Explore Environmental History Lecture Series, Spring 2014
The success of last fall’s Explore Environmental History series inspired us to bring you a new series this spring! Baltimore City Historical Society, Friends of Maryland Olmsted Parks & Landscapes and Creation Care at the Cathedral are sponsoring this FREE series. All three lectures will be held in the Peabody Room, Cathedral of the Incarnation, at 4 E. University Pkwy Baltimore MD 21218
Free admission, parking and refreshments. Directions: www.incarnationbaltimore.org
Saturday, March 22, 2014, 1pm – 3pm
Reclaiming the Edge: Urban Waterways and Civic Engagement with Gail Sylvia Lowe and John R. Wennersten.
Gail Sylvia Lowe is Anacostia Community Museum historian. She is a specialist on African American religious and spiritual traditions. She co-authored “A Different Drummer: John Kinard and the Anacostia Museum 1967-1989.” She co-curated the museum’s “Reclaiming the Edge: Urban Waterways and Civic Engagement” exhibit on the history, public use, and attitudes toward the Anacostia River and its watershed, exploring issues regarding human interaction with natural resources in an urban setting. It looked at densely populated watersheds and at rivers as barriers to racial and ethnic integration and examined civic attempts to recover, clean up, re-imagine, or engineer urban rivers for community access and use.
John R. Wennersten is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and was a senior fellow in Environmental History at the Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History. His works include the “Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay” which won the Maryland Writers Prize in nonfiction, “The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography” and “Anacostia: The Death and Life of An American River.” His newest book is “Global Thirst: Water and Society in the 21st Century.”
Saturday, April 26, 2014, 1pm – 3pm
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century World with John McNeill
John McNeill, past president of American Society for Environmental History, is a Georgetown University professor of world history, environmental history, and international history. He is the author of “Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914”, “The Human Web: A Bird’s-eye View of World History” and “Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th-Century World.”
Saturday, June 7, 2014, 1pm – 3pm
Public Health Challenges: Urban Pest Control and Inner-City Highway Construction with Dawn Biehler and Robert Gioielli
Dawn Biehler is an Assistant Professor at UMBC in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems where she has taught Geographies of Health and Disease; Environmental Justice; Gender and Environment and Environmental Politics. She has recently published “Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats” which explores the public health implications of domestic pests and pest control in US cities since 1900. The book tells stories about scientists, health and housing officials, and citizens who struggled to manage nature and support healthy neighborhood environments.
Robert Gioielli is an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, where he teaches American and environmental history. His book “Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago” will be published in May by Temple University Press in the Urban Life, Landscape and Policy series. This work explores how urban residents responded to the environmental problems caused by the destruction of America’s older industrial cities in the decades after World War Two. For Baltimore he shows how opposition to the city’s planned highway system in the 1960s and 1970s was a form of environmental activism.