In March 2020, as the scope and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic began to come into focus, we reached out to some of the leading lights in the field of environmental history—some senior, some junior, from every continent but Antarctica—and asked if they would be interested in committing to paper their thoughts about the meaning of the virus from their perspectives. Our hope was that the collected essays could provide some useful context for understanding a global historical phenomenon and also serve as a sort of time capsule, capturing what environmental historians thought was noteworthy at a moment.