Covid-19 Conference Cancellations: Send ANZEHN your material

In light of conference cancellations and travel restrictions, the Australian & New Zealand Environmental History Network (ANZEHN) – seeking to share and promote new research in the environmental histories of Australia and New Zealand – is inviting members and other scholars to submit items for informal dissemination via the Network’s website.

They will be developing a special section to showcase this material.

Material might include (but is not limited to) written items such as short papers, essays, or blog posts, or visual materials including infographics, videos and other digital presentations.

Please contact Ben Wilkie for submissions or to discuss your ideas at: bvwilkie@gmail.com

About the Australian & New Zealand Environmental History Network (ANZEHN):

The Environmental History Network was established in 1997 to facilitate communications between scholars working across a range of departments at the Australian National University and surrounding government, business, cultural and scientific institutions and independent scholars.

Since its foundation, it has expanded to include all states in Australia as well as New Zealand, and there are members in a range of other countries with interests in Australian and/or New Zealand environmental history. 

The purposes of the ANZEHN are:

• To provide a means to communicate with each other and exchange information about forthcoming events and new publications in Australia and New Zealand; and
• To provide a portal with links to other organisations in Australia and New Zealand with interests in environmental history, and to provide a portal to Australia for international groups with interests in global environmental history.

What is Environmental History?

Environmental history is the study of the interactions between people and nature in the past, and how they have changed with time. Australasian environmental history includes:

• the environmental history of Australia and New Zealand,
• environmental history that compares Australia and/or New Zealand with other places, and
• environmental history being done in Australia or New Zealand about other places

Environmental history is a rich collection of inquiries into the transformation of the natural world by human action and the consequences for both nature and people. It takes nature as an actor in history as much as it takes people as actors in nature. It aims at a synthesis, although the weighting given to human or natural agency varies considerably between inquiries.

It overlaps many areas of the humanities, the sciences and the social sciences and draws in archeologists, foresters, geographers, historians and scientists of many sorts, for example. It includes or is closely related to fields such as agricultural history, forest history, garden history and historical climatology.

Environmental history is often stimulated by a concern for current environmental problems. If we know more about how they arose, perhaps we can do better in the future.

For more information, visit the ANZEHN website »