For its 2012 conference, the American Society for Environmental History will convene in Madison, Wisconsin, a city and state rich in historical and environmental heritage. Here environmentalist John Muir grew up and took courses in botany and geology at the University of Wisconsin, frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner transformed the study of US history, and borderlands historian Herbert Eugene Bolton began his own transformative career. In Wisconsin architect Frank Lloyd Wright built structures attuned to the American landscape, and painter Georgia O’Keeffe began her career as an artist depicting that landscape. Wisconsin was the first state to restrict DDT, seven years after the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. While closely identified with the American Midwest, Wisconsin is also a border state, facing Ontario across Lake Superior. 

2012 will be the 125th anniversary of the birth of one of Wisconsin’s most important environmental thinkers who rose to international prominence, Aldo Leopold. In A Sand County Almanac and “The Land Ethic,” Leopold tried to find ways to live ethically with nature, and this began not in an iconic wilderness like Yosemite or Yellowstone but instead at the most local level - one's own home, yard, or farm.  

2012 is also the 50th anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring--a book with tremendous regional and global consequences. Both Carson and Leopold tied the idea of local responsibility to a much broader, all-encompassing environmental awareness, an environmental ethic informed by both science and morality that possessed the potential to be nationally and even globally transformative. Like Leopold and Carson, the ASEH conference for 2012 will begin with the local, but look to the global. We take their work as a starting point to look inward and outward, across chronological eras and geographic divides.  

Individuals and groups all over the world are searching for ways to live better with nature, and to make a better world for all outside of traditional political structures and older models of environmentalism. Please join us in Madison for an intellectual and collegial journey – “From the Local to the Global: Ethics, Environmentalism, and Environmental History in an Interdependent World."