The contributors have, accordingly, gone in a variety of directions some have focused on geographical regions, some have focused thematically, and others have considered the epidemiology or microbiology of the COVID-19 virus.

Our instructions to each contributor were spare: simply convey to our readers what seems important in understanding the pandemic and keep it short. The result of their efforts is the following collection of diverse and thought-provoking essays. Although we have done so in private correspondence, we would like to thank them here for their generosity, their professionalism, and their diligence. We were heartened by the response-despite the disruptions to daily life that most of us have experienced as the virus closed schools and universities, almost every invitee agreed. Our hope was that the collected essays could provide some useful context for understanding a global historical phenomenon and also serve as a sort of time capsule, capturing what environmental historians thought was noteworthy at a moment when the natural world came crashing into the human world in a dramatic way. In March 2020, as the scope and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic began to come into focus, we reached out to some of the leading lights in the field of environmental history-some senior, some junior, from every continent but Antarctica-and asked if they would be interested in committing to paper their thoughts about the meaning of the virus from their perspectives.

Oakland zoo jimmy smoking chimpanzee