Outreach Committee

This committee seeks to facilitate engagement among environmental historians and practitioners of many associated disciplines, to benefit our own scholarship and enhance its applicability to formulation of present and future environmental policies and practices. One of our goals is to increase awareness, conversations, and potential collaborations across disciplines. Involving communities in our research is a key part of outreach, as is communicating our findings to policymakers and the larger public.  Encouraging conversations with environmental journalists, serving on National Research Council committees, participating in the Leopold Environmental Leadership Program, encouraging members to write op-ed pieces, serving as congressional fellows – these are all possibilities. Individual members need to make their own decisions about whether they want to be involved in such outreach, but the committee can help make ASEH members aware of the possibilities. A list of members, along with committee reports, is provided below.

 
Members:

Catherine Christen, Smithsonian Institution, Chair

Karl Brooks, University of Kansas

Dale Goble, University of Idaho

Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin

Ravi Rajan, University of California – Santa Cruz

Harriet Ritvo, MIT

Recent activities of the Outreach Committee include the following:

• Expanding the experts' roster on our website. Reporters contact ASEH for info. on environmental issues around once/week.
• Assisting ASEH’s Diversity Committee on outreach to various communities during the Tallahassee conference in 2009. We expect to launch a “host” program during our 2009 meeting.
• Outreach to Organizations:
• Participated in the 2008 meeting of the National Council on Public History, which included a discussion about historians and climate change; coordination of blogs.
• Kate Christen, chair of the Outreach Committee, was recently elected as Humanities Representative to the Society for Conservation Biology’s Board of Governors. Kate has been working on ASEH-SCB outreach for some time and is looking forward to opportunities to expand this kind of outreach.
• Drafted proposal to participate in a congressional briefing sponsored by the National History Center.