comments on 2012 award recipients
The following awards were presented at ASEH’s annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin on March 31, 2012:
Distinguished Service Award
Many of us know Thomas Dunlap as an exemplary scholar, but tonight we are here to honor his service to ASEH. Tom was one of the founding members of our society – and he has not missed an annual meeting. He has served on many committees throughout the decades, including the executive committee, editorial board, nominating committee, and various prize committees.
He was one of the first program committee chairs, helping to organize the ASEH meeting in Miami, Ohio in the early 1980s. As he recalled in a recent interview, “We at ASEH wanted conferences, something beyond having environmental history sessions at other people’s conferences. Having our own conference seemed, in the early days, an impossible dream….” As our meeting in Madison attests, that dream no longer seems impossible - in large part thanks to Tom.
Tom continues to serve ASEH in various ways. Currently he is the co-chair of the journal management committee. He is always willing to volunteer - and his years of experience and dedication, as well as his practical, calm demeanor, have proven invaluable. As Tom summarized in his recent interview, “One of the great things about being in this field has been watching it grow and develop. I’ve spent [more than 30 years] watching us move from a few people scrambling around …to a professional field we can all be really proud of. And it is just so wonderful to spend so much of your career and see all this work being done. That’s really the great payoff.”
All of us here tonight are benefitting from Tom’s service. Please join ...in thanking him for his commitment and dedication.
George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history
David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (a Weyerhaeuser book published by Washington University Press).
In Quagmire, David Biggs expertly navigates the many currents and eddies swirling amongst a whole set of complex human relationships to a particularly watery environment in Southeast Asia, namely the Mekong Delta. Quagmire reveals surprising depth in one of the world’s flattest landscapes. Biggs demonstrates how the making and remaking of that wet and flat place is directly related to the making and remaking of modern Vietnam as a notional &/or national whole.
Biggs expertly navigates the ever-shifting waterscape of the Mekong Delta, showing how its multiple reorderings both reflected and transformed Vietnam’s politics and economy. For those of us who study other parts of the world Biggs shows how 'Balkanization' does not need mountains. It can happen (and re-happen) in a place that is so flat that water moves in only temporarily controllable ways. The archival work in multiple languages is impressive, and the scholarly erudition a model for future monographs on this increasingly critical part of the world. This is a book to think with, for all of us to think with. It is one of those rare books that says quite a bit more than even its author is fully aware of.
Alice Hamilton Prize for Best Article outside Environmental History
Katherine A. Grandjean, “New World Tempests: Environment, Scarcity, and the Coming of the Pequot War," William and Mary Quarterly. In this article, Grandjean explores the hidden dynamics behind the bloody conflict between English colonists and the Pequot Indians of New England in the 1630s. Grandjean finds that environmental factors are crucial in understanding the origins of the war; environment is not always front and center, but the environment—in different forms, including storms, climate, and agricultural yields—is the critical variable in making the author's argument. The beautifully written article uses the environment not as a monolithic explanatory device, but instead integrates environmental evidence with political, social, and economic considerations to reinterpret a major historical event, thereby underscoring the importance of the natural world in explaining the course of human affairs.
Leopold-Hidy Prize for Best Article in Environmental History
The winner is Samuel White's essay, "From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs: A Study in Animal Cultures and Evolutionary History" (16.1, 94-120). White asks: how did pigs from Asian make their to Europe and the Americas? Asian hogs were thoroughly domesticated, fed on home and barnyard waste, while European hogs were tougher, wilder critters that had to forage in forests to survive. As farming intensified in 18th century Europe, forest clearance meant that fewer wild food sources were available for local pigs. Enter the Chinese pig: with an enhanced capacity for rapid fattening, these breeds played a key role in the transformation from subsistence to industrial meat production.
White's article uses pigs as a fertile case study to explore the history of early modern globalization and the emergency of industrial capitalism. He combines cultural and technical material with grace and subtlety over a wide span of space and time, showing how the reciprocal influences of culture, evolution, and economy shaped pig breeds from the pre-modern era to the present.
One editorial board member calls this "classic environmental history: blending archival and scientific sources, the national and the global, our effects on nature and nature's effects on us, to help us re-see a world we thought we knew." Another board member notes that "Sam White's brilliant article attests to the potential of interdisciplinary work. His analysis is both striking and consequential, pointing to an environmental history of breeding in the necessary long-term perspective. A new approach to the growing body of animal studies in environmental history, based on a evolutionary perspective. The piece is eloquently argued and well illustrated. A major achievement for a young-career writer."
Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation
The Rachel Carson Prize committee read a record 17 dissertations this year, which engaged a wide range of topics and represented lots of really promising environmental history. We would like to recognize two runners-up; whose work we all agreed immediately rose to the top of our field. Drew Swanson’s “Land of the Bright Leaf: Yellow Tobacco, Environment, and Culture along the Border of Virginia and North Carolina” offers a compelling account of how Bright Leaf tobacco enriched, transformed, and, ultimately, undermined the region’s racialized agricultural economy. Andrew Denning’s “Schuss!: Skiing, the Alps, and the Invention of Alpine Modernity, 1880-1990,” is a beautifully crafted analysis of skiing as a transnational experience—and the Alps as an environment—both central to the development of modernity in Europe.
The committee is happy to announce this year’s winner, Bradley Skopyk, for his dissertation titled “Undercurrents of Conquest: The Shifting Terrain of Indigenous Agriculture in Colonial Tlaxcala, Mexico,” which he completed at York University. Skopyk’s analysis of Tlaxcalan environmental history over 200 years demonstrates that native farmers, plants, and agroecosystems resisted Spanish ecological imperialism in significant and innovative ways. Through a critical reading of everything from colonial cartography and Nahuatl annals to fluvial geomorphology and indigenous wills, Skopyk builds his argument quite literally from the ground up, teasing out local connections between climate, hydrology, and demography through the 16th-18th centuries that reveal not only the changing structure of indigenous agroecosystems, but also their resiliency (and ultimate lack thereof) to two major biotic crises. In this story the Little Ice Age, the Zahuapan River, and epidemics small and large share the stage with real people owning and working the land, adopting animal labor, and growing enough maguey to get colonial Mexico drunk on pulque. It is a dissertation that will help us re-think the narratives of colonial Mexico, indigeneous agriculture, and ecological imperialism. For these historiographical contributions and Skopyk’s exceptional research and analysis, we are pleased to award “Undercurrents of Conquest” the 2012 Rachel Carson Prize.
