Public History in a Changing Climate

Stanton, Cathy

In a television interview last year, American writer and neo-agrarian icon Wendell Berry spoke about the “dreadful situation” facing young people who are grappling with the cascading environmental, economic, and social challenges linked with runaway capitalism and anthropogenic climate change. Berry noted that the recognition of our big problems creates an expectation of equally big solutions, but added that our own answers and fixes have too often been part and parcel of those problems, because we’ve tended to impose them in a way that ignores the limitations and needs of the environments we inhabit. Real change, he said, means learning to listen in new ways to the non-human world and refusing to be rushed or impatient even while acknowledging the urgent need for action. “I think of them,” Berry said of younger people entering this arena, “and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.” The idea of being patient in an emergency strikes me as useful for public historians to think about, but from the opposite direction. Rather than being impatient activists who need to be convinced of the value of patience, we tend to be inherently deliberate practitioners who haven’t collectively acknowledged that we are in fact in the midst of an emergency. Public historians understand that intimate knowledge of place and attachment to place—Berry’s key preconditions for acting ethically and in relationship with the ecosystems that sustain us—require time, meticulous attention, and the careful building of relationships with other people in particular places. We bring a number of crucial skills to climate discourse—an openness to interdisciplinarity and teamwork, an attention to the role of the social within “natural” processes, an ability to weigh and communicate various kinds of evidence about the past, an understanding of how to create accessible narratives that bring macro and micro levels together. But we are only just beginning to put those skills to work in a concerted way within broader efforts to understand the causes and address the effects of our rapidly-changing climate. This born-digital collection is part of an emerging conversation within public history about how we might do that. It emerges from several years of discussions at annual meetings of the National Council of Public History and elsewhere, along with a growing strand of material within the Public History Commons focusing on environmental sustainability. Most of the pieces in these pages originated as conference Working Group case statements or posts from the History@Work blog, with a handful of additional contributions. This collection also connects with the 2014 NCPH Annual Meeting theme of “Sustainable Public History” as well as with a Summer 2014 special issue of The Public Historian journal on the same theme, edited by Leah Glaser. The combined print and digital pieces make up the first in a planned series of hybrid publication projects by the journal and the Commons, under the series heading of “Explorations.” Future “Explorations” will take up other topics, while we hope that public historians’ discussions about environmental sustainability will be able to build on this 2014 attempt to capture where we are at present.