It has been another full month of activity online in the environmental history community. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with the flurry of great work out there. To help you manage the flood of content, we keep track of the #envhist tag on Twitter for items of interest from around the world. Here is what was worth reading in April 2014:
1. Aerial views of the uneasy geometries of urban sprawl by Christoph Gielen
Just in time for CHESS 2014: Suburbia and Environmental History, TreeHugger.com profiled Christoph Gilen’s new book Ciphers. The book features amazing and hauntingly beautiful aerial photographs of global suburbs. Check it out and see suburbs from a different angle.
2. Why the Passenger Pigeon Went Extinct
AudubonMagazine.org published an excellent, lengthy piece on the history of the destruction of the Passenger Pigeon. Barry Yeoman traces the complicated, tragic history of this once abundant North American bird.
3. Journal of Canadian Studies Special Issue on Environmental Studies
Following an excellent conference at the University of British Columbia in 2012, Matthew Evenden has edited a selection of papers from that conference in this special issue of Journal of Canadian Studies. With the aim of moving beyond the “culture of nature” framework, the authors in this special issue examine a range of topics of relevance to bigger questions at the intersections of Canadian and environmental studies.
Professor Jessica van Horssen sits down for a recorded chat about her research on asbestos and Asbestos, QC on the Commodity Histories website. This is an insightful interview and provides great background on this fascinating research topic.
5. Environmental History Climate Change Forum
Perhaps the greatest environmental challenge of the twenty-first century, climate change looms large in the field of environmental history. Ten environmental historians offer short essays in this special forum on climate change. Like many of the other special forum issues of Environmental History, this one is certainly worth reading.
