[This short article was co-written by my colleagues in ESEH NEXTGATe, for which I serve as Chair, and it was published in Environment and History 32, no. 3 (2026): 465–468.]
The ESEH’s Next Generation Action Team (NEXTGATe) is hard at work and
has welcomed Aoife O’Leary McNeice, Gilberto Mazzoli, and Nike Stolpe
Wikström to its ranks, while keeping Mona Bieling, Sebastian Lundsteen, Jabulani Shaba, and Jonatan Palmblad from the previous cohort. We can report that 2026 has so far been a promising year with many opportunities for early-career researchers. Continuing an environmental history tradition harking back to the 1990s, we have started a listserv with a monthly newsletter on conferences, events, and opportunities for undergraduates, Ph.D. students and
postdocs.1
However, good news easily takes the form of a silver lining when the current state of the world is considered. Ongoing ecocides and genocides prove our work to remain important, but in these cases we would all prefer world events to give us a little less to work with. Moreover, new opportunities notwithstanding, the state of academia for up-and-coming scholars is hardly improving: academic work remains precarious, and the imposition of AI technologies on society and universities makes its prospects even more uncertain. While some see hope and possibility in the new Large-Language Models (LLMs), we see how the Silicon Valley narrative of an AI-dominated future questions the social utility of both scholarship and universities. Along those lines, the argument that we will be left behind if we do not accept and integrate LLMs in our workflows and methodologies is gaining ground in academia too. While AI is not without its uses, the flipside is not only that this technology and its growing infrastructure are supercharging the devastating growth economy that drives socio-ecological harm, but also that it discourages the slow and time-consuming practices that constitute the core of critical thinking and the humanities.
To care for both scholarship and the world, ESEH NEXTGATe therefore introduces the new theme of ‘Craft and Creativity’ – to instil hope in the next generation of environmental historians while calling to action. In this Notepad, we present our vision of how we plan to contribute to a better academia and a socio-ecologically just planet. ‘Craft and Creativity’, as outlined below, will therefore guide our future activities with the aim of promoting (human) self-reliance and mutual aid as two sides of the same coin.
Creativity is often invoked in academic contexts as a synonym for innovation, novelty or productivity. Often, it is considered a trait – something that one has, similar to the contemporary understanding of a genius as an individual. Here we will take cues from history to think differently, considering ideas not as the products of individual minds, but as what emerges through encounters. Older traditions in the classical and early modern periods imagined inspiration as a visiting presence, a daimon or genius, a nonhuman force that graced its host with a new idea. Creativity, then, is quite literally environmental. Read this way, with a more radically inclusionary perspective, ideas circulate between humans and other beings, places, materials and histories, and creativity becomes less an act of ownership and more a practice of attunement. In this sense, creativity emerges through connection: through archives that resist our questions, landscapes that interrupt established narratives, conversations that open unexpected routes of thought.
A collaborative, relational and radically open understanding of creativity makes for different methodologies that tie into the environmental humanities at large, and we aim to draw from various examples while emphasising the need for experimentation and exploration. As an example, NEXTGATe has previously organised sessions on failure as a part of the scholarly process, and we will continue to emphasise creative approaches in our writing support programme and other initiatives. In an academic environment where success is fetishised and failures are swept under the rug, we find creativity a generative and inspiring practice in opposition to a culture based on perfection and achievement. Competition may bring about innovation and ambition but, in an increasingly competitive environment, only collaboration can furnish support and bring about positive change.
If creativity in our understanding builds on mutualism and open-mindedness, our understanding of craft emphasises the diverse skillsets by which we can contribute to our common field. Arts and crafts might be relegated to history by many, but we believe that their do-it-yourself spirit is fundamental for history. What, then, is the historians’ craft? Ultimately, it is the set of tools and methodologies that we use to shape our research into something that communicates with our audience. Traditionally, this communication has taken the form of books, journal articles, seminars and conference presentations – and all-too-seldom public outreach. One of the things we want to explore as part of our theme of craft and creativity is other ways of communicating and presenting our research: ways that are more creative both in content and form. By doing so, we aim to promote alternative approaches to communication beyond conventional platforms and to expand the academic toolkit for meaning-making, publication and outreach.
Under the banner of craft, we are will therefore introduce two new initiatives for early-career scholars. The first consists of workshops in how to make zines – short do-it-yourself publications for disseminating research findings in and beyond academia. Such low-cost booklets can present interesting ideas in ways that are accessible and easy to share at events and online, and they constitute an alternative form of publication alongside the traditional forms. Our first workshop will be conceptual, introducing the idea and sharing recommendations, but we are also preparing a more practical in-person workshop for the next ESEH conference. The second initiative takes a similar form: ‘tiny essays’ to be published online in visually interesting ways, which we will invite early-career scholars to contribute. Coincidentally, such micro essays can easily be elaborated into an academic zine. News about zines and tiny essays will be shared via our newsletter (to receive it, see above footnote), via the ESEH and NEXTGATe social media accounts, and on the ESEH website.
The fundamental tools we use to produce environmental histories are those of research and writing; however, we also want to hone a craft that centres care. We care for the things that we research, whether these are historical agents long departed, living landscapes, human beings or more-than-human kin. Marc Bloch has famously written about the historians’ craft that it concerns the ‘spectacle of human activity’, which we adorn with ‘the subtle enchantment of the unfamiliar’,2 but environmental history adds nonhuman dimensions to this spectacle. As human and nonhuman ecology are being undermined and outright devastated, both in war and in peace, illegally as well as with legal backing, we believe that the next generation of environmental historians have an important role to play in fostering care both for one another and for the larger world of which we are all a part. Historians will continue to write about what interests them, and so they should, but NEXTGATe will throughout the next two years promote the power of storytelling for turning our rigorous research into real impact – not in the abstract world of NPM metrics but in the concrete ecological world we all inhabit.
NEXTGATe promotes craft and creativity at a time when both are said to be obsolete, with LLMs making redundant both the acquisition of skills and the need to exercise our brains – but we do so because we are historians believing in a different future. At a time when algorithms can write for us, helping us to fit into an economic system that our own field shows to be increasingly unsustainable, we believe that the next generation of scholars will benefit from knowing how to work from first principles – even if AI is used responsibly. As data centres consume our energy, space and drinking water and write the next chapter of environmental history, and as we must learn how to navigate and compete with misinformation, fake citations and wholly AI-generated articles, we must now work together – mobilising the past to show our fellow human beings that another future is possible. To that end, we will need both craft and creativity.
—THE ESEH NEXT GENERATION ACTION TEAM
Aoife O’Leary McNeice, Gilberto Mazzoli, Nike Stolpe Wikström, Mona Bieling, Sebastian Lundsteen, Jabulani Shaba, and Jonatan Palmblad
1 To join, please write to Jonatan Palmblad at jonatan[at]palmbl.ad
2 Marc Bloc, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 8.
Dr. des. Jonatan Palmblad 
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