Environmental history

Stirling’s Environmental Historians explore past and continuing human relationships with land and water, and the biota in and on them. We identify and analyse the interactions of human and natural agency, and the cumulative effects of choices made by our ancestors in response to climate change, pathogen impacts, or resource depletion, that together have shaped the world in which we live.

Peat moss in Perth and Kinross

Beyond political narratives

We look beyond political narratives to explore the dynamic between humans and the environment in which we live, where nature matters in ways that cannot be separated from the human experience.

With government, NGOs and other public bodies, charities, businesses, and private organisations and individuals making policy and taking actions that are having transformative impacts on our environment, ecology and personal wellbeing nationally, Stirling’s environmental historians are at the forefront of research upon which data-informed policy can be developed.

Partnerships and collaborations

Our interdisciplinary research draws on and integrates the methods and datasets of history, archaeology, politics and policy, language and literature, place-name studies, sociology, social anthropology, and biological and environmental sciences (including genomics). Through partnerships and collaborations with natural environment and ecology professionals, communities and civil society we explore fundamental issues relating to land-use (from development to desertification), discourse of ‘wilderness’ and ‘rewilding’, energy transitions and energy landscapes, resource conflicts, depletion and degradation epidemic and pandemic disease, providing the robust research to inform planning processes, policy development, and implementation.

Rain over Argyll and Bute