Kheraj, Sean. “Episode 43: Environmental Scholarship and Environmental Advocacy.” Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast, July 2, 2014. MP3, 47:04. http://niche-canada.org/2014/07/03/natures-past-episode-43-environmental-scholarship-and-environmental-advocacy/.
Environmental history has been both friend and foe to environmentalism. Historians can provide important context for understanding contemporary environmental issues, but they can also offer a critique of environmentalism that could undermine the political and social goals of activists.
This is the subject of a recent review essay I wrote for Acadiensis. In that essay I ask, Are all environmental historians environmentalists? How should environmental scholarship relate to environmental activism? Should advocacy for environmental issues shape historical scholarship on the environment? Can history always inform contemporary environmental issues?
On this episode of the podcast, we explore these questions with a group of scholars from the Toronto Environmental History Network. (From Nature’s Past)
Music credits: “The Rain” by Aitua Igeleke, “Dancing upside down” by Aitua Igeleke, “C#m120-GTR-arpeggios” by Martijn de Boer
Nature’s Past podcasts are posted on a monthly basis on the website of the Network in Canadian History & Environment / Nouvelle initiative Canadienne en histoire de l’environnement (NiCHE). The podcasts contain discussion about the environmental history community and research in Canada. They are hosted by Sean Kheraj, an assistant professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Canada.
This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.