New research networks for European natural resource history

I am very happy to see how the Tensions of Europe (ToE) network expands its activities in teaching and researching the history of natural resources. We are a growing community of European scholars, of all generations and at home in a variety of countries, who have taken on the task of digging deeper into the paradoxical and often simply unbelievable past of European natural resource extraction.

In June I organized, together with European colleagues, a ToE workshop here in Stockholm under the heading “Challenging Europe: Technology, Environment and the Quest for Resource Security“, in which we discussed around 17 full-length papers dealing with everything from the fierce struggles for control over 19th-century Russian wood supplies and the Cold War visions of Czechoslovak water management to Germany’s Antarctic krill expeditions and Swedish nuclear fuel imports. The results will now be turned into joint publication projects, in the form of three tentative journal “special issues”. A follow-up will be organized by my colleague Jawad Daheur in Paris in November.

And last week we got to hear that two grants have been awarded for the continuation of our by now rather intense international networking activities in this field. One of the networks will have as its main base the Technical University of Eindhoven and is organized by ToE chairman Erik van der Vleuten. It is called “Global Resources and Sustainability of European Modernization, 1820-2020” (GREASE). The other is led by Matthias Heymann at the University of Århus and has the name of our recent Stockholm workshop: “Challenging Europe: Technology, Environment and the Quest for Resource Security” (EurReS). These new networking grants will allow us to scale up our joint activities and further intensify our cooperation – in a way that is still quite rare for a community of historians.

Why is this valuable? Some of us like to point at the “societal relevance” of our research and teaching activities. And yes, clearly, research and discourses about natural resource extraction is “timely” in the 21st century. But I cannot help feeling that an even greater value lies in the stories themselves that are coming out of what we are doing – and in how those stories force us to view the world in unexpected new ways. To work as an historian in this field is to discover, over and over again, that the past is not what yesterday’s historians thought it was.