Series Description

This series is about historical actors who imagined and demanded alternative futures from the margins of dominant environmental stories, and about opening new vistas on the future of environmental history.

Even after decades of research and calls for new directions, the field underrepresents historically marginalized groups and their unique environmental experiences and perceptions. This series, Environmental History’s Futures, addresses that persistent shortcoming by pointing to such disparities—on the axes of race and ethnicity, class, gender, disability, accessibility, and more—in historical and interdisciplinary examinations of human-environment relationships. It centers resistance and rebelliousness in the face of these inequalities, as well as the creative vitality of people making their place through alternative ways of knowing and experiencing nonhuman nature. These are histories we can use, books whose historical lessons and contemporary urgency beckon readers to act.

Above: Fishing in a creek near cotton plantations outside of Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.