Oral histories of the environmental sector

Published on 7 April 2025

Research team

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Eleanor Hadley-Kershaw – University of Exeter

Angela Cassidy – University of Exeter

Susan Molyneux-Hodgson – University of Exeter

An image of Paul Merchant from the British Library asking the panel questions at the Biodiversity Parliament 2023.

Paul Merchant – National Life Stories

Mary Stewart – British Library

Partners

Aims

RENEW is undertaking collaborative research across disciplines and sectors while also studying the practices of collaboration. Through our work exploring 20th and 21st century histories of environmental interdisciplinarity we are drawing lessons from past experiences, exploring how perspectives and practices have changed over time, and building public archives to inform future researchers, practitioners and publics.

Working with The British Library’s Oral History team, we aim to:

Draw lessons from past experiences of collaboration

Contribute to historical records of the formation of environmental science and the broader environmental sector via deposits to the British Library’s Sound Archive.

Approach

We are collaborating with The British Library’s Oral History team to integrate social science and historical approaches to studying interdisciplinarity. RENEW has contracted National Life Stories to record a series of oral history interviews with people involved in environmental collaboration during their lifetime.

What is an oral histories interview?

Oral history interviews are in-depth, long-form interviews, conducted one-to-one over many hours. NLS are conducting ‘focused’ interviews (~3hours) concentrating on collaborative experiences, alongside a smaller number of ‘life story’ interviews (~12 hours) with key individuals. A skilled interviewer asks open questions working from a chronological spine, often building a relationship over several sessions. The slow pace and open format offer space for a depth of description and reflection that would not be possible otherwise, and centres the interviewee’s experiences, emotions and perspectives.

These interviews with mid/late-career and retired scientists, professionals, land managers, civil servants and activists involved in biodiversity and/or wider environmental work are uniquely detailed and will provide a rich resource for future research. Through this work we aim to document how people have worked together to understand and address biodiversity loss. We believe that practical lessons from the past can offer ideas for present and future collaborative work.

A vintage photograph of a book cover that reads Agriculture and the Environment, from the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology.

Above: Image courtesy of British Library and National Life Stories.

Next Steps

These in-depth biographical accounts will be preserved in the British Library’s Sound Archive – a collection of national significance. Alongside gathering new interviews, RENEW and BL researchers are working together to analyse it alongside existing BL collections (Oral History of Farming and Land Management, Oral History of British Science) and ethnographic data about RENEW’s unfolding collaborative practices.