ICEHO Bulletin 12
May 2017
From the President

ASEH 2017 Chicago – a few observations
The fortieth anniversary conference for theAmerican Society for Environmental History in
Chicago in March was remarkable for several
reasons. The program was very strong as usual.
The book exhibit took me a full 120 minutes ofconcentrated browsing to list all the books I would
want to order (without chatting to publishers), but
in a new development ASEH members discussed,
for the first time, in a forum open to all members,
the challenges to the free flow of people and ideasthat our American colleagues are facing these days.
The colleagues expressed concern that they needto advise their international students not to leave
the country, in case they might be denied re-entry.
Such worries echo earlier times when European
scholars working across the Iron Curtain faced
similar problems with keeping their internationalties alive. It is sad to see how history, if it does notrepeat itself, rhymes a lot (as Mark Twain put it).
Of course, ASEH cannot take up a formal position
on such questions, but the many good ideas thatwere circulating will support individuals who haveto take decisions in an increasingly difficult space.
Several colleagues remarked on the increasing
importance for US scholars to attend international
conferences abroad to enable them the freeexchanges they might find difficult at home. This iswhere the international community of ICEHO iscalled to action.

The conference ended on a lighter note with aplenary discussion with Bill Cronon about his
magisterial environmental history of Chicago,
Nature’s Metropolis. The 40th birthday wascelebrated with a cake for ASEH and champagne totoast its future success.
It was a joy to see so many aspiring young scholars
giving great papers, and to meet old friends again.
From ICEHO, we would like to congratulate
Graeme Wynn, the incoming President, who takes
up the baton from Kathy Brosnan. Congratulations
too, to Ed Russell who has been appointed
President-elect.
Verena Winiwarter, President ICEHODEADLINE FOR THE NEXT BULLETIN 1 July 2017

Bulletin Editor Libby
Robin is based at the Australian
National University, Canberra.
She welcomes contributions!

libby.robin@anu.edu.au

Universidade
Federal da Santa
Catarina, (USFC),
Florianópolis, Brazil
Hosts of WCEH III
in 2019

The third World Congress ofEnvironmental History (WCEH2019)will run from 23rd—26th July 2019

implications for ‘threads’ in the program and also
for the sponsorship of plenaries and more.
At this point, I invite feedback on the following
three questions:(1) Does your organization plan to hold ameeting/conference in 2019 independentof WCEH and if so, when is it scheduled? If
there is a potential conflict, may we ask
you to consider selecting a date for the
conference that might be less competitive?
(2) Does your organization wish to merge their
meeting with WCEH and if so, what
conditions need to be met by WCEH toenable this? Note that all papers submitted
to the conference will be selected by the
program committee, but there might beissues of expertise on the committee,
threads or necessity of meeting time for
executive boards or General Assemblies.
(3) Will your organization sponsor sessions or
people to come to WCEH? If so, please
inform us about your plans.
Please send your responses on these questions
to Verena.Winiwarter@aau.at.
Verena Winiwarter
President, ICEHO------------------------------------------------------------------

Special report from the Chicago
ASEH Conference
From Georgetown University Environmental
History/ICEHO officers
Collaboration for WCEH2019
To the representatives of ICEHO member
organizations (or working groups, etc.) from thepresident’s desk:
Dear colleagues,
We would like to encourage our partner societies
or working groups of such societies to consider
whether you would like to hold your regularmeeting at the same time as the World Congress –at Florianopólos.
If you decide to do this we would like to take this
into account in the program, so we can provide
space for business meetings or other meetings therespective societies might need. Such programissues may determine how many papers can be
accepted for the conference and may have

Dagomar Degroot, assistant professor ofenvironmental history, Georgetown University, and
ICEHO secretary:
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 inways that, arguably, would have been hard to imagine in2012. The first panel combined the insights ofanthropologists, 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 thecoevolution 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 allabout the environmental history of outer space, an areaof scholarship that has only recently gained momentum
and acceptance in our field. Our papers explored theenvironmental history of Mars, the consequences offalling orbital debris, and the anthropology of
exoplanets. Questions prompted us to think deeply
about historical analogies between Earth and otherworlds; the place of the Anthropocene in our research;and changing paradigms in science. It was telling that
nobody questioned whether environments beyond
Earth even belong in environmental history. Something
new, it seems, is orbiting the Sun.

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
individual topical insights, the major refrains of myexperience at ASEH 2017 were the value of unansweredquestions and hypotheses in our research and ourcollaborative work, and the power of storytelling as a
medium of scholarly communication.
Pictured below: Georgetown University ASEH Team
Front left: Jackson Perry. Back center-right: Robynne Mellor. Front
right: Dagomar Degroot.

Robynne Mellor, PhD candidate in environmental
history, Georgetown University, and ICEHO social
media co-editor:
This year’s ASEH was an exciting opportunity for me toengage with scholars interested in the same themes,
ideas, and topics as I am. I especially enjoyed all theways in which the panel participants discussed thehistory of resource extraction and its effects on theenvironment and surrounding populations. The
panellists 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 myhorizons as part of lively discussions on “newmaterialism” and what it means for environmental
history, from the understanding of carcinogens todinosaur 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,
Georgetown University, and ICEHO social media coeditor:
Attending ASEH this year encouraged me to think a lot
about questions, answers, and stories, as I move fromcomprehensive exams to dissertation research thisspring. Looking back at coursework and exams, theimperative to reach a conclusion about a debate inhistoriography or to advance a particular interpretationof 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 thananswers. They inspired curiosity and open-ended
discussion of, say, the relationship between colonial andpost-colonial development policy, or of linear andcyclical aspects of Mediterranean environmental
history. What sticks in my mind from the weekend’s

Women in Environmental History(WEHN)
From Julie Cohn
WEHN links women in environmental history across theglobe so that we can share insights and inquiries thatfurther our professional experiences.
To join contact Julie Cohn cohnconnor@gmail.com
Recent activities: We submitted “Report on Gender andthe American Society for Environmental History,” tothe ASEH Executive Committee in February, and it wasformally received at the ASEH annual meeting in March
We had a party!!! The second WEHN reception, held on
March 30th at the ASEH annual meeting in Chicago, wasa big success, with about 100 environmental history
scholars in attendance. A feature of the meeting was
topic theme signs around the room to help those with
common interests to find each other. The room wasabuzz with conversation and excitement and we hope tobe able to host another similar event next year.
Big Announcement!!! An anonymous donor has
generously offered to match, dollar for dollar, up to$1,000, all contributions made to support WEHN during2017. Our modest funds to pay for our networking
receptions and for our membership in ICEHO. Please
help us meet this challenge by making a contribution to
WEHN. Contact Lisa Mighetto to use a credit card, ormail a check made out to ASEH, with “For WEHN” in thememo line to: Lisa Mighetto, ASEH UW Interdisciplinary
Arts and Sciences, 1900 Commerce Street Tacoma, WA
98406 USAWEHN will meet at ESEH in Zagreb –June 30th 2017.
Workshop at 2018 ASEH Annual Meeting – WEHN isplanning a workshop about women in environmental
history – tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, March
14, 2018. This is a very broad topic that encompasses
both scholarly work and professional endeavours, so wehope it will have wide appeal to conference-goers.

ICEHO ELECTIONS 2017: TREASURER
AND SECRETARY
In the last Bulletin, as Election Officer, I announced
that two candidates – Steven Anderson and Bo
Poulsen – had been nominated for Treasurer andSecretary of ICEHO for the four-year period 2017 to
2021. Further nominations were invited with adeadline date of 28 February 2017. None werereceived and those who regularly visit the ICEHO
website will have noted that a General Assembly
will be convened in Zagreb (at the ESEH
conference), which, as well as handling otherbusiness (see below), will formally confirm theelection of these two candidates for the positions.
Steven Anderson has been the Treasurer of ICEHO
since its inception, and Bo Poulsen will replacefounding Secretary Dolly Jørgensen and interimsecretary Dagomar Degroot. As they vacate theirposts, we thank both Dolly and Dagomar for theirefficient and friendly filling of the secretarial
position.
We would like as many member organisations
as possible to attend the ICEHO General

Assembly so please diarise the following andattend if you can.

 Date: 28 June 2017
 Time: 11:00 to 12:30
 Venue: to be advised
Agenda:1. Ratification of the minutes of theprevious General Assembly Meeting(2016)
2. Report on current status of 2019congress (program committee).

3. Report on open Board Meeting in
Chicago at ASEH 31 March 2017:
matters arising.
4. General
If there are other items for discussion, pleaseadvise the current interim secretary, Dagomar
Degroot Dagomar.Degroot@georgetown.edu
Jane Carruthers
Past President. Election Officer 2017
Treasurer: Steven Anderson, a founder and everenthusiastic supporter of ICEHO, and who has been
responsible for the financial and administrative businessof the Consortium since its
inception, has agreed to be
re-nominated for a further 4year term. Steve, who has a
PhD in forest economics andwho has extensive experiencein many aspects of forestry, iscurrently President of theForest History Society basedin North Carolina.
Secretary: Bo Poulsen is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg
University in Denmark. Bo also has a long association
with ICEHO having been local organizer of the World
Congress of Environmental
History in 2009. Bo is a
widely published and highly
regarded environmental
historian with special
interest in marine andmaritime studies. Bo’s latest
book is Global Marine
Science and Carlsberg(Leiden, 2016)

Congratulations!
To Christof Mauch and Carolyn
Merchant on their respective awards at
the recent ASEH Conference.
Carolyn received the DistinguishedService Award, and Christof, the Public
Outreach Career Award.

Christof Mauch has greatly enriched the international
engagement of our field, promoted a more global
awareness of the role of the humanities, and served themembership of the environmental history community innumerous and vital ways.
As director of the Rachel Carson Center in Munich,Christof has provided funding for ASEH plenary speakers
and sessions at recent conferences. Moreover, ourmembers have profited enormously from the rise of the
RCC as an inspiring place for scholarly work and as aplace for making connections with historians from allover the world. Nearly 50 professors and post-doctoral
students from the US and Canada have been awarded
residential fellowships at the RCC. Their work as RCC
fellows has greatly enriched our conferences, ourscholarship, and in the broadest sense, our historicalimaginations.

Christof Mauch (left) and Carolyn MerchantThanks to Kathy Brosnan who provided the picture andshort speech she made for each of them:Distinguished Service Award
Carolyn Merchant has received many academic honors,
including ASEH’s Distinguished Scholar award in 2010.
But her award tonight recognizes service to ASEH
specifically. Carolyn Merchant is only the second person
to receive both the Distinguished Scholar andDistinguished Service awards from ASEH.
Carolyn joined ASEH in 1980, and was involved in our
first ASEH conference at UC Irvine. Since then, she has
contributed to ASEH operations not only by serving aspresident from 2001 to 2003, but also by serving on the
Executive Committee for many years. She served asassociate editor of Environmental Review from 1984 to
1989, and on the editorial advisory board ofEnvironmental Historyfrom 1990 to 2010. She has
contributed her expertise and insight to everything fromjournal editor searches to fund raising and prizecommittees. She was instrumental in reorganizing thestructure of ASEH by helping set up the office ofexecutive director, a change that has made theorganization stronger, more effective, and more
efficient. She also established and raised critical funding
for the ASEH travel grants, including the Ellen Swallow
Richards travel grant, and others intended to increase
diversity and inclusion at our annual conferences. Morerecently, she brought her considerable energy,
creativity, and contacts to bear while co-chairing the
local arrangements committee for the 2014 ASEH
conference in San Francisco, for which she helped raisea record $60,000. It is difficult to imagine where ASEH
would be were it not for Carolyn.
Public Outreach Career Award from the American
Society for Environmental History

Moreover, the RCC’s many partnerships and digitalprojects have strengthened the role of the humanities incurrent political and scientific debates.
Professor Mauch is a visionary leader in promotinginternational, transnational, and comparativeenvironmental history. Without his energy and vision
the ASEH’s recent growth in international awarenessand outreach would be greatly diminished. Please join
me in thanking and celebrating Christof Mauch.
---------------------- ----------------------------------------------

Congratulations to the Editors, Estelita Vaz, Cristina
Joanaz de Melo and Lígia M. Costa Pinto on thiswonderful publication of so many of the papers fromour last Congress.

Other News
News from the White HorsePress
The White Horse Press will be publishing a Virtual
Special Issue entitled Natures In Between tocoincide with the 2017 ESEH conference in Zagreb.
Comprising papers selected to reflect theconference theme, with an introduction by Karen
Jones and commentaries by Marco Armiero(Conference Programme Committee Chair) and
Dolly Jorgensen, this electronic edition will beavailable free to access for three months from lateMay. Further details will be posted on our website-www.whpress.co.uk and Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/thewhitehorsepresssoon.
We have recently started publishing a blog https://whitehorsepress.blog- where authors andeditors of or publications ruminate informally on
aspects of their research. We welcome pitches forblog items. Recent subjects have ranged from theRiver Tyne to the Aral Sea, from philosophising
environmental policy to doing environmental
history.
Lastly, we have justpublished a major new
monograph, Leona Skelton’s
Tyne After Tyne: An
Environmental History of aRiver’s Battle for Protection
1529–2015. Further details
may be found here:
http://www.whpjournals.co.uk/Books/Skelto
n.htmlSarah Johnson
Publisher

Chicago, several ICEHO member representatives
met to discuss the prospects for the Third World
Congress in Florianopolis to be held JULY 23--26
2019.
Please join the discussion. You do not need to be a
representative of an organization to be part of thisconversation, indeed, we need all the members of
our member organizations, and indeed, anyone
interested in the board field of environmental
history, to participate.
It has always been difficult for scholars from
economically disadvantaged backgrounds, toattend and participate in conferences
ICEHO strives to be inclusive and to represent theworld community of environmental historians(broadly speaking), so as an organization, wewant to do as much as we can to help scholars, forwhom it is difficult to attend for economic
reasons, and make it possible to hear their voices
in Florianopolis.
We will table a motion at the Zagreb General
Assembly during the ESEH conference (see ICEHO
website for details) to use a substantial portion of
our funds for bursaries, but this will only be a small
sum of money compared to what we would like toachieve.
Therefore, we seek alternative ways of funding andthis is where you become so important: As one of
the fundraisers, I shall work with the localorganizers in Zagreb and with Lisa Mighetto at the
ASEH 2018 conference in Riverside, CA, to set up
silent auctions for an ‘ICEHO bursary fund’.

Solcha’s
next symposium, in 2018, will be hosted by the Universidad
Nacional de Costa Rica at its Liberia campus (Guanacaste
province)https://solcha.uniandes.edu.co/index/index.php/simposios/si
mposios-solcha.

What, then, is a silent auction and how can you
participate?
(1) We need items to auction off, items thatcan be transported on airplanes and will
have some value for your colleagues, toencourage them to participate. Signed
copies of your books, environmental
material from your earlier days withnostalgic value (e.g. I still have a bag fromthe St. Andrews Conference), or any otherstuff you think will work. For those of you
who have met me in person it will come asno surprise that I will try to make anddonate as many presidentially-knitted
socks as possible, hoping that they become
collectors’ items bringing in a lot of cash.

see latest CLIMATE HISTORY NEWS here:
http://www.climatehistory.net/news2/2016/10/6/chn-fall-newsletter-publishedSupporting Diversity across
ICEHO: Florianópolis WCEH2019
On the occasion of ASEH’s yearly conference at the
Drake Hotel on the shores of Lake Michigan inOur publishers can of course, donate
books, too .
(2) We want you to participate in the auction
by bidding for one thing, or two or three …
or more. Bidding will be done byincremental amounts, and “silent”, that is,during the entire conference, as you walkby the auction stand, you record a bid.
There will be a short final action where
everyone who participated is asked tocome and see if they ‘’made it’’ and pick up
their new belongings and pay off their bids.
We will try to make this a fun occasion anda time to meet old and make new friends.
(3) We need volunteers at the stands during
the conference and we will eventually put
a list up where you can sign up.

If you organize a conference or workshop where
you can set up a silent auction or other fundraiser
between now and the beginning of 2019, please doso and let us know so we can feature you in the
Bulletin. We will update you regularly on progress
about the conference bursary funds.
Please help to make World Conference III in
Florianopolis as inclusive as possible!
VerenaCheck out our website:
http://www.iceho.org
There is always something new happening here!

Make sure your organization is part of the
ICEHO Family…
From as little as $US100/year

Information online:
http://www.iceho.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/01/ICEHOMembership-Application.pdf
Contact Valerie Bass:
Valerie.Bass@foresthistory.org

Contacts for ICEHO Executive Board
President: Verena Winiwarter
Verena.Winiwarter@aau.at
Vice-President: Claudia Leal
claleal@uniandes.edu.co
Secretary: Dagomar Degroot
Dagomar.Degroot@georgetown.edu
Treasurer: Steven Anderson
steven.anderson@foresthistory.org
Past President/Bulletin Editor: Libby Robinlibby.robin@anu.edu.au
Board Members
Alan MacEachern amaceach@uwo.ca
Claudia Leal claleal@uniandes.edu.co
Daisy Onyige chioma2nv76@gmail.com
James Beattie jbeattie@waikato.ac.nz
Mucha Musemwa
mucha.musemwa@wits.ac.za
Shen Hou houshen@ruc.edu.cn
Sidd Krishnan
siddhartha.krishnan@atree.org