Chase W. Fleece

Hello! I’m currently a second-year master’s student in the Department of History at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). As a historian of the twentieth-century United States and Canada, my research explores the intersections between agricultural production, anthropogenic pollution, and international relations. More specifically, I’m interested in how a degraded ecology in the Great Lakes region influenced transboundary natural resource management and conservation efforts beginning in the early 1970s. Amid the novel dynamics of the Anthropocene, these histories illuminate the successes (and weaknesses) of environmental diplomacy in North America and its pressing global implications in this age of crisis.

My thesis project “Mayhem in the Muck: An Environmental History of Ohio’s Scioto Marsh,” explores how human settlement and commodity production culminated in the complete degradation of an extensive marsh–estimated to be between 16,000 and 20,000 acres–in Northwest Ohio. Centered around the region’s sapric soils, this study traces the rise and fall of the marsh’s vegetable industry from the 1880s through the 1990s. In doing so, “Mayhem in the Muck” highlights the consequences of unfettered monoculture, profit-driven conservation, and commodity specialization in vulnerable ecologies. Today, these forces have reshaped this once-proclaimed “onion capital of the world” into nothing more than monotonous fields of corn and soybeans.

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