Thread by @AZHistSociety

Increasingly, my research and teaching has revolved around this image. How can we understand and explain not only how climate change works, but also why so much CO2 etc concentrates in the northern hemisphere? The first question is for scientists, the second is for historians 2/

So many historians and scientists are doing great work on climate change, but a few years back I was blown away to learn that around 1/4 of human greenhouse emissions come from the food system. I wanted to understand the history behind that huge number, and here I am. 3/

(Ok, now that the driveway's cleared, back to it!)

My efforts at @NAU center around climate change awareness. I helped found and run the Sustainable Ambassador Program, which hopes to give every NAU student working knowledge about how climate change and sustainability can impact their personal and professional life. 4/

@NAU I teach my environmental history classes around climate change, whether surveying environmental history, or delving deeply into food history. Most of the rest of this takeover will focus on my research, but I'm always happy to field questions about my teaching or the SAP. 5/

As an environmental historian, I focus on how humans manipulate nature, and how nature in turn shapes human history. In particular, I seek to use principles from ecology, geology, nutrition science, and climatology to better understand human history. 6/

My involvement with the wonderful folks @AZHistSociety began with an article in the recent issue "Exploring Arizona's Diverse Pasts" guest edited by Katherine Morrissey. muse.jhu.edu/issue/43395.
But my interest in Arizona history goes all the way back to my MA training. 7/

I was lucky enough to be part of a research team at U of A's Institute for the Study of Planet Earth. Together we put together an article that sought to account for differences in drought awareness and mitigation among Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque. 8/

This article, sciencedirect.com/science/articl…, used history and newspaper data analysis to argue that drought awareness was largely tied up in water infrastructure: the longer a city's history of large water projects, the less likely its citizens were to be aware of long-term drought. 9/

I was also a part of a team at ISPE that developed a drought mitigation plan for the Little Colorado River watershed. I used historical research to understand the major stakeholder groups, their interests, and understandings of environment and drought. 10/

This research led me to my MA thesis on LDS colonization of the Little Colorado River and a co-authored article on the river's environmental history. jstor.org/stable/4017036…. I am incredibly grateful to those at ISPE, now the Institute for the Environment. 11/

I left Arizona for while after, focusing on food globalization in the nineteenth century. More on that in a bit! But the Jour. of Ariz. Hist. allowed me to tell Arizona's environmental history through all the brilliant scholarship over the last two decades 12/

As I was driving between Kingman and Seligman one day, it occurred to me how "empty" this area seemed, when over a century ago it was marked by an entirely different human geography. For the rest of the drive back to Flagstaff, I considered how different the state now looked 13/

Then, I got back to thinking about my past research on Arizona water, and my current understandings of environmental history. Could the geologic concepts of erosion and sedimentation help me understand the human history of Arizona in the nineteenth century? 14/

Where once Arizona was a place of "wandering peoples" (Cynthia Radding's term) seeking seasonal food and water, now people brought resources to their settlements at all times of the year. I asked why, and the question brought me further into Arizona's watersheds. 15/

And going into Arizona's watersheds in the nineteenth century brought me face to face with colonialism and capitalism, in particular, the differing land and water use strategies of the region's indigenous nations and those who came to settle on their land. 16/

This is the crux of environmental history, illustrated by this and the next picture - both from the JAzH article. Until the mid-19th cent. floods in Arizona hit with less volume and force. They tended to spread across the land, like the one pictured below. 17/

By 1900, floods in Az hit hard, cutting arroyos like this one near Tucson on the Santa Cruz River. Note the steep bank cut from numerous forceful floods. 18/

The cool thing about environmental history is nature alone can't explain these differences. Arizona is arid and subject to floods, sure, but we have to look to human history to fully understand these changes in "nature." 19/

What best helps me understand these changes are the new people, plants, and animals that had come to occupy Arizona's watersheds in the nineteenth century. 20/

First, waves of disease devastated native populations densely settled near creeks and rivers. AZ's indigenous population extensively managed these watershed through upland burning and lowland check dams. Suddenly, it was more difficult to manage this infrastructure. 21/

Spanish and Mexican settlers brought grazing animals, who ate vegetation that had served to soak rainwater and disperse it over time. Anglo settlers nearly obliterated beaver populations in AZ over a few short years in the 1820s and 1830s. Suddenly, water ran faster. 22/

Wagon roads and horse tracks further channeled this water and often led to and from water sources. What we see over the course of the nineteenth century is people moving around, struggling to absorb the multi-scaled changes wrought by the Columbian Exchange and colonization. 23/

The article ends by arguing that the reservation system, the international border, and large erosion/water management projects undertaken by the state and federal government in the 20th century across Arizona responded directly to this history. 24/

I think of this history every time I'm in downtown Flagstaff, facing Route 66 and a transcontinental railroad. The modern world has been built by moving resources rather than moving to resources. And this point leads me to my other projects. 25/

I am currently working on two books. The first is "The Nature of Exchange" with @WVUPRESS and it looks at how the modern concepts of "nature" and "market" developed within Anglo-American capitalism in the nineteenth century. 25/

@WVUPRESS Like the JAzH article, this book utilizes concepts like "liquidity" to understand material changes in land and water, but also to changes in how people are thinking about the world around them. 26/

@WVUPRESS For example, I follow Fredrich Engels inside Victorian Manchester to understand how his understanding of the city's canals and rivers informed his ideas of capitalism. Like Marx, he understood human society in terms of "flow."

I then follow other stories in time to the mines of the American West, and see how economies and economic thought "hardened" as they became more reliant of minerals, physics, and mathematics. In some ways, William Stanley Jevons helped create John Muir. 27/

The other project I am working on is tentatively titled "Harvesting Power" and focuses on how European demands for food, fiber, finance, and fuel simultaneously drove capitalization and colonization in the nineteenth century. 28/

"Harvesting Power" focuses on food, wheat in particular. It asks why England in particular held mock funerals for cheap food in the early 1800s - like the one pictured here from the Liverpool Record Office - but ate wheat produced in California, Russia, and India by 1900. 29/

The answers for me, again, are capitalism and colonialism. Using private investment and public military strength, Britain was able to transform river valleys and grasslands around the world from food landscapes that fed indigenous communities to those that fed industry. 30/

I began to think of this global food economy as a series of pathways and basins connecting irrigation canal to sewer, and silo to stomach. My JAzH article was a meditation on how to talk about human history using ecological terms that I hope to expand for this project 31/

Thinking back to the image of greenhouse gasses that opened this thread, and the statistic that ¼ of them come from food, I hope these histories highlight the essential inefficiencies of the modern food system to its core. 32/

What I came to understand, and what I want my students to understand, is that the greenhouse image is a historical image, one that highlights the essential injustice of collecting resources from around the world and concentrating them in western cities. 33/

That image also highlights that the global economy continues to operate within nature, as we all do, and whether we’re focusing on the water-intensive cities of Arizona, or the food-intensive cities of Europe, our entire way of life is woven into this injustice. 34/

And this is why @NAU Sustainable Ambassador Program is so important to me. The answer is not only educating students about this history, but linking that history to their majors, to their career aspirations, to their lives. 35/

@NAU To help them understand that you never step out of nature when you step into the boardroom, and that the productive careers of the future will require a knowledge of how the decisions they will make day in and day out can contribute to the problem, or work towards a solution END/

@NAU (I have so many people to thank for the ideas about and within this thread, but in particular I'd like to thank everyone at the AZ Historical Society including Marilyn Murphy, @LoraKey12 and @dcturpie, Katherine Morrissey, and Stefan Sommer, Matt Muchna, and Ellen Vaughan at NAU)