Exploring Environmental History

From 27 June to 2 July 2011 the sixth conference of the European Society took place in the city of Turku in Finland. The meeting consisted of many parallel sessions on a wide range of topics exploring the interactions between human societies and...

For the past decade nuclear energy has been increasingly promoted as a carbon neutral source of energy. The Japanese Tsunami of March 2011 threw a spanner in the works when the Fukushima One nuclear power plant was flooded destroying its cooling...

Wetlands were once common over a large part of eastern England. Of these so-called fens only two percent survives today and most of it is now situated in nature reserves. One of these reserves is Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire. Today Wicken Fen is the...

What is the connection between the abolition of slavery, the Industrial Revolution, the use fossil fuels and climate change? Jeff Mohout of Birmingham University recently discussed this question in an article in the journal Climatic Change. In this...

This episode examines the history of the Fens of East Anglia in England. The Fens originally consisted of wetlands which have been artificially drained since the Middle Ages and continue to be protected from floods by a system of drains, dams and...

During the Second World War thousands of foresters left British Columbia and other parts of Canada to serve in the Canadian Forestry Corps in Europe. The Forestry Corps was set up to help European allies producing sufficient amounts of timber from...

Islands are complex ecological objects produced through flows of flora, coral polyps, human migration, and global capital. They are places that are constantly being changed through human and non-human action. Therefore, they are wonderfully rich sites...

This episode of Exploring Environmental History features an interview with Japanologist and environmental historian Cath Knight. In her spare time she maintains the blog envirohistory NZ which explores the environmental history of New Zealand. On the...

On 14 April 2010 the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted for a second time in two month after having been dormant for just under 200 years. The second eruption caused an ash plume that was ejected into the stratosphere and transported by...

The creation of a conventional classroom based environmental history course is challenging because of the diversity of topics involved. A distance learning course delivered trough the Web is even more challenging. This requires a different approach to...