How to contribute to “Places & Events”

“Places & Events” are short summaries of environmentally significant historical places or events, viewable on the Portal’s map and timeline. 

The Environment & Society Portal particularly encourages students to create their own “Places & Events.” This feature provides graduate students and advanced undergraduates with a unique opportunity to publish digital born essays in a concise format and to make individual research visible to an expanding online community. Submitted “Places and Events” items will be professionally edited and published on the Portal under a Creative Commons license, with full credits to the authors.

To submit a “Places& Events” item, choose a topic from your own studies, research interests, or experiences that fits one of the Environment & Society Portal’s eleven themes, then prepare the components listed below. The required metadata enables your content to work with the Portal’s map and timeline. Selected submissions will be published on the Environment & Society Portal under a Creative Commons license, with full credits to the authors. The Portal team will select a subset of submissions for publication. We reserve the right to edit approved entries.

Components:

1. Title:

  • Max. 100 characters.
  • The title should capture the reader’s attention and reflects the key themes of your chosen topic.

Examples: “First European Species in Oceania”; “Great Fire of London”

2. Summary: (max. 50 words)

  • The summary will be shown in search results and navigation tools, such as the interactive map or timeline
  • It should convey the main idea of the text body in present tense.

Examples: “The American diplomat and philologist George Perkins Marsh publishes Man and Nature.”; “The UN Conference for Environment and Development (UNED), known as the first “Earth Summit,” takes place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.”

3. Text Body:

  • The text body should clearly convey the facts and significance of your chosen topic in 150–200 words.
  • Any information mentioned in the summary should be repeated in the body.
  • Tense should be appropriate for context.
  • Whenever possible, the text should be concise and in active voice.

Example: “The Global 2000 Report, published in 1980, was commissioned by US President Jimmy Carter. It concluded that problems such as pollution, overpopulation, global warming, and other environmental issues posed a severe threat to the future of humanity, and called for international cooperation in solving these problems. The report attracted worldwide attention, and, as a consequence, scientists and the concerned public urged the president to act quickly and decisively against environmental destruction, which the report predicted would take place on a dramatic scale by the year 2000. However, in the face of Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, no follow-up action was taken on these issues.” (109 words)

4. Theme:

Suggest up to 3 themes from the following list: Biodiversity Climate Environmental Knowledge (science/ research/ ideas/ concepts/ theories) Environmental Movements Environmental Politics (incl. laws/ regulations) Infrastructure (incl. transport/ mobility) Landscape Transformation Disasters Pollution Population (incl. diseases/ epidemiology) Resources (incl. energy)

5. Keywords:

  • Suggest at least 3 tags for your entry (no person or place names).

6. Date (Day/Month/Year):

  • Provide a date (day/month/year) that is significant to your item.
  • It should be clear in the text body why this date is significant
  • For events covering longer periods of time (e.g., World War I), give the starting date (1914).

7. Region:

  • Suggest a place or region relevant to the item.
  • Be as specific as possible.

8. Further Reading:

  • Provide references for 2–5 further readings (books, journal articles, papers).
  • Use the Chicago Manual of Style bibliographic citation style.

Example: Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper Row, 1980.

9. Related Links:

  • Provide both a title and a URL for any external sites that may be of interest for readers

Example: The Journal of Ecocriticism, http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe

10. Images:

  • Provide at least one image for your entry (public domain or under Creative Commons license). State the specific CC license or, if public domain, briefly note the reason.
  • Provide a caption for each contributed image and the name of author.
  • Look for copyright free/public domain images in Creative Commons search engine (http://search.creativecommons.org/).

We look forward to your contributions!