Call for papers

The relationships between humans and their natural environment and other living beings; the production and treatment of waste; the mobilization and consumption of energy; industrial, agricultural, and domestic nuisances and their impact on health and the environment; the uses and management of forests, coastlines, mountains, swamps and commons; urban environments; relationships to rivers; environmentalism; natural or human-caused catastrophes; climate change; consequences of major developments, etc. The objects of environmental history are varied and so are the methods that have been developed to analyze them. In the past decade, the number of publications on environmental history in France has soared and contacts with researchers in other countries working on similar topic have multiplied.

While scholars—geographers, rural historians, etc.—had already paid attention to some of these objects in the past, environmental history has helped renew and broaden our understanding of these issues, in particular in light of the “sustainability” challenges prompted by the technical choices and economic models of development that appeared at the end of the 18th century and which intensified and spread globally in the 20th century. Faced with such incredibly complex questions, environmental historians are aware that no single discipline can pretend to ask and answer all our questions. Where the environment is concerned, trans- or interdisciplinarity is even more essential than it is for other topics of historical research. Moreover, interdisciplinarity, where the environment is concerned, does not simply entail forging connections between the human and social sciences but, more crucially, with disciplines that are even more foreign to historians, such as biology, ecology, and geology.

Take this example: is it even possible, today, to write the history of pollution—of the effluents discharged in our air, water, and soils—without trying to understand the evolution of production processes and, thus, the evolution of chemistry itself? Or without using any notion of eco-toxicology? Moreover, shouldn’t such a history of pollution enter into a dialogue with those who work on green technologies to remedy, if only partially, the damages caused by humans in the past and, in that way, contribute to weaving together the past, the present and the future? Environmental questions are fundamentally hybrid: they touch on social, economic, cultural, natural and technical issues and thus cannot be studied solely by one discipline. In order to include all these dimensions, inter and trans-disciplinarity is essential.

However, as the experience of interdisciplinary projects led within the CNRS (the French national scientific research center) has shown in the last decades, it remains difficult to produce truly interdisciplinary work. Difficulties stem from the specificity of scientific disciplines, which, for some of them, were shaped in opposition to others and which have their own vocabulary, methods, and questions. The different types of data used compound these difficulties as they usually mean scientists work on very different time scales, from a few years to thousands of years. Moreover, within each discipline, a gap (more or less wide depending on the periods under study) tends to separate scholars who work with written and oral sources and those who use “data from the ground,” whatever the method they use to analyze them. Overcoming these difficulties is a necessary step if we want to benefit from a true interdisciplinary approach to complex environmental problems.

For its tenth anniversary, the Academic Networks of Environmental Historians (Réseau universitaire de chercheurs en histoire environnementale) invites researchers from all disciplines who work on the environment to reflect on the sources, practices and methods that can help us gain greater knowledge of shared topics of interest. While this conference is initiative by the historians of RUCHE, we hope to receive papers from scholars from other disciplines and working on different periods. Proposals from all disciplines are welcome as long as they concern, one way or another, environmental history. The organizers hope that the proposals will allow for interdisciplinary discussions within each session.  

The conference’s objectives are:

We encourage interested researchers to circulate this call for papers within the networks of their own discipline.