Below you’ll find a few samples of Josh Kercsmar’s academic and nonprofit writing.

Kercsmar’s academic work centers on a large, cross-cutting, question: How do peoples’ attitudes toward nature influence the ways they interact with each other? His book manuscript addresses this question by exploring how the treatment of slaves and animals overlapped in the British Atlantic World, ca. 1600 – 1834.

Buillding on this work, a recent essay of his investigates how a diverse group of early antislavery writers drew parallels between slavery and the exploitation of animals as part of their larger attacks on speculative capitalism:

• “Interspecies Anticapitalism in British and American Humanitarian Writings, 1800–1850,” in Bellwether Histories: Animals, Humans, and U.S. Environments in Crisis, ed. Susan Nance and Jennifer Marks (University of Washington Press, 2023)

Another of his pieces moves the inquiry in a different direction. It argues, in effect, that divergent patterns of dog evolution shaped encounters between whites and Indians in North America, particularly as they read — and judged — each other through their dogs:

• “Wolves at Heart: How Dog Evolution Shaped Whites’ Perceptions of Indians in North America,” Environmental History (2016)

From academic essays, to book reviews across a range of journals, to encyclopedia entries and more, Kercsmar is very interested in exploring how people in the past viewed the natural world, as well as how and why those ideas changed over time.

Serving as Vice President of Preserve Rural Maine (PRM) has introduced Kercsmar to a world that, while different from academia, surfaces many of the basic questions that animate his research and teaching: Why do local farmers have such a strong connection to their land? How does the logic of developing natural spaces work, and what does it have to do with capitalism? Why is it possible, even in an age of massive political polarization, for a core group of conservatives and progressives to work together to address deep structural inequalities?

Working with PRM allows him to wrestle with these questions, while also arguing for more sustainable alternatives to industrial-scale development of working farms, timberlands, and natural spaces. See, for example, the following:

• “Aroostook Renewable Gateway Receives Up To $425 Million in Federal Funding” (Oct. 24, 2024)
• “Protect Sears Island!” (Jun. 10, 2024)
• Testimony on LD2266 “An Act Regarding Offshore Wind Terminals Located in Coastal Sand Dune Systems” (Mar. 18, 2024)
• Testimony on LD2087 “An Act to Protect Property Owners by Preventing the Use of Eminent Domain to Build Transmission Lines Under the Northern Maine Renewable Energy Development Program” (delivered Jan. 23, 2024)
• “The Aroostook Renewable Gateway Is a Failure of Imagination,” Bangor Daily News (Nov. 7, 2023)

In both academic and nonprofit settings, questions about why our attitudes toward nature are what they are — and how they got to be that way — inspire Kercsmar to keep thinking, writing, and working to create change for the benefit of future generations.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to talk with him about connections with your own ideas and interests!