2015 Turku Prize Awarded to Gregory Cushman

Gregory Cushman was awarded the Turku Prize for his study Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History at the Biennial ESEH Conference in Versailles. The prize is awarded jointly by the RCC and the ESEH for outstanding research in environmental history published in the prior two years.

For centuries, bird guano has played a pivotal role in the agricultural and economic development of Latin America, East Asia, and Oceania. As their populations ballooned during the Industrial Revolution, North American and European powers came to depend on this unique resource as well, helping them meet their ever-increasing farming needs. In Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World, Cushman explores how the production and commodification of guano has shaped the modern Pacific Basin and the world's relationship to the region.

The book has also received the 2014 Jerry Bentley Prize of the American Historical Association, the 2014 Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize of the Southern Historical Association, and the 2013 Henry Wallace Award of the Agricultural History Society.

The Turku prize committee (Helmuth Trischler, Patrick Kupper, Finn-Arne Jørgensen, Robert Emmett, and Julia Lajus) praised it as a "highly original, innovative, and groundbreaking contribution to environmental history, a role model both for future research and narratives in the field" which demonstrates the potential of "environmental history as a cross-disciplinary field which draws upon history of science and technology, political history and international relations, material culture studies and post-humanist scholarship as well as post-colonial and subaltern studies."

Read the laudatio here.

Congratulations also to the finalists: Deborah R. Coen, The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter; Jens Lachmund, Greening Berlin: The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature; Clapperton Mavhunga, Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovations in Zimbabwe.

Helmuth Trischler (right) presenting Gregory Cushman (left) with the Turku Prize.