Common Ground: Integrating Social and Environmental History‪.‬

Introduction Environmental problems have pushed their way to the top of the global political agenda and pose an enormous challenge to humanity now, and for the future. The growing demands of consumer societies in both developed and developing nations are placing an unsustainable burden on natural resources such as fossil fuels, while at the same time filling natural "sinks"--the atmosphere, land, and oceans--with hazardous domestic and industrial wastes. Writing in the early 1990s, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, two of social history's most influential figures, both identified the risk of ecological catastrophe as perhaps the greatest danger facing humankind in the new millennium. Thompson in particular had a long-standing interest in environmental issues, which surfaced prominently in some of his later work. (1) To date, however, their concerns have not generally been shared by other social historians. Environmental topics, for example, were notable mainly by their absence in the recent Journal of Social History special issue on the field's current state and future prospects. (2)