From Dealing with the Dinosaur (and Its Swamp) by Kurk Dorsey:
...It is time for diplomatic historians to deal with that other dinosaur; not the one who battles Godzilla for dominance of a swamp, but the one who fails to pay attention to its environment, fouls its own habitat (and let us not forget that there are many other tenants in that habitat), and seems largely incapable of taking past lessons on the subject and applying them to impending problems. In fact, we should be prepared to study the swamp itself, paying more attention to how nature influences foreign policy. Scholars in other fields, most notably various political scientists, some environmental historians, and the occasional historian of science, have taken international environmental issues seriously; and of course Jared Diamond has become nearly a household name by placing the environment at the center of a grand theory of international relations. For all of the good work these scholars have done, though, diplomatic historians should not leave this area of increasing interest and importance to others; by our training we should be better equipped than other historians to understand the practical dimensions of environmental diplomacy, and we should be able to historicize that diplomacy at least as well as political scientists. Given the steadily increasing importance of environmental challenges, from deforestation to sending our pollution offshore, we diplomatic historians should be as interested in environmental diplomacy as in political relations with various extinct dictators. The opportunity for our field seems to me to be as great as the opportunity presented by the opening of Eastern European archives for Cold War studies...
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