Note from the Editors

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeNote from the EditorsStephen Brain, Mark D. Hersey, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyreStephen Brain Search for more articles by this author , Mark D. Hersey Search for more articles by this author , and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreWhile preparing to compose these notes from the editors, we’ve come to think of them as postcards to the future. Returning from the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History in Boston, we mused about whether readers receiving this issue in July would recall the environmentally themed items in the news from recent months. Will February’s 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria, and the questions it raised about safe building codes in seismically active areas, have receded completely from the public memory? Did the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, spur a sustained conversation about the transport of toxic chemicals and the related environmental justice issues? Have the atmospheric rivers that recently filled California’s reservoirs put an end, however temporary, to thoroughgoing evaluations of western water usage? Events like these, the subjects of tomorrow’s environmental history dissertations, monographs, and articles, rise and fall so quickly in the public consciousness that they can seem ephemeral, evanescent. Yet it is precisely this fleeting quality of the daily news that makes the environmental historian’s vocation all the more important: to revisit key moments from the past, to track the changing relationship between humans and the nonhuman world, and to raise objections when that relationship merits critique.The articles in the July 2023 issue do precisely this, rescuing from obscurity certain historical episodes—some recent, others remote—and correcting scholarly misperceptions about the role that the natural world has played in human affairs, and vice versa. The Reflection essay by the chief historian of the United States Forest Service, Lincoln Bramwell, about the 2018 Camp Fire in California, places in deeper context the apparent rise of catastrophic forest fires in the twenty-first century, arguing that ill-advised human settlement patterns and blithe attitudes about fire have changed more than the climate or other pyrogenic conditions. Hayley Negrin’s essay about colonial diplomacy underscores how important interaction with the nonhuman world was for Indigenous communities by examining the treaties negotiated by the Powhatan leader Cockacoeske and foregrounding the environmental relationships that she negotiated into agreements with the English. Emma Schroeder’s contribution to the issue explores the intersection of gender equity and environmental activism, demonstrating how tightly bound the two have been in the postwar era. And finally, Joanna Linzer’s piece explores industrial pollution in early modern Japan, defying scholarly expectations about class conflict and environmental justice, and revealing that simple formulae about environmental harm moving downhill and toward the less privileged do not necessarily apply in all cases.Like the articles, the book reviews in this issue provoke readers to reassess popular environmentalist arguments. Reviewers ask us to reevaluate what we think we know about issues ranging from plastics pollution to climate migration; from the environmental impact of work, coercion, and slavery to the politics of public land stewardship. Emphasizing the global nature of the field, reviewers evaluate non-English works that synthesize the environmental histories of Finland and Russia for our English-speaking readership.We hope that this postcard to the future finds our readers well, and as always, we are pleased to have such devoted correspondents. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 28, Number 3July 2023 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 177Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725397 Views: 177Total views on this site HistoryPublished online May 04, 2023 © 2023 Forest History Society and American Society for Environmental History. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.