Richard Hugh Grove was born on July 21, 1955, and passed away on June 25, 2020. He was a British historian and environmental activist who helped create the academic field of environmental history. His award-winning book, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (1995), is widely recognized as an important early work that explored how colonial expansion affected the environment. It also helped shape early Western ideas about environmentalism.

Life and work

Grove was the son of Alfred Thomas Grove, a climatologist from Cambridge, and Jean Mary Grove, who was born as Clark. He was married to Vinita Damodaran, a historian from the University of Sussex. Grove attended the Perse School in Cambridge. He studied geography at Hertford College, Oxford, earning a BA in 1979. He later received an MSc in Conservation Biology from University College London in 1980 and a PhD in history from the University of Cambridge in 1988.

He worked as a Fellow at Clare Hall and as a College Lecturer at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1991 to 1992. He also held positions at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University and the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. In the 1990s, he spent a year at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC.

In May 2002, Grove became a professor and started the Centre for World Environmental History at the University of Sussex. In 2006, he was given a five-year research position at the Australian National University, funded by an ARC Discovery fellowship. However, he was unable to complete this work because he was seriously injured in a car accident in Cooma, Australia, while returning from the Manning Clark property "Ness" on the far south coast of New South Wales. After this accident, he could not work.

Academic contributions

Grove wrote his first book when he was 21 years old. The book was about the Cambridgeshire Coprolite Mining Rush. He studied the political, environmental, and economic history of many places, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, and other islands in the Indian Ocean, Malawi, Ghana, Nigeria, parts of the Southern Caribbean like St. Vincent, Montserrat, Dominica, and Tobago, and Australia and New Zealand. His most important work involved carefully researching old documents in many languages to learn about the environmental history of these areas, especially from the 17th to 19th centuries. He focused on how nature changed on islands around the world. He believed that some important people in hot, wet regions near the equator helped develop early ideas about protecting the environment in British colonies. The movement of plants by people from colonial powers was very important and helped imperial countries become more aware of environmental issues. His main idea was presented in a paper called The Culture of Islands and the History of Environmental Concern, which he shared at the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values in 2000.

A more recent part of his work studied the historical effects of El Niño events. In 2000, he wrote a book with Australian geologist John Chappell about the harmful effects of the 1997–1998 El Niño in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

Grove started an academic journal called Environment and History.

A special book called The British Empire and the Natural World: Environmental Encounters in South Asia, edited by Deepak Kumar, Vinita Damadaran, and Rohan D'Souza, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011. This book honored Grove’s important work in environmental history before he had an accident.

Key publications

• Anderson, D., and Grove, R.H. (editors). 1987. Conservation in Africa: people, policies and practices. Cambridge University Press.
• Grove, R.H. 1992. Origins of Western Environmentalism. Scientific American 267 (1): 42–47. DOI: 10.1038/scientificamerican0792-42.
• Grove, R.H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40385-5.
• Grove, R.H., and J. MacGregor (editors). 1995. Environment and History: Zimbabwe. Cambridge: White Horse Press.
• Grove, R.H. 1997. Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940. Cambridge: White Horse Press. ISBN 1-874267-18-9.
• Grove, R.H., V. Damodaran, and S. Sangwan (editors). 1998. Nature & the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195638964.
• Grove, R.H., and J. Chappell. 2000. El Niño: History and Crisis: Studies from the Asia-Pacific Region. Cambridge: White Horse Press.
• Grove, R.H. 2007. The Great El Niño of 1789–93 and its global consequences: Reconstructing an extreme climatic event in world environmental history. The Medieval History Journal 10: 43–66.
• Grove, R.H., and Adamson, George. 2018. El Niño in World History. Palgrave. ISBN 9781137457394.