The latest issue of the journal Environment and History is a co-edited special issue from John Morgan (Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol), and Prof. Sasha Handley (History, University of Manchester).
In Environment, Emotion and Early Modernity, the editors bring together a group of seven scholars writing at the intersection of the histories of environment and emotion in the early modern period. The collection covers forestry and geomancy in early modern Korea, foodways and emotional communities in seventeenth-century North America, and much inbetween.
Editorial
Sasha Handley and John Morgan Lusty Sack Possets, Nuptial Affections and the Material Communities of Early Modern Weddings Sasha Handley Foodways and Emotional Communities in Early Colonial Virginia Rachel Winchcombe Sylvan Anxieties and the Making of Landscapes in Early Modern Korea John S. Lee An Emotional Ecology of Pigeons in Early Modern England and America John Emrys Morgan Trees and Disease: The Ecology of the Roman Campagna in the Seventeenth Century Lisa Beaven Summer, Sun and SAD in Early Modern England Tayler Meredith ‘The Sky in Place of The Nile’: Climate, Religious Unrest and Scapegoating in Post-Tridentine Apulia Giovanni Tarantino
My reason to apply for a Green Transitions Fellowship at University of Stavanger was to make a start on a book about the history of wind energy. I presented my work to the academic community here early on, and spoke about how the history of wind energy has been shaped by interactions between people, place, and technology. The wind moves through these interactions, itself a product of planetary motion, oceanic currents, and the meeting of sea, air, and land. And while it was time in the quiet work room that helped me commit words to the page, it was time out in the Stavanger land- and seascape that helped me think.
I’ve been developing ideas on how energy technology interacts with place and the people who inhabit it. British state interest in wind turbines just after the Second World War was inflected with ideas about landscape, weather, identity, and productivity, and this shaped how and where turbines were tested. The wind is a dynamic actor in this history: it challenged attempts by meteorologists to predict it, and by engineers to harness it. New wind technology layered over old traditions of living with abundant and occasionally extreme weather, adding to already established and embodied knowledge of wind and place. Throughout my work I’ve been fascinated by winds, waves, tides, rivers – environments on the move that resist attempts to pin them in place, and yet forge a sense of place through their very transience.
Arrival in a new place brings with it an impulse to get grounded. As a swimmer, I like to learn the land by stepping off it and into the water. Here in Stavanger there is plenty, and I’ve been offsetting my solitary, stationary, writing with as many swims as I can. The view from the water helps to make sense of the shore.
Swimming reaffirms again and again that environments are dynamic, changing, and alive. The fjords pulsate with life like the lion’s mane jellyfish I avoided and comb jellyfish I didn’t (transparent, and without venom, brains, or complex nervous systems, they were so wonderfully, barely, there). The seaweeds are spectacular. Shallow fields of sea grass and inky deep fjords alike have been crystal clear, though signs warn against fishing in certain spots due to contamination. Contrasts of clean/dirty, visibility/invisibility, course through the history of energy. Renewable energy claims to cleanliness need to be interrogated carefully. Swimming in Stavanger – an oil town – has helped me keep these issues in mind.
New friends have joined me on many of these swims and we’ve joked about writing an article on ‘swimming-as-praxis’. Here is my confession, then, that (pretension aside) I believe that swimming helps me understand my work and the world around me. One of my first swims here was in a dock while Pøbel, a local graffiti artist, painted a tribute to Freya the walrus on the side of a grain warehouse. Freya had visited harbours across the North Atlantic, sinking sailboats in her magnificent wake. She was killed by Norwegian authorities in the Oslofjord days before I arrived, for the crime of attracting too many crowds to see her (but on the bizarre grounds of her own safety). Seeing her take new shape by the water’s edge at Stavanger was a prompt to keep thinking about power, about place, about ecosystems and care. To keep swimming. To keep writing.
Dr. Marianna Dudley is a historian at the University of Bristol. Her work explores environmental change and its impacts on communities, places, and politics in modern Britain. The rise of renewable energy is a current focus, and she is writing a history of wind energy. She was a Greenhouse Green Transitions Fellow at University of Stavanger, 15 August – 15 September 2022.
This post was first published on The Greenhouse Green Transitions Fellows Blog, and we are grateful for permission to republish it here. The Greenhouse is a research center at the University of Stavanger that draws together those with an interest in the environmental humanities.Since 2022, the Centre for Environmental History has partnered with The Greenhouse.
His talk will be based on his nearly-completed PhD thesis, which looks at the impact on the British rural and peri-urban landscape of the network of Royal Ordnance Factories and military aircraft factories that were built by the State in the run-up to and during the Second World War.
These military-industrial sites were constructed very rapidly under conditions of national emergency between 1937 and 1942 – thereby short-circuiting the in any case weak civic planning consultation processes that existed at the time. They produced war materials which by their very nature were dispensable and in the case of ammunition could be used once-only – and by 1945 the vast majority of these sites were no longer required for the purpose for which they were built, leaving a lasting imprint on the British landscape. Further proof, if it was needed, of the wastefulness of the war-making process.
The environmental and historical significance of military-industrial sites – as opposed to say, military airfields – is that the former represented a nearly always exclusive and permanent change in use of the land of the landscapes they occupied – whereas many military airfields shared their sites with agriculture even during the war, and many airfields were transferred back into civil agricultural use at the end of the war.
The impact on the landscape of militarisation is only one side of the story that Gary will explore however. He will also explain how the contours of landscapes, geology, and climate were active agents in influencing the location and form that this militarisation took in Scotland. He will look in particular at the decision-making process for the location of a Royal Ordnance Factory in Scotland which subsequently became ROF Bishopton, near Paisley, west of Glasgow.
Dr Alice Would (University of Bristol) discusses the temporalities of taxidermy following an encounter with a rotting rat, which is pictured below.
In January 2022, I received an email from my former PhD supervisor, the environmental historian Peter Coates, asking what I wanted to do with my attempt at taxidermy. This was a white rat, or rather, ‘now very sorry looking Mr Rat.’ Peter was packing up his office ahead of retirement when he rediscovered the rat’s bodily remains inside a plastic bag. We had taken a taxidermy course together in 2018; I was researching the processes and materialities of Victorian taxidermy and we thought it would be a useful exercise to trial practice-informed historical research. As I reflected in an essay for Environmental History Now, my own embodied experience was inextricable from my practice.[i] I was a knot of nerves, my ethics were challenged, and my fingers wouldn’t do what I asked of them – the coordination needed for taxidermy is considerable.
The Rat in 2018
I learned how taxidermy has always been a multisensory confrontation and discovered a great deal about the technicalities of Victorian practice: de-fleshing, looping wires, and cupping stuffing in the palm of the hand so that it sits within the animal skin as flesh would. However, and perhaps most significantly, I also encountered the barriers standing in the way of embodying a Victorian taxidermist. My practice was very much of the present, and I took my own worries, preconceptions, intentions, and lack of skill with me when I met with the rat’s skin. These feelings stayed with me: I was unsettled by the experience, and the way the smell of death clung to my fingers, and I therefore continued to keep a purposeful distance between myself and the rat and this is how he ended up residing in Peter’s office. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr Rat was packed away in a bag on a high shelf.
Over the course of my research, I kept coming across the processes of decay within the writing of hunters and taxidermists, and, consequently, rot, epidermic breakdown, and time became central themes, winding their way through my thesis. Everywhere I looked, from diary entries about skinning and preparing specimens within the colonial hunting grounds of East Africa, to museum records from both the turn of the twentieth century and the present day, I found descriptions of animal specimens hosting insects and bacteria. The British hunter Charles Peel noted how obsessively he watched-over his animal skins when travelling and shooting in the British Protectorate of Somaliland in the 1880s as ‘the ravages made by a little grub-beetle were terrible.’[ii]
Roughly a hundred years later, a curator at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, Devon (the museum Peel donated many of his specimens to), similarly described the ‘ravages’ of so-called museum pests, and their specific effects on the taxidermy within the Peel collection.[iii] I was struck by the entropy revealed in such statements. Taxidermy is always undertaken in an attempt to preserve an animal in time and body, and it is often conceptualised as ‘freezing’ the animal, and yet these sources also spoke of an accelerated disintegration, and of the circling processes by which death supports life. Consequently, I reflected on the ways in which time is embodied, and how the histories and temporalities of hunting and taxidermy might contribute to our thinking on the Anthropocene.
Somehow, though, it was still a shock when my rat rotted, despite my clear lack of skill when putting him together; it isn’t often that we encounter decay in our sanitised present.[iv] A week or so after he emailed, I met Peter to find out for myself what ‘very sorry looking’ looked like. It was the first time I had been into his office since the pandemic introduced us all to an abrupt new experience of time. The rat was both hardened and crumpling, a fading white-yellow body just visible within the sweaty plastic. Moths the colour of sand traversed the skin surface, I could make out clutches of eggs clinging to the places where hair had once grown. I was disgusted, but it also felt like a fitting end to my PhD and this period of thinking about lively death in the past. The rat was a tiny living landscape within the wider ecosystem of Peter’s office with its books, papers and maps, animal skulls, lumps of wood, tea caddies and view of nesting squirrels.
The rotting Rat in 2022
The question remained of what to do with these disconcerting animal remains, and we decided to dispose of the rat. Whilst I felt a little compelled to see this temporal process through to the bitter end, neither of us could stomach the practicalities. The rat confirmed my thinking that, as environmental historians, we should endeavour to follow the traces of liveliness when they are offered up by our sources. Even within the most unpromising of case studies, for instance the tales of extraction, extinction and death that are central to museum collection, environmental actors were not necessarily entirely deadened and silenced. They were sites of multispecies exchange, and often continued to play a role in shaping peoples’ emotions and actions – and their experience of time.
Dr Alice Would is a lecturer in Imperial and Environmental History at the University of Bristol. She completed her PhD on the taxidermy trade in the long nineteenth century in Britain and empire in 2021.
[ii] Charles Peel, Somaliland: Being an Account of Two Expeditions into the Far Interior, Together with a Complete List of Every Animal and Bird Known to Inhabit that Country, and a List of the Reptiles Collected by the Author (London: F. E. Robinson & Co, 1900), 118-9.
[iii] Letter to the Oxford Theatre, 2 May 1996, RAMM Archive.
[iv] For more on rot see: Caitlin DeSilvey, Curated Decay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Jamie Lorimer, ‘Rot’, Environmental Humanities, 8 (2016), 235–39.
