Rooting Out Injustices from the Top: The Multispecies Alliance in Morro da Babilônia, Rio de Janeiro

The article illustrates the reemergence of the Atlantic Forest biome in Morro da Babilônia, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, due to a reforestation project started in the 1980s conducted by institutional actors and the local community. The forest has played an important role in reinvigorating the sense of community, by legitimizing ownership claims that the community has made over the area, and by serving as a mitigation strategy in a context of increasing climatic-extreme events. In 2019 a team of researchers started an oral history project to document the social and environmental transformation of the favela. Interviews with members of the community and representatives of institutional partners opened up unexpected paths into people's memories and perspectives. In a frame of socioeconomic, political and environmental violence, injustice, and vulnerability, the making of a multispecies city and its related narratives turned out to be instrumental for the community's survival

Environmental History of Migration (EHM): its roots and most recent developments. An interview with Marco Armiero

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An Environmental History of the Pontine Marshes: Terracina from the Unification to the Integral Reclamation (1871-1928)

The 1930s reclamation of the Pontine region (south of Rome) represented the most spectacular, and impactful, environmental transformation that was launched and implemented during Mussolini’s regime. The narrative created during, and by, the regime has affected both the public debate and historiography to the extent that the fascist integral reclamation (bonifica integrale in Italian) still stands out as the definitive moments in the modern history of the area. Biasillo’s Una storia ambientale delle Paludi pontine rejects this assumption and reconstructs the history of the municipality of Terracina, the main administrative unit of the wetland, from 1871 when it joined the Kingdom of Italy to the decision to start the reclamation project in 1928

Augmented Regimes: Italian Political Environments between Liberalism and Fascism (1860s-1930s)

This article combines environmentaland political history approaches, and explores therelationship between the environment and thepolitical with regard to regime-building processes. Indoing so, it proposes a procedural and process-oriented approach to the analysis of Italian liberal andfascist regimes (1860s-1930s) from the perspective ofenvironmental politics and management. Based on theempirical case of the Pontine Marshes, the articleaddresses the question of whether distinctive liberaland fascist features existed in relation to theenvironment and proposes three areas worthy offurther investigation that bridge the distance betweenenvironmental and political history. The first of theseareas being the decision-making process over theenvironment; the second, the systems ofenvironmental knowledge production that a regimeaccepts and deploys in environmental management;the third, the principles behind environmentalintervention or non-intervention

Historical tools and current societal challenges: reflections on a collection of environmental migration cases

Through considering a "Geo Archive" as a tool of history, this paper explores several conundrums concerning environmental migration in social sciences. It demonstrates how historical perspectives can problematize and unsettle various automatisms that are widely present in journalistic, public, and policy discourses. Through examples from the Geo Archive, the article illustrates how unavoidable historical dimensions can enrich our understandings on the interaction between environmental issues and migration flows. This paper engages with an open access "archive in-the-making". This Geo Archive includes case studies of migration flows and puts those flows in conversation with environmental transformations and climatic changes. The analysed collection presents high-profile stories which are representative samples of different approaches, temporalities, geographies, sources of information, narratives, and scales. This endeavour encompasses different disciplines and fields of expertise: environmental humanities, IT and communication experts, and political ecology. The archive places itself within the realms of public history, environmental history, and history of the present and aims to reach out to wider audiences. This digital humanities project stemmed from a support action funded by the EU initiative Horizon 2020 titled CLISEL whose overarching goal was to analyse and better inform institutional responses and policies addressing climate refugees and migrants

Socio-ecological colonial transfers : trajectories of the fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya (1922–43)

First published online: 24 March 2021This paper intertwines the two historiographical concerns of migration and colonialism by exploring the case of Italian rule in North Africa from 1922 to 1943 and by adopting the analytic ground of the environment. The role played by the environment in targeting and shaping specific social groups, forming and grounding specific policies, creating and preventing social and natural transfers, has been overshadowed until now, particularly in relation to Italian colonialism. This study articulates the Fascist agricultural enterprise in Libya around the watershed event of the colony's 1932 pacification. To illustrate its development, it looks at the environment-making processes and transfers entailed in the transformation of the Italian colonial project. This reconstruction contributes to the environmental history subfields of migration and colonialism and invites historians to further explore the first decade of Italian rule in Libya and not to limit historical explorations to the lens of settler colonialism.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - CUP Transformative Agreement (2020-2022

The beautification of a historical landscape : Tuscany

Tuscany’s hills are the quintessential example of an Italian landscape in which humans, nature and history combine in the best possible way. In this context, the beautiful countryside of the Val d’Orcia has featured in artistic representations across the centuries and was declared a UNESCO heritage site in 2004. This contribution discusses the limits and potential of such prestigious recognition. This article argues that an historically-informed reading of landscapes opens up space for multiple narratives and diverse actors, and enriches our understanding of the views and representations to which we are very much exposed