Gregory T. Cushman

Contact Information Phone: (785) 864-9449 Office: 3631 Wescoe Hall Email: gcushman@ku.edu

Asst. Prof., History (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin, 2003, M.A. 1999; B.A. La Sierra University 1995). Environmental history (esp. climate, disasters, oceans); Latin America since 1750 (esp. Andes and Cuba); history of science and technology (esp. meteorology, oceanography, ecology, transportation, agriculture), global history.

Cushman came to KU in Fall 2003. He has an ongoing fascination with “all things foul and ugly, all creatures short and squat”--and their ecological and historical importance. He is currently completing a book titled The Lords of Guano: Global Ecology and Peru’s Marine Environment. It focuses on the role of experts in managing “The Most Valuable Birds in the World” and the earth’s largest marine fishery to produce guano and fishmeal. His article “Environmental Therapy for Soil and Social Erosion: Landscape Architecture and Depression-Era Highway Construction in Texas” won the 2001 Robinson Award for best published article in public works history. It gives prominence to the humble culvert, drainage ditch, and native plants in modern landscape engineering.

But his interests extend far beyond these regions. The Lords of Guano describes the formative impact “local” events in Peru exercised on major global trends, particularly the advent of input-intensive agriculture after 1840, the roots of neo-Malthusian fears of global overpopulation after World War II, and the division of the world into a “fat,” overconsuming North and “starving,” underdeveloped South after 1960. He teaches ecological history from a “big history” perspective, transcending the geographical, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries traditionally set by the historical profession. He is also researching the history of international understanding of the El Niño phenomenon, and its “invention” as a global disaster, by which he hopes to learn how humans came to envision environmental problems on a scale that spans, not only the Pacific Ocean, but the whole earth.