I had the pleasure of working with two incredible environmental historians, Katie Holmes (La Trobe) and Andrea Gaynor (UWA), on an article titled, ‘Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times’. Historians Yves Rees and Ben Huf invited us to contribute to a forum for History Australia, on the subject of ‘what it means to be a historian in this alarming historical moment’. Alarming indeed - our responses were framed by rising temperatures, bushfires, smoke, hail storms, biodiversity loss, and just as we submitted the article proofs, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To amplify the forum, the editors of History Australia arranged for responses from across different networks of historians. Jarrod Hore, a rising star in transnational environmental history at UNSW, offered his thoughts and more for the Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network in his essay, ‘Reckoning with Urgency: Crisis and Radical Environmental History’.