French Broad River Views| U.T. KNoxville GeoSym 2023 #PhotoEssay

I want to thank Morgan Rose Shelor, Katrina Stack, Kayla Roulhac, Derek Alderman, LaToya Eaves, Nikki Luke, and Alex Moulton for logistical excellence, kindness, and intellectual bridging during my visit.

Invited Presentations #Booked&Busy

These are all places that I will speak at in the 2022-2023 academic year. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to be invited to speak at these amazing places this academic year. This is especially important since this is my first year as a tenure track Assistant Professor! I spoke at the National …

Random Nature, my New Podcast

This is a podcast about how academics view the natural world and their place within it. I discuss many aspects of nature with a view to amplifying various causes of conservation and sustainability.

War Capitalism: Notes on Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton #envhist

Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton examines the significant influence that the institution of slavery had on the foundation of the United States’ role in cotton production and dawning of global capitalism. In the years following the treaty of independence of 1783, the areas in the upper South where enslaved people were concentrated experienced a severe …

J.R. McNeill: Summary points and future issues on Environmental History

Osnaburg Fabric: Garment for the Enslaved

It was the osnaburg nightshirt that failed to keep Moses Grandy’s enslaved brother warm when he died of exposure while trying to find a yoke of steers that had wandered into woods of the Great Dismal Swamp during the winter of 1795. That coarse, yet thin fabric had not been enough to keep the enslaved …

Notes on David Blackbourn’s “Conquest of Nature”

“The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany,” by David Blackbourn tells the story of how Germans transformed their landscape over the course  of 250 years.[1] The modification of the landscape included reclaiming marshes, draining wetlands, stream restoration, and dam construction. These hydrological projects, Blackbourn informs, changed the face of the …

Notes on Thomas Rogers’ Deepest Wounds

Thomas Rogers’ “The Deepest Wounds: Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil” expands our knowledge in understanding the rupture, continuity and change in the zona da mata region of Brazil. Rogers’ foremost concern in the book is assessing the damage that monoculture did to landscape and society in the region as well as …

Currently Reading…

The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History synthesizes developments and resources in the field. This volume presents a survey of environmental history including an overview of significant topics and themes as well as a compendium of historical actors and policy... Also reading Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South by the late Jack Temple Kirby. …

Notes on The Great Acceleration, by JR McNeil and Peter Engelke

"One can find reasons, as this book does, to prefer a more recent date for the beginning of the Anthropocene. Those reasons, in brief, are, first, that since the mid-twentieth century human action (unintentionally) has become the most important factor governing crucial biogeochemical cycles, to wit, the carbon cycle, the sulfur cycle, and the nitrogen …