In the 1970s, an Arab oil embargo thrust energy forward as a topic concern in the United States and as well in Europe. In 1980, as part of a U.S. educational initiative focusing on energy, Mel Kranzberg joined two of his colleagues to edit Energy and the Way We Live, and soon thereafter a number of books dealing with the history of energy and technology emerged, among them George Daniels and Mark Rose’s Energy and Transport (1982) and Thomas Hughes’ Networks of Power (1993). At ICOHTEC’s 1982 symposium in Smolenice, Czechoslovakia, participants agreed that the next symposium at Lerbach/Cologne, the Federal Republic of Germany, should focus on ‘energy in history.’ The 1984 Lerbach meeting resulted in two volumes of forty papers as well as a volume of Czechoslovakian contributions edited by Jarolave Purs. Through ICOHTEC’s next five symposia, energy continued as a topic of interest with perhaps thirty papers looking at energy resources, production, transportation and urban use. Growing out of these energy topics, a closely related interest in the environment emerged, with my book, Energy and the Making of Modern California appearing in 1997 in a book series focusing on ‘technology and the environment.’

Beginning in 1998 at the Lisbon symposium, technology and the environment appeared as a topic in its own right with a large session focusing on ‘technology and natural disasters.’ A year later in Belfort, France, an even larger session looked the ‘natural environment and technological choice’ and, with a second session on ‘technological choice and society within the built environment,’ melded energy consumption to the human/nature relationship. Several of the participants in these ICOHTEC sessions gathered at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) meeting in Munich in 2000, where in anticipation of ICOHTEC’s Prague symposium on ‘technological landscapes: energy, transport and environment,’ they formed a new organization, Envirotech, which subsequently has met alternately with SHOT and the American Society for Environmental History. Thus, ICOHTEC’s continued focus on technology, energy and the environment proved instrumental in giving birth to a new subfield in both the histories of technology and of the environment, one recently highlighted in the recent Envirotech sponsored book The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History (2010) and, as well, by publications of ICOHTEC members. This paper will briefly review ICOHTEC’s role in the study of energy, technology and the environment as well as try to suggest directions for the future.