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from the editor
| THIS ISSUE IS COMPOSED of four essays that are more in dialogue with past and future essays than with each other. Thomas Cox's "A Tale of Two Journals" is in many ways a companion piece to Brian Donahue's "Another Look from Sanderson's Farm" (January 2007). In recognition of the Forest History Society's long-standing commitment to scholarly publishing, I asked Brian to do a reflective piece on Forest History's most widely cited essay. At the same time, I invited Tom to write a fifty-year retrospective about Environmental History and its predecessors. Nancy Langston's "The Retreat from Precaution" focuses on the role of endocrine disruptors (industrial pollutants that mimic body hormones) in causing medical problems; a wide-ranging essay, it examines health debates that stretch back to the 1930s and 1940s. It also offers a foretaste of things to come: Nancy is preparing a forum on the topic of toxic bodies that will be published in the October 2008 issue. Glenn Grasso's "What Appeared Limitless Plenty" builds on an earlier essay by Jeffrey Bolster ("Opportunities in Marine Environmental History," July 2006). Grasso focuses on the demise in the late nineteenth century of the halibut, a fish that has been too often overlooked by scholars in favor of more prized species such as cod and salmon. Finally, James Murton's "Creating Order" examines the draining of Sumas Lake in British Columbia in the 1920s, a cautionary tale about the limitations and contradictions of Canadian liberalism and the state's failure to comprehend environmental complexity. |
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I would like to thank Mark Harvey for his searching and engaging interview with Donald Worster. Char Miller and I enjoy doing these interviews ourselves, but neither of us has the time or the expertise to interview every leading scholar in the field, so please feel free to step forward if you have the inclination and a deserving interviewee in mind. |
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The first World Conference for Environmental History will be held in Copenhagen in August 2009. I have been writing to individual scholars over the past few months, soliciting essays that shed light on aspects of the global environment for possible publication in this journal in 2009 or 2010. I would now like to broaden this call and invite all of you who are working on transnational environmental issues to consider writing and submitting essays. |
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Finally, I hope that this issue's cover photo and Gallery essay will not prove too controversial. Steve Anderson, the president of the Forest History Society, expressed concern over our choice of cover photo, but in the end I agreed with our graphics editor, Neil Maher, that it was an appropriate photo in light of the Gallery's theme (Marguerite Shaffer "On the Environmental Nude"). I know that Steve still is not fully comfortable with my decision. The Gallery photos themselves also generated a lot of discussion, as Neil notes in his foreword to the piece. Ultimately, I made the decision to crop one of the photos, although I know that Neil and Marguerite were not fully comfortable with this decision either. It is unusual for issues of censorship to occur in editorial discussions about the content of our journal, and I can assure you that they are unlikely to arise again in the near future! |
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MARK CIOC
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