International Events

Climate, Environment, Settlement and Society: Changing Historic Patterns in Ireland

All Hallows College, Drumcondra, Dublin 24-26 February 2012

The Group for the Study of Irish Historic Settlement (GSIHS) and Discovery Programme and the Irish Environmental History Network. The conference feature a Keynote Lecture by Prof. Michael O’Connell of the National University of Ireland, Galway, entitled: “Climate, environment and farming in Ireland During the last two millennia: insights from palaeoecology.”

A full program is available at: http://irishsettlement.ie/climate-conference-programme/

Online registration is at: http://irishsettlement.ie/conferences/thematic/register-gsihs-conference-2012/

 

Historical Political Ecology & Environmental History

Dimensions of Political Ecology Conference, Lexington, KY; April 13-15, 2012

Organizer: Nate Millington (University of Kentucky, Department of Geography)
Discussant: Dr. Robert Wilson (Syracuse University, Department of Geography)

This session seeks papers at the intersection between Political Ecology and Environmental History. While intimately related through the study of socio-natural processes over time, these two sub-disciplines nevertheless retain differing vocabularies, foci, and definitions. We hope this session will serve as a conversation between historians and social scientists on how to most fruitfully engage in the study of historical and contemporary environments.

For more information about the conference, see http://www.politicalecology.org

 

Under Western Skies 2: Environment, Community, and Culture in North America

October 10 - 13, 2012 in Mount Royal University’s LEED certified Roderick Mah Centre for Continuous Learning in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

The conference welcomes academics from across the disciplines as well as members of artistic and activist communities, non- and for-profit organizations, government, labour, and NGOs to address the environmental challenges faced by human and nonhuman actors across North America.

Confirmed keynotes include: Scott Denning (Climatology, Colorado State University) Louise B. Halfe (award-winning Canadian poet) Alanna Mitchell (author Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis) Gary Paul Nabhan (Ethnobotany, University of Arizona) Niobe Thompson (co-director Tipping Point: The Age of the Oilsands) Donald Worster (Environmental History, University of Kansas)

Call for Proposals Deadline is January 23, 2012. See http://skies.mtroyal.ca for full details.

 

Energy Resources: Europe and Its Former Colonies

Deutsches Museum in Munich from October 4-6, 2012.

Hosted by The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, and the Center for Public History at the University of Houston, Houston, Texas.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together ten to twelve presenters to discuss historical perspectives on the relationship between European nations and their former colonies with respect to: the exploitation of energy resources, European influences on the development of energy industries in the former colonies, the environmental implications of energy resource development, questions of technology transfer and the transformation of knowledge vis-à-vis energy development, and the postcolonial dimensions of energy resources in a global perspective.

For further information please see: http://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/events_conf_seminars/calendar/ws_energy_resources/index.html

 

Environmental Protection in the Global Twentieth Century: International Organizations, Networks and the Diffusion of Ideas and Policies

Berlin 27-29 October 2012

Research College (KFG) "The Transformative Power of Europe", FU Berlin Issues of pollution, excessive use of natural resources, nature protection and climate change transcend national boundaries. They tend to be of a regional or even global scope. In historical perspective, the European Union was relatively slow to take up environmental protection (beyond health and safety related issues) in the 1970s, followed by the formal introduction of this policy field into the EC treaty with the Single European Act only in 1986-7. In fact, other International Organizations (IOs) had addressed environmental issues much earlier starting with the League of Nations in inter-war Europe. After World War II the United Nations and its Economic Commission for Europe, the Council of Europe and the Organization for European Economic Co-operation and Development, the present-day OECD, addressed environmental issues such as water and air pollution by pooling scientific expertise, collecting comparative data, propagating and funding international scientific programmes and inducing greater media attention to the cross-border dimension of environmental protection. These IOs became norm entrepreneurs in environmental protection and crucial sites for the diffusion of ideas and policies to other IOs, to states and governments and probably, across world regions and regional integration organizations.

Academically, the conference has two main objectives. The first objective is to explore the structural environment for IO activities and agenda-setting in environmental protection, especially their linkages with scientific institutions and experts and any network-type relationships with societal NGO actors as well as member states and governments, which were pioneering new environmental policies nationally. The second aim is to study how the IOs helped to diffuse, or transfer, ideas and policy concepts - by uploading them from societal or state actors at national or regional level or by downloading and re-contextualizing ideas and policy concepts developed within and among IOs to national and regional policy-makers or even, businesses.

Strategically, the proposed conference has three main objectives. The first objective is to de-center the EU as a transformative power by embedding the analysis of its role in environmental protection within a broader study of the transnationalization of this policy field which includes other Ios (including those operating globally and in other world regions) and the EU's relations with them. The second aim is to connect historical research, which so far has mainly focused on the history of the environment rather than of environmental protection, with social science research on regional and global environmental policy and politics. The third objective is to broaden the study of IOs and environmental protection in Europe to a comparative regional and global analysis which begins to address the question to what extent "Europe" and its regional integration institutions have been the recipients of ideas and policy concepts downloaded from global organizations like the UN or other non-European national or regional actors like the US, and to what extent more recently, "Europe" and the EU have also increasingly acted as norm entrepreneurs and exporters in this policy field.

Prof. Wolfram Kaiser
University of Portsmouth
School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies
Wolfram.Kaiser@port.ac.uk