Still thinking about this (from @ferrisjabr.bsky.social 's Becoming Earth): "a single gallon of gasoline represents 100 tonnes of ancient life, roughly equivalent to 20 adult elephants". I knew it was big, but never worked it out. A tank of petrol is a LOT of ancient life. +1 reason to electrify!

The UK government boldly called time on drilling the North Sea, Europe’s largest declining hydrocarbon basin. I wrote @phenomenalworld.bsky.social with @freddiedaley.bsky.social on the North Sea's future and why its past shows we need more state intervention🔽 www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the...

I enjoyed giving it! Field trip tomorrow 🥳

Applications are now invited for the Society's Teaching Fellowships, 2026-27. Funds support innovative practice in history teaching in higher education bit.ly/4wbwoDb. Open to UK and international Fellows and Members of the Society. Closing date Friday 10 July 2026 #Skystorians 1/2

I basically had no idea about this 'flocking' behaviour in AI computation, and that's not an accident. After three bloody decades of sweaty hand wringing about wind and solar "inteemittency", this just gets treated like nothing bsky.app/profile/keta...

2014 REF: 2026: closing UG History

This is a devastating loss.

University of Hertfordshire closes a swathe of Humanities courses, accelerating the sweeping tide against Human-centred disciples in the UK. Because understanding humans is so yesterday today. With such happy consequences, as we see when we look around us.

TOMORROW Please join us for Global/Local Plant Worlds, our final More-than-Human/ities seminar w/ York University! Come explore human-plant relationality, the role of plants in history, their affects & communication!🌱 17:45–19:15 yorku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KnwSS2dZRdaebPC73lZ4BA#/registration

Le printemps de l'histoire environnementale, c'est parti ! Avec cette semaine un cycle de conférence à Pau sur le thème "Questions environnementales et classes sociales". Retrouvez l'intégralité du programme ici : leruche.hypotheses.org/9540

'There is an ancient tradition that when the Devil had smuggled himself into Noah’s Ark, he tried to sink it by boring a hole; but this scheme was defeated, and the human race saved, by the hedgehog stuffing himself into the hole.' - Moncure Conway, Demonology and devil-lore (1879), p. 123

Wow. This is damning. Government really needs to look at office for students, a regulator that seemed to be created as a culture war play and certainly was acting like one in this case

So wonderful to celebrate Rebecca’s achievement today! Who would have thought me and @benpohl.bsky.social would supervise a PhD together (our respective interests span a millennia)? And yet it made perfect sense in the end. Congratulations Dr Tyson!

I’m so very proud of my and @dudleymarianna.bsky.social’s brilliant student @tyguson.bsky.social, who successfully passed her PhD viva today with no more than very minor corrections! The fields of Anglo-Norman Studies and Environmental History have gained a major new voice! 🥳🥂🍻

Important - and we also need to read these data in tandem with the catastrophic collapse in PhD funding. We need to advocate collectively for colleagues, students and our discipline, but may also need to consider what it looks like to keep teaching & research alive outside of academic institutions.

Call me Cassandra, but if you make thousands of HEI staff either compulsorily or 'voluntarily' redundant and create conditions in which senior staff take early retirement in an attempt to save more junior colleagues' careers without significant new hiring, a critical loss is exactly what happens.

The Irish Government already spends 4.8 billion euro per year supporting fossil fuels & they just agreed to increase that by another 750 million. 'our vulnerability is the fossil fuel system itself. We are watching this system hold the country hostage, and the government pay the ransom'

Child poverty isn't just bad, it results in an enduring earnings gap. The pay gap between graduates who grew up in poverty and those who didn't persists even between when they go to the same university, get the same degree and work for the same firm ⤵️ buff.ly/5VfX2Fi

Now that we all left KC after a wonderful #ASEH #ASEH2026, continue the scholar conversation by reviewing a book for H-Environment! Check out my list of books below! #envhist #envhum #ecocrit #aghist #energy #animalhist #sustainability #anthropocene #plantstudies docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Enjoyed a brilliant talk by @kbruisch.bsky.social about her book ‘Burning Swamps’ today in Bristol. All about peat - Russia’s ‘forgotten fossil economy’ - it is interesting, surprising, and timely. www.cambridge.org/core/books/b...

My uni’s marketing department: we won’t advertise your course. It’s not a ‘hero’ course. Management: you haven’t recruited. We’re shutting you down.

Oil futures markets were, from the start, a neoliberal fantasy about efficient price discovery. The last chapter of my book covers this. This article, too: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...).

The Newbury Bypass protests 1996 - Lost Images rediscovered. Display at Newbury Library.

Reduce Your UCU Subscription Cost by Claiming Tax Relief As we’ve entered a new tax year, it’s a great time to remind #UCU members that you may be able to reduce the cost of your union subscription by claiming tax relief from HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC). Click the link for more details.

🔔⏰Just over 1 month to go! ⏰🔔 Call for papers: Modern British History and the 'Environmental Turn' A two-day workshop organised by @andrewseaton.bsky.social and myself at Lincoln College, Oxford, 16-17 September. Deadline for abstracts is 15 May. Details in poster below!

A good summary of the latest ASEH. Right at the bottom are some notable numbers: Americans made up 92.3% of attendees; the next largest group were FIVE Canadians; followed by China, Germany, the UK, Switzerland...

A single line in this piece just made my day: “The electricity system operator is understood to be preparing to run the grid without any gas for short periods as soon as this summer, in a first for the UK energy system.” Renewables *work*. And progress matters🎉 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

If you missed our Electric Wind event with @dudleymarianna.bsky.social last week, you can now listen back on the TTiN podcast channel on.soundcloud.com/sEmCqRDEjWeV...

This isn't just an environmental, corruption, sovereignty, and public-access disaster - it goes deeper. The Forest Service is an original kernel of the administrative state - more than any other, it's where the expert, nonpartisan civil service began. It's been a target of oligarchs for a century.

The latest oil shock has led to a resurgence of North Sea petro nationalism. I’ve written for @the-breakdown.bsky.social on the illusion of plenty behind Reform, Tory and SNP claims that red-green wreckers are sabotaging our energy security by blocking drilling. www.break-down.org/north-sea-na...

My only London event for Electric Wind, happening TODAY! Would be great to see you there.

I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again. Universities are roughly 1000 years old. They predate most operating models including capitalism and have lasted for a reason. Installing insecure, helpless managers who ape business methods results in bad businesses, not good universities.

Gift article. “This is all happening on a planet in the middle of its own transition, one that may well last thousands or even millions of years and to which few nations have even begun to properly adapt. In the meantime, vulnerabilities proliferate like heat.” www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/m...

STICK IT ON A FIVE POUND NOTE

This is the situation we find ourselves in

Friends! The deadline for Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” is tomorrow. This is a biennial series that I edit for @nichecanada.bsky.social. The number of submissions is low right now, would love to see a few more roll in. niche-canada.org/2026/02/28/c... #queer #envhum

REMINDER - One week left to get your proposals in for Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” Editors - @jessicamdewitt.bsky.social, @tinaadcock.bsky.social, and Sarah York-Bertram June 2026 Publication niche-canada.org/2026/02/28/c... #envhist #envhum #queerecology #affect

Nominations for the Judith R. Walkowitz Prize are due May 15! The Walkowitz Prize is awarded annually for the best published article on issues relating to gender and sexuality in British culture. Info and nomination instructions here: www.nacbs.org/prize-databa...

A few of us got together for a forum on degrowth in @envirohistory.bsky.social. Here is my bit: "It's the Economy Stupid." And check out the entries from @fredrikjonsson.bsky.social, @matthiasschmelzer.bsky.social, and www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Interested in environmental history? The IHR is offering a summer 2026 internship with the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH). Apply by 15 April 2026, 11:59 pm BST. More details at: buff.ly/Vzpz6G3.

This is as extraordinary as everyone says it is.

A good - useful - thread, this.

1/3 Since I wrote this response to Nigel Biggar’s malicious and completely false attack on me and university colleagues in The Spectator he has re-published it on his subscribers-only substack with me as the poster boy for “bad” history teaching at Sussex. alanlester.co.uk/blog/smearin...

I sat down with Filippo De Chirico to talk about Electric Wind for the @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social . It was a really nice chat and is available to listen to here: newbooksnetwork.com/electric-wind @manchesterup.bsky.social

It is the anniversary of the My Lai massacre today. I'd say that even more than most years, it's important to remember what happened. And the role Hugh Thompson, an active serviceman, played in both stopping and publicising it. Despite enormous military, political and public pressure to stay quiet.

Petition to ban the expression 'beat out' from the English language. One film does not 'beat out' another, it beats it. Beat. The one verb is enough. Why yes I have been reading the Guardian Oscars coverage!

'some creative arts graduates don’t appear to earn a significant graduate premium, but the UK’s creative industries are worth £125bn a year or, to put it another way, more than £1 in every £20 in the UK economy – a larger proportion of the nation’s wealth than almost any other country on earth.' 1/3

'Swallows of the river' is a lovely corrective to lampreys' usual horror image

Reaching net zero by 2050 is often framed as a cost burden. The UK Climate Change Committee’s latest analysis suggests the opposite. The real risk is fossil fuel dependency.

Join us for this free public event in London with @dudleymarianna.bsky.social discussing her book Electric Wind with @drdomdavies.bsky.social and featuring an exhibition of art and sound made in response to energy and the weather. Refreshments also provided!! www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...