November 10, 2022

From Autarky to Agnotology: Arsenic Pesticides and the Making of Ignorance in early Francoist Spain (1939-1953)

By José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez.  Massive pesticide usage was created through the disciplining of farmers in the use of new chemical technologies during Franco's dictatorship, contributing to concealing the slow and invisible poisoning of agricultural workers and consumers, leaving a toxic legacy in Spanish agriculture up to today.
February 17, 2022

Exposing eco-nationalists with premodern ecologies: a medievalist approach to the French far right

By Antonella Sciancalepore Scratching the surface of contemporary French far-right manifestos, we find superficial reproduction of medieval ideas about geographical bio-determinism and ethnic identification with nature. Ironically, when theorizing their version of “patriotic ecologies”, the far-right steps into a tradition that says exactly the opposite of what they would like to say: in relation to the environment, all humans are migrants.
January 14, 2021

The Many Faces of Municipalisation

A long-term historical perspective on a city’s infrastructures can reveal radically diverse agendas behind the call for municipalisation.
March 10, 2020

The Biggest Nuclear Threat—Lawsuits

by Kate Brown In the age of fake news, environmental archives may provide crucial insights for political, legal and scientific controversies.
July 31, 2018

Italian eco-narratives – Paths into the nationalisation of forests

by Roberta Biasillo and Marco Armiero What if we let Italy talk through its forests? What if we unfold Italian history through its forests? Today’s blog discusses Italian forest narratives and how they may be read.
July 9, 2018

Into the fascist forest – a real Italian controversy

by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg and Marco Armiero Can a forest be fascist? This may seem a facetious question, but it is one that Italians have been discussing of late due to a fire that occurred at the end of August 2017.
March 5, 2018

“Down with the fumes!” The Year of the Shootings and its relevance for mining today

by Félix Talego and Juan Diego Pérez On February 4, 1888, a demonstration called by the “League Against Calcinations” to protest against acid rain ended up with a massacre of civilians by the Spanish army. Researchers Félix Talego and Juan Diego Pérez argue that the commemoration of this event is an opportunity to spread the message of social and environmental justice today.
November 8, 2017

Trespass. An environmental history of modern migrations

by Marco Armiero In a new book, Marco Armiero and Richard Tucker have edited together important contributions to the emerging field of the environmental history of modern migrations. Three main ‘styles’ of research delineate the contours of a timely research effort. Histories in the Present Tense We are in the midst of a massive migration crisis when Europe is transforming itself into an impenetrable fortress. The times when walls were falling and barbed wires removed seem so far away. Everywhere rich nations are trying to […]
November 3, 2017

Toxic Bios: A guerrilla narrative project mapping contamination, illness and resistance

by Ilenia Iengo and Marco Armiero By bringing to the fore the affective, bodily and narrative dimensions of environmental injustices, the project Toxic Bios aims to open new paths of collaborative research and grassroots activism focused on “guerrilla narratives” and counter-hegemonic storytelling Toxic Bios is a Public Environmental Humanities project based at KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm. Building on Richard Newman’s definition of Toxic Autobiography, this project is informed by Stacy Alaimo’s work on transcorporeality and by research connecting the body and environmental justice, as, for […]
May 4, 2017

On ‘the Political’ in Environmental History

By Stefania Barca* Like all history writing—and much of science-making itself—environmental history cannot help but be political. Stefania Barca reflects on the political implications of what environmental historians do.
April 18, 2017

Fault Lines – Earthquakes and Urbanism in Modern Italy

By Giuseppe Forino* In his recently published book Fault Lines, Giacomo Parrinello delves into the environmental history of two major earthquakes in Sicily in the last century, allowing the earthquakes to narrate a fascinating journey into the dynamics and continuities between urban modernization and reconstruction efforts before and after the disasters.
August 16, 2016

Of the Titanic, the Bounty, and Other Shipwrecks

By Marco Armiero* In this essay, environmental historian Marco Armiero presents three metaphors of the Anthropocene and discusses why words, and class, still matter.