My paper examines research into African indigenous medicine and medicinal herbs by colonial authorities as a window to explore the biomedical and environmental history of pharmaceutical prospecting and its ties to other forms of colonial resource extraction. What similarities and differences emerged in the extraction of medicinal plants, compared to colonial extraction of other resources, including minerals, fossil fuels, and timber? Recently, extractivism has emerged as a key element in understanding the planetary ecological crises of the Anthropocene. In addition to bio-extraction this research will also examine how ideas about health, medicine, land and environment were transformed in the forest regions of Nigeria.

The trauma of conquest and settler colonialism is written on the lands and bodies of the U.S.- Mexico border. Rather than an event of the past, colonialism, its features, and historical processes, is a continuous event enacted on desert lands and peoples for more than four centuries. Its cultural, geopolitical, and environmental consequences represent what has been aptly called an “open wound.” This work looks to a common desert shrub, Larrea tridentata or the creosote bush, and its relations with desert people over time, to examine the metaphorical and material forms of healing in such a wounded place as the border. Through listening to memories evoked with the plant, we learn about the co-creation of place and of healing as a cultural partnership between nature and people in place.

The story I’m engaging is the fictional one told by rapacious industry over and over again in this region of central Pennsylvania for the last 150 years; the same story that briefly boomed and less briefly busted this region and contaminated its lifeblood, the Susquehanna River, through the avaricious industrialization—first of logging, then coal, then industrial farming, then pharmaceuticals. It’s a true crime novel disguised as a fantasy about non-existent jobs and sparkling futures. The antagonist in the latest chapter of this serial is Encina, a Texas-based corporation plotting to build a plastics pyrolysis plant on the floodplain of the river. It’s a familiar story about everyday people fighting to protect their families and their futures, but this time they’re trying to prevent history—specifically, a tragic environmental history—from repeating itself.

As the curator of Aquí en Chicago at Chicago History Museum (opening October 2025), I’m sharing environmental histories relating to the Latine population in and around Chicago. The experiences of Latine neighborhoods in Chicago attest to the ways in which communities of color and poor communities bear the environmental risks for the whole city and – when we consider manufacturing and exports – for the country as well. Communities that refuse environmental injustice or seek remediation are examples that lead the way toward a sustainable path. Stories of environmental restoration at Steelworkers’ Park and Big Marsh help temper the challenging examples above as does the Chicago branch of the Landless movement.

My essay tells the history of a memorial organization aptly named the Kizuna Project, to understand how public history and memory can help forge connection in the wake of environmental trauma. The Kizuna Project was a Chicago-based memorial project centered on annual commemorative photo exhibitions that featured images and stories of 3.11, disaster survivors, and the state of recovery in the Tohoku region (Japan) from 2011-2021. I analyze the Kizuna Project as a work of public history to highlight how history and memory can help forge powerful connections in the wake of environmental trauma. I introduce the term “disaster solidarity” to illuminate the connections that public history can help make possible following disaster.

Although infrastructure development is commonly understood as a public good, the process and aftermath of such development is a more ambiguous majer. In this paper, I explore the tension between public good and immediate experiences of infrastructural development in the rural Catskill Mountains of New York. During the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, New York City developed six large reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains, yet their construction erased more than 20 small villages and hamlets, displacing residents, their businesses, and their farms. These ruptures have echoed through the generations, forming a set of collective memories about places and lifeways lost to the development of New York City’s water supply infrastructure.

A decade ago, anthropologist Cathy Stanton called out a tension simmering under public environmental history. Scholars in this field held themselves to the highest standards of care and rigor in research. But, she said, the scope of their work – in pace, ambition, or impact – had not fully reflected that “we are in fact in the midst of an emergency” (“Introduction: A Good Enough Platform for Change,” 2014, p 3). In 2024, a new generation of public and environmental historians is poised to take up the mantle. We are developing new directions for public environmental history: principles, concepts, and methods to guide us forward. In a world of wounds, engaged scholarship has the potential to repair past harms, ensure equity and wellbeing now, and bring into being a future that is better for all.

In unexpected American places, artists are using their work to explore, illuminate, and engage the world around them, making art with goals of promoting community engagement, civic engagement, and social change. In my work with community-engaged artists in the early 2000s, common core values began to emerge, values that underpin creative work that most effectively transforms, revitalizes, and renews communities in distress. We’ve tried many terms; I propose seven —Agency, Authenticity, Artistry, Accuracy, Audacity, Audience and Accessibility. These provide a framework for planning, making and assessing work that aims to actually bring changes in attitude, in policy, and positive social change.