Climate Change and the Role of the Historian
What can a historian do when faced with the enormity of climate change and the difficulties wrapped in trying to understand it both presently and historically? Sponsored by the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, this year’s annual event series Climate Change in Historical Perspective will help both historians and the public wrestle with this idea and many more to come.
Wednesday night’s webinar featured three prominent historians working on the forefront of environmental history work with an emphasis on the relationship of human history and climate change. The panelists each introduced some of their recent scholarship as well as some exciting insights on current and upcoming work that will certainly establish new standards of historical practice and provide exciting new historical perspectives to climate change.
New Lepage Center Director, Dr. Paul Rosier introduced the three speakers for the evening. First to speak was Dr. Deborah Coen, Chair of the History of Science & Medicine Program at Yale University. With her unique background as a physicist and a historian, Dr. Coen approaches the intellectual and cultural histories of physical and environmental sciences in Central Europe particularly in her most recent publication Climate in Motion. Her presentation, “Doing Science Differently,” looked at how the Habsburg Empire used local knowledge and everyday people’s connection with the climate to create more usable science. The motivation to create usable science can have important implications for current scientists and the relationship between climate change and a general public that may want more transparency and interaction with this kind of research.
Next was Dr. Dagomar Degroot, an Associate Professor at Georgetown University whose most recent monograph, The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720, explored the Dutch Golden Age which occurred simultaneously with the Little Ice Age’s coldest years. Dr. Degroot introduced fascinating approaches scholars use to understand historical instances of climate change. Whether it be interrogating archives of nature, like studying ice core formations from ice sheets in the Artic, or compiling research from archives of society, such as understanding historical weather patterns from old ship’s logs. With a varied approach and a variety of audiences, Dr. Degroot provides possibilities for what a historian ought to do in a time of climate change crisis. With contributions to the Washington Post, Aeon, and The Conversation among others, Dr. Degroot taps into the historical approaches to climate change to better understand possibilities of a future.
For our final speaker, Dr. Ruth Morgan presented her research all the way from Canberra, Australia. There she serves as an Associate Professor in the School of History as the Director of the University’s Centre for Environmental History. Her book, Running Out? Water in Western Australia focused on the history of water over two hundred years in the region of western Australia. Morgan’s work, along with the all the works introduced by the panelists, carry important national and global relevance beyond their research scope. Morgan’s presentation touched on a variety of topics such as the role of the historian in environmental history, conceptualization of climate change as continuity or rupture, and inequity. Of note was the concept of climate data empathy, the importance of contextualizing and understanding the inequity of historical climate data due to the legacies of imperialism and Eurocentrism. One way to combat this is an interrogation of knowledge production, which was a component of all three presentations.
After the scholars’ presentations, Dr. Rosier led a short dialogue and fielded questions from the viewers. Dr. Degroot spoke on the unique difficulties of public advocacy and scholarship that climate change scholars can face, while also acknowledging the importance of this work and its value to the greater public. Dr. Coen and Dr. Morgan echoed this sentiment, and both spoke on the possibility of historians to better understand climate change through variations in approach, such as an interdisciplinary focus to bridge the gap between science and history.
Climate change is not a domain solely for scientists. Whether through everyday peoples’ recollections of earthquakes, archives of nature holding information stored in tree rings, or acknowledgement of indigenous knowledge, these three speakers provide examples for other historians to creatively to bridge the gap between disciplines and audiences so that everyone, not just historians or scientists can better understand our past, present, and future.
