Crossroads: Environmental Histories on Contested Ground

The American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) will be opening its portal for proposals to its annual conference soon! The conference will be held March 25-28, 2026, in Kansas City, Missouri. The theme, Crossroads: Environmental Histories on Contested Ground speaks to Kansas City’s rich history as a meeting point for people, goods, and ideas from across the continent. 

This region exemplifies the entanglement of environmental history with histories of imperialism, colonial displacement, globalizing economies, and struggles for racial justice. At the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, where the forests of the East become the prairies of the West, the city developed on land belonging to diverse Indigenous communities, including the Kaw and Osage nations. Before the founding of the city, the area was a hub for an Indigenous-white commerce in millions of beaver pelts and bison hides. In the nineteenth century, Kansas City became an eastern terminus for transportation routes that opened the West to extraction and settlement, while Missouri and Kansas played important roles in conflicts over freedom and enslavement and the competing systems of land use and expansion that undergirded sectional conflict. In the twentieth century the city and region continued to sit at the crossroads of both local and national challenges that came with urban development, racial tensions, and environmental degradation. 

This year’s theme also speaks to our current moment, with nations and people across the world facing crises emerging from the crossroads of technology, culture, politics, and environmental change. In the United States, attacks on environmental justice and the environmental regulatory state are the greatest threat to the environmental consensus since before the first ASEH conference in 1982. Environmental historians, who study the crossroads of human affairs and nonhuman actors, are uniquely situated to speak to these current challenges and their wider contexts.