Comments on Award Recipients

2010 Distinguished Scholar Award

Carolyn Merchant’s book, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, remains one of the most influential works of the genre. She has also been one of the few historians to openly theorize in her work on Ecological Revolutions, and her many attempts to bring excellence into teaching by producing textbooks also demonstrate scholarly excellence. It might be lesser known that she was one of the first scholars to cross the Atlantic to teach environmental history (she taught in Sweden). Furthermore, her cultivation of students in environmental history over the years has been exemplary. Carolyn also pioneered the interrelation of gender studies into environmental history – a much-needed perspective. As one ASEH executive committee member put it, Carolyn showed us that environmental history is more than “Boys out West.” It is with great pleasure that we present this well deserved award to her today.

Harriet Ritvo, ASEH President

2009 George Perkins Marsh Award (Best Book)

Timothy J. LeCain’s Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet won the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the ASEH because it is gutsy, eloquently written and narrated, and carefully argued. It is a fine example of “envirotech” scholarship, a sub-field within environmental history concerned with the intersection of technological systems and their inventors, the science that underscores those systems, the environments that comprise or fuel those systems and, more often than not, the landscapes that are utterly destroyed by them.

LeCain takes the reader on a marvelous journey, which starts with cosmic super-giant stars and their role in the creation of copper and ends with the engineers that built the technologies of “mass destruction” to access the king metal. As LeCain tours ranchlands strewn with dying livestock with faces devoured by industrial poisons, the reader learns in no uncertain terms the connections between technologies, economies, engineered environments, and the bodies that live on and near them.

LeCain proposes that historians often talk of mass production and mass consumption, but rarely of the mass destruction that underlay the mining that produced the copper that connects virtually every element of modern life, from refrigerator coils to battleships.  The writing is eloquent and it effectively leads the reader through the story at a brisk pace. For LeCain, technological systems, ranch lands and the livestock that dwell there, engineered subterranean environments, riparian ecosystem, Rocky Mountain cities, and the porous human bodies that call these places home all seamlessly connect, both in his narrative and his analysis. It is a great read.

George Perkins Marsh Prize Committee:

Brett L. Walker, Chair

Thomas Andrews

Thomas Zeller 

2009 Leopold-Hidy Award (Best Article in Environmental History)

This year’s winner is Emily Yeh, author of “From Wasteland to Wetland?:  Nature and Nation in China’s Tibet.”  Her essay focuses on Lhasa’s Lhalu wetlands and explores the competing ecological nationalist narratives of the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles regarding this region.

“This article is a brilliant examination of the social construction of nature and its deployment in the service of political goals,” one Editorial Board member noted: “Yeh approaches the topic from the unique perspective of the conflict that has raged since the 1950s between the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles over the Lhalu wetland of western Tibet---a conflict that served, in many ways, a ‘stand in’ for their battle over Tibetan sovereignty.  Yeh not only describes how differently the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles depicted this region, but also shows that both representations were imaginaries that had little to do with the reality of the indigenous community’s actual relationship to the wetland.”

Another wrote: “Emily Yeh’s article on Tibet elegantly interweaves multiple layers of analysis---ecological, social, political, and cultural---while offering the reader a penetrating exploration of the epistemological conundrums that confront all historians in their encounters with the past.  It is a tour-de-force of subtle, exacting, and methodologically sophisticated historical writing.”

A third stated: “Through innovative research methods and deft analysis, Emily Yeh tells a story filled with unexpected turns and surprising twists.  The Lhalu wetland becomes a powerful microcosm in Yeh’s reading of the political struggles and meanings of nature and nation in the eyes of the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles.” 

Mark Cioc, Editor, Environmental History

2009 Alice Hamilton Award (Best Article outside Environmental History)

This year’s Alice Hamilton Prize, for the best environmental history article published in a journal other than Environmental History, was awarded to Richard Keyser of the University of Western Kentucky for, “The Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management: Commercial Sylviculture in Medieval Champagne,” which appeared in French Historical Studies in the Summer of 2009.  The Hamilton Prize Committee (Michael Osborne, Oregon State University; Mart Stewart, Western Washington University; and Paul Sutter, the University of Colorado at Boulder) had a difficult task, reviewing a group of strong and diverse articles.

Nonetheless, we were quickly able to narrow the competition to three finalists, and we would like to recognize the other two for honorable mention: Michael Rawson, “What Lies Beneath: Science, Nature, and the Making of Boston Harbor,” Journal of Urban History (July 2009); and James Morton Turner, “‘The Specter of Environmentalism’: Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right,” Journal of American History (June 2009).  While we thought very highly of the Turner and Rawson pieces, and they made our final decision quite difficult, we ultimately were most impressed by Rick’s study.

“The Transformation of Traditional Woodland Management” enters into a debate about the nature and timing of forest clearance in Medieval Europe and the subsequent role of the French state in shaping forest exploitation.  The traditional historiography told a story of the “great clearances” during the high Middle Ages (1000-1300) and then narrated early state managerial intervention as a response to these unsustainable trends.  Rick, on the other hand, argues that high medieval demographic and economic growth in Champagne drove a transition from extensive silvo-pastoralism (grazing, hunting, and gathering) to a new system of woodland management based on intensive small wood production through coppicing.  And Rick insists that this new focus on intensive woodland management was largely developed at the local level, and was both market-oriented and remarkably sustainable. 

Indeed, Rick suggests that this system effectively served as a model for later state forestry interventions; as he puts it, “Royal officials did not so much innovate as respond to new market opportunities by appropriating and generalizing practices that had long existed in many regions.”  In other words, his article fundamentally challenges traditional understandings of high medieval woodland management and the rise of state forestry in France.

Several aspects of the article struck the committee as impressive.  First, we admired the depth of the primary research and the difficulty involved in teasing out such a fine-grained local story from limited archival materials.  Indeed, Rick’s is an article that challenges conventional wisdom precisely by looking at a different set of sources, and by eschewing the official archive’s rendition.

Second, while none of us qualify as medievalists, we were convinced that Rick’s article, by looking at a small part of the French countryside, substantially challenged conventional understandings of medieval Europe’s environmental history.  Like the very best case studies, it drew broad lessons from a detailed local portrait.  Finally, as more environmental historians studying different times and places are telling stories of centralizing states and the threats that they posed to local managerial autonomy, we found Rick’s argument that centralizing state forestry in France emerged as an articulation of local practice to be both refreshing and broadly important to the discipline.

Alice Hamilton Prize Committee:

Paul Sutter, chair, University of Colorado-Boulder

Michael Osborne

Mart Steward

2009 Rachel Carson Award (Best Dissertation)

I thank my fellow committee members, Jenny Smith of  Georgia Tech and Kieko Matteson, University of Hawaii, Manoa for reading these dissertations quickly and making our work of judging them both harmonious and intellectually exciting. From a group that, taken together, showed the intellectual vitality and expanding reach of our field, we unanimously chose Gina Rumore’s “A Natural Laboratory, a National Monument: Carving out a Place for Science in Glacier Bay, Alaska, 1879-1959” as the winner of the 2009 Rachel Carson dissertation prize.

Her work took on a topic central to American environmentalism and American thought about nature over the last century--the science of ecology—by studying scientific research in one place over time. It described and analyzed events and ideas in a way that put science and the scientists—too often seen in purely intellectual terms--into the culture and down on the ground, showing how concepts developed and how the land affected scientists’ understanding and perspective, ecology’s relation to other scientific disciplines, and ecologists’ dual roles as objective researchers and advocates for nature.

Placing local knowledge and “universal” concepts in conversation, it said important things about the influence of science on our understanding of nature, about “place” in the construction of scientific theories, and about the evolution of perspectives within the scientific community.  Her work should help environmental historians, even those not centrally concerned with science, better understand ecology’s influence on science and policy and the culture’s influence on the science.

Rachel Carson Prize Committee:

Thomas Dunlap, Chair

Kieko Matteson

Jenny Smith

2009 Distinguished Service Award

I am honored to present the Distinguished Service Award to Martin Melosi, University of Houston. Marty served as ASEH president from 1993-1995 – a critical time for ASEH. He funded the EV and Nancy Melosi Travel Grant for several years and helped organize two conferences in Houston – the only city where we’ve met twice. His tireless fundraising helped make these conferences successful. Marty continues to provide valuable advice to ASEH, particularly in the area of fundraising. He won ASEH’s best book award in 2001 for The Sanitary City, and his scholarship has inspired and encouraged many environmental historians. He has been instrumental in combining environmental and public history – and in helping students and young scholars in environmental history recognize potential opportunities. Marty has attended almost every conference and is an active participant. In summary, ASEH has long benefited from his high energy and vision.

Nancy Langston, ASEH President

2008 George Perkins Marsh Award (Best Book)

The competition for the George Perkins Marsh prize was extraordinarily strong this year. The winner, Thomas Andrews’s Killing for Coal is a meticulously-researched, beautifully written, and utterly persuasive book. Andrews not only evokes a place and time – Colorado at the turn of the twentieth century – but he also illuminates new paths for histories of resource extraction and energy around the globe.  By crafting the concept of “workscape” and pairing it with landscape to reveal the intimate relations between labor and nature, he  achieves a new level of sophistication in the environmental history of labor, mining, and energy.

Killing for Coal  provokes reflection about all the energies – fossil and human – that have poured into the lighting and powering of the world. In reconstructing the social and environmental costs of that development, Andrews has made a striking contribution to environmental history.

George Perkins Marsh Prize Committee:

Louis Warren, Chair

Lawrence Culver

Diana Davis

2008 Alice Hamilton Award (Best Article outside Environmental History)

This year’s winner for the best article outside Environmental History was Dr. Paul Sutter (University of Georgia) for his article “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal” that appeared in Isis (the journal of the History of Science Society) vol. 98 of 2007.  The prize committee came to this conclusion only after considerable discussion of over twenty submitted articles on a wide range of environmental history topics from all over the world.  Charged with judging the submissions on quality of writing, quality of research and documentation, quality of analysis, and how the article advances the field and significantly contributes to the discipline, the committee found that Sutter’s “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire?” won in all four areas.

The article traces the history of how “entomological workers were critical to mosquito control efforts at the reduction of tropical fevers” but how the scientists discovered that “human-caused environmental disturbances” were the cause of conditions that produced mosquitoes (p. 724).  Their findings, Sutter shows, not only advanced ways of controlling malaria and yellow fever, but made them “imperial agents of a particular kind” by learning that “there was no simple nature to be conquered in Panama,” but rather “a series of environmental processes and entities. . .  interlocked within human agency and action” (p. 754).

According to Evans, this thesis has applications not only for both North American and Latin American environmental history, but also for the history of science and medicine, social history, transnational history, and the history of the so-called Progressive Era.  Thus, he concluded, it represents the truly interdisciplinary nature of environmental history at its finest.  Congratulations Paul!

Alice Hamilton Prize Committee:

Sterling Evans, Chair

Geoff Cunfer

Tyler Priest

2008 Leopold-Hidy Award (Best Article in Environmental History)

Nancy Langston has been chosen as the recipient of the Leopold-Hidy Award for 2008.  This award is given jointly by the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society to the author of the best article published in Environmental History in 2008.  Nancy’s winning essay, “The Retreat from Precaution: Regulating Diethylstilbestrol (DES), Endocrine Disruptors, and Environmental Health,” appeared in the January issue of the journal (Vol. 13, no. 1, January 2008: 41-65). 

Nancy argues that endocrine disruptors—industrial pollutants that mimic hormones—have played a key role in increasing the rates of intersexuality, reproductive cancers, and infertility.  Focusing on debates in the 1930s and 1940s, she demonstrates how political pressures, scientific uncertainties, and evolving models of gender and health, made it all but impossible for the U.S. government to regulate these chemicals effectively.  This led to a retreat from the precautionary principle that was supposed to prevail in the handling of toxic chemicals. 

The members of the Editorial Board of Environmental History determine the winner by secret ballot.  One member noted: “The topic and the prose lured me into reading this piece as soon as I received the January issue in the mail.  But it was Nancy’s keen analytic mind that kept me engrossed, and ultimately it was the high level of her argumentation that elevated it above the other fine essays of 2008.”  Another wrote: “This is a rare example of an interdisciplinary approach that actually works.  Its appeal extends beyond the field of environmental history to include the fields of gender history and medical history.”  A third stated: “One of the many things I liked about this essay is that it is (to borrow a phrase from the current economic crisis) ‘shovel ready.’ Its focus is on the historical dimension, but it is really the perfect primer for policymakers.  I hope some of her ideas find their way into the Obama administration’s health policies.”

Mark Cioc, Editor, Environmental History

2008 Rachel Carson Award (Best Dissertation)

This year’s recipient for the Rachel Carson  Prize for the best dissertation in Environmental History goes to Carol Kieko Matteson, for Masters of Their Woods: Conservation, Community, and Conflict in Revolutionary France, 1669-1848, completed in 2008 at Yale University under the direction of John Merriman.  The prize committee concluded without question that this work, because of its deep research, depth and originality of analysis, and eloquent prose, deserves the ASEH’s highest award for graduate work.

This dissertation traces the intertwined human and ecological histories of the Franche-Compte region of eastern France, an area of mixed forestry, agriculture, and industrial uses, tucked away alongside the Swiss border.

The story is about the social conflict that resulted from disputes over resource use—especially forests—from the mid-17^th century to the mid-19^th century, as landowners, the crown, and peasants vied for control over the proper and just allocation of dwindling resources.  Matteson argues that the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 gave peasants the courage to combat ongoing campaigns designed to reduce traditional forest practices, and that in so doing the earliest government attempts to regulate the forests represented an emerging commercial bias, and extension of state power, and a plan to stamp out sedition—and was NOT about any sort of nascent ecological awareness or sensitivity.  She also argues that traditional community uses were often ecologically sustainable, putting her at odds with the “tragedy of the commons” notion that unregulated resources invariably decline over time.

Beyond this intriguing place and time, and the provocative thesis, lies great complexity.  Ironies abound: regulation leads to wanton over-exploitation; landowners achieve liberal goals, but only with the help of a coercive state; the very nature of a statist conception of the public good; and that the political left seals the political victory of Louis-Napoleon—a man with little sympathy for the poor.

Morevoer, Matteson avoids characterizing the people in the Franche-Compte in simplistic terms.  Through diving in to countless court records and written appeals to local officials, we learn that while many peasants fought for local control of resources and acted with a degree of restraint quite on their own, many others cared little for the future of their woods.  And while crown foresters and nobles can often appear as villains in this narrative, Matteson also shows us that their ranks included the voices of ecological reason and foresight.

Masters of Their Woods is an absolute joy to read.  Matteson’s prose is an example of what we should all strive to achieve: a clean argument, a sense of presentism, and the ability to tell a story—for that is what we do best.

Rachel Carson Prize Committee:

Andrew Duffin, Chair

Mike Reidy

Wendy Verhoff

2008 Distinguished Scholar Award

I am honored to present ASEH's Distinguished Scholar Award to William Cronon.  For many of us in this room, Bill has served as friend, mentor, editor, colleague, and above all, inspiration for the grace, excellence, and creativity of his scholarship in environmental history.

Bill’s first book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), challenged our understandings of the relationships between nature and culture in New England. In 1984, the work was awarded the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians.

In 1991, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, brought close attention to the ways Chicago transformed the west, tracing the links between growing urban markets and the ecosystems that supplied those markets.  In 1991, Nature’s Metropolis was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize;  in 1992, it won the Bancroft Prize; and in 1993, it received both the Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society.

Bill’s essays have been equally illuminating, challenging us to look at familiar questions in new ways. To mention only two, we all know how provocative—and productive—his arguments in “The Trouble With Wilderness” have been. “A Place for Stories: nature, History, and Narrative” opened my eyes to the power of narrative in environmental history. Bill’s own scholarship marries narrative grace with analytical rigor…. Please join me in honoring William Cronon with the Distinguished Scholar Award.

Nancy Langston, ASEH President

2007 George Perkins Marsh Award (Best Book)

The George Perkins Marsh Book Prize Committee spent December and January learning what 2007 brought in terms of new monographs and scholarship in environmental history.  The more difficult aspect of this endeavor involved selecting a winner from the 42 titles submitted for consideration.  We were impressed with the quality of the books and if it is any reflection of the field’s current state, I am very pleased to report that environmental history seems to be in good health. I should also like to stress the number of quality contributions from first-time authors.  Of the four books that we shortlisted, three were first books.  I think this bodes well for the future and is also a strong reflection of the quality instruction and direction junior scholars in this field are receiving from our senior colleagues.

Environmental historians are continuing to push the boundaries of the field, finding novel and exciting ways to integrate race, class, and gender into our environmental narratives.  We are also putting ourselves in deeper and more sophisticated conversation with historians of science, technology, and medicine.  And many of the books we read offered fresh approaches to examining older questions; landscape biography, wilderness, and the American West featured prominently.  In fact, the committee’s biggest challenge stemmed from having to identify a shortlist and a winner from such variety. 

After considerable deliberation, we reached a unanimous decision, selecting Diana Davis’s Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa from the Ohio University Press’ Series in Ecology and History.  Diana Davis’s book tells a story about stories about nature—and about the power of stories.  She deftly weaves together narratives of history, geography, race, science, and power in her account of the environmental history of the Maghreb.  Resurrecting the Granary of Rome relates how French colonial science imposed a narrative of environmental decline that justified French imperial expansion.  Through the 19^th century, French scientists and administrators pointed to deforestation and desertification across Algeria (and, later, Tunisia and Morocco) as a sign of destructive environmental practices following the Arab invasions of the region. 

According to classical scholars, the Maghreb had been the granary of Rome, a region that served as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.  Colonial accounts, in turn, charged that nomadic deforestation and overgrazing transformed North Africa, serving as a classic example of the declensionist narrative.  Part of the French civilizing mission, then, involved restoring the ecological sanctity of the region through the introduction of western agricultural and silvicultural practices, which resulted in a legacy of conquest that marginalized and impoverished North African peoples and landscapes. Davis’s story reveals the extent to which European extractive practices were in fact more harmful than the Arab practices that preceded them.  Indeed, a survey of more recent paleo-ecological research suggests that the nomadic practices that the French denounced were not responsible for ecological decline in the region.  But the prevailing narrative of the decline of the Roman granary situates injudicious Arab stewardship as the main culprit.

This is the story.  And, as Davis tells us, it is one that persists in recent UN conservation efforts, providing a telling indication of how deeply entrenched and powerful stories—and stories about place—can be.  In the issues she raises and the variety of sources she uses to make her case, Davis presents an environmental history that is persuasive in its argument, innovative in its research, and a fascinating read.

George Perkins Marsh Prize Committee:

Michael Egan, Chair

Ann Greene

John Soluri

2007 Alice Hamilton Prize for Best Article Outside Environmental History

It is my great pleasure to introduce the winner of the 2007 Alice Hamilton Prize for the best article published outside of the journal Environmental History. I would like to thank my committee, Chris Conte of Utah State University and Thomas Andrews of the University of Colorado at Denver who spent their winter holiday reading nearly 20 articles from across a broad spectrum of our field. In the end, however, our choice was unanimous for the article “Extraction Not Creation: The History of Offshore Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico” written by Tyler, or “Ty” Priest and published in the June 2007 issue of Enterprise and Society.

Here is the deal. I didn’t want to read this article, much less like it so much. I don’t really like reading business history and I’m certainly not drawn to the dirty business of oil and gas extraction in an environment that I know is already under pressure. I liked my simple story of declension and evil corporate behavior.  What Ty does so well in this article is to make perfectly clear, all of the dirty details of how and why we even have off shore drilling and how the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico itself is partly responsible.

Broken down into four distinct eras of exploration, Ty has carefully re-constructed the dynamics that led to deep water exploration.  His first observation: “The particular characteristics of Gulf hydrocarbons allowed for developments not possible in other marine environments” (232).

In plain English, the oil under the gulf practically waved a flag at the oil industry through detectable salt deposits which gave the industry an enormous boost and allowed them to drill without risk. The next phase of off-shore development involved direct and indirect government aid. This included technology developed during WWII, personnel trained by the government, even marine surplus. Additionally, both the state of Louisiana and the federal government under Eisenhower and again under Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior James Watt were extremely generous to the industry, allowing them to take ever greater risks. When the price of oil was low, the federal government protected oil companies against imports and when world prices skyrocketed, the feds encouraged expansion, without the economic burden of environmental controls.

All of this, Ty explains, is counter to the industry’s celebratory narrative of man against nature in the creation of new sources of energy and wealth. What his research reveals is that off shore drilling, given its enormous liabilities in terms of capital investment and vulnerability to storms, “should be characterized as an adaptation to decline, not a breakthrough to growth” (260). This is a history that confronts the oil industry’s tale of technological genius with a clear focus on decades of exploitation and the ecological damage that will continue to affect the Gulf ecosystem long after the industry has drained all of the oil and departed.

Here is a link to Tyler Priest's article:

http://es.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/8/2/227

Alice Hamilton Prize Committee:

Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Chair

Thomas Andrews

Chris Conte

2007 Leopold-Hidy Award for Best Article in Environmental History

Mark Carey’s essay “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species” is the 2007 winner of the Leopold-Hidy Prize for best article published in Environmental History. It was a highly competitive year, but what made Carey’s piece stand out was its fresh approach to a familiar (if long underappreciated) topic. Using global warming as his backdrop, Carey’s essay traces the emergence of a metadiscourse that tends to treat glaciers as “endangered species.”

His piece, of course, does a good deal more than just put the spotlight on the glacial meltdown. As he notes, to understand why people lament the
loss of ice, one must first place glaciers within their political, cultural, and historical contexts. “Probing historical views of glaciers demonstrates that the recent emergence of an ‘endangered glacier’ narrative stemmed from various glacier perspectives dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: glaciers as menace, scientific laboratories, sublime scenery, recreation sites, places to explore and conquer, and symbols of wilderness. By encompassing so many diverse meanings, glacier and global warming discourse can thus offer a platform
to implement historical ideologies about nature, science, imperialism, race, recreation, wilderness, and global power dynamics.”

The Editorial Board acts as the judges for this award. Members praised Carey’s lucid and compelling style, his knack for handling multiple story lines, and his innovative approach to environmental history. “This is an unusually insightful piece written in an elegant style,” one Board member wrote. “I especially liked the way he tackled the issue from multiple perspectives,” wrote another. “It’s easily the most memorable of the essays that were published in 2007,” wrote a third.

Mark Cioc, Editor, Environmental History

2007 Rachel Carson Award (Best Dissertation)

Taking the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis (where uranium ore was refined and smelted) as its point of entry into the large and consequential topic signaled by its title, this innovative dissertation is a tour de force (Gwendolyn Verhoff’s “The Intractable Atom: The Challenge of Radiation and Radioactive Waste in American Life, 1942 to Present”). By setting this plant, its activities, and the ideas of those who owned and operated it, in the contexts of time and place, it covers an impressive amount of ground and juxtaposes many well-known, but seemingly disparate, contributions to the literature of environmental history in surprising ways to yield an intriguing pointillist canvas.

Revealing her skill as an historian, Dr Verhoff has stitched together evidence from diverse sources such as personal papers, occupational health surveys and company magazines, to argue that the legacies of radioactive contamination with which we grapple today must be considered against mid-twentieth-century conceptions of environment, health and civic obligation. Her handling of scale is exemplary – local events are illuminated by wider trends and brought to speak to regional and national issues. So too is  her capacity to appreciate the fragmented ways in which the protagonists of her story encountered and understood their settings.  Rather than ranting at the indubitable environmental harm and personal injury produced by the mid-century nuclear industry, she seeks to understand how these outcomes emerged.

In the process Dr. Verhoff has given us a work that speaks to American intellectual, technological, labor, class, urban and environmental histories. It is, at once, about the Progressive Conservation movement and Love Canal; about the Manhattan project and the Cold War; about scientists, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and workers who viewed liquid and solid radioactive waste issues from many perspectives; about the difficulties of tying together the complex networks that supported uranium fuel rods, medical isotopes and weapons production; and about the problems of dealing with 40' high dunes of radioactive waste  neatly stored for future use on a former airport site.   It blends biography, questions of technology, and debates over occupational health to connect national regulatory systems through private companies in local communities to the experience of those who lived and worked in places that produced uranium at a time when “nationalistic fervor made production a moral imperative.”

In sum, this study occupies a central place in the quest to understand the ebb and flow of environmental debate in North America.  It asks large questions that lie near the heart of current policy debates over nuclear issues, competent systems of regulation, management and assessment, and long term effective planning for hazards.

Rachel Carson Committee:

Graeme Wynn, Chair

Joanna Dyl

Lorne Hammond

2006 George Perkins Marsh Award (Best Book)

The Marsh Prize Committee had a daunting task this year.  Our society received approximately seventy submissions for this prize.  Undoubtedly, this speaks to the health of our field, and gave the three of us an extraordinary boost to our personal libraries and those of our graduate students.

Consequently, the committee became thoroughly acquainted with a wide range of environmental histories, but also the final decision making became an arduous undertaking.  Max Edelson’s Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina, Michael Grunwald’s work on the Everglades, Tina Loo’s depiction of Canadian wildlife conservation in the 20^th Century, to Peter Thorsheim’s revealing look at air pollution in Great Britain since 1800 or Paul D’Arcy’s deep look into the historical ecology of the Pacific Ocean gives a brief indication of the innovative scholarship and wide breadth of environmental history published in 2006. 

As the committee struggled with its task, one book, John Soluri’s Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consupmtion, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States, commanded all of our respect.  All of us noted Soluri’s clear, readable prose.  Soluri makes pathogens – particularly Panama disease and Sigatoka – powerful actors in his historical drama of diseases literally reshaping landscapes, social relationships, and international economics.  He skillfully employs contingency theory, or the “particularity of place” and the “agency” of people, plants and pathogens, to shape his interpretation.

Soluri nicely illustrates the reciprocal relationships of economics, markets, race and class, soils, flooding, plant pathogens, technology, chemical farming, human illnesses, gender relations, and labor relations through time.  Moreover, the committee noted Soluri’s impressive research.  In short, he blended in an extraordinary manner the historical dynamics of agriculture, consumption, and political ecology into a revealing historical narrative.  For these reasons, after lengthy deliberations, the committee chose Soluri’s work as this year’s recipient of the Marsh Prize for the best book on environmental history published in 2006.

George Perkins Marsh Prize Committee:

James Sherow, Chair

James McCann

Sara Pritchard

2006 Alice Hamilton Prize for Best Article Outside Environmental History

The Alice Hamilton Prize Committee reviewed twenty submissions from seventeen journals and presses.  The authors did not make our task easy.   We found all of the articles to be deeply researched, vividly written, compellingly argued, and memorable.

Those works that combined social history with environmental history proved especially attractive to the committee.  Among this group, we would like to call special attention to works by Colin Fisher and Nancy Unger.  Fisher’s article, “African Americans, Outdoor Recreation, and the 1919 Race Riot,” published in “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History, ed. Dianne Glave and Mark Stoll (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006) offers a dramatic reinterpretation of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot.  Conflict over access to nature, Fisher says, not simply struggles over housing, politics, and labor, sparked the worst racial violence in the city’s history.  Unger’s essay, “The We Say What We Think Club,” published in the Autumn 2006 Wisconsin Magazine of History, is an intimate portrait of five farm women who, from 1937 to 1957, delivered weekly radio commentary on the virtues of the rural environment and the need for resource conservation and preservation.  The committee would like to highlight not only the quality of Unger’s prose, but also her effort to bring the fruits of her environmental history research to a popular audience.

After much deliberation, the committee finally agreed on the winner of the 2006 Alice Hamilton Prize.  Thomas Andrews, “’Made by Toile’?  Tourism, Labor, and the Construction of the Colorado Landscape, 1858-1917,” published in the December 2005 Journal of American History, resists easy categorization.  At once labor history, economic history, cultural history, the history of technology, and environmental history, it offers a trenchant analysis of the manner in which a modern corporation, the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, transformed the industrial landscape of Colorado into a tourist attraction by eliminating virtually all traces of the physical labor that had broken the rock, built the bridges, and laid the rails.  Andrews centers his essay on the remarkable story of John Watt, an aged, impoverished, and forgotten workman who wrote a series of letters to the president of the Denver & Rio Grande, trying to reassert a claim on a landscape from which economic change had excluded him.  Andrews’s astonishing recovery of this articulate working class voice, and his meticulous dissection of the deeply problematic relationships between labor, industrial development, tourism, and landscape production, reminds us that access to nature—to its wealth and to its charms—has been, and is, a matter of power.  “‘Made by Toile’?” is historical scholarship at its best: provocative, surprising, and beautifully written.  It is a worthy recipient of the Alice Hamilton Prize.

Alice Hamilton Prize Committee:

Mark Fiege, Colorado State University, Chair

Dan Lewis, Huntington Library

Heather Lee Miller, Historical Research Associates

2006 Leopold-Hidy Prize for Best Article in Environmental History

The winner of 2006 Leopold-Hidy Prize for best article in Environmental History has been awarded to Richard Judd, author of "'A Wonderfull Order and Ballance': Natural History and the Beginnings of Forest Conservation in America, 1730-1830," which appeared in the January issue.  Judd's essay examines the origins of conservationist thought among a group of scientists who explored the trans-Appalachian frontier in the late colonial and early republic period and suggest the lines of continuity to later thinkers.  One member of the selection committee called it a "masterful narrative that takes a group of early conservationists on their own terms and not merely as precursors to John Muir and other conservationists."  Another said: "I had no idea the degree to which late eighteenth century scientific discourse informed and affected later generations. Judd has, as E. P. Thompson would say, rescued a group of conservationists 'from the enormous condescension of posterity.'"  A third noted: "Among other things, this essay serves as a reminder that colonial and early republic America remains a fruitful and yet woefully under-appreciated field." 

Mark Cioc, Editor, Environmental History

2006 Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation

Joanna Leslie Dyl’s “Urban Disaster: An Environmental History of San Francisco after the 1906 Earthquake” (Princeton University) deploys the methods of environmental history to show that the earthquake was not an exceptional moment in the city’s history – it was, instead, characteristic of the city’s ecology.  She argues that the quake did not transform the natural, political, and social underpinnings of the city.  Instead, it was one more chapter in the story of the city’s shaping, in which natural, political, and social history are indistinguishable.  We learn that the winds, tides, marshes, and sands – as well as earthquakes – played a central role in the city’s historical development.  To support this argument, Dr. Dyl examines a broad range of evidence from archives, newspapers, and other sources to rewrite the city’s history from an environmental perspective.

Rachel Carson Prize Committee:

William Storey, Chair

Elizabeth Carney Sowards

Sylvia Hood Washington

2005 Distinguished Service Award

 It’s hard to imagine anyone in our Society unfamiliar with Hal Rothman.  But it’s also difficult to recall all the many things Hal has done over the years – and I would remind you that for someone of Hal’s intensity, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage that counts.  While Hal was not among the Society’s founders, it seems so, such has been his presence.  His books and columns have helped weld environmental history and Western history.  For a decisive decade he edited the journal.  He hosted a meeting in Las Vegas.  In the days before our arrangement with the Forest History Society and before we had an executive director or a secretary who handled administrative tasks, Hal donated considerable time and expertise in conducting the Society’s affairs.  He made things happen; as editor of the newsletter, as manager of membership matters, as overseer of conference organization.  More recently he has chaired our Development Committee.  Throughout, he has identified himself and his prodigious research with environmental history and with the Society in particular, an act of intellectual generosity that he has matched with a financial generosity.  In Hal we see the ASEH at its finest.

There is a lot more one could say.  But we don’t need more words.  Hal’s legacy is all around us this evening.  It’s here in the fact that we have a meeting at all; it’s here as an exemplary journal; here as a congenial society of scholars who have created a new field.  Everywhere we look tonight – from the caliber of scholarship evident to the no-host bar to which we will soon retire – bears Hal Rothman’s imprint.  It will continue to do so for a very long time.

Hal, you’ve honored us for many years with your enthusiasm, your wit, your insights, your scholarship, your generosity of mind and heart.  Tonight, please allow us to honor you with a token of our appreciation and admiration and friendship in the form of the American Society for Environmental History’s Distinguished Service Award.

-Steve Pyne, ASEH President

2005 George Perkins Marsh Award (Best Book)

Environmental history reminds us how our past reflects both chosen outcomes and surprising developments, a product of humans shaping and reacting to natural features and forces.  The problem of food -- how we eat now and what we ate then -- poses questions big enough to challenge the best environmental historians.

James McCann’s bold, imaginative book tackles those questions.  His answers, and the way he came to them, advance our field in significant ways.  He crossed oceans and continents, as well as centuries and species, to tell us how maize, a very old New World plant, became modern Africa’s indispensable food crop.  Through unconventional evidence and graceful narrative, McCann shows how discovering, changing, and eating maize transformed African lifeways and landscapes.  From genomes and cultivars to smallholders and slavers, there’s agency enough for every taste. 

Maize and Grace – aside from having a winner’s title – earned the Marsh Prize by using exciting methods to take on a big, important topic in a place that our field better needs to understand.  McCann has written a sweeping, captivating history of a plant that has become so successful and ubiquitous that its future poses major policy choices for Africans, as well as for those who watch the continent with hope and horror.

The George Perkins Marsh Prize Committee unanimously agreed that our field produced no better book in 2005 than Maize and Grace.

George Perkins Marsh Prize Committee:

Karl Brooks, Chair

Brian Donahoe

Alice Ingerson 

2005 Alice Hamilton Award (Best Article Outside Environmental History)

The Alice Hamilton Prize committee is pleased to award this year's prize to Mark Fiege's "The Weedy West: Mobile Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape" in the Western Historical Quarterly.  Fiege's fine essay deftly weaves history, biology, and geography into a bioregional analysis that demonstrates why weeds matter.  Like much important scholarship, Fiege's work seems both entirely new and yet somehow entirely obvious: how could we not have thought about weeds, about nature, about people's relations with nature like this before? And Fiege's story is eminently readable - the kind of graceful writing that makes environmental history compelling.

Using Montana as a case study, Fiege's well-researched and engaging narrative traces the historic proliferation of weeds and explores how mobile nature, which fails to respect such human boundaries as property lines and fences, nevertheless can promote cooperative, collective public management.  In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, as frustrated farmers and settlers confronted their vexing weedy predicament, Fiege argues, they realized that the biological agency of their tumbling tumbleweeds made a mockery of a seemingly  rational land grid system.  The solution lay in recognizing a shared ecological commons, indeed a weed commons that demanded a certain rural mutualism to control.  In Montana, the result was the formation of weed districts,  passage of the first "weed law" in 1895 and a landmark weed control act in 1939, which subsumed private property interests to the public good.  And while Fiege suggests that Athe weed commons was always a qualified, contested, and contingent space, he also elegantly proves that Athe shared problem of weeds could create common bonds among otherwise divided people.

The committee would also like to note, in the form of honorable mentions, Mart A. Stewart's "If John Muir had been an Agrarian: American Environmental History West and South," in Environment and History, and John F. Varty's "On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread: Rationalizing Technologies and the Canadian State, 1912-1935," in The Canadian Historical Review.

Alice Hamilton Prize Committee:

Sara Dant Ewert, Chair

Alan MacEachern

Sylvia Hood Washington

2005 Leopold-Hidy Award (Best Article in Environmental History)

The Leopold-Hidy Award recognizes the best article in the journal Environmental History.  It is given in tandem by the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History who jointly publish the journal.  It is named after Aldo Leopold, a forester, wildlife biologist, and environmental philosopher and Ralph W. Hidy who was a professor of business history at the Harvard Business school and a long-time Forest History Society director and member.  

The winner of this award is determined by the vote of the Editorial Board members, who are asked to re-read all of the essays published in Environmental History during the year, and to decide which article best contributed to the fields of forest and environmental history considering the quality of the argument, quality of the research, and writing style. 

The winner of the Leopold-Hidy Prize for 2005 is Gregg Mitman for the essay, “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” which appeared in the April 2005 issue of Environmental History.

Using Aldo Leopold’s concept of “land health” as an overarching metaphor, Gregg Mitman’s essay provides a survey of landscape and disease.  As he notes: “Health acquires meaning only by virtue of the relationships between and among living organisms—be they the cells of the human body or the species of a biotic community—and their environments.....  In cutting across the categories of the human and non-human, health offers a useful means for rethinking nature and how we come to know the natural world..... Air and water, microbes and pollen, toxic chemicals and radiation move in and out of urban and rural landscapes, through bodies, both human and non-human.  How such matter takes on form, acquires agency in bodies and landscapes, becomes a commodity in the consumption of health, or is turned into danger and risk, these are all topics worthy of much more thorough study.” (quotes from various parts of Mitman’s article)

Editorial Board members were effusive in their praise of this essay.  One wrote:  “Gregg Mitman’s well written essay challenges environmental historians to expand their conceptions of the scope of our field, while providing an excellent synthesis of the historiography of the intersection of the body and landscapes. Of all the articles, this one is most valuable for opening up vistas toward new areas of study.”  A second wrote: “This essay did a splendid job integrating the seemingly divergent topics of medicine and conservation.”  A third wrote (and here I want to underscore how much I agree with this sentiment): “It stood out for its sweeping breadth and innovative approach even among a group of essays that were outstanding in quality and sophistication.”

Editorial Board, Environmental History

2005 Rachel Carson Award (Best Dissertation)

The 2005 Rachel Carson Prize for the Best Dissertation in Environmental History is awarded to Liza Piper.  Piper, currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, completed her dissertation, “Harnessing the Wet West: Environment and Industrial Order on the Large Lakes of Subartic Canada, 1921-1960,” at York University under the supervision of Viv Nelles.

In her rich exploration of the ecological history of Northern Canada, Piper asks a basic question: “What happens to nature as a result of 20^th-century industrialization?”  Tracking the complex transformations engendered by the fishing, mining and transportation industries, and considering the multiple perspectives of scientists, natives, workers, governments and economies, Piper challenges the view that industrialization inherently alienated workers from nature.  As she complicates our understanding of industrial development, she provides an intriguing and nuanced analysis of ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature.  Particularly impressive is her ability to ground her study in the particularities of this place and time without losing sight of macro structural factors.

“Harnessing the Wet West is a carefully constructed, analytically rigorous manuscript, one that is well deserving of this year’s award. 

 As a committee, we would also like to acknowledge the fine dissertation by Michael J. Rawson, “Nature and the City: Boston and the Construction of the American Metropolis, 1820-1920,” completed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the supervision of William Cronon, as an “Honorable Mention.”

Rachel Carson Committee:

Katherine Morrissey, Chair

Lawrence Culver

Jim Webb

Comments on ASEH's 2004 Prizes

2004 George Perkins Marsh Prize (Best Book)

Brian Donahue’s The Great Meadow:  Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord is a magisterial work of environmental history.  Bringing to bear pathbreaking historical and ecological scholarship, his own keen insight as a Massachusetts farmer, and extraordinary gifts as a writer, Donahue reexamines one of the most famous places in America: colonial Concord.  His highly original analysis will profoundly alter our understanding of colonial farming practices, and cause us to rethink the environmental lessons of that period.  

By applying innovative spatial analytical methods to a monumental amount of information gleaned piecemeal from legal and property records, genealogies, and GIS mapping, Donahue brilliantly reconstructs colonial land ownership and land use patterns over a hundred-year period.  He achieves a phenomenal level of detail in laying out the rhythms of life that characterized New England rural society, while building a persuasive argument that turns on its head the longstanding orthodoxy through which seventeenth-century New England colonists have been characterized as poor farmers who degraded their land.

To the contrary, Donahue shows, Concord families possessed a deep and subtle knowledge of their regional environment, and gradually developed sophisticated farming practices that proved both ecologically and economically sustainable over more than eight generations.

Finally, The Great Meadow is a sheer delight to read.  Donahue clearly loves this land, and as he takes us through it, unfolding its secrets in beautiful prose, we gradually come to feel as if we ourselves had been tromping along its paths, watching it shift and evolve with the passing of time.  The book — like the farms it describes — is a labor of love, and one of its most impressive attributes is that it powerfully conveys a “feeling for place,” a uniquely concrete kind of knowing that allows the reader to become intimately connected with this small patch of New England.  The Great Meadow will no doubt come to be regarded as a classic work of environmental history: a study that sees through the lens of the “micro,” while brilliantly exploring fundamental questions of sustainability, and of the evolving relation of humans to their natural surroundings.

George Perkins Marsh Prize Committee:

Michael Bess, Chair

Lynne Heasley

Alan MacEachern

2004 Alice Hamilton Prize (Best Article Outside Environmental History)

The Alice Hamilton Prize committee is pleased to award Linda Nash’s “The Fruits of Ill-Health: Pesticides and Workers’ Bodies in Post-World War II California” with this year’s prize.  The 2004 submissions included a diverse array of excellent essays, a testament to the growing scholarly impact of our field outside the journal Environmental History.  Nash’s essay stood out among these articles for its ability to weave interdisciplinary insights, including the history of science, the history of the body, agricultural science, ethnic studies, and environmental history, into a compelling story about the ideological, institutional, and environmental factors that shaped occupational health authorities’ understanding of organophosphate pesticide poisoning in the California agricultural industry.  Nash offers makes a number of insightful claims about these authorities’ approach between the 1940s and the 1970s that underscore the limits of Western medical and scientific models to understand and regulate environmental toxins. 

Nash shows that “modernist” conceptions of the human body’s openness to environmental penetration were hopelessly limited; that understandings of how to quantify poisoning were naïve, especially given the variable effect of pesticides in changing environmental conditions of wind, temperature, and sunlight; that authorities, largely unintentionally, demonstrated their racism in distrusting the “popular epistemologies” of migrant reports and migrant health conditions; that social awareness of pesticide poisoning was intimately connected to other social arenas, such as the 1960’s antiwar movements and social justice movements; and that agricultural work was wrongly conceived of as “natural” and therefore as inherently healthful.  She backs up these sobering claims with a wide-ranging source base (including highly technical epidemiological and chemical risk studies), eloquent writing, and a sophisticated yet accessible approach appropriate for both scholarly audiences and advanced undergraduate students.  The article will undoubtedly stimulate renewed public policy interest in the occupational and public health effects of pesticides and sets a new standard for interdisciplinary analysis. 

The committee would also like to note, in the form of an "honorable mention," Connie Chiang’s excellent essay "Monterey-by-the-Smell: Odors and Social Conflict on the California Coastline"; like Nash, Chiang carries out an interdisciplinary, socially-inflected form of environmental history that is sure to influence the course of our future research.

Alice Hamilton Prize Committee:

Thomas M. Lekan, Chair

Lisa Kiser

Deborah Fitzgerald

2004 Leopold-Hidy Award (best article in Environmental History)

The Leopold-Hidy Award honors the best article published in Environmental History in the preceding year.  The award is presented jointly by the ASEH and the Forest History Society and judged by the editorial board of the journal.  This year, the Leopold-Hidy Award goes to Brett Walker for his article “Meiji Restoration, Scientific Agriculture and the Destruction of Japan's Hokkaido Wolf,” which appeared in the April 2004 issue.

In my editor’s note to that issue, I wrote that Brett’s article demonstrated that “new conceptions of nature were part of the self-conscious modernization program of Japan’s Meiji rulers in the late nineteenth century.  To be modern, the Meiji decided, the people of Japan needed to eat beef.  Accordingly, the Meiji sought to develop a ranching industry on the island of Hokkaido.  That effort led to a systematic campaign to exterminate wolves -- a campaign that went against powerful traditions.  Because the Meiji relied on American advisers, Walker’s work adds to our understanding of the globalization of western ideas about progress.”

Members of the Environmental History editorial board praised Brett’s work as “fresh,” “provocative,” “impressively researched,” and “well written.”  One board summarized the article’s virtues with these words of praise: “Like ‘The Last Samurai,’ this article tells a great story of a transplanted American in nineteenth-century Japan and, in that telling, illuminates both nations and their converging histories.  It is exceptionally well-crafted and brilliantly organized from the first sentence to the last.  The added bonus is that Walker also expands our moral vision to include a fellow creature who is normally missing from conventional history.”

Congratulations, Brett!

Adam Rome, editor, and Editorial Board of Environmental History

2004 Rachel Carson Prize (Best Dissertation)

The committee read nine dissertations.  We read manuscripts on controlling urban weeds, Great Plains conservation, on environmental politics, and on the "re-wilding" of Apostle Island National Lakeshore.  We were very impressed with these works and felt that most all of the authors make great contributions to environmental history.

The winning manuscript considers the lifestyle of leisure in Southern California, arguing that Catalina Island, Palm Springs, and Los Angeles contributed to the formation of a distinct American suburban culture in the twentieth century, and that these landscapes of leisure have proved to be at least as influential as the nineteenth-century suburban "hearths"--places like Westchester County, New York.  Lawrence Culver asks us to think about all the ways that Palm Springs changed the way Americans thought about leisure: modernist desert architecture, the golf-course residence, and the Hollywood vacation colony.  He also writes compellingly about segregated pools and beaches in Los Angeles--how African Americans resisted segregation and how they created their own places of leisure, like Val Verde, known as the "Black Palm Springs."

The manuscript explores the idea that leisure shaped the development of Southern California and "ultimately influenced the nation as a whole."  Perhaps most important of all, Culver refuses to look at these places as mere backdrops for certain attitudes about leisure or from the point of view of tourists but as emerging communities themselves--as suburban societies, in which people with competing interests and conflicting assumptions struggled over development.

We found this argument compelling, and we were very impressed by the skillful way that Culver situates it in the literature of tourism.  He writes gracefully and tells tight, witty stories.  Kavita said of the manuscript that it is "a successful piece of interdisciplinary scholarship that creatively integrates urban and suburban studies, architectural history, and cultural politics."  Neil said that the author did "a wonderful job weaving cultural and social history with the history of tourism and leisure," and he thought that Culver "succeeded in linking his local history with larger events in U.S. history generally."  Neil called it innovative and said that it "pushes environmental history in interesting directions."

And that might be the most important criteria for a winner of this prize.  The 2005 Rachel Carson Dissertation Prize is awarded to Milton Lawrence Culver for "The Island, the Oasis, and the City: Santa Catalina, Palm Springs, Los Angeles, and Southern California's Shaping of American Life and Leisure."

Congratulations for writing a significant book. 

Rachel Carson Prize Committee:

Steven Stoll, Chair

Neil Maher

Kavita Philip