This week, several Georgetown scholars and graduates will speak at the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History (March 29-April 2) in Chicago, Illinois.

Thursday, 30 March, 8:30-10 a.m.

• Robynne Mellor: A Comparative Analysis of the Environmental Effects of Cold War Uranium Mining in Grants, New Mexico (Panel 1-E: The Cold War, the American West and the Environment, Michigan room)

• George Vrtis: roundtable member for The Pedagogy of Hope, Teaching Hope in the Environmental Classroom (Roundtable 1-I, Walton North room)

Thursday, 30 March, 3:30-5 p.m.

• Jackson R. Perry: Gospel of the Gum: Jules-Émile Planchon and the Global Eucalyptus Fever of the Nineteenth Century (Panel 4-B: Publish or Perish? Print Cultures of the Anthropocene, French room)

Friday, 31 March, 8:30-10 a.m.

• Alan D. Roe: The Forest in the City: Elk Island National Park and the Challenges of the Russian National Park System ​(Panel 5-I: Ecologies of the Socialist City: Cultivating and Protecting the Green Spaces of Russia, Walton North room)

Friday, 31 March, 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m.

• Meredith McKittrick: Intersections of Race and Rain: Ensuring the Survival of ‘White Civilization’ in South Africa through Demographic and Climate Engineering, 1890-1934 (Panel 6-A: Before Climate Refugees: Mobility, Climate and Empire, 1600-1940, Astor room)

Saturday, 1 April, 1:15-2:45 p.m.

• Chris Gratien: Transhumant Temporalities in Ottoman Anatolia 
• and Graham Pitts: A Precarious Mediterranean Mountain Ecology: Migration, Silk and Famine in Lebanon, 1887-1918 (Panel 9-E: Mobilities, Limitations and Adaptations of the Mediterranean Mountains, Michigan room)

Saturday, 1 April, 3-4:30 p.m.

• Dagomar Degroot: ‘A Mysterious System of Configurations:’ The Environmental History of Canals and Climate on Mars (Panel 10-J: The Final Frontier (of Environnmental History): Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Environments Beyond Earth, Walton South room)
• Erin Stewart Mauldin: The Ecological Refugees of the Cotton Belt: Black Migration from Rural Spaces in the Wake of the U.S. Civil War (Panel 10-H: How the Other Half Drifts: Nature, Violence, and the Character of Migration in the 19th Century, Venetian room)

In the first post in a new series on the uses of environmental history, the blog of the Rachel Carson Center has published Prof. John R. McNeill's reflections on the potential usefulness of environmental history beyond the satisfaction of academic curiosity. The series offers adaptations of presentations made at Renmin University, Beijing, for the new Journal for Ecological History of Renmin's Center for Ecological History. "Environmental historians do not need to become more useful and practical. We should do so if we want to," McNeill writes. McNeill also describes his experience offering his knowledge of mosquito-borne diseases in the Caribbean to a U.S. Congressional briefing on the Zika virus in September 2016. Shortly after that briefing, Congress voted to approve $1.1 billion for Zika control efforts. For his answer to his own question, 'Did we actually have any impact?", read his full post on the RCC blog.