10yo is right to ask why my book is some 110 Euros more expensive than the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I can’t get my head around this either, but I just received a discount code valid until 30 September. Use BRUISCHK25 to get 20% off. Greg’s next adventure will still be cheaper, I fear👇

Today is publication day! EXTRACTION: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism is officially out with @wwnorton.com - find it at a bookstore near you or order online💚📚 wwnorton.com/books/978132...

📣 It's publication day! 🔥Burning Swamps🔥 is out with @universitypress.cambridge.org ! My book tells the forgotten history of peat in the context of Russia’s industrialization & electrification and points to the lingering presence of past extraction 1/5 #envhist #energysky

📣 It's publication day! 🔥Burning Swamps🔥 is out with @universitypress.cambridge.org ! My book tells the forgotten history of peat in the context of Russia’s industrialization & electrification and points to the lingering presence of past extraction 1/5 #envhist #energysky

The War-driven Environmental Destruction in Ukraine: Naming, Understanding, Witnessing Part of the international series “Rethinking Ukraine’s Environment: War, Ecocide, and Beyond” Thursday – 9 October 2025 – Zoom niche-canada.org/2025/09/23/o... #envhist #envhum #ukraine #ecocide

Gen AI has been trained and developed in ways that no university research ethics committee would approve. And yet as academics we supposedly need training in how to use it ‘ethically’…

Exciting list of speakers presenting in our Environmental History Research Seminar this term. If you happen to be in Dublin, come along. We'll meet on Mondays at 1 PM in the Trinity Long Room Hub #envhist Thanks to @tlrhub.bsky.social for hosting us! @historytcd.bsky.social 👇

This technology is so clearly designed to profit off cheating and struggling students--its insidious. And yet universities keep announcing how they're allowing this company into its midst, to exploit and incapacitate our students even more

Thrilled to have this piece up on Dublin Review of Books today drb.ie/tcds-forgott... it brings together my own family history and the work we are doing as part of the Trinity Colonial Legacies project.

a brilliant thread on the invisible drainage infrastructure underneath farmland in northern Germany calling us to read the land as a product of history 👇

“A lot of academic research on AI currently is also funded by the AI industry, which creates the risk of distorting scientific knowledge, similar to how we’ve seen happen in the past.”

CFP: "The Greyzone of the Green Transition – Environmental Inequalities in Central and Eastern Europe." International conference in Romania, May 2026. Keynotes by Stefania Barca, Erik Swyngedouw, and Andrej Grubačić. #envhist #envhum

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Very much looking forward to reading this.... "In tech we trust: A history of technophilia in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) climate mitigation expertise" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Academics are under unrelenting pressure to accept the narrative of the inevitability of #generativeAI & to embrace it in teaching & learning. We resist - because it is ecologically destructive, ethically corrupt, & because it undermines the thinking abilities that make us both human & intelligent.

It was good to co-author alongside @clarekelly.bsky.social & Caitríona Leahy & with the input from Harun Šiljak & Norah Campbell. We are clearly not the only ones thinking like this, both within Trinity & beyond, so let's build community to #resistAI www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY. We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration. I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.

This week we check-in with frequent EK guest Brian Milakovsky to learn about the destruction of forests in Ukraine. How has the war accelerated the destruction of eastern Ukraine’s ecology, and what does this mean for the future? patreon.com/posts/deforestation-of-137412305

excited to share the call for the workshop EXTRACTIVE NATURES / NATURES OF EXTRACTION happening at @uobrisceh.bsky.social on 6-7 Nov 2025, 
made possible by the @britishacademy.bsky.social deadline: 10 September! full call below ⤵ #envhist #envhum

ESEH 2027, “Environmental History Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries,” will take place on 6–10 September in beautiful Salzburg, Austria! #ESEH2025 #ESEH2027 #envhist #envhum @mknoll.bsky.social

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

For all of the educators trying to deal with AI, I did a deep dive in early June and these are the four articles I decided to assign to my students. 1. This is the longest of the bunch, but so wonderfully comprehensive. www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

What can historians contribute to the climate change debate, and reform? In a new article for 'Transactions', Alex Hibberts considers the future of environmental history, historians' place in these discussions, and the environment's centrality to wider historical practice bit.ly/4l5xQAj

One week left to apply for this great #envhist job with us in Norway.

Incredibly instructive reporting on what appears well on its way to becoming the biggest, most concentrated, most energy- and resource-intensive, and most speculative wave of capital investment ever. ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

I was excited to find out that my book is available for pre-order! One for anyone interested in energy, climate, and the history of Britain. Thanks to MUP for making it pretty and affordable 🫶 manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526182968/

Join us next Wednesday for our @basees.bsky.social panel on resource extraction & the company town in Eurasia with papers by Volodymyr Kulikov @vkulikov.bsky.social on coal-mining towns in Ukraine, Nikolai Erofeev on copper-mining in Mongolia & myself on peat workers' settlements in central Russia 👇

What makes a city happy? In this final event for the Eurasian Environments series, we paired Maria Taylor and Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho to discuss green cities from two different contexts. patreon.com/posts/green-cities-in-132999719

1/ 🙏 PLEASE support our work! uwecworkgroup.info/donate/ Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group has been highlighting the far-reaching environmental consequences of Russia's full-scale invasion of #Ukraine since 2022.

Now available for pre-order - The Long Heat by Wim Carton and Andreas Malm "If you still believe or hope that climate catastrophe can be averted through technological rather than political change, I urge you to read this book." - Sally Rooney

Great to see Elena Kochetkova's thought-provoking "The Green Power of Socialism" discussed in this H-Environment roundtable featuring contributions by Julia Ault, Tatiana Kasperski, Péter Szabó & Katja Doose and Elena's response 👇 networks.h-net.org/group/announ...

The oil and uranium industries always have been intertwined. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte published my new article on the shared history of uranium and oil geophysics in German, French and Canadian seemingly depleted boreholes. You can read the article (Open Access) here:

Rare good news delivered from the US, although personal. It's printed and will be available from 1 July ugapress.org/book/9780820...

Finally an occasion to show this photo. These women travelled hundreds of km every year to extract peat for Soviet power plants. The work helped them alleviate some of the poverty of their villages, but their bodily needs were neglected as they functioned as a pool of cheap labour for the economy

New Publication: Exploring Chernobyl’s Connection to Dnieper Hydropower Today my article "Joining the Dnieper Cascade. An Envirotechnical Water-History of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, 1927-1986" was published online in the journal Water History. I am really happy that this was possible. You…

Imperial Valley is both a major agricultural producer and solar power producer in California. This paper situates the history of solar development in the context of the region's Indigenous history, biodiverse landscapes, and water and agricultural political economies. rdcu.be/epvQW

I refused to sign an AI addendum to my contract with CUP. Officially started my career as a Luddite, I suppose.

In a serious blow to scholars, the Russian authorities have outlawed the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) as an "undesirable organization." The designation poses legal risks for the organization's 3,200 members when researching in Russia. meduza.io/en/news/2025...

I'm biased, but this report is a must-read for anyone looking to understand the state of AI in 2025. It explains how AI is entrenching power for big tech and the oligarch class, speeding deregulation, dislodging human expertise and threatening workers—and how there's still time to refuse all that.

Happy #WorldPeatlandsDay! Let's talk more about peatlands as places of human history. This is Radovitsky Mokh, a Soviet peat extraction site in central Russia. The images show the geometry of drainage canals & extraction fields and the partial return of water after the end of extraction #envhist

"Wondering how corporations turned the rural landscape into a poisonous cesspool? Read this book." — Deborah Fitzgerald In "Titans of Industrial Agriculture," @jennifer-clapp.bsky.social‬ explains how a handful of agribusiness titans have dominated the farm inputs sector: bit.ly/45xM094

Looking forward to this online workshop, organized by Johanna Conterio (Oslo), to prepare an edited volume on ecologies of health and disease in Eurasia. #envhist www.hf.uio.no/iakh/english...

Academia in 2025: For weeks I’ve been working through botched copy-edits of my monograph, outsourced by the publisher to a company I’d never heard of, until it finally dawned on me the terrible job might be AI. A quick search confirmed the company recently launched new AI software, which now means..

Marx im Anthropozän ist erschienen! www.dtv.de/buch/marx-im...

Save the date for the last (but very exciting) ESEH online seminar in environmental history of the 2024–2025 season, "Hooked: A History of the Black Sea in Six Animals," with Taylor Zajicek and Constantin Ardeleanu. Register here: forms.gle/pyjgCXSWJcdk... #envhist

This episode resonated. I've been struck there has been no collective pushback against AI in HE. Universities normalize AI in research while asking lecturers to police students. Linking students' AI use to scarce resources is spot on IMO & I liked how they deconstructed the inevitability myth

'Energy Workers in Transition' is my new essay for Regeneration journal. It uses oral histories with British electricity, nuclear and oil workers to understand how they conceptualise transformations to work in the energy economy since the 1950s. Read🔽

Returning from a few days away, I found our allotment in such beauty last night. 💚💚💚 #myhappyplace