Telling Environmental Histories

This collection explores the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people's perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments change over time. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active, more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. It includes contributions from Australia, India, the UK, Canada and the USA.

1. 1. Introduction: Telling Environmental Histories; Katie Holmes and Heather Goodall.- Part I: Rivers.- 2. Memory, mobility & the more-than-human world: oral history and environmental history.; Heather Goodall.-3. Talking Fish: Oral History in the Environmental Histories of Murray-Darling Basin Rivers; Jodi Frawley.- 4. River of Many Voices: Oral and Environmental Histories of the Severn; Marianna Dudley.- Part II: De/Industrialisation.- 5. Industrial Remains: Community Narratives of Mashapaug Pond in Providence, Rhode Island; Anne Valk.- 6. Building a safe space for unsafe memories: The Remember Bhopal Museum; Rama Lakshmi & Shalini Sharma.- 7. Stories of Life, Work and Nature before and after the Clean-Up of North-East England's River Tyne, 1940-2015; Leona Skelton.- 8. The Deindustrialization of our Senses: Residual and Dominant Soundscapes in Montreal's Point Saint-Charles District; Piyusha Chatterjee & Steven High.- Part III: Living with Environmental Change.- 9. 'Another weed will come along': attitudes to weeds, land and community in the Victorian Mallee.; Karen Twigg.- 10. Famine and elephants: remembering place-making along Travancore's forest fringe.; Meera Anna Oommen.-11. Hearing the Legacy in the Forecast: Living with stories of Australian Climate; Deb Anderson.- 12. 'The devil you know': environmental stories from the Victorian Mallee; Katie Holmes.