Kheraj, Sean. “Episode 51: Has Environmental History Lost Its Way?” Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast, January 27, 2016. MP3, 53:04 http://niche-canada.org/2016/01/27/natures-past-episode-51-has-environmental-history-lost-its-way/.
Late last year in December, Lisa Brady, the editor of the journal Environmental History, posted a provocatively titled blog article, “Has Environmental History Lost Its Way?” In that article, she reviews a round table panel from the most recent annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in which Mark Hersey, a historian from Mississippi State University, challenged the audience to consider whether or not environmental history has broadened too widely in its scope and drifted from its methodological roots.
Two years earlier, Liza Piper, a Canadian environmental historian from University of Alberta, wrote a similarly provocative article in History Compass in which she argues “that Canadian environmental historians, even as they foreground nature as an historical actor, nevertheless continue to focus their attention and orient their investigations around questions of how human social, cultural, economic, and political power reshaped both nature and human experience in the past.” (From Nature’s Past)
Music credits: “Sunday Morning” by texasradiofish, “Gentle Romance” by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD), “73 Strings” by Stefan Kartenberg
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.
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