"Merging environmental history and migrations, or for what it matters just environment and migration, has never been an easy task. Migrants seem to have moved through any kind of medium but the environment. Lately, the forecasts on climate change have raised the issue of possible waves of environmental refugees, acknowledging that ecological stress can be a cause of migrations. All this goes without saying that migrants are themselves nature on the move-their bodies are in a metabolic relationship with external ecologies-, while the nature they traverse or settle in is never just nature, but complex socioecological formations where power matters. So far environmental historians have worked prevalently on more-than-human migrants, often in the framework of "invasive species ecologies", while the movement of people has been addressed mainly for the age of discoveries and within the framework of the empire. But what about the age of modern and contemporary migrations?

In this talk, Marco Armiero will present his idea of what an environmental history of migrations may look like, illustrating his proposal through a series of case studies coming from his research on Italians in the US. Going beyond the national boundaries, connecting environmental history with other disciplines, looking at work, nature, and bodies altogether, inflecting the categories of race and ethnicity in relations of both the environmental risks and the production of the space, thinking of multispecies communities beyond the framework of invasive species: these are some of the methodological opportunities that an environmental approach to the history of migrations can offer."

** Marco Armiero is the Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is also an Associate Professor of Environmental History. He is the author of A Rugged Nation. Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (2011, translated into Italian in 2013) and co-editor of several volumes: A History of Environmentalism. Local Struggles, Global Histories (2014); An Environmental history of mass migration (2017); Future Remains. A cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene (2017); and Nature and History in Modern Italy (2010). He has published articles and edited special issues in Environment and History, Left History, Radical History Review, Modern Italy, Southern Atlantic Quarterly, Capitalism Nature Socialism, and the Journal of Political Ecology. Since 2019, Marco is the elected president of the European Society for Environmental History.