Environmental History最新文献

{"title":"68 Degrees: New York City’s Residential Heat and Hot Water Code as an Invisible Energy Policy","authors":"Rebecca Wright","doi":"10.1086/726711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726711","url":null,"abstract":"For over a century, New York’s Residential Heat and Hot Water Code has controlled the distribution of heat in New York City. Established in 1918 by New York City’s Department of Health, it mandated that all residential and office spaces in the city be heated to 68 degrees Fahrenheit at all times. Changes to it in the ensuing years not only sought to protect New Yorkers’ health but reflected pressures in New York’s fuel economy, which experienced periods of shortages and a transition from anthracite coal to oil that started between the two world wars. Consequently, the standardization of 68 degrees Fahrenheit reflected shifting assumptions about health and the “right to heat” for different communities over time, and the practical need to ensure affordable fuel for the city’s population. The Heat Code, accordingly, played a crucial role in shaping energy consumption in New York and helping to formulate an “invisible energy policy”—that is, a policy developed in non-energy fields, such as health and housing, that alters energy usage in important but inconspicuous ways, with important consequences for the environment and for social justice.","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135193973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"California’s Quandary: Saving Energy at the RAND Corporation","authors":"Thomas Turnbull","doi":"10.1086/726450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726450","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1970s, employees at the RAND Corporation turned their expertise in rational decision making toward the problem of energy demand. In surveying existing energy demand forecasts, primarily those carried out by electrical utility companies, RAND researchers found that contemporary approaches were self-serving, and that these simple extrapolative methods helped create growing demand for energy. In response, RAND developed an independent method which recast the determinants of energy demand in general systemic terms. They proposed that each consumer, appliance, and act of consumption could be reconceived of as parts of a vast and programmable energy-conserving computer. The RAND approach made systems analysis and cybernetics central to energy policy, but also helped establish a misleading certainty that economic growth could be significantly decoupled from increasing rates of in energy use.","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136309021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Note from the Editors","authors":"Stephen Brain, Mark D. Hersey, Catherine Dunlop, Sarah Stanford-McIntyre","doi":"10.1086/726657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726657","url":null,"abstract":"Next article FreeNote from the EditorsStephen Brain, Mark D. Hersey, Catherine Dunlop, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyreStephen Brain Search for more articles by this author , Mark D. Hersey Search for more articles by this author , Catherine Dunlop 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 SectionsMoreTurn your back on Mother Nature,Everybody wants to rule the world.—Roland Orzabal, Ian Stanley, and Chris Hughes, Songs from the Big ChairAs the fledgling field of environmental history sought to gain scholarly traction in the 1980s, it found common ground with pop stars from the era, who also warned of the dangers stemming from the attempt to exert control over the nonhuman world. The ensuing years would see the field’s audience grow—less explosively than that of Tears for Fears but perhaps more enduringly—as its studies grew increasingly sophisticated. Along the way, it developed new overlaps with myriad historical subfields that collectively underscored how profoundly intertwined the human experience has been with the ostensibly natural world.Those overlaps are evident in the two monographic articles in this issue. Thomas Turnbull’s study of the RAND Corporation and its 1970s-era research in alternative energy highlights the field’s strong connections to the history of science in identifying the novel application of systems analyses and cybernetics within that research and its inadvertent legacy of fostering a conviction that economic growth wasn’t necessarily tied to energy consumption. Rebecca Wright’s essay underlines the field’s strong connections to urban and social history by demonstrating how a 1918 mandate by New York City’s Department of Health that required buildings to be heated to a uniform temperature fostered the development of an “invisible energy policy” that has shaped energy consumption and entailed unintended environmental injustices ever since.Rather different historiographical shifts are evident in this issue’s forum. Jason Newton, Willa Brown, and Mark McLaughlin draw on a long-standing thread in forest history to make the case that the idea of a “timber frontier” might be worth revisiting when tracing the history of North America’s forests. Graeme Wynn and Ellen Stroud are more circumspect about the possibilities of doing so given the cultural freight that the notion of a frontier often carries, but agree with the authors that the intersection of forest history and environmental history is long overdue for regeneration. Indeed, the feature includes a call for a follow-up forum that looks at the history of forests elsewhere in the world.In the Gallery essay, Yota Batsaki analyzes how the German artist Anselm Kiefer merged the concepts of present and geological time in his 2014 installation Ages of the World. This stunning three-","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135011393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Picturing Time in the Anthropocene: Anselm Kiefer’s Ages of the World (2014)","authors":"Yota Batsaki","doi":"10.1086/726357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726357","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyzes a massive installation by the contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer, Ages of the World (2014), as an answer to a conundrum central to thinking about the Anthropocene: how to represent the convergence of deep time and historical time? Humans are geological agents whose influence will be recorded in deep time, yet they are faced with the necessity of acting in historical time to counter the existential threat of climate change. Composed of a pile of discarded canvases interspersed with rocks, debris, and dried sunflowers, and flanked by two reproductions on photographic paper and canvas annotated with geological terms, Ages of the World fuses together different temporalities that are not customarily and immediately available to our perception. The installation enacts a temporal convergence by interweaving historical and geological events through image and metaphor, awakening our sensory and intellectual perception of time. Ages of the World does not work on the viewer through narrative argument, yet its aesthetics of juxtaposition and superimposition, and its oscillation between the global and the particular, may offer food for thought to the historian as storyteller of a still unfolding epoch.","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72992495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":Making America’s Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands","authors":"T. Hart","doi":"10.1086/725374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725374","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91145436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Note from the Editors","authors":"Stephen Brain, Mark D. Hersey, Sarah Stanford-McIntyre","doi":"10.1086/725397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725397","url":null,"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 ","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135061379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":Suomen ympäristöhistoria 1700-luvulta nykyaikaan","authors":"Simo Laakkonen, Janne Mäkiranta","doi":"10.1086/725376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725376","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85734734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":Thicker Than Water: The Quest for Solutions to the Plastic Crisis","authors":"Isabelle Marina Held","doi":"10.1086/725380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725380","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76573383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Philip Gooding","doi":"10.1086/725381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725381","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82080747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":":Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean","authors":"S. Turchetti","doi":"10.1086/725370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725370","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46406,"journal":{"name":"Environmental History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89485991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}