Doing environmental history in urgent times

Abstract

The human/nature relationship is at the heart of one of the most urgent crises of our time: climate change. What does this mean for environmental historians, trained as we are to examine the culture/nature relationship, its changing temporal expressions, to challenge the binary which underpins the discipline of history itself? This article is framed as a conversation between three environmental historians as we respond to key questions about environmental history and the climate crisis. Together we ponder the skills we bring to understanding it, the stories we have found to move us forward and our thoughts about the interface between history, science and activism.

History and the Climate Crisis

“…It critically reviews 'lessons from history' (Salmons 2010;Chapman 2020) approaches as too simplistic and binary, and argues instead for approaches that foreground historical concepts and the interrogation of causation, continuity and change. Finally, acknowledging how the youth climate strike (among other developments) has sensitised many students to the issues of climate change, the chapter has addressed how discussions about activism (Holmes et al 2020) can be brought into the history curriculum and managed effectively in classrooms.…”

“…Greta Thunberg, in a 2019 speech to the American Congress, invoked the spirit of Martin Luther King and the other civil rights leaders who marched from Selma to Montgomery in protest against discrimination towards Black voters in Alabama (Thunberg 2019). Similarly, Extinction Rebellion meetings routinely refer to civil rights and suffrage movements (Holmes et al 2020), while the prestigious journal Nature published a call for scientists to engage in 'non-violent civil disobedience', drawing from the examples of Rosa Parks, Emmeline Pankhurst and Mohandas Gandhi (Gardner and Wordley 2019). Establishing these connections in our teaching illustrates Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's observation and argument that 'it takes concrete histories to make any concept come to life' (Tsing 2015: 66).…”

“…In considering how teachers can respond to these different incoming preconceptions, the chapter draws from existing scholarship on the teaching of other sensitive and controversial histories, including teaching the Holocaust (Foster, Pearce and Pettigrew 2020). Finally, acknowledging how the student climate strike (among other developments) has sensitised many students to the issues of climate change, the chapter addresses how discussions about activism (Holmes, Gaynor and Morgan 2020) can be brought into the history curriculum and managed effectively in classrooms.…”

‘Differences within a range of similarity’: mapping Australian urban history

“…The phenomenon is most evident in the thriving areas of environmental and settler-colonial histories. 34 While a broader evaluation of the state of Australian urban history is beyond the scope of this article, some observations are relevant in line with the inquiry into doctoral theses. A disjuncture appears to exist between the interests of recent urban history doctoral students and those of academic Australian historians.…”

Of mermaids and monsters: Transgender history and the boundaries of the human in eighteenth‐ and early‐nineteenth‐century Britain

“…Yet, as environmental historians have long pointed out, there is also an urgency to thinking beyond anthropocentrism, to understand how 'humans' and 'nature' interact and change each other, and thereby break down the boundary between 'human' and the 'non-human animal', the agential versus the 'natural'. 9 Sujit Sivasundaram, for example, calls for 'multi-species' and even 'trans-species' histories that illustrate the way life forms come together to generate historical change. 10 Trans scholars have already begun this work, showing how trans itself is a process 'through which thingness and beingness are constituted' that allows us to think beyond the human, to the ways in which we become configured or denied as 'human' in relationship to non-human animals.…”