Call for Papers for two panels under the theme “Intentional Preindustrial Sustainability: Practices, Norms, and Ideas in Europe” at the upcoming “Premodern Ecologies” conference organized by the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Oct. 20-22, 2016 (http://www.colorado.edu/cmems/cmems-conference)

These panels will examine preindustrial European usages of and reflections about natural resources that were geared more or less consciously towards ensuring productivity over the long term. In many cases intentional sustainability is most apparent in the management of commons or public resources, where concerns for maintaining pastures, woods, and wildlife have produced, among other things, abundant normative and regulatory texts. But contributors may also examine how preindustrial people managed privately-held land and resources, where for example efforts to provide ongoing productivity shaped arable farming, gardening, arboriculture, animal husbandry, and other agrarian practices. Other approaches to the larger topic of preindustrial sustainability are also welcome.

Those interested should send proposals of 250 words or less as soon as possible, and not later than May 24^th, to both Abigail Dowling (dowling_ap@mercer.edu) and Richard Keyser (rkeyser@wisc.edu).