Gareth Davies is a political and environmental historian at St. Anne’s College. He is interested in the historical evolution of human attitudes to nature, and with the competing narratives of fear, conquest, wonder, and coexistence that have accompanied the settlement and then intensive development of hitherto ‘virgin’ landscapes. He is currently completing a book that explores these themes in relation to the development of American responses to ‘natural’ disaster, from the eighteenth century to the present. He recently gave a talk about ‘Global Coastal Cities and Climate Change’, exploring patterns of similarity and difference in the forms that the current environmental crisis is taking in Jakarta, Rotterdam, and Miami, and especially in the way that the three societies and polities have been responding to it. He would be interested in pursuing foundation funding for a larger study that historicised these questions, and expanded the number of cases to include Latin America, southern Europe, Africa, India and China.