The University Press of Mississippi will release Craig Colten’s new book, Perilous Place, Powerful Storms:  Hurricane Protection in Coastal Louisiana in July 2009.
The hurricane protection systems that failed New Orleans when Katrina roared on shore in 2005 were the product of four decades of engineering hubris, excruciating delays, and social conflict. In Perilous Place, Powerful [...]

[Read more →]

Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America
Ann Norton Greene
Harvard University Press, 2008
Historians have long assumed that new industrial machines and power sources eliminated work animals from nineteenth-century America, yet a bird’s-eye view of nineteenth-century society would show millions of horses supplying the energy necessary for industrial development. Horses were ubiquitous in cities and on [...]

[Read more →]

James Williams sent us a note to say that he has retired from teaching at De Anza College in California, but that he is still writing and will continue to be involved with Envirotech. His web site continues to be hosted by De Anza College at http://www.deanza.edu/faculty/williams.

[Read more →]

The Society for the History of Technology honored long-time envirotechie Joel Tarr with the Leonardo da Vinci Medal during the Lisbon Annual Meeting in October 2008. The Leonardo da Vinci Medal is the highest recognition from SHOT and is awarded to individuals for their “outstanding contribution to the history of technology, through research, teaching, publications, [...]

[Read more →]

A new book from envirotechie Jeffrey K. Stine: America’s Forested Wetlands: From Wasteland to Valued Resource
From the darkest, most forbidding swamp to the smallest soggy bog at the side of a housing development, wetlands provide invaluable ecological services to life on earth. Yet, prior to the 1930s, few people worried about the mounting loss of [...]

[Read more →]

Finn Arne Jørgensen successfully defended his PhD dissertation “The infrastructure of everyday environmentalism: Tomra and the reverse vending machine, 1970-2000″ Friday November 23, 2007. The dissertation examines the parallel technical development of reverse vending machines for the return of empty beverage containers and the cultural context of beverage container recycling.
For more information, see http://finnarne.jorgensenweb.net/

[Read more →]

I remain a professor at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University.  Every fall my wife Deborah, a geographer at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York, and I teach a course on land-use planning at the Environmental Studies Program at Princeton University.  We were in South Dakota in June [...]

[Read more →]

Pat Munday worked with the Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups to write and direct a brief image event, “President Bush Grills an Endangered Species,” to publicize the plight of the Big Hole River grayling, a species recently removed as a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act. See it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wASzy-ikmYA

[Read more →]

Soon after settling in Butte in 1990, Montana Tech professor and environmental historian Pat Munday became interested and involved in Superfund issues. For many years, he worked with groups such as the Clark Fork River Technical Assistance Committee and Trout Unlimited to promote remedies protective of human and environmental health. Now that the remedies, or [...]

[Read more →]

Joel Tarr and Clay McShane’s book The Horse in the City won Honorable Mention for the Lewis Mumford Prize of the Society for American Regional and Planning History.

[Read more →]