The World Health Organization declared the mosquito-borne Zika virus a global public health emergency on February 1. Spreading in the Americas, the mosquito-borne disease has been associated with microcephaly in newborns. Read Georgetown professor John McNeill's thoughts on the ecology of mosquitoes and disease in the Americas in this CNN article. Lake Poopó, Bolivia's second-largest lake, has dried up for the second time since 1990. Now over one month into the rainy season, water has yet to return. The lake is particularly exposed to climatic fluctuations due to its very shallow depth (9 feet). “I don’t think we’ll be seeing the azure mirror of Poopó again. I think we’ve lost it,” one Bolivian scholar told the Associated Press. Genetic mapping confirms that the parasite causing schistosomiasis was first carried from Africa to the Americas in the bodies of African slaves, further evidence of an environmental history of slavery. "Comparing the S. mansoni genomes suggests that flukes in West Africa split from their Caribbean counterparts at some point between 1117AD and 1742AD, which overlaps with the time of the 16th-19th Century Atlantic Slave Trade," Professor Joanne Webster of Imperial College London and the Royal Veterinary College said. "During this period more than 22,000 African people were transported from West Africa to Guadeloupe by French slave ships, and the fluke was carried with them."
On Suffolk's North Sea coast, Researchers are using ultrasound to map the submerged town of Dunwich. Once one of eastern England's largest ports, Dunwich was claimed by the sea during a succession of major storms in the 13th and 14th centuries. Weaving together the history of the town, "you get this 900-year story of a coastal settlement being affected by climate change," the lead researcher told the Washington Post. (BBC Documentary, UK only) From tiny St. Helena to continental Australia, islands have long offered valuable case studies of invasion ecologies to environmental historians. In the Channel Islands off California, this history heads for an unpredictable conclusion: environmentalists there have nearly completed, after many years of hunting, a wild sheep chase and a wild turkey shoot. Speaking of islands, new archaeological research in Malagasy caves suggests that anthropogenic forces and ungulate irruption drove deforestation in Madagascar 1000 years ago. According to Professor David McGee, "We went in expecting to just tell a climate change story, and were surprised to see a huge carbon isotope change... Both the speed at which this shift occurred and the fact that there's no real climate signal suggest human involvement." The full study, which examined stalagmites, was published this month in Quarternary Science Reviews (Paywall). Elephant unemployment is on the rise in Myanmar. Image: NASA Earth Observatory via The Independent
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Meredith Denning On January 29, Prof. Adam Rome is coming to Georgetown. Ahead of his visit, I’ve been re-reading The Bulldozer in the Countryside (2001) and thinking about the landscape that shaped my interest in environmental change. Rome’s work addresses the American environmental movement and explores how post-World War II suburban landscapes shaped perceptions of environmental change just as powerfully as traditionally ‘natural’ landscapes like the National Parks. New Toronto, where I grew up, is not exactly a Baby Boom suburb. Laid out as a self-contained manufacturing town at the turn of the twentieth century, it has an electric streetcar running down the main street twenty-four hours a day, three bus lines and two commuter train stations. A car is hardly necessary and the layout is classic urban Ontario, with tidily numbered streets and high-density amenities like a greengrocer, a fish-and-chip shop, cafes, and a third-generation cobbler. However, one of Rome’s points in Bulldozer resonates for me, and that is the powerful impact that witnessing the transformation of a landscape can have upon a person. I also find myself thinking about how useless it is to try to distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘human’ landscapes. If you take the bus to the foot of Kipling Avenue today, you’ll find yourself in a very interesting space. An old mental hospital and its extensive grounds have been converted into a variety of spaces for the human community: an ice-skating ‘trail,’ an assembly hall and gallery, part of a community college campus, a new high school and spaces for ‘nature’: turtle nesting habitats, fish nurseries, and meadows of native grasses. This assemblage is the result of several decades of urban design and it’s a fascinating layer cake of meaning for the environmental historian. The map (below, right) shows the space, coloured according to the six site management units that were adopted as part of an Etobicoke City Council resolution in 1997: 1. Heritage Conservation (yellow) 2. Landscape Regeneration (green) 3. Park Transformation (orange) 4. Waterfront Transition (purple) 5. Boating Basin (lt. blue) 6. Primary Shoreline (dk. blue) When my family moved to New Toronto in 1990, the ‘hospital grounds’ were just starting to be turned into this brightly delineated Colonel Samuel Smith Park. I spent much of my free time exploring that space and I knew it like the back of my hand. I knew every pothole in the old road that led from the main street down towards the lake, twisting past disused asylum buildings with broken windows until it reached the one residential building still in use. I knew every footpath that bird-watchers, dog-walkers and pot-smoking teenagers had carved through the underbrush of the forest tract. For most of my childhood, using the waterfront was illegal because it was literally under construction. The shoreline of the new park is made of landfill, and soil was still being moved in by the truckload. Nobody that I ever saw paid any attention to the ‘Do Not Enter’ sign, since anywhere a truck can drive, a bike or a birdwatcher can follow. The wire fence at the base of the peninsula was permanently ground into the dirt by passing feet. There I learned that the people who use a space daily make their own determinations. Huge slabs of concrete, their rusted steel reinforcements sticking out, were dumped to form a coast with many small inlets. Nobody tries to hide these plain signs of created ‘extra’ land, even now. Perhaps their presence indicates our growing comfort with created/natural landscapes, or perhaps the city’s budget was too small. In any case, the inlets are designed to shelter birds and turtles, but they also make good beaches for bonfires, excellent perches for a quiet talk, and multilevel jungle gyms for kids to explore. The occasional broken beer bottle between the ‘rocks’ never makes much of an impression in the face of the grand stillness of a Great Lake. Eventually, the government opened up the new park. I knew the trees there well, and I watched them change as the last phase of landscaping unfolded.There were trees that were best for sitting, some were made for climbing, some served only for hide-and-seek. My dad still scratches his head sometimes, looking for his third-best hammer. I’ve never told him that I lost it in a big willow tree there. (My friend Denise and I decided to improve somebody else’s treehouse, and I blithely assumed that tools in a bike basket on a branch would be left untouched). The old orchard, mentioned in some local histories, is all gone now. The treehouse willow gave way to a parking lot for the new skating trail. I hear this place called many things. The oldest residents still call it ‘the looney bin’ or ‘the hospital grounds.’ In my head, it’s still just ’the big park,’ a schoolyard name that made sense if your mental map was only a few kilometres wide. Sometimes one hears, ’Sam Smith,’ a version of the formal name. Only the newest arrivals call it by names that suggest its current functions: ‘the Humber campus,’ ‘the figure eight’ (meaning the skating trail), or ‘the Assembly Hall.’ Clearly, the old hospital grounds are a largely human construction and their current iteration, for all its emphasis on resorting native species and providing habitat, is as consciously confected as the asylum's gardens ever were. Watching the transformation from neglected lawns and orchard to an ’multi-use urban wilderness’ during my lifetime convinced me that habitat restoration is possible. The number and variety of birds, fish, mammals, and other creatures has increased dramatically since I first biked around the peninsula construction site. At the same time, marshalling the money and political will to change this large space brought many new tenants and much more activity. The dark, silent asylum buildings are busy classrooms and the marsh birds build safe nests in the long grasses by the shore. If you’re curious to learn more about this place, here are some links: Profile by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an American NGO: https://tclf.org/landscapes/colonel-samuel-smith-park Very quick local history: http://torontoplaques.com/Pages/Colonel_Samuel_Smith_Park.html Citizen’s waterfront association: http://www.ccfew.org/html/sam_smith_park.html A local birder’s website, long to load but with wonderful wildlife photography: https://burlingtonontariobirder.wordpress.com/tag/colonel-samuel-smith-park/ Thomas Erdbrink of the New York Times continues his coverage of the severe drought in Iran, which has lasted seven years. Very low rainfall and rapidly dwindling groundwater, 70 percent of which has been consumed in the last half-century, threatens agriculture and has transformed the country's urban life. Williams College environmental studies fellow Elizabeth Kolbert reports on the steady flooding of south Florida, where climate change is seeping up through gutters and front lawns, in the latest of her ongoing 'Field Notes from a Catastrophe' for the New Yorker. Cultural anthropologist Sidney Mintz died on December 27th at the age of 93. Read Sarah Hill, Marion Nestle, and an OUP editor on the passing of a giant in the history and anthropology of commodities. The foods eaten have histories associated with the past of those who eat them; the techniques employed to find, process, prepare, serve, and consume the foods are all culturally variable, with histories of their own. Nor is the food ever simply eaten; its consumption is always conditioned by meaning. These meanings are symbolic, and communicated symbolically; they also have histories. (Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom (Beacon Press, 1996), 7) A data revolution is coming to farming. An archive for future agricultural historians?
Professor Nancy Langston reflects on the alternative history of land policy in the American West advanced by the anti-government militia that is currently occupying Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. 195 countries agreed to the most significant international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions in history at a UN climate summit in Paris this week. The voluntary emissions cuts entailed in the accord will not prevent a 2°C increase in global temperatures, but represent a major step toward mitigating some effects of climate change. (Agreement text) A new study in PLOS Pathogens warns of the dire consequences that loom for the worldwide banana economy due to the likely spread of the TR4 strain of Panama disease from plantations in Southeast Asia. Environmental scientists from Columbia University and the University of Buffalo question the global extent of the Medieval Warm Period in a new study in Science Advances. Dating boulders left behind by retreating glaciers in Greenland, the researchers conclude that the glaciers reached their Little Ice Age maxima during the MWP. The lead author said, "If the Vikings traveled to Greenland when it was cool, it’s a stretch to say deteriorating climate drove them out." The Indian Ocean's annual northeast monsoon brought devastating floods to southern India. The state of Tamil Nadu experienced its highest rainfall total in over a century for the month of November. Meteorologists have linked the emerging El Niño in the South Pacific to the strength of the autumn monsoon in South Asia. (Quartz photo gallery) AHA reports on transformations in field specializations among US history faculty over the last 4 decades. While the largest absolute differences reflect the cultural turn, environmental history faculty experienced the highest rate of growth: "The field with the largest proportional expansion was environmental history—from 0.2 percent of the listed faculty in 1975 to 2.7 percent today. That may still seem like a small number, but the share of departments employing an environmental historian grew from 4.3 percent in 1975 to 43 percent in 2015." New Digital Archive: Readex offers a new collection of 200+ 19th-century American agricultural newspapers, including The California Farmer, The Florida Agriculturalist, and The Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture.
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EH@G BlogArticles written by students and faculty in environmental history at Georgetown University. Archives
May 2020
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