In the Note from the Editors that appeared in the January issue, we provided some guidelines to prospective contributors, intended to help them prepare their manuscripts for submission to Environmental History. Our suggestions encouraged authors to focus on the “Big 3”—narrative, argument, and intervention—and to make each core element as compelling as possible. In the interests of symmetry, we’d like to focus on what makes for a good referee report in this Note from the Editors. There is nothing secret or proprietary about the instructions we send to referees when they accept an invitation to review an essay. Indeed, they are posted on the journal’s website. But we hope that a discussion about this part of the peer review process will render benefits to authors and referees alike.

After accepting an invitation to review an essay, referees receive the following list of guiding questions, grouped into five categories, and are asked to assign the essay a score from 1 to 10 for its significance, originality, and quality, with 10 as the highest score. They are also reminded that Environmental History has historically accepted only about 12 percent of submissions for publication. (That number varies from year to year, of course, with some years being slightly higher and others dropping under 10 percent.) Because of the volume of manuscripts the journal receives, referees should be convinced that essays they endorse will be among the twelve-to-fifteen best articles submitted in that calendar year. The questions are as follows:

Significance: How important is the subject of this piece to the field of environmental history? How likely is it to spur conversation in the field? Is it likely to be widely cited?

Quality: Are the argument, intervention, and narrative arc all clear? Is the piece well-structured and well-written? Is the evidence to support the argument richly sourced? Please note that we expect evidence to include primary sources, usually including archival sources.

Originality: How original is the author’s argument? How does this piece contribute to scholarly debate? Does it challenge conventional understandings, or does it simply confirm what environmental historians already know or would be likely to guess?

Historiographical engagement: Is the manuscript well situated in the historiographical landscape it inhabits? Does it draw upon and engage relevant debates within the field of environmental history? Do the citations reflect the diverse authorship that marks the field of environmental history?

Audience: Is it aimed principally or only incidentally at environmental historians? Will it appeal to a wide swath of environmental historians? Might it find an audience beyond the field by underscoring the significance of environmental history to other subfields? If changes are needed to broaden the manuscript’s appeal beyond specialists in a particular area, how extensive would they need to be?

A number of themes recur in these questions. One concerns the article’s capacity to provoke new conversations in the field. Because the journal only has space for three or four articles per issue, on average, the most deserving essays are those that advance the field by challenging historiographical commonplaces and generating novel insights and discussions that open the space for new kinds of inquiries. The most useful reviews flag articles that simply corroborate the conventional wisdom or provide an additional data point illustrating a well-established observation, such as the exploitative nature of imperial relationships.

A second thread running through the guiding questions pertains to fit. The journal receives many worthy, well-researched, provocative submissions that nevertheless do not primarily interrogate the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world, the journal’s core mission. Environmental history, as a discipline, is a relatively big tent, sharing porous boundaries with the history of science, historical geography, animal studies, environmental science, and other subfields, but it nevertheless is distinguished by a focus on how human history shapes natural history, and vice versa. (When discussing new submissions, we often use the sadly unpronounceable acronym RbHatNHW and evaluate the degree to which the essay uses the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world as its anchor.) History of science articles, for instance, may examine the work of ecologists or conservation biologists, but are probably better suited for Isis if they focus on the production of knowledge. Similarly, farming, as the agricultural historian David Danbom has drolly noted, “mostly takes place outside,” but a history of row crop agriculture that emphasizes labor or economics without a comparable accent on the role of the ostensibly natural world would probably find a more welcome reception at a journal like Agricultural History.¹ We do a preliminary review of manuscripts when they arrive and redirect manuscripts that clearly aren’t good fits to other journals. But we allow a good deal of latitude in delimiting the boundaries of the field at the initial stage, and so we ask reviewers to carefully consider the intended audience as they evaluate manuscripts.

That evaluation of fit extends even to manuscripts that are undeniably environmental history in form, if their focus is too narrow. When we give talks, we frequently tell authors and referees alike that they should keep in mind the fact that articles in the journal are likely to be read by a diverse range of scholars, and so both in producing and evaluating manuscripts, they should imagine what an article’s takeaway might be for an audience that could well include a historian of forests in British Columbia, a historian of Australian fisheries, a historian who writes about soybeans in the Brazilian Cerrado, a historian of urban parks in Korea or Japan, a historian of industrial pollution in California, and a historian of outdoor recreation in the Alps—or scholars of some similar combination of topics that regularly appear on the programs of environmental history conferences. Case studies that offer no such takeaway and engage specialists only in a particular geographic region or subfield lack the broad appeal that articles in the field’s flagship journal should possess. In these instances, there is often room to rework the manuscript to expand its audience. Indeed, part of our job as editors is to help authors frame their manuscripts to best advantage, but we specifically ask referees to assess the extent of the changes a given manuscript would need to lend it an appeal beyond a narrow band of specialists. Referees can usually discern where the author’s heart is—in terms of both a manuscript’s framing as an environmental history and the breadth of its intended audience—by examining the works cited; if environmental historians comprise a small minority of citations, or if the citations to the secondary literature prove decidedly narrow, the essay might better belong in a different journal.

A third thread has to do with the thoroughness of the research and the effectiveness of a manuscript’s argumentation. We depend upon referees, as subject experts, to assess the richness of the primary research and the effectiveness of the manuscript’s engagement with germane secondary literature. It is not difficult to imagine a manuscript with an argument that appears novel and compelling but that rests on inadequate research, and it takes someone steeped in the archival material and historiographical debates of the place and subject under evaluation to uncover that inadequacy. We have been fortunate during our tenure to have encountered comparatively few manuscripts practicing academic legerdemain of any sort, and our editorial office fact-checks every manuscript’s notes so far as is reasonably possible before moving it into production, but we nevertheless appreciate reports that affirm the thoroughness of the research.

The best readers’ reports, then, make a case for the inclusion or exclusion of a given manuscript based on its potential to prompt new discussions, its fit for the journal, the scope of its appeal, and the extensiveness of its research. We’re less interested in a particular form or rationale than a deliberate consideration of the criteria. It is not difficult to imagine—in fact, we sometimes get—two excellent reports with divergent recommendations: one might find that a given manuscript’s intervention is a bit narrow, while the other contends that despite the tight focus, the manuscript opens new territory geographically or topically, or perhaps offers a perspective that has been heretofore overlooked. But reports that indicate both whether a reviewer can see “a clear and nearly certain path to publication” (which is the standard for moving an article forward) for the manuscript and why it does or does not merit serious consideration for publication in the journal are enormously helpful to us as editors.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the best reports prove valuable not only to us but to the authors. Consequently, they frame their evaluations kindly, but without skirting real issues and so point to fatal flaws in the argumentation, historiographic oversights, evasive theses, and the like, and by doing so offer a road map for improving the manuscript for publication—even if it’s down the road or at another journal.

As has been the case for every article we’ve published during our tenure as editors, the articles in this issue benefited tremendously from the peer review process. They once again cover a wide swath of topics, but are joined in exploring the histories of ideas integral to the modern environmental movement. In the journal’s opening article, Rebecca Woods challenges conventional wisdom about wildlife protection and extinction. By telling the intertwined stories of mammoth and elephant ivory, Woods underscores the surprising conceptual complexity of extinction by highlighting the ways in which vanished species live on. Julia Nordblad takes up the history of a prominent thread of contemporary environmentalism by exploring the concept of ecosystem services. To the degree the term reinforces anthropocentrism, she argues, it works against its aim of fostering “planetary habitability.” In this issue’s final article, Atte Arffman examines debates over the development of South Carolina’s coast in the wake of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, when regulations designed to curb coastal erosion were brushed aside in the name of economic development.

The forum in this issue centers on the oft-neglected subject of private-land conservation. At its center is a call for environmental historians to engage with (and help equip) private land conservation organizations, especially community- and tribal-led initiatives. By tracking the histories of lesser known conservation institutions, its essays, authored both by historians and activists, call for environmental historians not only to rethink the axiomatic distinctions between public and private land that have informed histories of the conservation movement, but to apply an environmental justice lens in their assessments of the effectiveness of conservation tools.

In their Gallery essay, Dagomar Degroot and Rachel Kase argue that the rich visual legacy of Arctic whaling—in the form of myriad paintings, etchings, and maps—reveals how early modern investors and merchants extracted profits from the Greenland Sea while whales and whalers suffered dire consequences. The book reviews, as usual, showcase the diverse approaches of the field.

By the time the issue goes to press in early April, we’ll be preparing to head to Pittsburgh for the annual meeting of the ASEH. We look forward to seeing many of you there. In the meantime, keep the manuscripts coming.