For my purposes, Mueller's interactions with the Mediterranean world included frequent dispatches of eucalyptus seeds to Algeria, France and Italy, and interchanges of scientific information, in both private letters and published journals, with institutions of science. Scholars of North Africa will find complete runs of the Bulletin de la Société d’Agriculture d’Alger (image, right) and the Bulletin Agricole de l’Algérie-Tunisie-Maroc, alongside mycology journals and numerous volumes of Linnaean societies from across the European continent. Other topics with rich potential for further study include the social and bureaucratic histories of pre-Federation Australia, the exploration of Australia, Oceania and the Antarctic, networks of exchange in the Indian Ocean and the British Empire, German colonialism in Africa and Australasia, and Mueller's engagement with the theory of evolution. 

Further reading:

• Home, R.W., et al. Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, vols. 1-3. Bern: Peter Lang, 1998-2006.
• Maroske, Sara. “Australian and Indian Plants: Making Connexions in Global Botany.” Historical Records of Australian Science 23, no. 2 (2012): 107-119. ​

Jackson Perry is a PhD candidate in history at Georgetown University who studies the transformation of modern Mediterranean environments. His dissertation examines the introduction of the Eucalyptus tree genus to the Mediterranean region in the nineteenth century.

In the 1850s, Californians experienced the state’s natural environment primarily through work. In was the gold rush then and the northern Sierra Nevada foothills were overrun with miners. Although many Californians associate gold mining with human labor, the largest and most productive companies harnessed the mountain’s rivers to mine for gold. Mining companies built networks of reservoirs and canals that diverted water to hydraulic cannons which then blasted the water against mountainsides. As entire hillsides washed away, a mercury-lined sieve sitting in the center of the valley attracted gold. By the mid-1870s, a hydraulic mine at North Bloomfield, near present day Nevada City, became the largest gold mine in the state. The landscape at North Bloomfield was so scarred from the water cannons that French miners reportedly compared it to the Battle of Malakoff, a bloody episode in the Crimean War (1853-1856). 

Historian Andrew Isenberg argues that hydraulic gold mining had a staggering environmental cost and encouraged a host of other industries such as logging, ranching, and urban growth, which also degraded the nonhuman environment. In the 1850s and 1860s, the government overlooked such costs because gold mining was lucrative. However, in the 1870s and 1880s, a coalition of farmers and railroads helped pass legislation that put a stop to hydraulic mining, which was sending torrents of mercury-infused sediments downstream to inundate fields. In 1884, California courts banned hydraulic mining because of its environmental impact and the North Bloomfield mine closed shortly thereafter.
               
​In 1965, roughly a century later, the government declared the old gold mine a state park. The transition from North Bloomfield gold mine to Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park reflected a change in how many Californians were experiencing nature. 

                 
Last summer I spent time with family and friends hiking and swimming in the Sierra Nevada. Having read about North Bloomfield, I lobbied to stop, and after winding our way through empty mountain roads we arrived at the ghost town. We checked in at the museum, and then proceeded to the ‘diggins.’ I spent over an hour hiking the perimeter of the old gold mine, staring at the weathered cliffs and struggling to imagine how the lush fields I walked through were once hills themselves, and then briefly a watery mess of mud and mercury that quickly disappeared downstream.

Environmental history has given me an appreciation of such sites. Unlike the reservoirs, oilfields, power stations, and landfills I’ve visited, North Bloomfield has no direct connection to my life. Yet, shortly after California’s birth as a U.S. state, it was the center of the state’s most lucrative industry, which attracted capital and immigrants and encouraged commerce and urbanization in Sacramento and the Bay Area.
                 
​Studying environmental history has not changed the fundamental parameters of my relationship with the natural world: my direct experiences with nature remain primarily leisure-based. But it has given me a greater appreciation for just how strange such a relationship is in the long sweep of human history. As I walked through the gravely remains of the North Bloomfield mine, stopping to take photos, I reflected on how utterly different my experience of this space was than those who used it before me. 

Matthew Johnson is a PhD Student at Georgetown University who studies modern Latin American and Caribbean environmental history. His dissertation will look at the social and environmental costs of large hydroelectric dams built by Brazil’s military government in the 1970s and 1980s. ​

Robynne Mellor 

Last fall, I designed and taught a course called The Global Environmental History of the Cold War.  Throughout the semester, the students and I discussed the many ways that the bipolar conflict and the environment interacted between 1946 and 1989, as well as the various consequences of the Cold War that stretched beyond this temporal boundary.  We covered topics ranging from the nuclear fuel cycle and the arms race, to dam building and defoliants associated with Cold War development theory and proxy wars. 

​Throughout the course, I often relied on maps, especially when discussing issues such as “toxic layering” and geographic “sacrifice zones,” as well as how one might visually plot the intersections of Cold War containment and the environment.[1]  These themes, along with Adam Rothman and Dagomar Degroot's maps, inspired me to add a mapping portion to the final class paper. 

The assignment was to choose one aspect of the way that the Cold War and the environment interacted, conduct independent research, and to plot some detail of the topic on a collaborative map with an annotation.  In addition, I asked the students to write an argumentative paper about their chosen topic and, within the paper, to reflect upon what the process and result of mapping added to their understanding.  

As a learning tool, maps and mapping assignments can help students--along with those who look at the map--acknowledge the intricateness, breadth, and variation of the Cold War's relationship with the environment.  The map the students created for the assignment was quite good and their engagement with the project was enthusiastic.

One of the aims of the project was to encourage a broader understanding of the conflict.  The history of the Cold War is often confined to diplomatic and political spaces, but a global mapping project shows how the conflict affected regions outside of these traditional areas of focus.  

Students were largely interested in aspects of the nuclear cycle and the space race, and focused predominantly on the activities of the two main Cold War powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Even so, their work incorporated many regions of these countries often left out of traditional Cold War narratives, along with frequently-overlooked areas such as northern Canada and the Pacific Islands.

There was an unforseen issue with using a terrestrial map, however.  As my students quickly pointed out to me as we discussed potential topics, there was no way to map the Cold War’s effects on the extraterrestrial environment.  When examining the environmental history of the Cold War period and beyond, this project made it clear that a map of the world does not fully convey interactions between humans and their environment.  I learned that I need to add more about the Outer Space to the course, and the mapping project, along with the student's work, helped to change my thinking. 

In addition, this mapping project detracts somewhat from the interconnectedness of the Cold War's effects, and their sometimes global scope.  For example, it is difficult, if not impossible, to render effectively on a map the consequences of atmospheric testing.  The structure also leads to a one-sided narrative, with the form encouraging students to focus on how humans impacted nature.  It is much more difficult to plot the dynamism of the environment and its role in Cold War history. 

The map and the idea behind it is useful beyond the classroom, as well.  As environmental historians, we often try to view history irrespective of political borders.  The ability to zoom out and examine the global impact as a whole helps to better conceptualize the scale of historical moments such as the Cold War.
​
My vision for this map is for it to be added to continually.  There are many complex layers that the topic “the global environmental history of the Cold War” encompasses.  To fully understand the true impact of the Cold War on the environment (and vice versa) I wold like to move forward with this same map, and have students (and possibly others) build upon it.


[1] For more on dam building and containment, see Richard P. Tucker, “Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers: American Strategic Interests and the Globaal Soread of High Dams in the Early Cold War” in Environmental Histories of the Cold War, eds. J.R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 139-163.  For more on “toxic layering” in a Cold War context, see Magadalena E. Stawkowski, “‘I am a Radioactive Mutant’: Emergent biological subjectivities at Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 144-157.

Robynne Mellor is a PhD Candidate at Georgetown University who studies the intersection of environmental history and the Cold War.  Her dissertation is comparatively examines uranium mining in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union.

Georgetown had a particularly big presence at this year's American Society for Environmental History conference. Here are some reflections from three of our environmental historians:

Dagomar Degroot, assistant professor of environmental history:
 
I first visited Chicago as a PhD student, while driving to the 2012 ASEH conference in nearby Madison, Wisconsin. Five years later, I returned as a Georgetown University assistant professor for this year’s ASEH conference. How quickly life can change! Scholarship, too. This year, I was fortunate to be part of two panels that advanced the frontier of environmental history in ways that, arguably, would have been hard to imagine in 2012. The first panel combined the insights of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians all struggling to understand the environmental history of the North Atlantic, particularly its Arctic marine ecosystems. Papers drew on everything from oral traditions to protein sequencing to trace the coevolution of natural and human histories. The discussion that followed touched on topics that ranged from the steady disappearance of coastal “natural archives” in the far north to best practices in multidisciplinary collaboration.

The second panel was all about the environmental history of outer space, an area of scholarship that has only recently gained momentum and acceptance in our field. Our papers explored the environmental history of Mars, the consequences of falling orbital debris, and the anthropology of exoplanets. Questions prompted us to think deeply about historical analogies between Earth and other worlds; the place of the Anthropocene in our research; and changing paradigms in science. It was telling that nobody questioned whether environments beyond Earth actually belong in environmental history. Something new, it seems, is orbiting the Sun.  
 
Robynne Mellor, PhD candidate in environmental history:
 
This year’s ASEH was an exciting opportunity for me to engage with scholars interested in the same themes, ideas, and topics as I am. I especially enjoyed all the ways in which the panel participants discussed the history of resource extraction and its effects on the environment and surrounding populations. The panelists addressed the impacts on the environment associated with mines from Ontario and Minnesota to Murmansk, and there is growing interest in creating a network of environmental historians of resource extraction, something about which I am particularly excited.

I was also able to participate in conversations about Canadian, U.S., and Soviet environmental history, all areas in which I am interested, and broaden my horizons as part of lively discussions on “new materialism” and what it means for environmental history, from the understanding of carcinogens to dinosaur fossils. Finally, hearing Bill Cronon’s retrospective on Nature’s Metropolis while eating Chicago mix popcorn in Chicago was a great way to end the weekend.
 
Jackson Perry, PhD candidate in environmental history:
 
Attending ASEH this year encouraged me to think a lot about questions, answers, and stories, as I move from comprehensive exams to dissertation research this spring. Looking back at coursework and exams, the imperative to reach a conclusion about a debate in historiography or to advance a particular interpretation of history based on original research was strong. The time between question and answer was sometimes as short as a few seconds. The most engaging panels at ASEH meanwhile emphasized questions more than answers. They inspired curiosity and open-ended discussion of, say, the relationship between colonial and post-colonial development policy, or of linear and cyclical aspects of Mediterranean environmental history.

What sticks in my mind from the weekend’s papers were the stories they offered, of a sick cattle herd downwind of a nuclear testing range in New Mexico, or of the dreams of white South Africans about diverting rivers into the Kalahari Desert for agricultural expansion in the early twentieth century. Beyond particular topical insights, the major refrains of my experience at ASEH 2017 were the value of unanswered questions and hypotheses in our research and our collaborative work, and the power of storytelling as a medium of scholarly communication.

Two days before world leaders converged to Marrakech for the U.N. climate summit, a smaller and cozier meeting took place in Washington, DC with a shared interest in, and concern for, humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. The meeting was the first conference for graduate students that Georgetown University hosted on world environmental history, titled: “Humanity & Other Forms of Life: Environmental Histories of the World.” The conference took place at the Mortara Center for International Studies on a cold Saturday (November 5) and featured the work of students from eight universities (Cornell, Georgetown, Indiana, NYU, Ohio State, Princeton, Stony Brook, and Yale). Environmental history graduate students at Georgetown organized the event with generous support from the Georgetown Institute for Global History, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Provost Office, and the Mortara Center. Doctoral candidate Faisal Husain masterminded the day’s events, supported by several students and faculty members. It was a polished, friendly conference that covered an impressive range of topics with grace and thematic cohesion.