Contribution short abstract:

The convenors of the session will provide an overview of current debates concerning the role of Environmental History in the environmental crisis. They will introduce key terms, arguments, and positions that are significant in this debate.

Contribution long abstract:

As the environmental crisis worsens (climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, fossilist economy, and the energy transition), time for historical reflection seems to have become short. Historians are challenged to enlarge the scope and scale of their activities beyond understanding past and present phenomena towards more future-oriented approaches; action, it seems, has taken the place of analysis. Is this observation at all appropriate? Are historians even complicit in creating a new environmental urgency that defers historical examination to an afterthought?

In a joint introduction, the two convenors of the roundtable start from this provocation to reflect the difficult position of our discipline(s) in the midst of the great environmental crisis. Can we as environmental historians keep abreast of taking ecological problems and their envisioned solutions for granted? Can theoretical and methodical positions that mediate between critique and action be formulated? Is there a way for us as environmental historians to historicize the ecological crisis while simultaneously fostering green transitions? And is such a dual task desirable at all?

We will introduce key terms, arguments, and positions that are significant in the debate about the scope and function of environmental history in the Anthropocene. Additionally, we aim to outline some ideas on a radically historical concept of the environment that can be perceived as both a critical and forward-looking contribution to the contemporary environmental challenges.

Contribution short abstract:

This contribution explores the emerging field of “urgent histories” and poses methodologies and future directions for the discipline. I trace the historiography, contemplate what is and is not urgent about our work, and seek to bring together experts beyond history working in times of chaos.

Contribution long abstract:

In 2020, Yves Rees and Ben Huf introduced a forum on Urgent Histories to the journal History Australia. The special issue included an article on doing environmental history in urgent times: the journal’s most-read of all time. Two years later, “Urgent Histories” was chosen as the theme for the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association, the professional organisation that oversees production of the journal. Environmental historians had much to contribute to this theme: sharing reflections on the discipline’s capacity to affect change in a decade that has so far been marked by climate crisis and pandemic. This turn towards urgent histories is a phenomenon that is by no means limited to Australia. Globally, historians have been shifting their attention to the climate crisis and experimenting with new forms of scholarship that are cognisant of — and attempt to respond to — this existential threat.

This contribution attempts to wrangle these scattered voices, and proposes an emergent discipline: the turn to urgency. By giving a name to this trend in the scholarship, I seek not merely to observe and legitimise it, but equally to problematise it. I ponder whether urgent histories are merely extractive, and explore the need for care for ourselves, our (more-than-human) kin, and the Earth, while doing this work. I elaborate on the work already done in establishing the field, and contemplate future directions and gaps yet to be filled. I consider what is and is not urgent in our work, and frame academia as activism.

Contribution long abstract:

The first six years of my academic life I trained and worked primarily as a historian. However, I eventually decided that the discipline did not allow me the direct, activistic engagement I wanted to. In order to feel like I could be useful, and contribute to finding ways to mitigate the climate crisis, I traded the past with the present. And now, after a new Master's degree in environmental science, I am starting a PhD in Polar Science, working on currently active research projects in the Arctic.

In my contribution I would like to explain and discuss some of the reasons for my switch, and provocatively question the potential and feasibility of activist historiography for the discipline as whole. Although my contribution can be therefore somewhat provocative, I wish to stress that it is however not meant to disqualify the idea to write activist histories. Especially since, paradoxically, some of the main motivations for my own switch have been Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's Merchants of Doubt, or John McNeill and Peter Engelke's The Great Acceleration.

Contribution short abstract:

There definitely is a dispute about how activist environmental historians should be. I believe, however, that beyond that, there is an inherent tendency in environmental history itself to take back history in the emphatic sense. A loss of opportunities to be active is itself actively brought about.

Contribution long abstract:

Environmental history has itself changed in the course of its history. Set out to study the “interactions people have had with nature in past times” (Donald Worster), it sought in its early days first of all to explain how humanity has shaped the environments current form. Today, in view of the widening ecological crisis, environmental history seems to prefer to investigate how a changed environment in turn shapes people and human cultures. The form of interaction is being reweighted. But at the same time, the time horizon has also shifted: away from the influence that humans exerted on the environment in the past to the influence that a changed environment will exert on humans in the future.

In doing so, to me it becomes apparent that extrapolation of those historical interactions studied in the early days, leading to our crisis-ridden present, tends toward the retraction of history itself. The window of time, as well as the space for human action, threatens to become ever narrower. What looms is the end of humanity. The view of the future is increasingly a prehistoric one.

There definitely is a dispute about how activist environmental historians should be. I believe, however, that beyond that, there is an inherent tendency in environmental history itself to take back history in the emphatic sense. A loss of opportunities to be active is itself actively brought about.

I would like to bring this paradoxical role of environmental history into the debate of the Roundtable.

Contribution short abstract:

This contribution argues for the need for historians to move beyond the important and longstanding critique of the concept of the Anthropocene into a politicization of its content as a historical-geological epoch. Historians will need to create a critical understanding of this unprecedented time.

Contribution long abstract:

This contribution argues for the need for historians to move beyond the important and longstanding critique of the concept of the Anthropocene into a politicization of its content as a historical-geological epoch. While important, these critiques have tended become internal affairs within the humanities, and as the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene moves rapidly towards formalization, there is an urgent need for a critical understanding of its meaning among the public as well as a reformed historical consciousness. I argue that rather than turning our back on the Anthropocene for its fraught relation to global power structures, we need to seize the opportunity to define its meaning in historical terms. This includes the economic and ideological structures and notions that have underlined the Great acceleration as a signature of the Anthropocene, as well as a critical understanding of the means of knowing and changing the environment at scale during this period.

Contribution short abstract:

In this presentation, we will discuss museums' vital role in climate literacy, and explore the significance of intertwining historical narratives of human-climate interactions with contemporary societal concerns regarding climate change within museum exhibitions.

Contribution long abstract:

Museums are important actors within society, connecting its different sectors, acting as catalysts for change and playing an important role in building climate change literacy. Since the 1990s, concerns about climate change have materialized in exhibitions around the world. Interestingly, museums are only a minority in the set of spaces that create, promote, and receive these exhibitions: from around 200 exhibitions, from 1992 to 2018, less than 40 took place in museums. Climate exhibitions in natural history and science museums usually focus on the natural and physical sciences and present climate change from the deep past of Earth into a future of disasters. In these museums, the climate thematic exhibitions seem to make little contact with the recent human past, missing the opportunity for visitors to engage with the examples, lessons and experiences that the past offers. On the other hand, we can find examples of exhibitions or activities addressing recent past relations between society and climate in museums with more generalistic collections, such as historical, ethnic, archaeological and art collections. In this presentation, we will explore the significance of intertwining historical narratives of human-climate interactions with contemporary societal concerns regarding climate change within museum exhibitions, and discuss how historical research can function as a valuable tool, enabling a more profound understanding of the present climate crisis and the identification of common paths towards its resolution.