Environmental History Today on air again

During the season 2023-2025 I have the honour to serve as the Chair for the Council of Regional Representatives for the European Society of Environmental History (ESEH) and during this period, the CRR will be hosting the Environmental History Today seminar series. Each month, one region will be discussing what is going on in their environmental history - with book launches, presentations, round tables and whatever format the regions consider important. The seminar series is currently chaired by myself representing the Baltic States, Anna Olenenko from Ukraine and Nina Vieira from Portugal.

Today, the series has kicked off with the book launch by Viktor Pál, Tuomas Räsänen and Mikku Saikku. the next in line will be my very own Baltic region with a presentation by Karl Hein on Animal Rights in Interwar Estonia.

Environmental History Today seminar series on the ESEH web page

BALTEHUMS cancelled

Sad news but nothing we can do about it: today we notified all our participants that the  Second Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS II) that we had postponed to October 1-2, 2020 due to the pandemic, will definitely be cancelled.

COVID cases are going up, university and travel restrictions getting worse by day. More than half of the participants would not be able to get there and BALTEHUMS is a networking event, so online version would not really do. I am pretty sure I am not the only one suffering from Zoom fatigue.

We have also decided not to postpone for 2021. It is already packed with conferences, one for every week! And there is no real guarantee that something will be better by that time. Instead, we are hoping to hold BALTEHUMS II in 2022. Long time to go…. Meanwhile, we hope to have a BALTEHUMS social event in ESEH program and perhaps some other smaller events along the way, digital or not. KAJAK Facebook page keeps publishing regional updates about the events we hear about.

And I was so much hoping to see Kaunas and the amazing water reserve.

BALTEHUMS II postponed

While we were sifting through the submissions to the Second Baltic Conference for the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS II) and were ready with the acceptance decisions, it became gradually clear that the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible to hold the conference on the planned dates. So the Local Organising Committee and the Programme Committee have been trying to come up with a solution.

For the time being, we decided that it will not be an online conference, because one of the main purposes of BALTEHUMS II is to get to know each other and network, to find new collaboration partners. Online papers do not help you with that. Kaunas University of Technology has preliminarily offered to host the conference in the first days of October. So we have decided to postpone BALTEHUMS II to October 1-2, 2020. It will still be held at the Kaunas University of Technology, Faculty of Social sciences, Arts and Humanities, hosted by KTU’s dynamic Civil Society and Sustainability Research group. Keep your eyes on the conference Facebook Event or its website for updates.

At this moment we are planning to re-open the call in late summer to invite those for whom the original dates were inconvenient. Those who rejected will also have a possibility to update their abstract at that occasion or submit a completely new abstract for review instead.

Just as we had laid down the plans for a social program at Kaunas’ vast water reservoir under which many submerged villages lie, the conference had to be cancelled. October is not quite as nice as May but we hope to be able to hike there anyway! Photo: By Creative, CC BY-SA 3.0