Statements of the Candidates

Candidates for the 2009 election have provided the following statements:

Officers:

John McNeill, Vice President/President Elect

I joined ASEH some 20 years ago and have served on the Executive Committee,  the Nominating Committee, the editorial board of Environmental History, and  several prize committees.  I am now University Professor at Georgetown  University (which in theory means deans and department chairs are supposed  to leave me alone) after some years as Cinco Hermanos Chair in International  and Environmental Affairs.  My books include The Mountains of the  Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (1992); Something New Under  the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-Century World (2000); and  Epidemics and Geopolitics in the Greater Caribbean, 1640-1940 (forthcoming  2009).  I co-edit the Cambridge University Press series in environmental  history, and serve on the boards of Environment and History (UK), Global  Environment (Italy), Historia Agrária (Spain).  My ambitions for ASEH are,  first, to do no harm, and second, to preserve and enhance its  multidisciplinary character; also to strengthen links with organizations  such as ESEH and SOLCHA; and to raise ASEH’s profile within the both the  universe of learned societies and the environmental community at large.

Mark Madison, Treasurer

It has been real privilege to be the ASEH Treasurer since 2001.  In the subsequent years our organization has rationalized our finances, allowing strategic planning and the hiring of our first full-time Executive Director.  Our future financial plans include ongoing auditing of our finances, investing more of our monies in "sustainable funds", and carrying our financial plans to meet our needs 5 and 10 years out.  Currently I am the historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service helping manage our agency's museum and archives and coordinating our national heritage activities on wildlife refuges and other environmental sites.  I am completing two books on wolf restoration and the California condor.  I have edited collections on Rachel Carson and Olaus and Mardy Murie and am launching a new periodical on wildlife conservation history.  I also teach environmental history, conservation biology, and environmental ethics at Shepherd University.

Ellen Stroud, Secretary

Ellen Stroud is an assistant professor of environmental problems and  policy at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches in the Growth and  Structure of Cities and the Environmental Studies programs.  A U.S.   Environmental Historian, She received her B.A. from the University of Michigan, her M.A. from the University of Oregon, and Ph.D. from Columbia University.  She taught in the History Department at Oberlin   College for five years, and is in her third year at Bryn Mawr.  Her  first book, Seeing the Trees: How Cities Brought Forests Back to the  Northeastern United States, is under contract with the University of  Washington Press.   Her publications include articles in the Radical  History Review, History and Theory, and Environmental History.  Her  1999 Radical History Review article “Troubled Waters in Ecotopia:  Environmental Racism in Portland, Oregon” won the ASEH Alice Hamilton prize for the best article in environmental history published outside of the society’s own journal.  She has been a member of ASEH since 1995, served on the 2003 Rachel Carson prize committee, and has been serving as secretary of the organization since 2005.

Candidates for Executive Committee (four will be elected):

Marcus Hall

I am grateful for the opportunity to help steer ASEH, which has been my home away from home since 1993 (in Pittsburgh) when I found kindred souls at my first academic meeting.  Ever since, I have been calling myself an environmental historian and I am delighted that a few people are finally beginning to think they know what that means.  Like many of us, I have come to this field with a diverse background that includes arts and sciences, and with a less-than disinterested interest in the environment.  Graduating from Wisconsin's Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies, I spent post-doc years in Italy and Switzerland and am now assistant professor of history at the University of Utah, associate researcher at the University of Zurich by summer, and teaching a variety of environmental history courses at both institutions.  My research interests are wide, and I have dabbled or published in subjects ranging from the histories of environmental restoration to invasive species, George Marsh, malaria, and archaeology, even avalanches. I am proud that my book, Earth Repair (2005) garnered attention from an unlikely group, the architectural historians, whose society awarded it their Downing Book Award.  I also proudly hold ASEH's 2000 Rachel Carson Prize for the dissertation that became the book, and the WHA's 2002 Ray Allen Billington Prize for an article that appeared in Environmental History.   ASEH has given me a great deal, and I clearly need to give something back.

Over the next four years, I believe ASEH's crucial issues will revolve around internationalization and outreach.  Environmental history is pushing rapidly across national borders, and our organization needs to reflect and encourage that trend.  The upcoming World EH conference in Copenhagen is an exciting opportunity to make concrete plans for more transboundary conversations, both for scholarship and citizenship;  I am an active member of ESEH, and would like to see the other EH societies flourish. Secondly, along with ASEH's ongoing efforts at public outreach, the other group with whom we need to engage is scientists.  Environmental historians have finally turned the heads of fellow historians of various stripes (and many social scientists), but we haven't done nearly enough for communicating with ecologists, geologists, foresters, meteorologists, and medical researchers, many of whom are eager readers of our work.  Inviting more of such outsiders to our meetings or involving them as co-authors would be important steps, as would organizing a joint meeting with a willing society, e.g., landscape ecologists or conservation biologists, who would spark new ideas for our scholarship, publications, funding, organization, and outreach (to see how the other half does it, glance at http://www.conbio.org/AboutUs/).  Environmental history is, I feel, part of the larger endeavor of environmental humanities, and learning about environmental sciences can only help us define our own work.

David Hsiung

I am honored to be nominated to serve on the Executive Committee.  I am the Charles and Shirley Knox Professor of History at Juniata College, where I have taught since 1991.  I have been active with the ASEH since 2000, having organized sessions and breakfast discussions on teaching, having presented papers on the American Revolution, and having served for one year as the acting Book Review Editor for Environmental History.  Some of that work has led to articles in the journal Teaching History and an article in the New England Quarterly that won the Forest History Society’s 2008 Theodore C. Blegen Award.  I have also won teaching awards from my home institution and from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

If elected, I would champion our organization’s important ongoing work in overseeing the annual conference, building connections to other organizations, and supporting graduate students.  In particular, I would work to enhance the teaching of environmental history, whether at the conference, in our journal, on the ASEH website, or with organizations such as National History Day or the National Council on Public History.  To accomplish this, I would draw upon experience gained from working with other organizations—serving on a membership committee, a nominating committee, two prize committees, three conference program committees, and one term on a governing “council”—as well as the good advice of ASEH members.

Tina Loo

I’m a professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of History at UBC, where I teach an introductory course on the global environment, as well as more specialized ones exploring the environmental history of North America.  I came to environmental history indirectly, through my earlier work in legal history.  My most recent book is States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (2006), which was awarded the Canadian Historical Association’s Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for the best scholarly book in Canadian history in 2007.  My current research examines the social and environmental impacts of hydroelectric development after the Second World War, focusing on three rivers in British Columbia: the Nechako, Peace, and Columbia.  I use these case studies to explore the nature of environmental inequality and the challenges confronting those who tried to do justice to both the environment and the peoples sustained by it.

Recently, I’ve taken my interest in environmental history outside the university classroom and into places as diverse as community centres, town halls, and convents, where I’ve facilitated discussions about climate change as a member of Al Gore’s Climate Project.  This experience has reinforced my belief that we, as educators and historians, are in a unique position to engage and connect diverse audiences in a conversation about the local and the global – and that there’s no more important time to do so than now.  As a member of the Executive Committee, I would like to see the ASEH do more to facilitate such conversations; to build on its strengths as an interdisciplinary and increasingly internationalized organisation, and one committed to disseminating research across a broad spectrum of venues.

Gregg Mitman

It is an honor and a privilege to be nominated for the Executive Committee of the American Society for Environmental History, a professional society that has over the past decade increasingly become my intellectual home.  Over the past six years, I have served on the editorial board of  Environmental History, and have been delighted to see the journal become a forum for some of the most exciting, innovative, and increasingly international and interdisciplinary scholarship in environmental history.  At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I serve as Director of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, which has become a vibrant intellectual community of faculty, and graduate students from a wide array of academic disciplines dedicated to investigating environmental and cultural change in the full sweep of human history.  I am also the William Coleman Professor of History of Science and Professor of Medical History and Science & Technology Studies.

My teaching and writing interests span the history of ecology, nature, and health in American culture, and are informed by a commitment and hope to help build a more equitable and just environment. My books include The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought (1992), Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (1999), and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes.  I have also edited, with Christopher Sellers and Michelle Murphy, Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments (2002), an effort to bring environmental history in dialogue with medical history and science and technology studies, and co-edited with Lorraine Daston, Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism  (2005).  In addition to publishing numerous articles in scholarly journals, I have also written for Orion and Writers on the Range.  In 2006, I received the Aldo Leopold-Ralph W. Hidy Award from ASEH, and I have held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton.

As a member of the ASEH’s Executive Committee, I would continue to help support and nurture ASEH’s involvement in a growing network of international organizations and societies related to environmental history, as well as help extend its reach to professional societies in allied fields.  Graduate student support and public engagement are two issues important to my academic life, and I would make these priorities as an ExComm member as well.

Linda Nash

It would be a privilege to serve on the Executive Committee of ASEH, an organization that has been fundamental to my own development as a historian since I joined in 1995 and the single most important organization supporting the field of environmental history in North America.  In recent years the organization has developed a more global focus and has attracted more scholars from allied disciplines.  These are trends that we should embrace and further.  We also need to continue and even intensify our efforts to promote environmental history within the wider historical community.  I would like to see ASEH encourage collaborations with other scholarly organizations with whom we share common interests—not only other environmental history groups but also other thematic associations (e.g., the Society for the History of Technology, Agricultural History Society, Society for the History of Medicine, the World History Society) and other disciplines.  I am less concerned with defining the boundaries of environmental history than with seeking ways for our best work to infiltrate other, more established communities.  I would also like to see us continue and strengthen our commitment to diversity within the organization.  And finally, I believe that ASEH should take an active role in articulating the value of environmental history perspectives to both contemporary environmental education and policy issues.  At a moment when many universities (including my own) are reorganizing themselves around interdisciplinary environmental colleges and research institutes, we need to articulate why science-based approaches to environmental problems are by themselves inadequate, and to underscore the crucial knowledge generated by humanistic studies of environments and environmental change.  For the past 9 years, I have been an assistant and then associate professor of history at the University of Washington in Seattle.  My own research focuses on the environmental and cultural history of the modern US, with particular interests in the histories of medicine and the body, technology and imperialism, and consumerism.  (For a partial list of publications, see http://depts.washington.edu/history/faculty/nash.html.)

Joy Parr

I’m honoured to stand for ASEH Executive Council. In 2000 a catastrophic water contamination in my home village drew me from economic history to health geography, to  research on the environmental effects of agricultural and manufacturing industry, and to the stimulating and exuberant collegiality of the ASEH.  I served from 2004-07 as co-director of ENVIROTECH, published on the perception of environmental hazards in Environmental History and Comparative Studies in Society and History, and prepared an essay on embodied histories for The Illusory Boundary volume of envirotech explorations Martin Reuss and Stephen Cutcliffe are editing. My book on the human ecologies of megaprojects, Sensing Changes: technologies, environments and the everyday will appear next year and I’m happy for a new way to contribute. I continue as the social scientist amongst the medical researchers conducting the Walkerton Long-Term Health Study, as Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Risk at the University of Western Ontario and on the Advisory Board of Niche, the Canadian Environment and History network. I am leading a national initiative to build an interdisciplinary doctoral training program in Environment and Health with colleagues in geography, toxicology and public health at Montreal, Toronto, Alberta, and Northern British Columbia. My doctorate is from Yale. I’m a woodworker.

Brett Walker

I'm truly delighted to be nominated for the ASEH Executive Committee, as I've been an enthusiastic supporter of our association for years. The ASEH oversees one of the few fields that, in my estimation, seeks to elucidate those historical and natural forces that sustain, and now threaten, human and nonhuman life on Earth. Obviously, this is a powerful intellectual mission.

Currently, I'm department chairperson and professor of Japanese history at Montana State University. I would bring to the ASEH Executive Committee modest administrative experience, and a deep commitment to the timely importance of our field. I'm also committed to the expansion of environmental history to include more participation by scholars who study histories outside Europe and the United States. Environmental forces and problems challenge the traditional boundaries of nations, and so should our vibrant association.

Over the years, my research has explored the intersection of history, environment, and science. I've sought to blend scientific and humanistic inquiry to break down traditional boundaries in order to better understand pressing global challenges. My first book, The Conquest of Ainu Lands (California, 2001), investigated the cultural and ecological forces that drove the Japanese settlement of the northern island. My second book, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Washington, 2005), tackled the question of wolf extinction in Japan, combining research on ecological science and Buddhism, as well as my observations in Yellowstone, where I researched with wolf biologists.  Most recently, Toxic Archipelago (Washington, forthcoming) investigates large-scale pollution episodes in Japan, focusing on problems ranging from mercury and cadmium poisoning to asbestos and endocrine disruptors.

It would be an honor to help craft the future direction of the ASEH.

Laura Watt

It is a great honor to be nominated for the ASEH Executive Committee; ever since I attended my first environmental history conference as a graduate student in 1995 (Las Vegas, baby!), this organization has felt like my academic home.  I’m about as interdisciplinary as they come, with degrees in vertebrate ecology, natural resources management, and environmental policy, and professional experience working for The Nature Conservancy and a private consulting firm as a public lands planner—and now in my third year as Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University, teaching in Environmental Studies and Planning, I continue to be anything but a classically-trained historian.  Yet when people ask me what my “field” is, the closest I can come is environmental history, taking the changing relationships between humans and their environments seriously.  Looking back over my CV, my involvement with ASEH stands out clearly: presenting papers and/or organizing panels at every conference since 2001, publishing in Environmental History, and serving on the Program Committee for the 2007 meeting in Baton Rouge.  I’ve co-authored a history of land acquisition for conservation, and am currently writing an environmental history of Point Reyes National Seashore, examining the impacts of agency management on a working, lived-in landscape.

I have always been impressed by the ASEH’s ability to embrace interdisciplinary scholars, as well as journalists, advocates, and other kinds of working practitioners in the environmental field.  It is this relationship with interdisciplinarity that intrigues me the most; for last year’s Boise meeting, I organized a two-part round-table discussion of the relationship between environmental history and environmental studies departments, and will be participating in a follow-up panel at Tallahassee on campus sustainability movements.  If elected to the Executive Committee, I will continue to focus attention to this important relationship, as well as greater collaboration with public agencies and other environmental managers to encourage the use of environmental history to inform planning and management documents.

Candidates for Nominating Committee (two will be elected):

Lynne Heasley

I am an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in History and Environmental Studies.  My book, A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley (2005), explores twentieth-century rural transformation.  Currently I am carrying out research for The Paradox of Abundance, a transnational environmental history of the Great Lakes.  Following that project, I am planning a book that examines the history of the Peace Corps and its influence on vastly different landscapes in the U.S. and abroad (circling back to an earlier part of my career when I worked in sub-Saharan Africa).  I have also written an eclectic mix of journal articles, reviews, and essays, including two for Environmental History.   Off campus I am on the board of directors of Tillers International, an organization devoted to sustainable agriculture and forestry.  Tillers was my partner last summer in a NEH grant that brought together K-12 teachers from around the U.S. for field-based workshops on “The American Farm in U.S. History.”

It is no overstatement to say that the ASEH has been fundamentally important to my development as a scholar, educator, and environmentally-concerned citizen.  Like many friends and colleagues, I have made our conference my principle annual commitment.  I have served on the George Perkins Marsh book prize committee and as last year’s Program Chair for the Boise meeting.  I would be honored to serve the organization again as a member of the Nominating Committee.  In addition to carrying out the committee’s specific duties, I am especially interested in how we can support our members’ efforts to sustain complex research, educational, and outreach profiles while still maintaining a collective sense of scholarly identity and purpose.  I also hope to work on ways to enhance ASEH’s presence and member support at regional levels, to complement our efforts to form national and global environmental history networks.

Michael Lewis

An associate professor of history at Salisbury University (a regional comprehensive state university in Maryland), I am the author of "Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, 1945-1997" (2004), the editor of "American Wilderness: A New History" (2007), and have supervised teams of undergraduates that have produced three student-authored on-line books on local environmental history. I am currently writing essays on both local environmental history, and my longer running interest in the exchange of science and conservation policies between the US and India. I am deeply committed to crossing disciplinary and national boundaries; my Bachelor's degree is in Biology, my graduate degrees are in American Studies (though I did my dissertation research in India under the supervision of a historian), I am housed in a History department, and I founded and direct my university's interdisciplinary program in Environmental Studies.

The ASEH is my academic home. Its members comprise my professional role models, sounding boards, and support group. Its conference is my annual source of intellectual rejuvenation. I have had the honor to serve on the conference program committee twice, and am the program chair for the 2009 annual meeting in Tallahassee. The intellectual vitality of our society was never so apparent to me as when I was working on the program for our upcoming 2009 annual meeting. In the time that I have been attending the ASEH conferences, the society has steadily become more diverse -  in the participants, their disciplinary backgrounds, geographic scope, and topic of study (including time period). But I am sure that many of you agree that we have further still to go in all of these areas. As a member of the nominating committee, I would hope to continue to support those qualities that make our society strong, including the vigor of our scholarly discourse mixed with the extreme collegiality that I have found nowhere else in academe. I would also continue previous committees efforts to expand diversity in our society by appointing leadership and committee members that appreciate this need. The opportunities for our society to establish, maintain, or renew connections with affiliated scholars and societies across disciplines and across the world has never been stronger.

 Alan MacEachern

University of Western Ontario

http://history.uwo.ca/faculty/maceachern/

It is an honour (and an honor) to be considered for the ASEH Nominating Committee.  Having first presented at an ASEH annual meeting in 1995, I have been involved with the society for my entire career.  In fact, the two are related: like many environmental historians, I owe a great debt to the ASEH in welcoming me to this fascinating field.  In turn, I have served on the Alice Hamilton Prize and George Perkins Marsh Prize committees, and have assisted Environmental History by reviewing submissions, writing reviews, and co-editing the special 2007 Canadian issue.

As the director of NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment / Nouvelle initiative canadienne en histoire de l’environnement, I am intent on assisting the ASEH as it continues to broaden its international perspective.  Among the many advantages of such a perspective is that it will yield more comparative work and so enrich the study of American environmental history too.

In terms of my own research, my Natural Selections looked at the politics and aesthetics of national park selection in mid-20^th century Canada; it received honourable mentions for the Canadian Historical Association’s and Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences’ major book prizes in 2002.  This year, I co-edited with William J. Turkel Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History, an undergraduate reader focused on our field’s methodology.  I am currently at work on three projects: a history of Canada’s largest forest fire, a study of the back-to-the-land movement in 1970s Prince Edward Island, and an online primer (again with Turkel) called The Programming Historian.  I am in that happy place of having no idea where my research will go next – other than that it will be in environmental history, where there is still lots of work to be done.

Kathy Morse

I am currently Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College and director of Middlebury’s environmental studies program.  I have been a member of ASEH for 15 years, since 1993 when I attended my first ASEH conference in Pittsburgh.  In 2006, I chaired the program committee for the conference in St. Paul, and from 2003 to 2007 I was graphics editor for Environmental History.  In 2003 the University of Washington published my first book, The Nature of Gold:  An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush in its Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series.  Beyond that formal service and publication, I have contributed book reviews and brief essays to Environmental History, and participated in roundtables and panels, many of them teaching-related, at ASEH conferences:  1993 in Pittsburgh; 2000 in Tacoma; 2002 in Denver; 2003 in Providence; and 2007 in Baton Rouge.   My current scholarly project is an illustrated environmental history of the United States, designed to introduce the field to a broad audience and to capture some of the wealth of visual images that provide such rich sources in environmental history.

As a faculty member at a liberal arts college, and now as director of its environmental studies program, much of my academic service has focused on the role of environmental history within environmental studies curricula.  I have served as an external review committee member for two other environmental studies programs at liberal arts colleges, and I continue to reshape my environmental history teaching to reach a broad spectrum of students interested in the environment broadly defined.  The challenge of this work is akin to the consistent challenge we face as members of ASEH:  to nurture our vibrant intellectual community, which supports scholarly work and critical thinking across a wide spectrum of questions, topics, and problems, while remaining responsive to, but thoughtful about, present-day concerns about the environment.  Having just finished a term on the Nominating Committee of the Western History Association, I would very much look forward to serving in a similar capacity for the American Society for Environmental History.