3rd World Congress of Environmental History

The Environmental History of the Recent Past: A Roundtable on Environmental Politics and Policy in the 21st Century

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Chair:
Panelists:

Andrew C. Isenberg, University of Kansas (isenberg@ku.edu)
Lisa Sedrez, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Frank Uekötter, University of Birmingham (F.Uekoetter@bham.ac.uk)
Robert Wilson, Syracuse University (mwilson@maxwell.syr.edu)

From one perspective, environmental reform has made enormous strides in recent years. Such advances include the entry of Green parties into power-sharing coalitions in Europe, the advance of renewable energy technologies, and the signing of an international climate accord in 2015. Yet since the turn of the twenty-first century, reform has also slowed or reversed. Conservative parties have rolled back environmental protections in Eastern Europe and the United States. A surprisingly cohesive concert of international voices continue to push aside convincing evidence of the public health disaster that followed the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl in an effort to clear a path for a renewed future for nuclear energy. The reform priorities of the developed world and the Global South remain at odds. This roundtable brings together key scholars—four historians and a geographer—who will address the conflicting and sometimes confusing state of twenty-first-century environmental politics. Our perspective is a global one; the panel includes specialists in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Global South. We will address both national and international politics. Panelists will discuss the emergence of conservative opposition to environmental regulations in the U.S. and elsewhere, the challenge of shifting the focus of environmental reform toward building new energy systems, and the divergence between the industrialized world’s prioritization of climate change and the priorities of the Global South, where pollution remains a paramount concern.

The format of the session will emphasize discussion; each of the five panelists will open by speaking for only five to seven minutes, leaving an hour of and hour-and-a-half for the audience to participate.

Sub Unit

• 3rd World Congress of Environmental History

Chair

• Peter Coates, University of Bristol

Presenters

• Andrew Isenberg, University of Kansas

• Frank Uekötter, University of Birmingham

• Robert Wilson, Syracuse University

• Lise Fernanda Sedrez, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro