As an environmental historian, I am fundamentally interested in how the natural world has been a part of human history. Nature has been our oldest home, but remains one of our most significant challenges. In this way, we must recognize that while humans can have incredible effects on the environment, natural forces also hold great sway over human destiny.
My book, Atomic Environments, charts a concurrent rise in the use of environmental science by high-ranking executive policymakers in the U.S. government when making decisions about nuclear technologies. In this way, atomic science was not merely a despoiler of world environments, affecting humans’ relationship to the natural world only as an ironic, unintended impulse for the coalescence of the modern environmental movement. Those same technologies also functioned as a vehicle for improving scientific understandings of the environment and involving those into policymaking.
Choice magazine of the American Library Association called it “Highly Recommended. All readers.” I have recorded podcasts about it on Modern Scholar Podcast (Season 3, 14 February 2023) and the Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks. It can be purchased on the press site or Amazon.
“While the past entraps it can also liberate; it can remind us of possibilities we did not know we had.”