page_title: Environmental history
section_title: Current practice
hierarchical_section_title: Environmental history / Current practice
caption_attribution_description: English: Frederick Jackson Turner, c.1890 en:Category:United States history images Born in en:Portage, en:Wisconsin in en:1861, Turner began his career in newspapers, and in 1880 entered the en:University of Wisconsin. Following his graduation with an MA in History, he went on to en:Johns Hopkins University for his doctorate, returning to Wisconsin as Professor of History in en:1889. It was there tha he developed his most famous work "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" which became recognised as a seminal work in the understanding of the reasons for, and the benefits of territorial expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts. He describes the effects of the expansion of the frontier on the American character, its nationalism and individualism and so on, much of which he attributed to this frontier mentality. Turner died in en:1932.
context_page_description: Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa.
  Environmental history emerged in the United States out of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and much of its impetus still stems from present-day global environmental concerns. The field was founded on conservation issues but has broadened in scope to include more general social and scientific history and may deal with cities, population or sustainable development. As all history occurs in the natural world, environmental history tends to focus on particular time-scales, geographic regions, or key themes. It is also a strongly multidisciplinary subject that draws widely on both the humanities and natural science.
  The subject matter of environmental history can be divided into three main components. The first, nature itself and its change over time, includes the physical impact of humans on the Earth's land, water, atmosphere and biosphere.
context_section_description: In the United States the American Society for Environmental History was founded in 1975 while the first institute devoted specifically to environmental history in Europe was established in 1991, based at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1986, the Dutch foundation for the history of environment and hygiene Net Werk was founded and publishes four newsletters per year. In the UK the White Horse Press in Cambridge has, since 1995, published the journal Environment and History which aims to bring scholars in the humanities and biological sciences closer together in constructing long and well-founded perspectives on present day environmental problems and a similar publication Tijdschrift voor Ecologische Geschiedenis (Journal for Environmental History) is a combined Flemish-Dutch initiative mainly dealing with topics in the Netherlands and Belgium although it also has an interest in European environmental history. Each issue contains abstracts in English, French and German. In 1999 the Journal was converted into a yearbook for environmental history. In Canada the Network in Canadian History and Environment facilitates the growth of environmental history through numerous workshops and a significant digital infrastructure including their website and podcast.
  Communication between European nations is restricted by language difficulties. In April 1999 a meeting was held in Germany to overcome these problems and to co-ordinate environmental history in Europe. This meeting resulted in the creation of the European Society for Environmental History in 1999. Only two years after its establishment, ESEH held its first international conference in St. Andrews, Scotland. Around 120 scholars attended the meeting and 105 papers were presented on topics covering the whole spectrum of environmental history. The conference showed that environmental history is a viable and lively field in Europe and since then ESEH has expanded to over 400 members and continues to grow and attracted international conferences in 2003 and 2005. In 1999 the Centre for Environmental History was established at the University of Stirling. Some history departments at European universities are now offering introductory courses in environmental history and postgraduate courses in Environmental history have been established at the Universities of Nottingham, Stirling and Dundee and more recently a Graduierten Kolleg was created at the University of Göttingen in Germany. In 2009, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC), an international, interdisciplinary center for research and education in the environmental humanities and social sciences, was founded as a joint initiative of Munich's Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the Deutsches Museum, with the generous support of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The Environment & Society Portal (environmentandsociety.org) is the Rachel Carson Center's open access digital archive and publication platform.
caption: Frontier historian 
  Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932)
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