Introduction - Ryan M.

     My name is Ryan and I am a fourth year history major. I am a native of Riverside and am quite fond of my native town. I enjoy the study of history because I think it is important to know why things are the way the are. This inquisitiveness runs in my family as my father enjoys to read and my mother drove herself through dental school simply because she found it "vaguely interesting". I hope to use my history degree to go into teaching or, regardless of owning a degree, to go into beekeeping. As someone who has looked into beekeeping, I feel that this is my closest connection to environmental history. This is because the health of the bees is closely linked to the health of the environment. This in turn connects to human society because bees are essential pollinators of many food crops. This importance is bolstered by the fact that the state of California is a major agricultural producer. I look forward to learning what I can about local environmental history in order to see what works and what does not so that I can be the best beekeeper I can.

Comments

  1. David BiggsJanuary 6, 2021 at 4:30 PM

    Cool! Could you add some photos to your post? :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yvonne MarquezJanuary 9, 2021 at 12:52 PM

    I also love Riverside history. I hope you get to work with Bees!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yvonne Chamberlain-Marquez (Stringfellow Acid Pits)

Image
Stringfellow Acid Pits For those who live in the Inland Empire, the sight of a giant metal woolly mammoth looming over highway 60 is familiar. Dinosaurs and other extinct creatures adorn the hillside, serving as a teaching tool for school children. Many probably have memories from spent time at the Jurupa Cultural Center as kids, learning about Earth Science from founder, Ruth Kirkby. What is seemingly absent from cultural memory is the toxic waste that sits less than a mile away in the Stringfellow Acid Pits. The Acid Pits were once home to over 32 million gallons of toxic chemicals, dumped by numerous corporations and the United States military. The chemicals penetrated through the ground and into the water supply of thousands of residents. During multiple heavy rain events, the pits overflowed sending the waste into neighborhoods and the local elementary school. Residents recalled their children playing in the foaming waste, making beards and throwing snowballs.  Though now a...
Read more

Introduction - David Biggs

Image
 Introduction - David Biggs Welcome to HIST 197 - Environmental Problems in California. I'm David Biggs, your tour guide and professor. I have been a prof at UCR since 2004, and my research interests are environmental history with a special focus on Vietnam. I've written some articles and two books, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta and Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam . If interested, you can find out more about my work at http://davidbiggs.net . Besides my main research, I am also involved in  local environmental policy issues. I have served as an expert witness on federal environmental cleanup cases involving a military herbicide called Agent Orange that is linked to all sorts of illnesses, and I wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times about chemical warfare in Vietnam. At UCR in the past, I've taught a Public Policy course focusing on local environmental history case studies, and that is where the research materials and case st...
Read more

Antonios Theodosis - Radium Craze in Los Angeles During the Early Twentieth Century

Image
  Radium Craze in Los Angeles during the Early Twentieth Century  In the early twentieth century, a new buzz was quickly growing around Los Angeles with the discovery of an element that would glow in the dark and could be found naturally in the environment. The element in question was none other than radium, the eighty-eighth element in the periodic table was something fresh, hot, and exciting in all aspects of the early 1900s. As a result of this fresh excitement, the element could be found in numerous consumer products, medicinal practices, and in areas of congregation around the city of Los Angeles. Its exciting glow and mystery that surrounded it intrigued scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and the general public in what can only be deemed as an era of the “radium craze.” This infatuation and mystery surrounding this radioactive element was not a good thing, however, because as noted, it was infused in everyday consumer products, in medicinal products, and procedures wh...
Read more