Article
Early Career Environmental Historians for a Sustainable Academia
How can we walk the talk of sustainability on a daily basis in our working environments? How can we interpret the concept of sustainability within the academic sphere and widen its scope? How can we build more sustainable careers? This notepad reflects on the condition of early-career environmental historians in Europe and beyond, introduces visions for the field, and suggests concrete action in order to build a more inclusive academic environment.
In recent years researches on resources history have been actively developing in the broader direction of environmental history. The constructivist approach helps to see natural resources as material objects that become resources only when actors interested in them prescribe certain qualities to them and relate its use to achieving one’s goals. This article considers the issue of creation of the Soviet coal-mining trust “Arktikugol” on Spitsbergen in 1931–1932 for the needs of industrialization in the north of the European part of the USSR from the standpoint of social constructivism.
The idea of North is a multivalent concept. It is geographical, but more than just Arctic; it is both an imagined space and a place of harsh challenges. These challenges resonate with each other across the northern world, shaping different areas of the North in many similar ways. Distinctive northern environments are created as humans adapt to climatic and geographic conditions while simultaneously adapting the landscapes to their own needs with technologies, trade, and social organization. This collection of essays argues that the unique environments of the North have been borne of the relationship between humans and nature. Approaching the topic through the lens of environmental history, the contributors examine a broad range of geographies, including those of Iceland and other islands in the Northern Atlantic, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Pacific Northwest, and Canada, over a time span ranging from CE 800 to 2000. Northscapes is bound together by the intellectual project of investigating the North both as an imagined and mythologized space and as an environment shaped by human technology. The North offers a valuable analytical framework that surpasses nation-states and transgresses political and historical borders. This volume develops rich explorations of the entanglements of environmental and technological history in the northern regions of the globe.
Mastering the North was a long-term problem for the Russian state, which at least from the eighteenth century tried to organize the effective use of its resources. This chapter illustrates two very distinct foreign models employed for the “state colonization” of the Russian North in a formative period between the Great Reform of 1861 and Stalin’s industrialization of 1930s: Norway and Canada. Although the use of the Norwegian model for colonization of the Russian North is relatively well studied, “railway colonization” of 1920s is not that well known,and very few works embrace both imperial and early Soviet periods of colonization.
This work is an analytical overview of the 8th Biennial ESEH Conference held in Versailles between 30 June and 3 July 2015. The article tells about key presentations made at the conference, main tendencies in ecological history, and perspectives of research in this field.
is chapter examines the diering opinions between industrial and scienti c institutions over the use of the waters of Lake Baikal in the context of Soviet development policies in Siberia, beginning in the 1950s. It argues that institutions and people experienced Baikal as a place of contradiction, clearly illustrating that Soviet industry posed the risk of harm to the natural environment. In dierent professional layers of Soviet society, Baikal became an arena of con ict over water (and nature more broadly) and the lake’s own, natural ability to purify chemical waste discharged into the waters. Employing new archival sources, such as institutional and individual correspondence and reports, this chapter discusses the role of Baikal in the interplay between industry and environment at the institutional level and contributes to the scholarship on Soviet postwar environmental history.
This paper is ah intorduction to the special issue of the journal devoted to Russian ennvironmental history. The special issue is edited by Jonathan Oldfield, Denis Shaw and Julia Lajus and is bradly concerned with exploring the different ways in which Russian society engaged with the natural environment from the late seventienth century htrough to late Soviet period.