Bringing together scholarship from across the globe, this volume of RCC Perspectives aims to shed light and stimulate discussion on the past, present, and future of the “unruly” environments that frustrate efforts at social and environmental control.

Through a short account of French reclamation in Algeria, this paper shows that it is between two divergent notions of environmental agency—environments acted upon and environments acting—that unruliness emerges as a provocative and potentially useful theme for environmental historians.