PANEL 1: ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTS
Caroline Kreysel (MIT, VU Amsterdam)
“Washing down from the plantation: A downstream history of intensive land use and the Pantanal wetland (1970s-2000)”
Since the 1970s, communities living alongside the Taquari River, a part of the Brazilian Pantanal wetland, noticed changes in the river’s annual flood rhythm. Flood periods became more pronounced, the river carried more sediments into the wetland and its fish stocks declined. The river responded to intensive farming methods introduced in its headwater region. Since the 1970s, land had rapidly been converted to soybean monocultures following the Brazilian military regime’s developmentalist agenda to increase the production of agricultural commodities. Land conversion led to the destruction of riparian forests, soil erosion and the outwash of pesticides. The Taquari River carried these materials into the Pantanal wetland. In this paper, I narrate the history of the Taquari River foregrounding the temporalities of its flood rhythms as entangling multiple plantation legacies with different downstream livelihoods that were attuned and responded to the river’s dynamics. As the Taquari carried material legacies of plantation farming into the Pantanal, it created new encounters between different human and non-human entities, practices and knowledges. This paper approaches a history of intensive land use from the depths of the wetland to account for fishers, cattle ranchers and other wetland beings becoming entangled in the soybean complex. The paper charts how the shifts in the Taquari River’s behaviour informed ways of thinking about the wetland region, monocultural farming and the voices claiming to represent them. It integrates the ecology of the wetland into the environmental history of monocultures and intensive land uses to highlight the multiple legacies that plantations produced.
Ayushi Chauhan (Boston University)
“Sanitary Futures Disease Railways and the Politics of Improvement in Colonial Delhi 1857-1900”
In 1868, Punjab’s Army Sanitary Commissioner urged the creation of sanitary works to “dispose people to forget our failures and to have faith in our ability to prevent epidemics”. In the decades following the 1857 rebellion, Delhi underwent a profound period of urban reconstruction. The paper weaves together disease, railways, and sanitation to show how officials used sanitary and hygienic reforms to make people forget the colonial state’s failures in preventing epidemics. Railway construction transformed local ecologies as embankments, earthworks, and cuttings altered drainage patterns, producing stagnant pools, polluting wells, and raising subsoil water levels. Yet instead of attributing these conditions to engineering interventions, officials associated sanitation and hygiene with native bodies and practices. Thus, the very ecological disruptions created by the railways allowed the state to justify expanded sanitary regulation, surveillance, and urban restructuring in the name of disease control. The paper traces how sanitary discourse gained authority even as water supply and drainage projects faced continual delays caused by a shortage of skilled engineers, iron, finances, and the inadequate knowledge of the Indian landscape. When completed, they produced little measurable impact on diseases. By examining railway expansion along sanitation policy, this study shows how urban reconstruction was driven as much by ecological change as by the politics of governing disease. It reframes the city’s transformation not simply as an administrative response to public health crisis but as a process through which colonial authorities consolidated control over landscape in the name of hygiene and improvement.
Jason Chan (Harvard)
“Cold Peace: Circumpolar Cooperation, Subarctic Canada, and Experiences of Polar Infrastructure Development along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway”
This paper follows a Chinese permafrost science delegation to subarctic Canada in 1975. It situates these exchanges within the broader National Campaign on Science along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway (1974–1978) in late Mao and Hua-era China, and within the wider thaw of what Nordic historians called the “glacial curtain” between the North American and Soviet Arctic. In so doing, it unearths the trans-polar connections made possible by the convergence of two developments in the 1970s: the Qinghai-Tibet Railway’s accelerated construction under what I call a national mobilizational technocracy and the regularization of collaboration between US, Canadian, European, Japanese, and Soviet permafrost scientists. Utilizing Chinese and Canadian archives, reference materials institutional libraries deaccessioned, and oral histories, this paper challenges regionalist histories of Chinese railroad development and current elucidations of Maoist sciences as primarily mass participatory and autarkic. It argues instead that the Qinghai-Tibet Railway Science Campaign not only mobilized scientific expertise from across the People’s Republic; joining the trend of converging northern developments in the Arctic Ocean rim, it also mobilized experts and imported experiential knowledge from a coalescing circumpolar community to overcome what Chinese railroaders called the “engineering bottleneck of the millennium:” permafrost. By framing common cold-region engineering challenges facing the North and Third Poles, the Ministry of Railways entangled the Qinghai-Tibet Railway with contemporaneous resource and infrastructural developments across the circumpolar North in its “scientific pitch battle” to overcome technical bottlenecks impeding the Tibetan Plateau’s extractive development.
PANEL 2: ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
B. Jack Hanly (MIT)
“Assessing Development’s Impacts: Environments between Paperwork and Software”
This paper examines how environmental regulation in the 1970s reshaped both the process and policies of land development in the American West. In the wake of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and California’s 1972 Friends of Mammoth decision, environmental review transformed ecological concern into a procedural requirement. The Environmental Impact Statement did not prohibit harm; it demanded that potential harms be described, producing a vast new paperwork regime that remade relations among citizens, bureaucrats, and developers. Drawing on archival materials from architects, planning agencies, and consulting firms, this paper traces how these mandates created a new class of “environmental professionals” who translated regulation into practice. Focusing on architect Beverly Willis’s Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis (CARLA), a computational planning tool developed amid California’s housing controversies, it shows how environmental review became a domain of technical and managerial expertise. Willis’s offered developers a tool that could model ecological and economic parameters in a single frame, rendering soil, drainage, and grading conditions alongside market factors and loan terms. It furthermore promised to rationalize the development process in light of activist blockade, anticipating opposition and modeling contingencies in response to shifting regulatory terrain. In this way, the program occupied an “intermedia” format that rested between paperwork and software, bureaucracy and representation. These practices marked a pivotal moment in the bureaucra3za3on of environmentalism, when the ideal of ecological stewardship was transformed into the work of simulation, reporting, and procedure – an enduring legacy in the “environmental management state” today.
Nicholas Morrison (University of Maryland)
“Shielding the Steppe: The Semipalatinsk Test Site and Environmentalism in Late Soviet Kazakhstan, 1964-1994”
This paper examines Kazakhstani opposition to Soviet nuclear testing in the late twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources from Kazakhstan and the United States as well as Soviet newspapers and published document collections, this paper argues that environmental concern about nuclear testing in Kazakhstan spanned the late twentieth century. Located in the heart of the Kazakh steppe, the Semipalatinsk Test Site was one of the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear testing facilities. Cattle grazing pastures and underground water reservoirs were contaminated after nuclear tests commenced. Kazakhstani intellectuals and anxious Soviet citizens were first to draw attention to environmental degradation around the test site in the 1960s and 1970s. Through letters to the Soviet government, poems, and protests they lamented the destruction of the steppe ecosystem. The opening of the Soviet public sphere in the late 1980s led to the creation of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement (NSM), an organization that advocated for the closure of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site and the ecological protection of the region that surrounded it. Led by the very scholars who first critiqued nuclear testing, the organization successfully pressured the Soviet government to close the test site in 1991. Activists from the NSM carried out environmental rehabilitation efforts in areas affected by radiation pollution until 1994. By tracing efforts to shield the steppe across three decades, this paper builds on our understanding ofenvironmental activism in the Soviet Union and in the late twentieth century more broadly.
Max Chervin Bridge (Brown)
“Teaching the Environmental History of Disability: Pedagogy as Field-Building”
In recent years, historians have begun to pay more attention to the rich intersections between the fields of environmental and disability history. Drawing out the possibilities of this scholarship, I designed and taught an undergraduate seminar in Spring 2025 entitled “Bodies that Matter: Environmental Histories of Disability in the United States.” This course focused on relationships between changing ideas and experience of bodily difference and changing ideas and experiences of the nonhuman environment over the past 250 years across histories of labor, knowledge, and political activism. In this talk, I would like to center pedagogy as a modality of field-building, exploring the ways that syllabus and assignment creation can operate as distinctive ways of bringing these two fields together through reading and narrative-building practices. In the process, this talk will reflect on the historiography of both fields, introduce some of the exciting work being done, and explore the primary sources I used – memoirs, novels, comic books, Congressional testimonies, and more – to generate a through-line that connects both environmental and disability lenses to central topics of U.S. history from slavery to nuclear radiation to COVID-19.
LIGHTNING ROUND I: SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT
Brigid Prial (Penn)
“Save the Chimpanzee (Labs)!: Conservation and Biomedical Science in Transnational Species Politics, 1945 - 1980”
For U.S. laboratory scientists working with chimpanzees in the twentieth century, their experimental subject linked them uncomfortably to African environments. When Yale psychologist Robert Yerkes first institutionalized chimpanzees as laboratory animals in the 1920s, he hoped that captive breeding would solve researchers’ dependence on the wild populations of chimpanzees in West and Central Africa. By the 1960s, African decolonization had radically reshaped U.S. laboratories’ colonial supply chains and captive chimpanzees still struggled to reproduce in American labs. As conservationists and animal rights advocates drew critical attention to U.S. chimpanzee laboratories, lab chimp scientists asserted themselves in conservation policy and suggested that American labs were safer places for chimpanzees than their African habitats. This claim presented laboratory science as a modern and protective use of chimpanzees while constructing African environments as politically and ecologically volatile. This paper presents the U.S. biomedical laboratory as a significant actor in the conservation politics of the late twentieth century. Environmental historians have generally focused on animals in their “natural” locations in debates about conservation and wildlife management. My work shows how animals in spaces not considered typically environmental, like laboratories, are deeply relevant to our understanding of transnational environmental politics. I consider how U.S. biomedical researchers working with chimpanzees in the mid-twentieth century advanced powerful, troubling narratives about who should manage valuable species in times of ecological crisis.
Oliver Lucier (Yale)
“’The Desert Feeds Back Upon Itself!’: The Charney Hypothesis and the Shifting Relationship of Plants, Oceans, and Drought, 1970s-2000s”
This paper investigates the formation and influence of US meteorologist Jule Charney’s highly influential theory about desert-albedo feedback, which postulated that vegetation loss and drought existed in a negative feedback loop. Charney first publicized his theory in the mid-1970s in several academic papers and public lectures. The theory was quickly taken up in three overlapping environmental discourses. Within Israel, where Charney had first developed his work on deserts during a sabbatical from MIT, Israeli scientists utilized Charney’s results to characterize Indigenous Bedouin land use in the Negev as unsustainable and justify a program of forced removal. In the US, climate scientists at major research institutions built on Charney’s theory using satellite observations and global circulation models to show that although drought in the Sahel during the 1970s was shaped at the margins by vegetation loss it was predominantly driven by changes in sea surface temperatures which were ultimately tied to aerosol emissions from the United States. Such results challenged the third discourse: UN anti-desertification efforts. While the UN had initially eagerly accepted Charney’s initial results as substantiating long-term concern about overgrazing, the findings of subsequent generations of US-based climate scientists profoundly challenged existing UN anti-desertification policy and reshaped who had claims to expertise about deserts and drought. The history of Charney’s hypothesis foregrounds a new type of environmental history belonging to the Anthropocene: one which traces the complex, transnational flows of scientific expertise, environmental change, and land use management across a quickly changing and unstable global climate system.
Abigail S. Higgins (Harvard)
“ ‘Contaminated Mothers’: Breast Milk Biomonitoring and the Gendered Politics of Embodied Risk from Michigan to Akwesasne, 1973-1999”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” released by the Trump Administration in May 2025, warns that an “aggregation of environmental chemicals” is contributing to an alarming health crisis for the country’s children. It highlights breast milk as an important mode of exposure to a wide range of persistent organic pollutants. Concerns about the accumulation and transfer of toxicants in breast milk arose in the mid-twentieth century. Breast milk biomonitoring studies accelerated in the United States and globally in the following decades, ultimately becoming a cornerstone of the international data infrastructure to assess human health and progress towards pollution reduction. Yet, despite breast milk’s symbolic resonance, such biomonitoring efforts have not resulted in sustained alarm nor unequivocal, actionable insights for environmental regulation and health decision-making. In this paper, I examine two sites of breast milk biomonitoring conducted in the wake of large-scale environmental contamination between 1973 and 1999: Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation at Akwesasne. I ask: How did activists, scientists, and others balance surveillance of toxicity in breast milk with breastfeeding guidance? Where do these actors locate risk? How do different politicizations of motherhood in environmental activism reveal a multiplicity of epistemologies of risk? I suggest breast milk biomonitoring illuminates negotiations of environmental and reproductive politics, where invocations of “motherhood” as a political resource yield uneven consequences and where scientific knowledge production is inseparable from the complicated emotional and political landscapes it helps produce.
Noah Kulick (Johns Hopkins)
“The Elephant in the Room: The Humane Society of the United States, The Zimbabwe Trust, and the First International Sustainability Controversy”
Two years after the Brundtland Report (1987), Zimbabwe launched one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s first large-scale tests of sustainable development principles: The Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE). It was a rather simple wildlife conservation program, no different conceptually than many other programs that had long been established in developed countries. The state would allow local governing bodies to sell hunting permits for wildlife, and the revenue from those sales would be reinvested into wildlife conservation and local communities. The only difference was that a greater share of that money would go towards development. Yet this program would become the center of the first large-scale referendum on the limits of sustainable development in the global south. At the center of this controversy was Zimbabwe’s sale of hunting permits for the endangered African elephant and its lobbying for free trade of elephant ivory. The Zimbabwean government, the WWF, and the IUCN, would argue fervently in defense of these measures as sensible applications of sustainable development principles; the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, and the Sierra Club would argue that these measures were an affront to the very concept of sustainable development. Using archival records from government agencies and NGOs on both sides, this paper traces the controversy over CAMPFIRE from 1987 through 2004 and examines the fundamental questions it raised: What are the limits of sustainable development? And who has the authority to define them?
PANEL 3: ENVIRONMENTS ON THE MOVE
Anke Wang (Cornell)
“Profits of Mobility: The Monsoon and Migrant Fishers in the Gulf of Tonkin, 1880–1950”
The Gulf of Tonkin, a shallow sea bordered by northern Vietnam and southern China, is defined by the rhythms of monsoon winds and ocean currents. The environmental forces remained constant even as political regimes changed. Each winter, thousands of fishers from the southern Chinese port of Pakhoi (Beihai) sailed southward to the northern Vietnamese coast, riding the northeast monsoon. The 1920s marked a shift for fisheries in the Gulf, where French colonial governance intersected with emerging marine science and industrial ambition. This paper examines how colonial authorities transitioned from collecting navigation fees to imposing tariffs, aiming to industrialize the sector and prioritize indigenous fisheries over seasonal Chinese interests. Central to this transformation were two driving forces: the Oceanographic Institute of Indochina, which used mechanical trawlers to rationalize fishing grounds, and the ideology of mise en valeur. However, the tension between developmental goals and extractive imperatives—capital investment versus profit repatriation—created a paradox that ultimately led to stagnation in the fishing industry. By analyzing the interplay between environment, colonial science, and political economy, this paper highlights how the dual mandates of colonial capitalism constrained the industrialization it sought to promote.
Eduarda Lira de Araujo (Harvard)
“Ancestral Waterscapes: The Magic of Invisibility, Freedom, and Enslavement in 19th-century Brazil”
A complex interplay of visibility and invisibility, and a conflict between the structures of enslavement and strategies freedom-making, coalesced in the woods of the Itaipu restinga, in Rio de Janeiro. This swamp-like space, which traffickers used for disembarking captives in the illegal slave trade in the first half of the 19th century, was home to Evaristo Antônio da Costa, a Black healer and diviner arrested in 1859, accused of tricking masters into signing manumission letters, and sheltering runaways.
This paper discusses the complex environmental and social histories of Rio de Janeiro’s waterscapes—particularly the restinga and the northern Atlantic coast—through a critical analysis of Evaristo’s police files, as well as newspaper records and civil registries. Alongside plants and animals, this coastal zone was a powerful agent in Evaristo’s spiritual, political, and intellectual endeavors. If the swamp area played a role in making the illegal slave trade a possibility, Evaristo’s counter-spells made it a space where runaway slaves became effectively invisible, hiding in plain sight. Possibly a runaway himself, Evaristo had arrived in Rio de Janeiro by traversing the Atlantic coast of Brazil from the northern Pará province as a sailor. Evaristo and his human and non-human counterparts were connected to a South Atlantic intellectual tradition that centered ancestors in healing practices. The important role that plants like bitter melon (Momordica charantia) played in his healing rituals, for instance, found resonance on the other side of the Atlantic, where West African communities used it to escape the slave trade.
Karl Nycklemoe (Stony Brook University)
“Legal Relations: European Navigation Through Upper Mississippi Indigenous Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”
Inspired by literature on the Rights of Nature and from Indigenous legal studies, this paper demonstrates how Upper Mississippi Indigenous communities deliberately regulated how human beings navigated their waterways in the eighteenth century. In 1766, the Ho-Chunk diplomat Decorah traveled from his village on Lake Winnebago to the waterfall Owamniyomni, the end of navigation on the Mississippi River and heart of Mni Sota Makoce. In the homeland of the Dakota people, Decorah directly entreated both a Dakota village and the waterfall through mirrored diplomatic protocols: declaring his intent for good relations, the exchange of gifts, and smoking a common pipe. Throughout his journey and diplomatic meetings, Decorah was joined by Jonathan Carver, a Massachusetts-born British subject. Though Carver was sent to spy on putatively illegal French traders who traveled throughout the British-claimed Upper Mississippi watershed, he found himself subject to Decorah’s complex political world defined by Indigenous, not European, law. By articulating how Indigenous nations governed their waterways through a consistent set of diplomatic protocols, and how Indigenous and European visitors alike followed such protocols, this paper argues that human mobility in the American interior was mediated by longstanding Indigenous legal systems. This intervenes in the fields of U.S. and environmental history, which have long described Indigenous legal systems in the terms of cultural customs, usufruct rights, and economic incentives. While not wholly inaccurate, this tendency elides the profoundly structured practice of Indigenous law, which is evident within European travel accounts and governmental correspondence.
LIGHTNING ROUND II: REGIONS AND LANDSCAPES
Charlotte Leib (Yale)
“A New Lens on the End of the Little Ice Age: Periodizing climate change in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions with nineteenth-century ice trade records”
The Little Ice Age (LIA)—a period marked by episodes of cooler-than-average temperatures and alpine glacier expansion across the Northern Hemisphere beginning in the fourteenth century—has gained increasing prominence in environmental history scholarship (c.f. Parker 2013; Degroot 2018; Brook 2024). Humanists and scientists, however, have yet to agree on a precise LIA end date. They also have debated the utility of treating the LIA as a monolithic climatic period (cf. Neukom et al. 2019). The consensus now is that the LIA “can mean different things in different contexts [and geographies]” (Collet et al. 2025). Extending an interdisciplinary model of scholarship piloted by the first generation of climate historians (c.f. Ladurie 1972; Lamb 1982), this paper uses nineteenth-century ice trade records to analyze the timing of the Little Ice Age’s end in New England and the mid-Atlantic. While historians have shown that the harvest and trade of ice formed part of a longstanding New England business tradition (c.f. Cummings 1949; Everson 1970), this paper: (1) demonstrates how the ice trade also constituted an early infrastructure of anthropogenic climate change and (2) shows how ice trade records can be used to study historical climatic conditions. By examining the rhythms of the mid-Atlantic and New England ice trade alongside historical climate data and additional literary and artistic evidence, I argue that the LIA began to wane in these regions starting in 1840. I date the Little Ice Age’s regional end to the collapse of the Hudson River ice trade in 1880.
Marlaina Yost (Yale)
“Constructing Security: The Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel and Post-Naksa Subterranean Infrastructure”
In 1869, the Suez Canal became the first clearly constructed boundary of the Sinai Peninsula. Displacing traditional circuits of migration and trade, the Egyptians and the British called the canal a defensive moat, increasingly isolating the peninsula and defining it as an empty military buffer zone. Over a century later in 1980, the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel opened beneath the Canal, reestablishing a landed connection between Egypt and Sinai. Most basically, the opening of the Tunnel offered bidirectional public access to Sinai by car. At the opening ceremony Egyptian president Anwar Sadat declared a historical mistake corrected: Sinai returned to mother Egypt and Egypt returned to Sinai, the tunnel once again connected east and west with Egypt at the center. In this presentation, however, I will examine the tunnel as indicative of a new imperative of security by construction—incorporating the long-isolated buffer zone into plans for active settlement. I read the tunnel in the wake of the Arab defeat in 1967 and Israel’s capacity to use space and sky as a space of military dominance within part of a broader region response to aerial Israeli supremacy in a turn to the subterranean. Connecting spatial history and critical infrastructure studies, I will read the connective infrastructures of Sinai three dimensionally — questioning how layers of meaning were developed across this rugged terrain. Though opened in the wake of new “peace,” I show how development plans moved Sinai more totally towards a landscape of constructive violence—materially affixed to the project of militarization.
Aaron Stark (Brown)
“Hiking as Metaphor: National Parks, Recreational Biopolitics, and the Kinesthetic Culture of Homefront Mobilization in Wartime Japan, 1938-1944”
This presentation examines the politics and culture of outdoor recreation as social mobilization in wartime Japan from 1938 to 1944. Like other societies in total war, the Japanese empire exhorted (and coerced) its subjects into providing manual labor as a service to the state and as a dutiful expression of patriotic loyalty in a time of national emergency. Less known is the fact that the empire’s national park and outdoor recreation movement experienced a dramatic rise in popular visibility as the state implored its subjects to travel domestically and engage in outdoor physical activity as a means of increasing their physical and spiritual “conditioning” (tanren). In the interests of producing strong bodies for a strong empire, state bureaucrats developed grandiose plans for the rapid expansion of Japan’s national park system in addition to the creation of a dense network of outdoor recreational zones in metropolitan Japan. Attendance at national parks and popular interest in outdoor recreation accordingly surged during the war. This presentation examines how tourism, national parks, and outdoor recreation became central to Japanese imperial homefront culture at a time when the state officially heralded thrift, austerity, and economy as the keys to winning the war. By examining wartime hiking culture, the national park movement in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, and plans for a massive expansion of Japan’s recreational infrastructure, we see that the biopolitics of national parks and outdoor recreation operated as a form of social mobilization, mass surveillance, and an attempt to the integrate the natural environment into a grand narrative of racial and imperial destiny.
Owen Clow (Fordham)
“The Photography of Dysplacement: Project DOCUMERICA and Place-Identity as a Subject of Environmental Concern”
Project DOCUMERICA, a social documentary photography program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during its infancy in the 1970s, has long been overshadowed by the Depression-era Farm Security Administration photographs that served as its historical model. This paper gestures towards a new reading of the visual archive of Project DOCUMERICA, which includes over 20,000 color photographs of the American cultural landscape in the mid-1970s, by considering the protection of a “sense of place” as an integral feature of the so-called “heroic era” of American environmentalism. While many historical accounts of the environmental movement in the midcentury United States focus on conventional subjects of concern–toxic waste, polluted air, oil spills, and so forth–the EPA’s photography project incorporated a more expansive understanding of what could and should be protected by the new environmental management state. This paper examines the institutional history of Project DOCUMERICA and “reads” a sample of photographs from various DOCUMERICA assignments to highlight how a popular anxiety over the perceived destruction of place and regional identity in the United States was co-constitutive of American environmentalism in the 1970s. In so doing, this paper also fleshes out Barbara Fields’s notion of dysplacement (“the loss of a sense of identification with other persons through a shared connection to a geographical place”) and indicates its underappreciated utility to environmental history.
