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Global environmental history deals with the complex and changing network of relationships between humans and nature from a perspective that focuses primarily on cross-border phenomena and connections.

Global environmental history is equally concerned with the globe, i.e. the man-made construction of worldwide networks of ideas, people, institutions, goods and infrastructure, and with the planet Earth as an ecosystem in which plants, animals, humans and other organisms create and shape life together with weather and landscape formations.

Global environmental history is interdisciplinary. Like any form of environmental history, global environmental history is located both in the humanities and in the natural sciences. It works with the archives of nature, such as scientific data on toxicity and climate change, as well as with the archives of societies, including first-person documents, media products, court records or UN documents.

With its focus on planetary environmental issues, global environmental history is necessarily part of a lively conversation with the inter- and transdisciplinary environmental humanities ( here). These are a rapidly growing field of research that adds humanistic concepts and research questions such as values, norms, responsibility or historicity to contemporary discussions of the planetary environmental crisis.

• Verticality, infrastructures and the Anthropocene
• Wetlands in History [ Working Group at the IEK]
• Toxicity, waste and contaminated sites as environmental heritage
• Interdependence of eating habits, culture and environment [ ENB Junior Research Group Off the Menu]
• Theory and concepts of environmental history and interdisciplinarity
• Walking as a method: a Teaching-Learning Lab [ Walking]