Laura is one of the curators of the Land.Schafft.Klang exhibition that focuses on the soundscapes of the Bavarian countryside and on the ways the presence – and absence – of sounds of nature reflects biodiversity. The exhibition has been touring Bavaria since 2024. Congratulations!
EuCoHN network member Nicola Thomas together with network associates Blake Ewing and Enaiê Mairê Azambuja have published a virtual exhibition on wetlands. The Wetland Times project investigated how time is understood, lived, and represented in wetland environments across three geographically and culturally distinct sites: Morecambe Bay in the UK, the Wadden Sea in northern Europe, and the Dja Faunal Reserve in southern Cameroon. The project responded to the dominance of global and abstract temporal frameworks such as ‘deep time’ or the Anthropocene in climate and conservation discourse, and instead focused on the more situated, culturally specific, and often conflicting timescapes that shape how people relate to and care for wet places.
The Wetland Times Virtual Exhibition, launched on 29 September 2025, presented the findings of this research through six thematic sections: Imaginaries, Narratives, Structures, Flows, (A)synchronicities, and Ruptures—each exploring different temporal dimensions found in wetland life and language. Drawing on interviews, fieldwork, and creative contributions, the exhibition highlighted the layered and sometimes paradoxical qualities of wetland time: from cyclical rhythms and ecological succession to ruptures caused by displacement, environmental change, and competing land use agendas. It also raised questions about how conservation practice might better account for the temporal knowledge embedded in local traditions, languages, and lived experience.
EuCoHN members at the ESEH conference in Uppsala. Photo credit: Ines Meier
EuCoHN had a strong presence at the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) conference that took place this August in Uppsala, Sweden. Eight members of our network participated, with Sabine Höhler serving as a member of the program and local organizing committees. We convened four panels between us, on topics ranging from environmental governance and history of nature conservation in the Habsburg Empire to visual histories of climate change and insights on academic writing.
EuCoHN members gathered in Oldenburg in May 2025 for the second meeting of the network. This time felt very different to our first meeting in Munich in 2024 – there, the emphasis was on getting to know each other’s work and approaches, and facilitating the space for conversations that would allow us to build the kind of network we want to have. This time we met as an established network, with lots of news to share and the energy to work together on taking our projects forward.
Network member Cormac Walsh had arranged for us to spend our first day in the beautiful facilities of the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity Oldenburg, and to kick us off Anna-Katharina Wöbse had organized a roundtable with external guests Peter Südbeck (Leiter der Nationalparkverwaltung, Niedersächsisches Wattenmeer) and marine biologist, activist, author, and “Wadden Seanior” Karsten Reise. This passionate and lively discussion set the tone for our whole meeting, ranging from the intricacies of bird migration routes and ecological change to the big questions: Can we even talk about conservation or restoration when ecosystems are already adapting to a new world? What does it mean to protect nature that is not the nature we know?
These are questions that underlie all of our work and our teaching, in different ways; and they are also questions that speak of and to the current moment of political uncertainty. Network member Astrid M. Eckert spoke movingly about the need to conserve also intellectual freedom and research in an academic climate that is also changing fast and unpredictably. We considered the need to find and preserve hidden voices and narratives in conservation, and the importance of forging alliances between Europe and the rest of the world in the current moment. We broke into smaller interdisciplinary groups to discuss particular conservation paradigms and learn more from each other’s disciplinary and geographical expertise, and reflected in plenum on the progress and future plans for our network.
On the second day of the workshop, following the model of our 2024 meeting, we left the Helmholtz Institute and continued our conversations in the field. Whereas last year our focus was urban ecology and rewilding, this year took us to the Wadden Sea itself to consider the history and future of coastal protection. Besides learning a lot about the particular concerns of Wadden Sea conservation past and present, our field trip involved wind, rain, sun, muscle power and (the badge of honour for conservationists) mud! In the spirit of embodied, down-to-earth conservation practice, we very much hope that it sticks.
CONSERVATION HUMANITIES 