Captain François Roudaire (1836-1885) was convinced that a large inland sea could be created in the Sahara Desert across southeastern Algeria and southern Tunisia. The French military surveyor received funding from public and private sources in the 1870s to carry out feasibility studies on that region’s chotts or shebkas, seasonal salt lakes that are sometimes found below sea level. The centerpiece of his proposal was a long canal from Tunisia’s coast on the Gulf of Gabes to low-lying chotts in the interior. Once the Mediterranean began to flow into the desert, Roudaire believed, the Saharan climate would become cooler and the rate of precipitation in the region would increase. His announcement in the widely-read Parisian periodical Revue des deux Mondes on May 15, 1874 that French engineers could build “une mer intérieure en Algérie” stirred up the imaginations of the capital’s political, social, and scientific elite. Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose success in the Suez Canal project led him to seek similarly grandiose opportunities to remake the world (e.g. in Panama), soon joined the project and helped with funding.

Roudaire’s most prominent critic was Ernest Cosson, a senior member of the Société botanique de France and an expert on North African botany. Cosson and many of his colleagues in metropolitan scientific associations rejected the plan for several reasons: its clearly negative consequences of an infusion of salt water for native flora (particularly the date trees on which Saharan oasis agriculture depended); the engineering nightmare posed by a canal up to 150 miles in length; the highly questionable nature of Roudaire’s claims about climatic change; and the social unrest that would have followed the substantial expropriation of native land. The scientific community’s dismissal of the scheme, the state’s loss of interest when the difficulty of the project became clear, and the deaths of Roudaire in 1885 and de Lesseps in 1894 ended the Saharan Sea project.

However, the Saharan Sea dream has lived on. In fiction, it first appeared in British journalist Louis Tracy’s futuristic An American Emperor: The Story of the Fourth Empire of France (serialized in Pearson’s Weekly, 1896-97), which features an immensely wealthy American businessman who arrives in Paris intent on making the inland sea a reality. Jules Verne’s L’Invasion de la mer (1905) describes a future conflict between colonizers attempting to build the sea and native Saharans who opposed the European effort. In Verne’s story, an earthquake that occurs at the climax of the tale causes the Mediterranean to engulf the chotts of the Sahara ahead of schedule.

​Several historians have already ably examined the scheme as it relates to the history of European imperialism in Africa and the history of European understandings of desertification and geo-engineering (See suggestions for further reading below). What I find illuminating in the Roudaire affair is the important role of newspapers and journals. The power of popular media to drive scientific inquiry has become quite clear in my dissertation on another ecological modification scheme of the late 19th century: the dissemination of the Australian eucalyptus tree to malarial environments in the Mediterranean, South Africa, India, and elsewhere.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
–L. P. Hartley
 
 In my introduction to the undergraduate history major, we read John Lewis Gaddis’ The Landscape of History, wherein he discusses the fundamental problem of trying to put ourselves in the shoes of people we can never meet and whose thoughts we can only guess at. My recent research trip to Argentina highlighted for me a related problem that environmental historians must face: the difficulty of looking at a present environment that can be just as fundamentally different from the past as historical people were.

​The course of my research trip took me crisscrossing the pampas and northern Patagonia on double decker busses with big plate glass windows opening up a sweeping panorama of the areas I passed through. Although it was my first substantial experience outside Buenos Aires, I had read enough travelers’ accounts to recognize most of the names of the places we stopped – the colonial frontier guard of Luján, the outpost city of Carmen de Patagones, founded thousands of kilometers from the next settlement, and the seat of a powerful indigenous group at Trenque Lauquén. Despite the tacit knowledge that these places had grown into bustling modern cities I found myself somehow surprised by the parking lots and electronics shops. Even more than that, I was disappointed to not be able to experience the vastness of the Pampa that evoked sublime horror in European visitors (at least in the places I passed through). Instead of the unending sky and open plains I found lights in every direction, chic modernist houses, and the famous native grasses tall enough to hide a man on a horse replaced by alfalfa, soy, and corn (Fig. 1). The harried frontier soldiers who spent days or weeks on horseback carrying the messages that ended up in the archives I visited would scarcely recognize my experience of zipping from the capital to tierra adentro in a matter of hours in an air-conditioned bus.

​For environmentally-minded historians, and particularly for those of us who study periods that suffer from a scarcity of written sources, archaeological data can be crucial. Excavations give insight into past material culture, providing information about past societies that is absent from the written record and offering tangible evidence of human interactions with the natural world. Yet, despite its many benefits, interpreting archaeological data isn’t easy, and shouldn’t be taken on lightly by those unfamiliar with the field. This summer, I had the opportunity to spend five weeks excavating at La Villa Romana Di Poggio Gramignano (VRPG), a Roman villa-turned Late Antique infant cemetery in Umbria, Italy. My experience taught me to appreciate, not only how difficult it is to properly use a pick-axe, but also the range of specializations within the field of archaeology and the rewards of interdisciplinary collaboration.

​
​VRPG is located about 6 km from Lugnano in Teverina in Umbria, on a steep hillside overlooking the Tiber river. It was first excavated by Daniela Monacchi of the Soprintendenza Archaeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio dell’Umbria, between 1982 and 1984, and again between 1987 and 1994 by David Soren, of the University of Arizona, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Archaeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio dell’Umbria. While most of the site has not yet been uncovered, these initial excavations exposed large sections of the living quarters of the villa. Soren’s findings suggested that the villa was first built during the late-first century BCE. By the late first or early second century AD, the site’s hilltop setting destabilized the south side of the villa, causing it to collapse. While supports were constructed in the third century to prevent further damage, the use of the villa waned during the third century, and by the fifth century the villa had fallen into disrepair. The site was not fully abandoned until the sixth or seventh centuries, though, and the tens of infants uncovered at the site so far date to the mid-fifth century.

​Soren and his team uncovered no fewer than 47 burials at the site, ranging in age from prenatal to three years old (Soren 1999). The stratigraphy of the site, and paleoenvironmental data, suggested that the infants had been buried over a short timespan, leading Soren to blame a sudden epidemic of malaria, caused by Plasmodium falciparum (Soren 2003). While interdisciplinary analyses of the skeletal remains have corroborated this interpretation (Sallares and Gomzi 2000; Inwood 2017), the rooms that make up the cemetery were not fully excavated during Soren and Monacchi’s excavations. After two decades of inactivity, the site was reopened in 2016 under the leadership of David Soren and David Pickel, of Stanford University, in order to complete the excavation of the infant cemetery and gather additional information about the occupation of the site.  

​​I worked at VRPG between June 24th and July 26th 2019. While the five-week excavation certainly helped me develop my shovelling and pick-axe technique (as you can see in the picture above), it also gave me a behind-the-scenes view of archaeological research. The excavation at VRPG was a complex collaborative effort between a large group of researchers, including field archaeologists, ceramicists, zooarchaeologists, osteologists and conservators, all of whom worked together in order to excavate, catalog, and interpret the wide array of materials found on the excavation, from potsherds to human remains. During my time in Lugnano, I was able to gain some basic experience in these various sub-disciplines, and, by watching specialists at work, I learned to appreciate the great variety of skills necessary to carry out archaeological excavations.

Our excavation also looked outside the traditional bounds of archaeology; in order to test Soren’s malaria hypothesis, we extracted teeth from some of the infants and sent them to the Ancient DNA Centre at McMaster University, where Hendrik Poinar and his team are mining them for remnants of pathogens and genetic material. While the results of these tests may not be available for some time, with any luck they will help to shed light on both the people who were buried at VRPG and the pathogens they harboured.

​​After five weeks in Italy, I came home with a little bit of a tan, more than a few aches and pains, and a fresh perspective on the study of the past. Given my interest in ancient landscapes, I appreciated the opportunity to work directly with the natural environment of VRPG, to stand on the same hill and take in the same (or similar) view of the Tiber river as the site’s late Roman occupants centuries ago. Unlike most historians, archaeologists also work in close proximity to modern communities. Throughout the excavation, I was inspired by the level of interest our research received from the local community, who were not only supportive of our investigation into their local history, but also incredibly hospitable and patient to a bunch of foreigners, some of whom, myself included, could hardly string together a sentence of Italian. 

​I have no doubt that this experience will help me to interpret archaeological data in my later research, and, when necessary, to reach out to those who know a lot more than me, whether they study bones, ceramics, or aDNA. While I don't think it’s necessary for every environmental historian to have personal experience on an archaeological site (though I would certainly encourage doing so), it is essential that we familiarize ourselves with archaeological methods and theories before attempting to make use of archaeological evidence. Better yet, environmental historians should aim to go even further, and include archaeologists in our academic circles and research projects. Generating and interpreting archaeological material isn’t easy​—in fact, in my experience it’s a difficult, dirty, and dusty job. But it’s also the best way to sift through the sources available to us without misinterpreting them, leading to more interesting and productive scholarship.

Georgetown Environmental History recently sat down with renowned Brazilian environmental historian José Augusto Pádua in Rio de Janeiro to have a conversation about fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. We asked him about the relationship between fire and deforestation, the history of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, and who is responsible for the recent surge in deforestation. Check out the video below for his answers. 

Video Guide
What is the relationship between fire and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?
00:05-02:51
 
What is the history of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?
02:52-04:31: Deforestation prior to 1970s
04:32-12:06: Decades of destruction, 1970s-1990s
12:07-15:47: Improvements, 2004-2014
 
Who is responsible for deforestation in the in the Brazilian Amazon?
15:48-22:01
 
What was the catalyst for the current crisis (June-October, 2019)?
22:02-30:19. 

Author Biography
​José Augusto Pádua is a professor of environmental history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s Institute of History, where he is a co-coordinator of the Laboratório de História e Natureza (Environment and History Laboratory). He a specialist in the history of the Brazilian Amazon and has been studying the forest and doing fieldwork there since the 1970s. He is the author of numerous books and chapters about Brazilian environmental history, including “Brazil in the History of the Anthropocene” in Liz-Rejane Issberner and Philippe Léna (eds.) Brazil in the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2017), 19-40, “Civil Society and Environmentalism in Brazil: The Twentieth Century’s Great Acceleration” in Lise Sedrez and S. Ravi Rajan (eds.) The Great Convergence: Environmental Histories of the BRICS (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 113-134, and “The Dilemma of the ‘Splendid Cradle’: Nature and Territory in the Construction of Brazil” in José Augusto Pádua, John Soluri, and Claudia Leal (eds.) A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 91-114. 

Environmental history (EH) is still in its infancy in academia, particularly on a global scale, when compared to other fields within the discipline of history. The practitioners of economic history, for example, are preparing for their 19th world gathering in Paris. The most recent World Congress of Environmental History (WCEH) was only the field's third, and it presented environmental historians from around the world with a great opportunity to meet fellow scholars in global EH. The conference also highlighted regional expansions and, more broadly, a global growth of an environmental way of doing history. 

The 3rd WCEH took place in Florianópolis, Brazil, at the campus of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) from 22 to 26 July 2019. The event is set to happen every five years, the first being held in 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark and the second in 2014, in northern Portuguese town of Guimarães. The island city of Florianópolis, in the southern state of Santa Catarina, was an ideal location to host the 3rd World Congress. Not only is the city itself testament to the challenges of human occupation in a delicate natural environment (as islands generally are), but it is home to one of the most  active Environmental History Laboratories in the Americas. The Laboratório de Imigração, Migração e Historia Ambiental - LABIMHA - is arguably the oldest of its kind in Brazil, having been created in 1992. Since then, the lab's organizers João Klug and Eunice Nodari have published multiple books and  articles, organized several events and supervised many Masters and PhD theses, actively contributing to the regional growth of the field.

​The 3rd WCEH was truly a global event. Over 300 scholars from 35 countries of every continent came together to discuss their research, debate the challenges of the field, promote books, meet peers and make connections. The vast array of talks, roundtables, panels and experimental sessions represented a challenge for attendees, who had to choose from so  many interesting offerings.

There were some definite highlights: the opening keynote address by Brigitte Baptiste, the General Director of the Humboldt Research Institute for Biological Resources in Colombia was one of them. Self-described as a queer ecologist, her talk connected biodiversity and sexual diversity in novel and interesting ways while discussing anthropogenic change in what she labeled a transitional world in which humans have substatially transformed nature both in and outside of their bodies. Another highlight was the presence of many prominent scholars in EH. For example, many young scholars and students reported cherishing the unique opportunity to see Donald Worster speak. According to the organizers, his two sessions were the ones that attracted the most attendees.

The emerging themes of EH were represented across panels and sessions. New perspectives were brought to traditional topics such as water, energy, animals, landscape, forests and cities. Several comparative panels featured multiple regions of the world, such as China, India, Latin America and Antarctica. Political and cultural approaches helped inform yet other discussions. The attention to the present, the consequences of the Anthropocene, the challenges of teaching EH and the ways in which the environment will shape the future history of humanity were also debated in sessions - and at informal circles after the official program was over. 

Conferences are a great way to stay connected, see old friends, make new ones, and get to know exciting new research in the field. As such, conferences are an excellent opportunity to strengthen bonds beyond our home institutions and help build a thriving, global community. Scholarly work in history can feel very lonely if confined to libraries and archives. Meeting peers and discussing ways to connect are essential means of overcoming the solitude of reading and writing individually. The days in Florianópolis were particularly fruitful in terms of overcoming this academic isolation and discussing ways of moving from individual production to collaborative work (historians have much to learn from our peers in the natural sciences about the power of collaboration). This was my main takeaway from being at the conference: to see how much greater our contributions can be if we work together as a group.