2013 election results 

The following people were elected:

officers: 

Kathleen Brosnan, vice president/president elect

Mark Madison, treasurer

Jay Taylor, secretary

executive committee:

Sarah Elkind

Ellen Stroud

Paul Sutter

nominating committee:

Brian Black

Robert Wilson

Gregory Rosenthal was appointed this year's graduate student liaison.

Thank you to all candidates that stood for election.

ASEH thanks the following individuals for their service, as they rotated off the executive committee this year:

Stephen Pyne, Marcus Hall, Tina Loo, Linda Nash, and Kara Schlichting

member news

Adam Rome's book The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation and Aaron Sach's book Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition were featured recently in an article "When the Earth Moved: What Happened to the Environmental Movement?" in The New Yorker.  

Ellen Stroud's book Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast (University of Washington Press) was listed  

in the History News Network as one of the best history books of 2012. 

Nancy Unger's book Beyond Nature's Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History was recently published by Oxford University Press.

announcements

 

Call for Papers

film review: "waking the green tiger"
 by David Biggs, University of California-Riverside

"Waking the Green Tiger" is really an ideal film for courses on global environmental history that seek to examine what environmentalism means "in translation" far beyond the United States and Europe. This film is one of three directed by Gary Marcuse for the CBC series "The Nature of Things." It draws extensively on Judith Shapiro's 2001 book Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China and is really three or four stories wrapped into one. It begins with the story of Beijing-based journalists visiting the Nu (Salween) River in the highlands of Yunnan Province. The journalists, drawing upon a recently passed Environmental Impact Assessment Law, interview villagers in a valley where a large hydropower dam is planned, reporting their views on to a national audience. The central story underlying this account in the Nu Valley and others is the deep political crisis in China around environmental protection and participatory democracy.

For environmental historians, the film is especially teachable as it splices in rare archival footage of revolutionary China (1949-1980), showing the origin's of the Chinese state's hyper-development platform in the first years after the revolution. China's iconic leader Mao Tse Tung led mass movements from 1950 on to rapidly develop and industrialize rural areas. Particularly poignant is one segment in the film on the Four Pests Campaign (1958-1962) where the Eurasian Tree Sparrow was almost eradicated into extinction. A Chinese couple who were youths in this campaign remark in an interview on their shock in participating as young children in this mass killing of the tiny sparrows.  Archival footage shows dump trucks leaving villages with heaping mounds of the dead birds. The scene of so many dead songbirds recalls Rachel Carson's lament of a "silent spring" without birdsong.

Besides the historical documentary, the film introduces foreign viewers to some of the leading environmental activists and journalists. Ma Jun, author of China's Water Crisis (2004), offers critiques on the dam projects detailed in the film. His book is one of the first widely read, environmentalist works to be published inside China. Wang Yongchen, another journalist working with China's National Public Radio, is featured in several segments. Her reporting on the threatened, bio-diverse valleys on the Nu River in 2004 led China's Premier, Wen Jiabao, to suspend work on the river pending more investigations. The film is a virtual who's-who of China's environmental movement.

While the film ends on an upbeat note, events since it's airing on CBC television in 2011 reveal the fragility of these environmental victories against a state still oriented to development-at-all-costs. The government lifted the ban on dam construction in the Nu River Valley in late January 2013. Many villages like the one depicted in the film have already been razed with villagers relocated. Time Magazine in 2009 listed the Nu Valley as one of the top places to visit "before it disappears." Thus "Waking the Green Tiger" is provocative because it shows not only how an environmentalist consciousness has emerged in China but also, like the sparrows in the Four Pests Campaign, how fragile are the few environmental victories.

[David Biggs is the program committee chair for ASEH's 2014 conference.]

attention: graduate students

On April 5, the Graduate Student Caucus held its first meeting of the year. Twenty-three students attended. At the meeting, we discussed the expanding role and influence of the caucus (established in 2011) and brainstormed ideas for future graduate student programming and activities at the 2014 conference in San Francisco and beyond. The graduate student caucus will next meet, via online conference call technology, in late May. The exact date, time, and access information will be announced in coming weeks.
 
If you are not on the graduate caucus email listserv, I encourage you to join us! Please contact me at rosenthal.gregory@gmail.com to be added to the listserv. As of this spring, the graduate student caucus includes over 35 active members. We meet at least three times per year. We have a lot of great plans for 2014, and I invite you to join in the conversation to help make these plans a reality.
 
Gregory Rosenthal
ASEH Graduate Student Liaison