The world's nations are racing to adopt a treaty this year to cut plastic waste. That's because every month, companies produce tens of millions of tons of plastic. It's everywhere - toilet seats and clothing, candy wrappers and grocery bags. Most of it ends up in places like landfills and oceans, and it breaks down and gets into our bodies. But it wasn't always this way. Michael Copley from NPR's Climate Desk reports on how plastic became so ingrained in modern life.
Guests are Jill Jedlicka, Heather Davis, Bart Elmore, Matt Seaholm, and Susan Freinkel
(The New Books Network podcast, Nov. 18, 2022) Guest Jennifer Eaglin
As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world.
Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford UP, 2022) offers the first full historical account of the industry's origins. The Brazilian government mandated a mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s, and the success of the program led the military dictatorship to expand the industry and create the national program Proálcool in 1975. Private businessmen, politicians, and national and international automobile manufacturers together leveraged national interests to support this program. By 1985, over 95% of all new cars in the country ran exclusively on ethanol, and, after consumers turned away from them when oil was cheap, the government successfully promoted flex fuel cars instead. Yet, as Jennifer Eaglin shows, the industry's growth came with associated environmental and social costs in the form of water pollution from liquid waste generated during ethanol distillation and exploitative rural labor practices that reshaped Brazil's countryside.
By examining the shifting perceptions of the industry from a sugar byproduct to a national energy solution to a global clean energy option, Sweet Fuel ultimately reveals deeper truths about what a global large-scale transition away from fossil fuels might look like and challenges idealized views of green industries.
Mohamed Gamal-Eldin is a historian of Modern Egypt, who is interested in questions related to the built environment, urban history, architecture, social history and environmental ecology of urban centers in 19th and early 20th century Egypt, the Middle East and globally.
(The New Books Network podcast, Feb. 15, 2019) Guest Nicholas Breyfogle
Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, had produced a new edited volume, Eurasian Environments: Nature and Ecology in Imperial Russian and Soviet History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) that brings together multiple perspectives on Russian and Soviet environmental history. Starting with the story of two dams built 150 years apart, Breyfogle discusses both continuity and change in how Russian and Soviet citizens and its various governments viewed the environment. The focus of the volume is contextualizing and “de-exceptionalizing” Russia and the USSR by placing Russian and Soviet environmental history in a global context as well as demonstrating how the environment can profoundly impact the course of human history. Listen in as we discuss both the tragedies and triumphs of Russian and Soviet environmental policies, ecology and conservation, such as dam building, collectivization, industrialization, eco-tourism and the rise of the Soviet environmental movement.
Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here.
(The New Books Network podcast, Dec. 8, 2021) Guests David Moon, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Alexandra Bekasova.
Place and Nature: Essays in Russian Environmental History (White Horse Press, 2021) is a collection of essays on environmental history spanning primarily the 19th and 20th centuries. Covering a wide range of thematic topics (water history, migration history and environmentalism) and geographic locations, this book provides new perspectives on the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. This is largely achieved through the researchers’ experiences traveling extensively through the areas they study, seeing them as living places, interviewing inhabitants and marveling at the beauty and harshness of the environment they study. Join us as we talk with Nicolas Breyfogle, David Moon and Alexandra Bekasova about their journeys and research, how the two intertwined and how that granted them new perspectives on the Russian and Soviet environment.
Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia.
(The Road to Now podcast, May 15, 2023) The “Amazon economy” seems like something new, but it rests on the physical and intellectual infrastructure built by those who came long before the age of the internet and leaves many of the same marks on the environment. Prominent in this story are five companies- Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, Bank of America, and FexEx- all of which have global reach and southern roots. In this episode, Bart Elmore joins us to talk about his new book Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade our Economy and the Planet (UNC Press, 2023), and how understanding the history of American business can help us address the environmental challenges that are undeniably facing humanity today.
Dr. Bartow Elmore is Associate Professor of History and a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at The Ohio State University. In addition to Country Capitalism, he is also the author of Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015) and Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future (W. W. Norton, 2021). You can hear his discuss these books in RTN episode 140 and episode 208 respectively. Bart is also a 2022 winner of the Dan David Prize.
This episode was edited by Ben Sawyer.
(The Road to Now podcast, Nov. 6, 2022) The Monsanto Company officially ceased to exist when it was acquired by Bayer in 2018, but its legacy lives on in courtrooms, factory towns and farms across the globe. Today the company’s name is most associated with the herbicide Roundup and genetically modified seeds, but Monsanto also served as a leading producer of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, an essential supplier of caffeine and saccharin to Coca-Cola in Coke’s early years, and the sole US producer of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs). In short, Monsanto’s history is one that will continue to shape the world well into the future.
In this episode, Bart Elmore joins Bob and Ben to talk about his new book Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Future (W.W. Norton, 2021) and how a small midwestern company founded in 1901 became an agricultural powerhouse by selling solutions to the problems it helped to create.
(The Road to Now podcast, Aug. 26, 2019) Coca-Cola is one of the most well-known products on planet earth, but did you ever wonder how a brown fizzy drink fueled the rise of a corporate juggernaut? The answer, says Ohio State historian Bartow Elmore, has everything to do with its business structure. In this episode, Bart offers his take on how Coke went from Atlanta soda parlors in the late 19th century to markets across the globe in less than a century, all along reaping tremendous benefits from public infrastructure while passing the bulk of its environmental costs on to others. Bart also talks about the difficulties of doing research on powerful corporations, why he thinks we should care about environmental history, and the meaning of what he calls “Coca-Cola Capitalism.”
Chris Otter, Diet for a Large Planet, Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology on It's All About Food with Caryn Hartglass
Chris Otter, Diet for a Large Planet, Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology
Chris Otter is associate professor of history at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
As the hazards of carbon emissions increase and governments around the world seek to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, the search for clean and affordable alternate energies has become an increasing priority in the twenty-first century. However, one nation has already been producing such a fuel for almost a century: Brazil. Its sugarcane-based ethanol is the most efficient biofuel on the global fuel market, and the South American nation is the largest biofuel exporter in the world.
In this talk, Jennifer Eaglin discusses her new book and offers a historical account of the industry's origins. The Brazilian government mandated a mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s, and the success of the program led the military dictatorship to expand the industry and create the national program Proálcool in 1975. Private businessmen, politicians, and national and international automobile manufacturers together leveraged national interests to support this program. By 1985, over 95% of all new cars in the country ran exclusively on ethanol, and, after consumers turned away from them when oil was cheap, the government successfully promoted flex fuel cars instead. Yet, as she shows, the growth of this “green energy” came with associated environmental and social costs in the form of water pollution from liquid waste generated during ethanol distillation and exploitative rural labor practices that reshaped Brazil's countryside.
Speakers:
Jennifer Eaglin, Assistant Professor of History and Sustainability Institute
Nicholas Breyfogle (Moderator), Associate Professor of History, Director, Goldberg Center
Co-sponsors of this episode:
The Center for Latin American Studies, https://clas.osu.edu/
The Sustainability Institute, https://si.osu.edu/
...And Water For All is an educational documentary about water affordability in Ohio. The film aims to amplify the voices of those who work toward providing clean, affordable water for all. Even though the movie is set in Ohio, many of its lessons will be relevant for those concerned with water affordability in other places.
This project was made possible by the support of the School of Environment and Natural Resources and the Ohio Water Resources Center at The Ohio State University.
Bart Elmore takes us on an authoritative and eye-opening journey into how the company Monsanto came to have outsized influence over our food system. Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018―but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced twenty-five years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. Elmore examines Monsanto’s astounding evolution from a scrappy chemical startup to a global agribusiness powerhouse. Monsanto used seed money derived from toxic products―including PCBs and Agent Orange―to build an agricultural empire, promising endless bounty through its genetically engineered technology.
We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point? Join Ohio State History Professor Chris Otter as he takes us back over the last 200 years to explore how we developed our current diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar. He’ll explore how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.
Panelists:
-Nicholas Breyfogle | Associate Professor, Department of History; Director, Goldberg Center
-Chris Otter | Professor, Department of History
Eminent environmental historians from the Ohio State University Department of History share how environmental history informs our shared future in a world confronted by pandemics, climate change, droughts and floods, unstable food supplies, changing energy needs, and the threats of pollutants and toxins.
Panelists:
-Nicholas Breyfogle, Associate Professor, Department of History; Director, Goldberg Center
-Kip Curtis, Associate Professor, Department of History
-Jennifer Eaglin, Assistant Professor, Department of History
-Bart Elmore, Associate Professor, Department of History
On World AIDS Day 2020, in the midst of another pandemic, Ohio State University History Professor Thomas McDow presented a close look at the historical factors that shaped the global spread of HIV, from equatorial Africa to the world.
Thomas F. McDow is a specialist in African History at Ohio State University. He co-teaches a course with a microbiologist on the global history and science of HIV and is writing a history of HIV in Tanzania.
Zoos are some of the world’s most visited attractions. Yet they often make headlines for controversial reasons such as in 2016 when the Cincinnati Zoo shot and killed a gorilla after a child fell into the animal’s enclosure or in 2017 when poachers killed a rhinoceros at a Paris Zoo for its horns. While schoolchildren and adults alike may delight at the prospect of a trip to the zoo, historically zoos have represented far more than a fun way to spend an afternoon. Explore zoos past and present in this episode of History Talk where hosts Brenna Miller and Jessica Blissit speak with historians Daniel Vandersomers and Tracy McDonald.
In this Origins podcast of Writers Talk History and History Talk, host Patrick Potyondy interviews historian and Origins editor Nicholas Breyfogle about the international race for the arctic. He tells us about the complex and perhaps explosive historical dimensions of climate change.
Delegates from across the globe will soon gather at the Paris Climate Change Conference, set to begin at the end of November. Sponsored by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, conference representatives will endeavor—not for the first time—to find ways to "stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system." On this episode of History Talk, hosts Patrick Potyondy and Leticia Wiggins talk with three environmental historians, Sam White, John Brooke, and Nicholas Breyfogle, about past patterns of climate change—both recent and others from the deep planetary past—and what these historical processes of climate adaptation and survival tell us about humanity's prospects today.
How and what we eat defines who we are. Food is both everywhere and nowhere, so normal that we rarely consider how radically the production and consumption of food have shaped not only human culture but the environment as well (and how radically the production of food has changed over time). Sample a little food history with historians Chris Otter, Helen Veit, and Sam White, who reveal that what we shove into our mouths has shaped our cultures, our bodies, and our planet.
A highway bridge collapses in Minnesota, lead poisons the water of Flint, Michigan, and Americans are reminded of the fragile state of our basic infrastructure—the roads, pipes, power lines, and waterways that make modern life possible. On this episode of History Talk, hosts Mark Sokolsky and Patrick Potyondy speak with panelists Steven Conn, Bernadette Hanlon, and Clay Howard about the history of public investment in American infrastructure, how it has reached such a perilous state, and what it can tell us about changing conceptions of the common good. In addition, host Patrick Potyondy interviews the executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Tom Smith, who updates us on how our infrastructure is holding up today.
On this episode of History Talk, host Patrick Potyondy interviews Jefferson Cowie, the James G. Stahlman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. Cowie has written extensively on American economic, racial, cultural, and political history, and is the author most recently of The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. In this interview, Cowie helps make sense of the 2016 presidential election by discussing the connections between the collapse of the New Deal exception, populism as the primary driving force of change in American politics, immigration as a key political pivot, the long-term movement of manufacturing jobs from place to place, and international trade like NAFTA and the TPP. He also explains why today's political climate looks a lot like the 1970s, not only in the electoral arena but in pop culture, too.
As the world considers how to respond to climate change, China has emerged as the great paradox. With its fast-growing economy, China has become the leading producer of CO2 (though not on a per-capita basis). Simultaneously, it has become the world's leading producer of green and renewable energy. In this episode of History Talk, hosts Jessica Blissit and Brenna Miller talk to three experts—David Pietz, Betsy Brunner, and Ruth Mostern—about the problems facing China today, the short and long-term history of China’s relationship to the environment, and what global role China might play in the coming years in confronting climate change.
As the effects of climate change, toxic pollution, and over-exploitation of resources increasingly dominate the news, there may be an even larger threat on the horizon. By the end of this century, scientists are warning that nearly 25-50% of all species on earth could be lost, in what they are calling a "sixth extinction." Are humans on the cusp of a global extinction event of our own making? And if so, what will this mean for humanity and what can we do about it? Listen in as hosts Jessica Viñas-Nelson and Brenna Miller take a long view of environmental history with two esteemed guests, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert and historian Sam White. Learn more about how human actions have reshaped ecosystems in the past, their consequences for animal and plant diversity, and what this may mean for the future of life on earth.
"Pandemics: Past, Present, Future" features experts from the Department of History at Ohio State University. From plague to influenza and HIV, learn about the history of global pandemics from our faculty in order to better understand the current Coronavirus pandemic. Panelists include Prof. John Brooke, Dr. Jim Harris, Prof. Thomas McDow, Dr. Erin Moore and Prof. Kristina Sessa.
In the West, many think of HIV/AIDS as a phenomenon that began in the 1980s, when news first broke of a mysterious and highly deadly disease. In reality, however, the history of HIV/AIDS stretches back more than a hundred years, and has been shaped by some of the most important trends of the 20th century: from European colonialism in Africa, to the proxy conflicts fought between allies of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to the globalization and economic neoliberalism that transformed the global economy in the late twentieth century. On this episode of History Talk, hosts Eric Michael Rhodes and Lauren Henry speak with three experts — Thomas F. McDow, Kathy Lancaster, and Jesse Kwiek— about the origins, spread, and future of HIV/AIDS in both the United States and around the world.
A conversation with Ohio State University Department of History faculty members, John Brooke, Jennifer Eaglin and Samuel White about the historical context of climate change.
Recent mass shootings have turned American attention to the nation’s mental health system, its perceived failings, and it's potential to stem the tide of mass violence. However, Americans have a long history of pointing to mental illness as a panacea for solving social problems and an equally lengthy history of criticizing the treatment of those considered mentally ill. On this episode of History Talk, hosts Jessica Viñas-Nelson and Brenna Miller speak with two experts, Dr. Susan Lawrence and Zeb Larson, to discuss the history of mental health in the U.S. and the realities of providing meaningful care.
As the struggle between members of the Standing Rock Reservation and their allies against the Dakota Access Pipeline continues, History Talk takes a look at the long-term patterns of Native American relations with the U.S. government. Hosts Jessica Blissit and Brenna Miller and guests David Nichols, Christine Ballengee Morris, and Daniel Rivers discuss the specific environmental and sovereignty concerns surrounding construction of the DAPL, as well as how this issue fits into the larger history of Native American treaties, resistance, and protests.
There is perhaps no greater challenge facing humanity (and all species on the planet) than climate change. This podcast explores the top ten most important things you should know about it.
As the world grapples with the ongoing pandemic of COVID-19, it is important to remember that this is not the first but rather the seventh human coronavirus that scientists have discovered since the mid-1960s (four of which just cause a common cold in humans).
Recent estimates suggest that the 1918 flu claimed as many as 50 million lives around the world between 1918 and 1919, killing more people in a single year than the entire “Black Death” of the 14th century. On its centennial anniversary, it is worth remembering the history of the “Spanish” flu and how it set us on the path towards our modern flu vaccine.
Because of COVID-19, N95 respirators and cloth masks—their availability and their efficacy—now dominate the news and are at the heart of often vitriolic public debates. Both futuristic and somehow archaic at the same time, millions now depend on their use to prevent infection of a potentially deadly illness.
The Black Death was the second pandemic of bubonic plague and the most devastating pandemic in world history. It was a descendant of the ancient plague that had afflicted Rome, from 541 to 549 CE, during the time of emperor Justinian. The bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, persisted for centuries in wild rodent colonies in Central Asia and, somewhere in the early 1300s, mutated into a form much more virulent to humans.
Australian scientists have been successful in growing the Wuham virus in a lab, increasing the possible development of a vaccine for the Corona virus. Just what do we know about the history behind the creation of vaccines? Find out the most important things to know in "Top Ten Origins: Vaccination" written by Dr. Christopher Otter.
In geologic years, the Galapagos Islands are infants. Located on the perpetually moving Nazca tectonic plate, the islands were formed through repeated volcanic activity. Layer by layer, the islands have risen off the ocean floor, forming a chain that is approximately five million years old.
On the surface, HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 seem as dissimilar as two viruses could possibly be. Yet, the ways in which the Soviet Union reacted to the arrival of HIV/AIDS, and how it spread in the first years of the outbreak, yield valuable insights into our current coronavirus pandemic.
As national governments and the global scientific community struggle to contain the spread of the coronavirus, they have also spent the last few months confronting a different type of outbreak.
Misinformation about the current public health crisis—which has either denied the existence of the virus entirely or framed it as an intentional product—has proliferated at an alarming rate. It has also enjoyed the most mainstream attention of any conspiracy theory since the 9/11 truther movement.
HIV and COVID-19 have both laid bare that stark racial disparities exist in population health and in access to quality medical care in the United States.
Epidemics figure prominently in what we call “Early” American history—a past often animated by the meeting between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans in the Americas. The idea that diseases such as smallpox, measles, typhus, and influenza decimated Indigenous communities in the Americas is a commonly held one. Like so much of our popular conceptions of Early American history, however, this simple narrative obscures a great deal.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has returned to its pre-revolutionary position as a major agricultural exporter of key commodities. With Russia currently controlling a large portion of Ukraine’s cultivated agricultural land in the south, as well as blockading ports on the Black Sea, a significant amount of grain for export is stranded in Ukraine.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring shocked the American public when it was published in the summer of 1962. Carson hooked readers by describing a fictional town where spring no longer marked the singing of birds, the buzzing of bees, or the laughter of children.
In the last year, tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, a false nuclear missile alert in Hawaii, and debates over the Iran nuclear deal have renewed public attention to the development of nuclear weapons and armament and the potential for war. But from the Cold War, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to Chinese nuclear tests in the 1960s, the U.S. and the world has frequently faced these fears, and attempted to place particular countries’ access to nuclear weapons technology under international control. So how concerned should we be about nuclear weapons and who has them? How did the U.S. become so central in efforts to control them? And how can past attempts to limit nuclear proliferation inform how we address these questions today? On this episode of History Talk, hosts Brenna Miller and Jessica Viñas-Nelson speak with experts Christopher Gelpi, Dakota Rudesill, and Matt Ambrose to discuss the history of nuclear armament and control.