māori language forms. Researchers say the resource supports Indigenous communities, conservation, and rewilding by providing precolonial maps of plant distributions and returning culturally significant botanical knowledge to Pacific peoples.

3) Prelude to a Revolution, Part One

In this first of what promises to be a fascinating series for the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Charlotte Lieb traces how climate measurement, mapping, and imperial practices shaped modern understandings of climate change, arguing that today’s 1.5°C warming threshold and “pre-industrial” baseline obscure deeper historical causes. With the help of some compelling data visualizations, Lieb critiques reliance on temperature averages, noting that colonial expansion, cattle grazing, deforestation, and population growth in 18th-century New England and the Mid-Atlantic likely contributed to early anthropogenic climate change. Despite continued severe winters, settlers perceived environmental shifts linked to land use. Lieb calls for situating climate change within localized, colonial histories of exploitation and inequality, rather than treating it solely as a numerical problem, and frames early American environmental change as a precursor to today’s climate crisis.

4) Coyote America – Reckoning with Jason Herbert

In this episode of Reckoning, Jason Herbert is lucky enough to sit down with Dan Flores, a historian of the American West who found popular acclaim with the publication of his book, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016). I really enjoyed this conversations which meanders through Flores’ earlier career, the newfound level of celebrity that Coyote America brough, to his latest efforts, including hosting The American West podcast for the MeatEater network. I appreciated hearing from Flores and how he successfully navigates public scholarship.

5) Radioactive Governance with Maxime Polleri – Culture of Energy

In this episode of Cultures of Energy, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer sit down with Maxime Polleri to discuss his book, Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Revitalization in Post-Fukushima Japan. From discussing the 2011 disaster and post-disaster efforts by the Japanese government to downplay the event in favour of getting back to “normal,” to tackling longer histories of nuclear energy politics, this conversation has a lot to ponder as we move towards a more uncertain environmental and energy future.

Feature Image: Portraits of sled dogs and of a northern coyote at Wood Buffalo Park. 1934. Photographer: Soper, J. Dewey (Joseph Dewey). Credit : Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada / Library and Archives Canada / e010864337.
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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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