Web resources: Networks, portals and centres
Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network
The Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network is a bulletin board with news and stories related environmental history in Australia and New Zealand. The is the first stop for anyone interested in environmental history of Australasia and invites interested scholars to subscribe to the news feed and contribute to the site.
Centre for Environmental History, Australian National University
The website of the Centre for Environmental History (CEH) at the Australian National University is a very informative site for current developments in Australian Environmental history. Here you find the latest news on conferences, workshops, new research, publications and seminars, to mention only the most obvious new items. But like the CEH the site goes beyond the field of environmental history and strays into the wider field of the environmental humanities as well as anthropology, ecology and archaeology. The website also features detailed biographies of the Centre’s members, including their research interests and publications. A really interesting section is the “Stories from the Field”, which is in actual fact a blog on field work, archival visits and ongoing research written by members of the Centre providing real insights into the work of environmental historians.
Environmental History Network for the Middle Ages (ENFORMA)
This website, as it name suggests, is a virtual network of scholars working in the sub-field of medieval environmental history. The site is a central place to share news, conference information, and research ideas of interest to anyone interested in environmental history of the middle ages. Of particular interest are a bibliography and a register of researchers working on medieval environmental history. The teaching resources page provides syllabi but is very limited in scope. Other resources such as links to video material, online articles or source material useful for teaching purposes are not included yet. Material can be contributed and share material using the comment tool on the site.
Environment & Society Portal
The Environment and Society Portal provides the opportunity to explore a collection of free, openly accessible digital materials in an ever growing, dynamic, growing, and interactive “cabinet of curiosity.” In the Multimedia Library, visitors can listen to the Exploring Environmental History podcast episode on Rachel Carson or watch the Seven Dwarves combat malaria in a 1940s animated film. One can explore environmentally significant places and events in the interactive Map Viewer, Timeline, and Keyword Explorer, allowing users to browse and visualise spatial, temporal, and thematic relationships. And the Portal’s media-rich online exhibitions feature in-depth contextualization of archival documents.
Part of the Environment and Society Portal is the Arcadia project, a collaboration between the European Society for Environmental History and the Rachel Carson Centre, and presents illustrated and hyperlinked short environmental histories of particular places or events.
The Environment and Society Portal is probably the most comprehensive website in the broadly defined fields of environmental history and environmental humanities.
H-Environment is a discussion platform for environmental historians and is part of H-Net, an international scholarly organisation dedicated to promoting the scholarly use of the Internet and electronic resources. H-Environment is supported by the leading organisations in the field such as the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) and the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH).
H-Environment is used by scholars in the field to draw attention to events, calls for papers and to put questions to colleagues in the field. The site also posts book reviews and a more recent feature are the Roundtable Reviews providing perspectives from multiple reviewers on a books, and allow authors the opportunity to respond.
The aim of the HistoricalClimatology.com site is to make interdisciplinary climate change research available for policymakers, journalists, scholars, and the general public. It is especially concerned with connecting cutting-edge scholarship of past climate change to modern issues related to global warming. The site emphasises the value of climate change scholarship in disciplines other than the sciences, including history, economics, political science, law, and more generally the environmental humanities.
The site features regular blog posts, interviews with climate researchers, info about projects, a bibliography, data bases and videos. HistoricalClimatology.com is the most comprehensive and informative site for anyone interested in climate and history.
Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE)
The Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) website is a popular forum for activity and information about environmental history in Canada. It is a valuable website that hosts a number of blogs in English and French and resources for the study of environmental history. Particularly interesting are the NICHE sponsored monthly audio podcast Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast. Also noteworthy are the monthly #envhist Worth Reading updates which provides a round up of the most interesting online environmental history material that has been appeared online. The site is a real treasure trove.