The results of a ground-penetrating radar survey and multiproxy studies of the sediment cores collected from two lakes in the Valdai Highlands (East European Plain) provide new insights into the late glacial and Holocene environmental history of the region situated in the marginal zone of the last Scandinavian ice sheet. The cores were analyzed for organic carbon and nitrogen content, as well as for pollen and diatoms. The chronology of the cores is based on radiocarbon dates and pollen-based stratigraphy. The studied records document that vast dead ice masses and associated ice-dammed lakes existed in the Valdai Highlands area until ∼14 cal ka BP. Open tundra-steppe communities dominated the study area during the Oldest Dryas, Bølling, and Older Dryas (between ca. 17 and 14 cal ka BP), but dwarf birch (Betula nana), shrub alder (Alnus fruticosa), and willow (Salix) were also common. Scots pine forest (Pinus sylvestris) became common for a short interval during the Bølling warming (ca. 14.9 and 14.4 cal ka BP). The appearance of spruce (Picea) forest in the landscape occurred in the beginning of the Allerød warming (∼14 cal ka BP), but the open steppe-like plant communities remained common until the onset of the Holocene. The modern lake systems emerged at ∼10 cal ka BP, marked by an onset of organic-type sedimentation and the appearance of modern-type forests. The Mid-Holocene (∼8–4 cal ka BP) was the warmest time, as documented by the maximal distribution of temperate and broadleaved taxa in the region. The onset of agricultural land use and simultaneous trend of increasing lake trophic state and increasing paludification in the area is recorded at ∼2.5 cal ka BP.

This is a reflection on the experience of carrying out an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded public humanities project during the pandemic, focusing on one pathway to impact – a collaboration with Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books – as a case study. I want to explore how we adapted these programmes in the light of global and personal circumstances and embraced digital media in unexpected ways. Looking back on what we accomplished, I now believe that, despite considerable challenges, we ended up with outcomes that were even richer and more rewarding precisely because of the challenges we faced and the unexpected paths that the project took us down. The second voice in this article is that of Charlotte Lancaster. Through her role as a Postdoctoral Impact Fellow at Bath Spa University, she worked to evidence the wider public impact of the “Into the Forest” project retrospectively. Here, she evaluates the impact of the project with Seven Stories and offers a coalescent voice to the argument underlining this article: that we need more realistic and flexible approaches to research planning, funding, and evaluation.

In April 2023, eighteen scholars from nine different subjects representing the humanities, natural and social sciences came together for a one-day workshop at St John’s College, Durham. Despite our differences, all had one aim: the study of past environmental change and its effects on human societies. Talking across disciplinary divides, we discussed what environmental history is, how it may or may not contribute to tackling the climate crisis, and the problems of sources, scale and temporality. This article collects select conversations into a roundtable format split into four areas: scale, time and space, interdisciplinarity, and the future of environmental history. We argue that environmental history is more usefully understood not as a distinct sub-field of history, but as an interdisciplinary meeting place for innovative collaboration. This also presents a model for future research aimed at tackling the climate crisis at higher education institutions.

The destruction of tropical forests is an environmental issue of global significance. This process has deep historical roots, with recent scholarship exploring the role of European colonisation and capitalist expansion in driving tropical deforestation from the sixteenth century onwards. Less attention, however, has been given to how Indigenous resistance has impeded deforestation over this time period. Here we analyse how non-state Indigenous groups obstructed Spanish and Portuguese political control and commodity frontiers in tropical South America. Drawing on archival sources, together with Indigenous Guaraní and Paiter Suruí philosophy and oral history, we assess this phenomenon in two biomes, the Atlantic and Amazon Rainforests. The results highlight that over the longue durée, Indigenous resistance has assisted in the conservation of South American tropical forests, acting as a significant—but under-recognised—factor in both regional and global environmental history. This history is of particular importance given the increased recognition of the role of Indigenous peoples in conserving tropical forests as carbon sinks in the twenty-first century.

Just before World War I, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) geographically expanded its trade in the Canadian Arctic to derive profits from Arctic fox fur and secure its position in a global value chain (GVC) delivering fur to metropolitan consumers. The “problem of nature” challenged the company’s business venture. Furthermore, “nature” was made and remade by the HBC’s own capital investments. The fox trade itself changed human ecology. Technology transfers to Inuit modified their hunting regimes to increase the company’s returns of polar bear skins. Though these skins had high potential market value, modes of production introduced by the HBC to the Arctic precluded the company from sending high-quality products to metropolitan dressers. Within a changing Arctic human ecology, the HBC produced one highly valued commodity for the market while producing another from which it could derive only modest profit. The HBC’s fox and polar bear trade at the onset of the last century suggests ways that business empires can set off complex and unanticipated changes in human ecologies and, therefore, the dynamics of nature and business at their very peripheries.

This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was an effort to plant American rootstocks, which were relatively resistant. The Ottoman response to phylloxera offers another example of the ways in which the alleged “sick man of Europe” was actually much more dynamic than its detractors insisted. The invocation of phylloxera moreover became a way for post-Ottoman states like Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia to protect their national grape economies. The article’s broader analysis explains how the shared environment of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean incubated both the spread of phylloxera and—in the protectionist legal regimes formed in response—the architecture of the region’s peculiarly integrated disconnection. The article closes by considering the agriculture of displacement amidst the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and how it further entrenched these dynamics as migrants took vines with them and planted them in the remarkably similar environments of their new national homes.

From less than three dozen in 1949, the number of small hydropower stations in the People’s Republic of China grew to nearly ninety thousand by 1979. By the early 1980s, these stations were distributed across nearly 1,600 of China’s 2,300 counties. In 770 counties, small hydropower was the primary source of rural electricity generation. This article offers a history and assessment of these developments, unsettling our traditional emphasis on large-scale hydroelectricity. The article begins by reconstructing the PRC’s enormous investments in small hydropower from the 1950s to the early 1980s. This reconstruction, the first of its kind in the English language, not only helps reassess key periods and events in the history of the PRC but also establishes the position of small hydropower in the hydraulic history of the twentieth century. The article then turns to a discussion of the claimed impacts of small hydropower. As electricity became available for the first time in many parts of the Chinese countryside, it affected patterns of economic and social activity for hundreds of millions of people. Finally, the paper explores what the case of small hydropower can offer to conceptual and theoretical problems surrounding development, innovation, and the environment. Returning to the long-standing debate over scale and development, China’s experience with small hydropower reminds us of the important role played by smaller-scale, appropriate, and self-reliant technologies in global energy history.

Logwood, a dyestuff extracted from its namesake tree native to the Yucatán Peninsula, was a commodity valued in the textile centres of early modern Europe. The trade in logwood began as an extractive endeavour attempted by merchants and former pirates on the margins of Spanish colonial authority, but by the late eighteenth century it had expanded to become a wide-reaching activity with connections to broader trends on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New World, the trade's growth fuelled Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalries and led to the introduction of slave labour to harvest dwindling logwood stands. The ecological consequences of human exchange also spread logwood's range to Caribbean islands, turning a frontier trade into a domesticated plantation industry. In the Old World, logwood was a versatile dye source that contributed to a range of hues. Initial regulations to protect consumers eased as dyers improved the quality of logwood dyes. The logwood trade expanded global textile supply chains and brought innovation to Europe's proto-industrial textile industry. It gave the continent's dyers new ways to meet consumer demand and spurred the development of mechanical methods to expedite refining.

Archival aerial photographs are a unique but underused and potentially game-changing source to study twentieth-century environmental and climate change dynamics. While satellite imagery with comparable high resolution appeared only in the early twenty-first century, archival aerial imagery with native sub-1-meter resolution became ubiquitous in the 1940s. Archival aerial photography therefore quadruples the time depth of high-resolution analysis to eighty years, allowing for a more reliable identification of structural trends. Moreover, the greater time-depth brings into focus the Great Acceleration that started in the 1940s, and virtually in real time. The article uses a human manual analysis of a sample from two time series (1943 and 1971) of archival photographs of the Oshikango area of Namibia (see Figure 1) to demonstrate how aerial photography complements conventional datasets. Namibia was one of the first places in colonial Africa where what subsequently became the standard protocol for “aerial mapping” was used and for which the imagery and the “flight plans” have survived. The standard protocol makes the imagery compatible with any archival aerial photography from the 1940s to 1990s and the flight plans contain key information to identify, interpret, and combine the individual photographs into orthomosaics. Although the use of manual analysis of aerial photography is not new, unlocking the full explanatory potential of high-resolution mass data requires machine reading and analysis. Current machine reading methods, however, are based on the pixel method, which identifies such features as farms, water holes, and trees only as low-resolution pixel aggregates. In contrast, the object method of machine analysis, combined with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology to unlock the sub-1-meter native resolution of historical aerial photography, renders visible individual trees and other features, including their precise location and size, allowing for the dimensions of trees and other features to be measured between different time series of images. The interrelationships between different features in the environment can thus be assessed more precisely in space and over time, for example comparing tree growth and surface water sources. A major challenge is that the object method used for high resolution geospatial imagery cannot be easily applied to monochromatic archival aerial photography because it has been designed for analyzing multispectral satellite imagery. As discussed in the article, using the manual sample as a training data set for an experimental machine-learning protocol demonstrates proof of concept for automatically extracting such features as farms, water holes and trees as individual objects from archival aerial photography. This increases the time depth of available high-resolution land use, environmental, and climate data from 2000 back to the 1940s and provides a base line for the Great Acceleration and brings the massive changes from the 1940s through the 1990s in focus as captured in aerial photography.