Kent A. "Kip" Curtis is an environmental historian whose research and teaching examine the relationships among environment, technology, resources, food systems, and sustainability. Across his work, he is especially interested in how human societies understand and respond to ecological limits, and how technologies, institutions, and systems of knowledge shape those responses.

He teaches courses in United States history, environmental history, and food history.

Environmental History, Mining, and Technology

Curtis’s first book, Gambling on Ore: The Nature of Metal Mining in the United States (University Press of Colorado, 2013), examines how uncertainty about the character and extent of ore deposits shaped mining technology, investment, settlement, and environmental change in the nineteenth-century United States.

His related scholarship includes “Producing a Gold Rush,” winner of the Western History Association’s W. Turrentine Jackson Award; “Greening Anaconda,” on environmental remediation in a former Montana smelting city; and “‘Tanks Are Born Underground’: Mining and World War II,” published in The Nature of War: American Environments and World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He is currently developing a new essay on gold rushes and the nineteenth century.

His work has also expanded toward longer histories of energy, technology, and human development. With John L. Brooke, he is coauthor of Climate, Energy, and Human History: Living within the Earth System (Cambridge University Press, 2027), an advanced undergraduate textbook that interprets human history through changing relationships among climate, energy, food production, technology, social organization, and planetary systems.

Environmental Ideas and Sustainability

Curtis also works on the history and practice of environmental ideas. His essay “The Virtue of Thoreau: Biography, Geography, and History in Walden Woods” reconsiders Thoreau by placing his ideas within their social, historical, and geographic context.

His current book manuscript, Relearning Sustainability: Race, Place, and the Human Practice of Care, argues that sustainability must be understood not simply as a technical or managerial problem but as an embodied moral and relational practice. Drawing on environmental thought, education, race, community food systems, and the Edible Peace Patch project in St. Petersburg, Florida, the book develops the idea of “seeing like a garden”: an approach grounded in attention to place, uneven histories, reciprocity, and the everyday practices of care through which communities and environments are sustained.

At Ohio State, Curtis brings these questions into institutional sustainability work. He has served since 2024 as Chair of the Sustainability Institute’s Sustainability in Action Subcommittee, connecting research, teaching, student engagement, and applied sustainability initiatives across the university.

Food Systems and Community-Engaged Research

Since 2016, Curtis has led a long-term effort to develop a replicable system of small-scale commercial urban agriculture. The work grew into a major community-university partnership supported by a $2 million Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research Seeding Solutions grant.

The project asked a larger systems question: what institutions, technologies, knowledge, infrastructure, and markets are necessary to make very small-scale commercial agriculture economically and socially viable? Work in Mansfield and Marion trained twenty-four prospective growers and helped launch twelve microfarms associated with the Richland Gro-Op cooperative.

That research has since developed into a broader effort to make the system replicable in other communities. Intellectual property emerging from the work is being developed through the American Farm Initiative; AFI-Learns supports education and implementation; and MIDAS, a software platform under development, is designed to help communities reproduce and manage the system.

Curtis has discussed this work in two TEDx talks: “Fulfilling the Promise of the Land Grant University” and “Fixing the Food System: First You Need the Farmers.”

Food History, Teaching, and Public Scholarship

Curtis’s recent work also explores food literacy and the ways modern food systems distance consumers from the environmental, technological, economic, and labor systems that make food possible. These questions inform his course Food in World History, which uses food as a lens for examining agriculture, empire, trade, industrialization, migration, inequality, and environmental change.

Across his research, teaching, and public scholarship, Curtis is interested in the same underlying problem: how people come to understand the material systems on which their lives depend, and how that understanding can shape more durable relationships among communities, technologies, and environments.

Contact Kent A. Curtis