Sarah S. Elkind is a professor of history teaching environmental, technology, political, and urban history at San Diego State University, and was the 2010–2011 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research engages history of technology through the examination of environmental consequences of technological innovation, and policy responses to those consequences. Her new research explores the global history of resource management in the longue durée. In How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy (2011), she used case studies from Los Angeles’s energy, flood control, air pollution, and water resources history to explore business influence in twentieth-century American politics. Her first book, Bay Cities and Water Politics (1998), examined regional public works and political reform in American cities. As a public historian, she has researched nation-building and public memory, and curated exhibits on twentieth-century tourism economics, the nineteenth-century Pacific ceramics trade, and the environmental history of the military in southern California. She teaches courses on the history of water resources policy and development in the American West; the history of current environmental crises, the environmental history of warfare, and the role of the media in shaping environmental politics. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Michigan.

Finn Arne Jørgensen is professor of history at the University of Stavanger, Norway. He is the author of Making a Green Machine: The Infrastructure of Beverage Container Recycling and coeditor of New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies.