Trees, Environmental Thought & the American Conservation Movement – A Panel Discussion

MHS Event

This seminar will workshop a work in progress. 
The event is hybrid and free of charge. An in-person reception will begin at 4:30 PM. 

Register to attend in person

Register to attend online

This panel will examine environmental and agricultural thought from the Early American Conversation Movement and beyond. 

Kristan M. Hanson’s essay highlights the work of English botanical artist Marianne North. Over fifteen years, North traveled to every continent but Antarctica, producing roughly 830 paintings of plants in their native habitat. North visited California twice, making special excursions to giant sequoia and coastal redwood groves in 1875 and 1881. During both trips, she painted trees enmeshed with the land and documented the impact of extraction capitalism and tourism on old-growth forests. This paper applies an art historical and plant humanities lens to North’s paintings of individual trees to interpret their significance in relation to the American conservation movement and issues of history, place, race, and justice. 

Sarah Hastings’s paper the Northern Nut Growers Association (NNGA) in the early to mid-twentieth century. The NNGA advanced perennial nut trees as both practical crops and tools for regional land use and planning in the United States. In contrast to the private, standardized, plantation-style nut industries of the South and West, the NNGA bred diverse native varieties suited to the cooler temperate zones of the northern states with ecological and economic resilience in mind. As they articulated a decentralized agrarian future, their systems were incorporated into early New Deal planning. This paper recovers an overlooked strand of agricultural reform that remains relevant today amid debates over food security, crop breeding, and regional land-use planning.

Join the conversation at the Environmental History Seminar.
Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.