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Forum: Climate Change andEnvironmental History

Mark Carey and Philip Garone, Forum Introduction

Adrian Howkins, Experiments in the Anthropocene: Climate Change andHistory in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica

Georgina H. Endfield, Exploring Particularity: Vulnerability, Resilience, andMemory in Climate Change Discourses

Lawrence Culver, Seeing Climate through Culture

Sam White, Animals, Climate Change, and History

Sherry Johnson, When Good Climates Go Bad: Pivot Phases, ExtremeEvents, and the Opportunities for Climate History

James Rodger Fleming, Climate Physicians and Surgeons

Philip Garone, Mission Convergence?: Climate Change and theManagement of US Public Lands

Mark Carey, Science, Models, and Historians: Toward a Critical ClimateHistory

Mark Carey, Philip Garone, Adrian Howkins, Georgina Endfield, Lawrence Culver, Sherry Johnson,

Sam White, and James Roger Fleming, Forum: Climate Change and Environmental History,

Environmental History (2014): 281 364.

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Mark Carey and Philip Garone

Forum Introduction

AbstractThis Forum explores global climate change, one of thiscenturys most prominent environmental issues. Authorsanswer two critical questions: (1) How does the study ofclimate history enrich the field of environmental historymore broadly? (2) How can environmental historians contrib-ute to present-day understandings of and responses to globalclimate change? This introductory essay (and the Forum moregenerally) contribute to both environmental history research

and climate change discussions by grappling with several keyissues including the agency of nonhuman nature and environ-mental determinism, environmental governance, climate as acultural construction, the history of environmental ideas anddiscourse, environmental narratives, the commodification ofnature, and the politicization of the natural and life sciences.This essay also shows how the study of climate history providesmethodological and practical tools for environmental histor-ians. It analyzes the role of interdisciplinary sources and

archives, scale, the place of science in environmental historyscholarship, and the relevance of environmental historiesfor present-day policymaking and public discussions aboutclimate change.

doi:10.1093/envhis/emu004

# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American

Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved.

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INTRODUCTIONClimate change has become one of the twenty-first centurys most im-

portant and debated environmental issues. And yet relatively few envi-ronmental historians are studying climate or have examined it in thepast, despite Robert Claxtons prediction in 1983 that climate historywas becoming a new focus within environmental history.1 Historiansof science have published substantially on climate history, and the fieldof historical climatology has thrived in Europe since the 1970s after Em-manuel Le Roy Ladurie published his classic Times of Feast, Times of

Famine and Christian Pfister launched his influential career studyingclimate and society.2 Many other climate histories have been writtenby nonhistorians, especially journalists and natural scientists. Climatescientist and geographer Mike Hulme, for example, has become one ofthe most influential voices in climate history.3 To inspire more environ-mental history research on climate, this Forum highlights diverse newresearch and underscores accomplishments, deficiencies, discrepan-cies, and debates about climate history. The goal is to jump-startclimate history research among environmental historians while simul-taneously invigorating the field of environmental history and contrib-uting to ongoing discussions about climate change today.

To these ends, we posed two fundamental questions to each contribu-

tor:(1)Howdoesthestudyofclimatehistoryenrichthefieldofenviron-mental history more broadly? (2) How can environmental historianscontribute to present-day understandings of and responses to globalclimate change? More than just answering these questions, the Forumessays are provocative: they are written to raise questions, challengeconventional wisdom, and arouse debate. They cover diverse topicsacross various world regionsand over disparate time periods, from Pleis-tocene animals and colonial Caribbean history to the Antarctic Treatyand twenty-first-century US national park management. The essays

tackle topics that environmental historians have long analyzed: wilder-ness, humananimal relations, public land management, natural disas-ters, water management, narratives of nature, and environmentaldeterminism. But here authors showcase new angles of analysis.

Climate histories contribute to a host of issues at the center ofenvironmental history scholarship. Essays in this Forum, for example,analyze the agency of nonhuman nature without devolving intoenvironmental determinism. They discuss environmental governanceto examine not only the atmosphere, but also the ways in whichclimate change impacts, adaptation, and perceptions yield new envi-

ronment society interactions. Authors illustrate various ways inwhich climate is culturally constructed in specific places and periods.In this way, the discussion traces the history of environmental ideasand discourse. Some authors also touch on the commodification ofnature; others scrutinize the politicization of the natural sciences and

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the ways in which climate science emerges from particular sociopolitic-al contexts. In addition to these thematic and theoretical issues, thestudy of climate history has important methodological and practical

implications for environmental historians. The essays in this Forumoffer insights into various topics along these lines including interdiscip-linary sources and archives, scale, the role of science in environmentalhistory research, and the place of environmental histories in present-day policy discussions.

WHAT IS CLIMATE ANYWAY?Climate historyand even the wordclimatedoes not mean the same

thing to everyone, and there is disagreement and variation aboutwhat climate means within this Forum. Some think of climate asweather over time, conceptualizing it as a material or physical forcethat influences societies. Within this framing, however, scholars expli-citly or implicitly make other distinctions among climate change, cli-matic variability, and extreme weather events. Some of the essays inthis Forum (by Adrian Howkins, Sam White, Philip Garone, and MarkCarey) construe climate change as long-term processes, such as thelate Pleistocene or Holocene, or the 150-year postLittle Ice Age era ofglobal warming. Others like Sherry Johnson focus on particularextreme weather events, which she ties to pivot points in longerterm climatic variation. Georgina Endfield also calls attention to theseparticular weather events because they affect human vulnerabilityand adaptation, though she also tends to see climate as acting overthe long term. Still others in the Forum, such as Lawrence Culver, con-ceptualize climate as variable and human influenced as well as simplyaverage weather over time, thereby deemphasizing its fluctuationsand variations to instead emphasize perceptions and climate impactsregardless of climatic variability.

Then there is the issue of anthropogenic versus natural climatechange, which has come to the forefront in recent decades with globalwarming, the greenhouse effect, and the ozone hole. Why the climatechanges is less important to many historians than understandingimpacts or perceptions of those changes. For others it is critical to recog-nize that humans have caused or contributed to climate change. Thishas led some to conceptualize the Anthropocene, this recent era ofhuman-induced changes in the world that Howkins discusses exten-sively. But the notion of anthropogenic climate change is not new.

For centuries, people worried about the effects of deforestation on re-gional climate change.Yet another conceptualization of climate gets at the root of the word

itself: climes. Clime underscores the powerful link between weatherand place that was historically so prevalent, such as in ancient Greekviews of the world or in more recent racist and imperialist

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interpretations of the worlds climates and races at the height of Euro-pean colonialism.4 Culver illustrates not only how ideas about theseclimes led past peoples to see weather as regions (and vice versa), but

also how those beliefs about climes led North American settlers to seeand settle landscapes. They associated certain climesand certainenvironments such as swampswith stresses to the human body andto disease. Historical human anxieties concerning climate have led phy-sicians to study linkages between climate and health for thousandsof years, right up to the present-day schemes. Perceptions of cli-mate have thus shaped expectations of the land as well as the historicalconsequences that follow from those expectationssuch as thenineteenth-century American conquest and acquisition of northern

Mexico. Perceptions of climate, Culver explains, even helped shape na-tional destinies.The notion of climes points to ways in which climate is a cultural and

scientific construction. Culver and James Fleming reveal in their essaysthat climate exists in the imagination, memory, metaphors, and dis-course as much as in the atmosphere. Fleming and Carey also analyzethe climate that scientists create through their rhetoric and mathemat-ical models, thereby underscoring additional conceptualizations ofclimate: the predicted climate that exists primarily in models. Clearly,neither historical actors nor the historians studying them have a singu-lar definition or conception of climate. This lack of consistency is not ahindrance or problem, but rather shows the richness of the field, theimportance of keeping an open mind about the meaning of climate(not simply anthropogenic global warming), and the multiple anglesof entry open for environmental historians examining climate society dynamics.

CLIMATIC DETERMINISM

Climate history opens up other important issues for historians to con-front. Although most environmental historians long ago rejected theidea of environmental determinism, it remains a key subject forclimate historyboth as an historical topic of research because theseideas influenced past societies and as a real concern today because ofits resurgence in global warming discussions. Climatic determinism inthe past helped justify European imperialism and racism by explainingwhy Africans were suitable for slavery or why tropical regions werebackward and in need of help from the North.5 Now researchers

such as Hulme contend that a form of climatic determinism hasreturned in climate models that are devoid of human variables andrely on the predictive quantitative sciences to project future scenarios.6

The essays in this Forum tackle this issue of environmental determin-ism by trying to understand how climate could both shape societies andbe a cultural construction, often at the same time. In short, the Forum

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grapples directly with the agency of nonhuman nature. Anthropogenicclimate change affected Antarctica, a place without a history of humanhabitation, Howkins reminds us, even before scientists set up their re-

search stations and started studying the region after the mid-twentiethcentury. Climatic variability, Johnson reveals, also caused dramaticsocial and political change, thereby demonstrating quite overtly howclimate can literally shape historical trajectories. Johnson examinesthe border region between Spanish Florida and the British colonies tothe north during the late 1730s to demonstrate that a pronouncedshift in climate led to a breakdown of order and social dislocation. Butshe also shows how the results of such climate-induced crises are notsimply deterministic. Drawing on disaster theory, she argues that the

outcome of rebellion depends on the level of control that authoritiesare able to maintain during crisis. This argument is part of a historio-graphical trend in recent years to attribute (or sometimes misattribute)significant historical change to weather. Such strains of climatic deter-minism also appear in the climate-related models that Carey analyzes,whereby projections about future climate change impacts are at oddswith the historical reality once more human variables are exploredand set alongside the models available to policymakers.

The Forum also shows that environmental variables like climate canalter the course of history, though without a predetermined influence,as Garone demonstrates. He argues that in response to rapid climatechange, the management approaches of the US Forest Service, USFish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of LandManagement are beginning to converge as they seek to build resilienceinto systems and as they accept system transitionsall while mov-ing toward multijurisdictional management involving state, local,and tribal governments. He suggests that these new policy directionsoffer numerous opportunities for environmental history, includingincorporating responses to climate changeoften grounded in conser-

vation biologyinto agency histories, bringing contested notions ofwilderness into dialogue with climate change, and drawing on method-ologies from political science to examine the implications of new publiclands management paradigms for American federalism and climategovernance. Garone is thus suggesting that conservation, wilderness,and public lands histories need to consider more overtly the role ofthe physical environment in shaping management practices over time.

The Forum reminds scholars to uncover the agency of climate whilealso recognizing that nature is socially constructed in particular places,

by particular cultures, and at particular times. Endfields theoreticalanalysis proposes a movement away from global generalizationswhich can devolve into apocalyptic narratives that overshadow thepossibilities of human adaptation and resiliencetoward regionallyspecific climate histories and a study of the societal responses toextreme weather events. Endfield is concerned with lived experiences



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and how those experiences of relative vulnerability or resilience affectwhether the impacts of climate change become inscribed into culturalmemories. Analyzing those memories of past events, she argues, can

shed light on popular perceptions of the risks of future environmentalchange and of how communities respond to and cope with risks.

NARRATING AND QUANTIFYING THE CLIMATEAnalysis of climate ideas through time and space helps show researchershow to decipher the cultural construction of the naturalworld, whetherthrough art and literature or memory and metaphor.7Uncovering thesehistorical perceptions about climate also helps reveal, for example,

European colonists ideas about land in the Americas or British identityin the eighteenth century.8 With recent discussions of global warming,new climate narratives and metaphors have emerged, with the atmos-phere coming to represent something quite different than it did previ-ously. New narratives about air, temperature, precipitation, El Nino,droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events have emerged inthe recent era of climate change awareness.9 But these narratives haveundergone countless changes in the past and among diverse societiesworldwide as well. Most recently, an apocalyptic global warming narra-tive has gripped Western societies. Yet simplistic declensionist narra-tives are precisely what many environmental historians have tried tomake more complex and nuanced. And while our field may havemoved on from declensionism, the constant reiteration of crisis, catas-trophe, and apocalypse in climate change reports, media coverage,college classes, and environmental groups statements shows just howrampant the declensionist environmental narrative remains. Given itsprevalence, it is important for environmental historianswho have ex-tensive experience with both declensionism and narratives of natureto critically examine these apocalyptic tales common not only in the

media and among environmental groups, but also within environmen-tal history scholarship itself because too often scholars uncriticallyaccept the climate crisis narrative without asking rigorous questionsabout it, as Carey notes in his essay on critical climate history.

Another way climate history opens up new inroads into environmen-tal history is by revealing how the atmospherelike forests, oceans,animals, natural resources, landscapes, and most everything elsehasbeen commodified over time due to the recent actions of climatescience, policies, rhetoric, and, most importantly, emissions agree-

ments that have transformed the air into a commodity to be regulated,litigated, traded, contested, and redefined from the way it was previous-ly conceptualized.10These policies and regulations may not be very suc-cessful in terms of slowing global warming or even reducing emissions.But they have resulted in other, perhaps unintended outcomes. All thediscussion about the atmosphere, the emphasis on its science, the

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efforts to govern it, and the relentless focus on carbon dioxide and partspermillionhastransformedtheairintoparticularunitsthatcanbemea-sured, categorized, controlled, and sold. Such is the history of so many

naturalresources and other aspects of nonhuman nature that were simi-larly identified, measured, governed, and commodified. As climate tookon new economic and political meanings, and as new internationalclimate treaties and agreements emerged, environmental govern-anceas well as economicsshifted in turn. The history of this com-modification and transformation of the atmosphere has only barelybeen studied, and even less by environmental historians. And yet theroots run deep: climate change today has its roots in the industrializationoftheplanetdueinparttotheglobalriseofcapitalism.11Sincethebirthof

environmental history, the relationship between capitalism and the en-vironment has been at the center of the field, so this issue as related toclimate holds particular promise for additional research.

SOURCES AND ARCHIVESEffective climate histories often hinge on sources gathered from diversegeographic locations well beyond researchers regions of expertise.Whats more, the sources themselves are also quite varied. Historiansreconstructing past climatic conditions can use proxy records such asice cores, tree rings, ocean and lake bed cores, and coral records. Theycan also use archaeological data, ship logs, diaries, river flow rates, flow-ering dates for plants and trees, artistic depictions of weather andclouds, agricultural records, and a host of other sources. Putting thesekinds of historical records in dialogue with other sources can yieldnew information about the past, about periodization, and aboutdrivers of historical change. A climate focus in research, such as in

Johnsons analysis of the 1730s Caribbean, often utilizes new sourcesthat help expand geographic and temporal scales, and sometimes

even rethink pivotal periods and events in world history.Sometimes using fresh sources or analyzing novel topics allows envi-

ronmental historians to uncover new insights into topics already wellvisited by other historianssuch as witch trial explanations infifteenth-century Europe, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, or thecourse of the American Revolution.12 In this Forum, Sam White offersa new link between livestock and climate. He maintains that animalshave so far played only a minor role in climate change discourse. Yethe shows how climate extremes affected clashes between pastoralists

and agriculturists in the ancient world. He further suggests that past so-cieties reliance on livestockfrom medieval Europe at the beginning ofthe Little Ice Age to the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empirehas been acritical factor in determining the vulnerability or resilience of those so-cieties during periods of climatic stress. And White makes compellingclaims about the importance of revisiting animals and climate in part



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based on a unique source base for his research. The study of climatehistory often requires integrating sources that span from archaeologyand the natural sciences to diaries and ice cores. These kinds of linkages

are precisely what environmental historians do so welland could domuch more with climate-related research.

SCALEThe study of climate history obviously raises important issues of scale,both temporal and spatial. Environmental historians have a particularaffinity for thelongue duree. A focus on climate often makes the longuedureeessential, not just a historians choice. Covering thelongue duree

requires analysis of diverse sources, especially stretching back to thepost-Pleistocene period,as White shows. Like researchers, often nonhis-torians, who have similarly conducted multi-millennia studies ofclimate, environmental historians canand shouldtackle these long-term chronologies to inform histories, rethink the past, and gain greaterinsight into human environment dynamics.13 The longer time framesallow historians to see patterns and processes not visible on time scalesof decades or even centuries.

Beyond chronological scale, there are issues of spatial scales in climatestudies. Although climate pays little attention to national boundaries,climate adaptation agendas, policies, perceptions, and values do matteron national scales. Endfield calls for a more local and particularized ana-lysisof climatesociety dynamics because todays more global framing ofclimate change misses too many of the particularities. Howkins tacklesthese issues of scale in another direction. Focusing on the relativelybrief human history of one particular isolated and remote place, Antarc-tica, he scales upward to probe issues of global significance about theinteractions between human activities, perceptions of climate change,and the material environment, as well as to experiment with the idea

of the Anthropocene. Among the provocative questions he poses isthis: If anthropogenic climate change is altering the material environ-ment in a place where the direct impact of humans has been relativelyminimal, then what are the implications of this for the central placeawarded to humans by the discipline of history? Together, Howkinsand Endfield point to the merits of both upscaling and downscaling.

More broadly, theForum demonstrates howclimate operates on everyscale in both space and time. Like the diverse definitions of climate,these variations and inconsistencies should not be construed as prob-

lematic, but rather as invitations for environmental historians totackle climate histories on multiple, often intersecting, scales. Ourfield tends to be better at dealing with time and place than with space.In other words, we deal with particular geographic places or a sense ofplace better than we analyze spatial relationships. Studies in climatehistory could thus build on environmental historians proclivity for

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chronology and enhance research on spatial relations because the studyof climate invites or even demands both.

THE NATURAL SCIENCES AND HISTORIANSEssays in the Forum also remind environmental historians that wecannot accept the natural sciences at face value, that we have toremain critical of the social contexts in which science is produced inboth the past and presenteven as we remember that collaborationwith natural scientists and use of their studies can enrich our field andenlighten present-day discussions about climate change. Most environ-mental historians rely on research from the natural or life sciences.

However, historians have also shown how even the bestand bestintentionedscience can produce unintended consequences, exacer-bate social inequality, or support certain political-economic agendas.Historians of science and, to a lesser degree, environmental historianshave consistently shown how power structures and inequality havebeen embedded in the production, circulation, and application ofscience. The historical study of climate suggests how certain depictionsof and approaches to climate science, climate change impacts, mitiga-tion, and adaptation also have embedded power dimensions, whetherduring past centuries or in the presentand the framing of Earthsclimate by natural scientists and geoengineers might even triggerwhat Fleming believes are potentially dangerous technoscientificschemes to control Earths climate. His essay argues that these latter-dayplanetary physicians, participating in a modern-day Hippocraticrevival, are advancing and perpetuating anxiety-ridden metaphorssuch as planet as patient that are not historically informed, but thatprovide an opportunity for critical review by historians and a meansfor historians to engage in current climate debates. Without such en-gagement, therhetorical excesses surrounding these unexamined meta-

phors have the potential to turn anxieties stemming from climateperceptions into ill-conceived actions that may have dangerous and un-predictable consequences.

Carey charges environmental historians with this task of criticallyanalyzing recent depictions of nature, focusing in particular onclimate models and their neglect of ground-level historical trajectories.He suggests that climate modelsas currently understood and utilizedin present-day policymakingcan lead to a form of environmental de-terminism that excludes human factors such as adaptation, political-

economic influences, technology, and innovation. The models havelimitations in part because of the way they are produced, the expertiseof the scientists and economists generating them, and the contextsin which they are used. He contends that environmental historiansshould both scrutinize model production and contribute to modelmaking by providing historical information that might rethink or at



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least alter the underlying assumptions driving model production andapplications. Environmental historians should thus be asking whatunderlying assumptions and historical data go into climate models

or any environmental modelsas well as how scientists and quan-titative economists have produced the historical trajectories thatnourish these models, which can influence the trajectory of policiesand debates.14 Carey thus critiques the dominant climate discoursewhile also indicating how environmental historians can contribute toongoing climate science and policies to help advance mitigation andadaptation plans.

The broader implication is about how environmental historians usethe natural and life sciences in their research. Critics have accused envi-

ronmental historians of accepting recent so-called Western science un-critically, even as the historians critique past science for its embeddedsocial, political, and economic agendas. Essays in this Forum that relyon scientific data are careful to avoid accepting climate science at facevalue. Rather, they challenge embedded ideas about climate changethat exist in both public perceptions and scientific paradigmseventodays climate science. Climate histories also open up potentialavenues to analyze and understand diverse knowledge systems, suchas folk science or indigenous knowledge, topics not well representedin this Forum in part due to the lack of environmental historians study-ing them. Indigenous climate knowledgefrom Arctic sea ice thicknessand wind patterns to the timing of El Nino events and droughtscanoffer key insights not only into past climatic conditions and societalimpacts or responses, but also about cultural practices more generally.15

Keeping with the politicization of science theme, it is important to rec-ognize how indigenousknowledge has often been excluded from recentclimate assessments and policies.16 There is a great need for environ-mental historians to investigate these issues.

CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCHAlthough relatively few environmental historians have made theirclimate research relevant for present-day discussions about climatechange, this Forum demonstrates how climate histories can contributeboth to anunderstanding of the pastand to public debates about climatechange and natural resource management today. The latter point offersbroader implications for the field of environmental history that has fordecades discussed the need for research to be relevant for policy. The

Forum shows that if people and human cultures are not directly insertedinto climate discussions (as these essays explicitly seek to do), thenclimate change adaptation will be more difficult because peoplesactual lived experiences will be ignored in future planning.

Intheend,theseeightprovocativeessayspushenvironmentalhistoryand climate conversations in new directions. They analyze novel

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environmental narratives and rethink histories by using diverse arch-ival sources and databases. They argue for longer time frames andmore cross-disciplinary studies while also breaking out of strict regional

confines to deal with global forces. Some of theessays scrutinize science,including the production and use of current climate science, and theyoffer tools of analysis that historians can employ when interpretingclimate history. The implication is thus clear: environmental historyscholarship can be linked with public policy and ongoing environmen-tal debates. Ultimately, we hope this Forum is only the beginning, notthe endpoint, of a conversation about climatechange and environmen-tal history. We hope it inspires significant discussion, dissent, anddebate.

NotesThis Forum is based on work supported by the US National Science Foundation undergrants 1010132 and 1253779. The authors wish to thank Lisa Brady and Nancy Lang-

ston for guiding the Forum through to publication, and the anonymous reviewerswho provided extremely helpful and detailed comments for this introduction as

well as all the individual essays.

1 Robert H. Claxton, Climate and History: From Speculation to Systematic Study,The Historian 45, no. 2 (1983): 220.

2 EmmanuelLe Roy Ladurie,TimesofFeast,TimesofFamine:AHistoryofClimateSince

the Year 1000 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971); Christian Pfister, Climate andEconomy in Eighteenth-Century Switzerland,Journal of Interdisciplinary History

9 (1978): 223 43. On European historiography, see Rudolf Brazdil et al., Histor-icalClimatologyinEuropeTheStateoftheArt, ClimaticChange70,no.3(2005):

363430.

3 Mike Hulme,Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy,

Inaction and Opportunity(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).4 Clarence J. Glacken,Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western

Thought from Ancient Times to theEnd of theEighteenth Century(Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1967), chap. 12.

5 David N. Livingstone, The Moral Discourseof Climate: Historical ConsiderationsonRace,PlaceandVirtue,Journal of Historical Geography17,no.4(1991):41334.

6 Mike Hulme, Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinismand Reductionism, Osiris 26 (2011): 245 66.

7 MatthiasHeymann, The Evolution of Climate IdeasandKnowledge, WileyInter-

disciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 1, no. 4 (2010): 58197.8 James Rodger Fleming,Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (NewYork: Oxford

University Press, 1998); Vladimir Jankovic,Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of

English Weather, 1650 1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

9 Stephen Daniels and Georgina H. Endfield, Narratives of Climate Change: Intro-duction,Journal of Historical Geography35, no. 2 (2009): 21522.



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10 Diana M. Liverman, Conventions of Climate Change: Constructions of Danger

and the Dispossession of the Atmosphere, Journal of Historical Geography 35,no. 2 (2009): 27996.

11 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History: Four Theses,Critical Inquiry35,no. 2 (2009): 197222.

12 Wolfgang Behringer, Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the

Little Ice Age on Mentalities, Climatic Change 43 (1999): 33551; Sam White,The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2011); Sherry Johnson,Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and theAtlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 2011).

13 William F. Ruddiman,Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control

of Climate(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Brian Fagan, The Great

Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (New York:Bloomsbury Press, 2008).

14 On climate models, see Paul N. Edwards,A Vast Machine: Computer Models, ClimateData, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); KirstenHastrup and Martin Skrydstrup, eds., The Social Life of Climate Change Models:

Anticipating Nature (New York: Routledge, 2013).

15 For example, Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, ColonialEncounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia

Press, 2005).

16 James D. Ford, Will Vanderbilt, and Lea Berrang-Ford, Authorship in IPCC AR5and Its Implications for Content: Climate Change and Indigenous Populations

in WGII, Climatic Change 113, no. 2 (2012): 201 13.

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Adrian Howkins

Experiments in theAnthropocene: Climate

Change and History in the

McMurdo Dry Valleys,Antarctica

AbstractThis essay suggeststhatthe McMurdo Dry Valleys inEast Antarc-tica offer a useful place for thinking about the relationships

between climate change and environmental history. The DryValleys have become an important site for climate change re-search over the past fifty years, and they are now an importantcase study forthe ecological consequencesof a warming planet.The atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen has suggested the termAnthropocene to describe how humans have created a distinct-ive geological epoch through anthropogenic climate changeand other large-scale environmental impacts. The history ofthe McMurdo Dry Valleys offers a useful place to experiment

with this idea and think about its implications. In particular, theshort and relatively simple history of this unique region bothencourages and facilitates a focus on the historical interactionsbetween human activities, human perceptions, and the mater-ial environment, which are key to understanding the relation-ships between climate change and environmental history.

INTRODUCTIONMeasuring the flow of a meltwater stream in Antarcticas McMurdo DryValleys is a laborious process. A scientist stands in the water countingthe clicks on a flow-tracking device for a 45-second period, then callsout the number to a colleague on the bank who records the figure.The flow-tracker is moved 6 inches, a new depth measurement is


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taken, and then the counting process is repeated. In this manner it cantake an hour or more for the necessary measurements to be made to cal-culate stream flow. On a bright, still day this can be a most enjoyable

task, with the sunlight bringing a sense of life to one of the fewice-free landscapes in the Antarctic continent. Nestled among the spec-tacular Trans-Antarctic Mountains and located thirty minutes by heli-copter from the main US Antarctic station at McMurdo Sound, theDry Valleys have been described as a curious mosaic of glaciers andstreams and deeply etched stone.1 The rocky landscape contrastsstarkly with the surrounding ice sheet, and there is something comfort-ing in its relative familiarity. On windy, overcast days, however, the en-vironment can quickly turn brutal, and the pleasures of measuring a

stream can wear thin, especially if your gloves get wet or the streamwater seeps into your boots. Not infrequently, scientific work of anykind is made impossible by the raging katabatic winds that pour downfrom the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and help to keep the region largelyfree of snow and ice.

For scientists, the measurement of summertime stream flow in theMcMurdo Dry Valleys has an obvious utility. Streams come frommelting glaciers, thereby giving an indication of climatic change overtime. In turn, the relative simplicity of the regions ecology makes thisa useful place to investigate the impact of climate change on the

Figure 1: The Taylor Glacier and Lake Bonney in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, 2013. Credit: AdrianHowkins.

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regions microscopic ecosystems, where nematodes, rotifers, and tardi-grades comprise the largest species.2 The McMurdo Dry Valleys can alsohave utility for environmental historians interested in the two central

questions raised by this Forum: How does the study of climate historyenrich the field of environmental history more broadly? How can envi-ronmental historians contribute to present-day understandings of andresponses to global climate change? Answers to these questions arerooted in the complex interactions between human activities, humanperceptions, and the material environment. In much the same waythat the biological simplicity of the region makes it a good place tothink about ecological interrelationships, the relative simplicity of thehuman history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys makes it a useful place to

think explicitly about these interactions and to ask what can belearned about the relationships between climate change and environ-mental history.

Climate change helps to make the McMurdo Dry Valleys relevant tothe field of environmental history not because of the regions intrinsicvalue or interestfascinating though its history may bebut becausethe questions raised by studying this distinctive place have global sig-nificance. That the McMurdo Dry Valleys can be included in a forumsuch as this already begins to suggest an answer to the question ofwhat climate change does to the field of environmental history: itshifts perceptions of scale, creates global interconnections, and givesrelevance to even the most isolated and obscure of places. If theMcMurdo Dry Valleys have been tangibly affected by climate change,then it is legitimate to ask what environment has not? The themes ofscale, interconnection, and relevance are repeated in several of theessays in this Forum and are perhaps some of the biggest implicationsof climate change for environmental historians. The atmosphericchemist Paul Crutzen has popularized the termAnthropocene to describethe way in which humans have created a distinctive geological epoch

through anthropogenic climate change and other large-scale environ-mental impacts.3 Although it has provoked fierce debates and has notbeen universally accepted, the concept of the Anthropocene offers auseful way to think about the scope and scale that human activitieshave had on the geophysical world and the interconnections thathave been created. The history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys offers auseful place to experiment with the concept of the Anthropoceneand consider the implications of anthropogenic climate change forthe field of environmental history.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORYStarting with the question of how climate history can enrich the field ofenvironmental history, the McMurdo Dry Valleys raise interesting ideasabout the nature of history and the place of humans within it. Much of



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thescientificresearchconductedintheregionasksquestionsabouthowhuman activity on a global scale has changed the physical environmentin this unique location, and then what these changes can tell us more

broadly about the global consequences of climate change. Theconcept of the Anthropocene and Bill McKibbens related idea of theend of nature raise the intriguing possibility that human activitywas altering the environment of the region before people had even setfoot in it.4 This in turn engages with important debates within thefield of environmental history about the idea of wilderness.5 TheMcMurdo Dry Valleys remained unseen by humans until 1903, whena British sledging party led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott stumbledacross what they described as a curious valley on their way down

from the ice sheet.6

Several perspectives on the Anthropocene positthat human activities were discernibly changing the global atmospherebefore this date, which, if correct, could meanthat the landscape seenbyScott and his two companions was already partially a human creation.On one level, such a possibility is only of esoteric significance and prob-ably not provable one way or the other. On another level, however,simply by asking the question of how direct human influence needsto be for a place to have a human history explicitly raises many of theprejudices and assumptions about the centrality of humans withinthe discipline of history. An acknowledgment of this continued anthro-pocentricism is of relevance to environmental historians far beyond theconfines of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, with the idea of the Anthropo-cene potentially making us more anthropocentric than ever.

Another way in which the McMurdo Dry Valleys can help us to seehow climate history can enrich the field of environmental history isin its reminder of the way in which the physical environment shapeshuman activities. Climate and climate change have tangible materialimplications for what people can and cannot do, and this is a fact thatshould never be forgotten, even in the most theoretical of discussions.

Upon entering the McMurdo Dry Valleys in 1903, Captain Scottand his two companions had to leave behind their sledges, since theusual form of polar transportation was useless without snow and ice.7

Another sledging party, led by the Australian geographer GriffithTaylor, explored the region early in 1911.8 Although they were betterprepared for what they would find, Taylor and his companionsquickly tired of having to carry everything they needed and living offcold food because fuel was too heavy. It remains logistically difficultand expensive to work in Antarctica, and the remote location and

extreme climateof the McMurdo Dry Valleyshave arguably contributedmore than anything else to limiting human activity in the region andmaintaining its pristine wilderness environment. At the same time,it is interesting to note that, since the time of Captain Scott, researchin the McMurdo Dry Valleys has largely been made possible by thesame industrial economy that has produced the Anthropocene and

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anthropogenic climate change. Without fossil fuels there would almostcertainly have been no ships, planes, or helicopters to transport scien-tists to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and no heating to keep them warm

while they are there. In this way, the Anthropocene has helped toproduce the conditions for scientific self-reflection, although it isperhaps the tragedy of the age that the knowledge produced byclimate science and associated academic disciplines (including environ-mental history) has done little to halt the inexorable march of thecarbon economy.9

Another climate-related theme that can enrich the field of envi-ronmental history is the question of how changing environmentalperceptionsprincipally throughscientific developmentshave influ-

enced human activities in the McMurdo Dry Valleys and beyond. Theincreasing threat of global warming has encouraged more climate re-search to be done in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. In this way, thescience of climate change helps to account for human activity takingplace at all in this remote corner of the world.10 On a much broaderscale, the self-perpetuating nature of scientific research has longbeen studied by historians of science, and it offers a critical insight forenvironmental historians studying climate change. Science alsoshapes politics, and Antarctica offers a useful place to think about thisconnection, since, as a result of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, scientific re-search is a prerequisite for any country to participate fully in the politicsof Antarctica.11By conductingclimatechange research in theMcMurdoDryValleys,NewZealand,theUnitedStates,andothercountriesperiod-ically involved all seek to reinforce their political positions in Antarc-tica. The contested political history of Antarctica, and indeed thePolar Regions more generally, offers a useful reminder that climatechange research has political implications that go far beyond a simplis-tic climate change science versus climate change skeptic dichot-omy.12 Insights from Antarctica as a continent for science offer a

useful perspective for thinking about relations between science and pol-itics in other parts of the world.13 On a global scale, the production ofuseful climate science increases a countrys strength within climatechange negotiations, creating a hierarchy of power relationshipsbased on scientific productivity that are not always acknowledged.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO CLIMATE SCIENCEAt the same time as enriching the field of environmental history, the

historical study of climate change provides a critical context forunderstanding climate science. Such contextualizing is by no meanslimited to the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and it is a task thathistorians can perform in many other situations, as other essays inthis Forum demonstrate. This leads into the second central questionof this Forum: What can environmental historians contribute to



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present-day understandings of and responses to climate change?Perhaps most basically, a study of the McMurdo Dry Valleys suggeststhat historical research has the potential to investigate histories of

science and exploration and potentially contribute data for use in col-laboration with scientists. The Long-Term Ecological Research con-ducted in the McMurdo Dry Valleys has a clear historical dimension,and the data draw their utility from history. It is because scientistshave stood in streams to measure stream flow year after year since the1960s that we have the data that allow us to understand change overtime in this region. In this example, and in numerous others, historiansmight be able to draw on these historical dimensions to make practicalcontributions to the collection and analysis of climate data. In the

McMurdo Dry Valleys, historians can potentially extend the length ofrecords by gleaning additional environmental information from the ex-pedition accounts of Scott and Taylor.14 If historians hope to be takenseriously in scientific conversations about climate change, then con-tributing where possible to the collection and analysis of data is agood place to start, and this is something that is already being done ina number of climate reconstruction examples around the world.15

Environmental historians are well positioned to ask how actual ma-terial changes in the McMurdo Dry Valleys have shaped scientific think-ing over time. This raises important questions about attribution: Towhat do we owe our understanding of climate change? As soon asScott and his companions entered the McMurdo Dry Valleys, theywere struck by its otherworldly environment. This is truly a valley ofthe dead, wrote Scott in his diary, even the great glacier which oncespanned the valley has since withered away.16 Every visitor to theregion since then has been influenced in some way by the landscape.But as a result of environmental change over time, later visitors wereviewing a somewhat different landscape to that which Scott saw at thevery beginning of the twentieth century. The frozen lakes have risen,

streams have meandered, and soils have blown around. The history ofthe McMurdo Dry Valleys offers a number of examples of physicalchanges shaping perceptions of the region, and the idea of absolute wil-derness has largely been replaced by the concept of Antarctica as a vul-nerable environment. Perhaps most dramatically, in the early 1990s therising level of Lake Vanda forced the New Zealanders to move the re-search station they had built on its shores. A number of authors haveattributed this move to the consequences of climate change.17 Withmuch of climate change history being the history of future predictions,

rising lake levels in the McMurdo Dry Valleys offer a useful example ofphysical environmental change shaping perceptions. Taking this ques-tion of attribution to a much broader scale, the more directly climatechange science can be connected to actual material change, the morelikely it is that the threat of climate change will be taken seriously.

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It is the science of climate change broadly conceived that allows scien-tists to go to the coldest continent on earth and ask questions aboutwarming. Such an observation offers a useful reminder to environ-

mental historians that our understanding of material reality is filteredthrough scientific perceptions, and it raises important questionsabout scale and place within climate history. Interestingly, climaticdata from the Dry Valleys and from East Antarctica more generallyshow that this is one of the few regions of the world not experiencingdramatic warming trends over the past thirty or forty years.18 Atmos-pheric scientists attribute this to the hole in the ozone layer that iskeepingcontinental Antarctica artificially cool by strengthening thecir-cumpolar vortex; as the hole in the ozone layer recovers over the next

fifty years, temperatures in East Antarctica are expected to increase dra-matically.19 Although climate involves far more than average tempera-ture, this lack of temperature increase also suggests that much of theassociation of the McMurdo Dry Valleys with global warming comesfrom outside the region, from the theories and models of climatechange that scientists bring with them, attesting to the importance oftheory and modeling to our understanding of climate change.20 An im-portant task for historians in any given location might be to untanglethe relative importance of tangible local factors and abstract globalfactors in shaping ideas about climate change, again linking back tothe question of attribution.

CONCLUSIONSBy encouraging a sustained analysis of the interactions between humanactivities, human perceptions, and thematerial environment over time,the short and relatively simple human history of the McMurdo DryValleys offers environmental historians an excellent location for think-ing about the central questions raised by this Forum. Such an approach

can deepen our understanding of environmental history and movebeyond a simple empirical approach to the problem of climatechange.21 It also suggests a number of ways that historians can contri-bute to the study of climate change, both practically and theoretically.Perhaps most importantly, by offering a useful place to experiment withthe idea of the Anthropocene and its implications, the history of theMcMurdo Dry Valleys suggests that climate history deepens our under-standing of environmental history most of all by encouraging, evencompelling, environmental historians to engage profoundly with the

science and politics of climate change.

AdrianHowkins is an assistant professor in the History Department atColorado State University. He has published a number of articles on the historyof Antarctica and is currently completing a book manuscript on the environ-mental history of the Antarctic Peninsula.



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NotesI would like to thank the National Science Foundation (Grant ANT-1115245) and

everybody associated with the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research(LTER)siteformakingthisresearchpossible.Ihavehadanumberofveryusefuldiscus-sions about the theme of climate change and environmental history with my col-

league Mark Fiege. Mark Carey, Philip Garone, and the anonymous reviewersprovided excellent suggestions for improving earlier versions of this essay.

1 Bill Green and Craig Potton,Improbable Eden: The Dry Valleys of Antarctica (Nelson:Craig Potton, 2003), 12.

2 For an overview of the science conducted by the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term

Ecological Research site, see http://mcmlter.org/.

3 See, for example, P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoemer, The Anthropocene,Global

Change Newsletter41 (2000).4 Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).

5 See, for example, Michael L. Lewis,American Wilderness: A New History(Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2007).

6 Robert Falcon Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery, 2 vols. (New York: Cooper Square

Press, 2001).

7 Ibid.

8 Carolyn Strange andAlison Bashford, GriffithTaylor:VisionaryEnvironmentalistEx-

plorer(Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008).

9 Julia Adeney Thomas, Comment: Not Yet Far Enough,The American HistoricalReview117, no. 3 (2012):794803.

10 For an overview of the history of Antarctic science, see G. E. Fogg,A History of Ant-

arctic Science, Studies in Polar Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992).

11 For the text of the Antarctic Treaty, see http://www.state.gov/t/avc/trty/193967.htm.

12 Adrian Howkins, Melting Empires? Climate Change and Politics in Antarcticasince the International Geophysical Year,Osiris26, no. 1 (2011). For the Arctic,

see, for example, Matthias Heymann et al., Exploring Greenland: Science andTechnology in Cold War Settings,Scientia Canadensis 33, no. 2 (2012); Ronald

Doel, Cold Conflict: The Pentagons Fascination with the Arctic (and ClimateChange)intheEarlyColdWar,in Circumpolar Studies 8: History of Resource Exploit-ation in Polar Areas, ed. Louwrens Hacquebord (Groningen: Arctic Center, Univer-

sity of Groningen, 2012).

13 Richard S. Lewis,A Continent for Science: The Antarctic Adventure (New York: VikingPress, 1965).

14 Alia Khan,Adrian Howkins,and Berry Lyons, Taylors MissingLake:Integrating

History into LTER Research in the McMurdo Dry Valleys,LTER Network News 25,

no. 2 (2012).

15 MarkCarey, ClimateandHistory: A CriticalReviewof HistoricalClimatologyandClimate Change Historiography,WIRES Climate Change 3, no. 3 (2012).

16 Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery.

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Georgina H. Endfield

Exploring Particularity:Vulnerability, Resilience,

and Memory in Climate

Change Discourses

AbstractThough frequently referred to in the risk, hazards, and dis-aster literature, vulnerability has become an importantconcept in the field of environmental change and for under-standing peoples susceptibility to harm in the context of

uncertain climatic futures. Resilience has similarly become apopular concept for exploring the complexities of linkedhuman nature systems but focuses on capacity building,learning, and adaptation in response to threats or harm. Inrecent years, there have been efforts to propose synergiesbetween research on vulnerability and on resilience in linkedsocial-environmental systems. Integrated studies of vulner-abilities and resilience to climate change in the past, effective-ly drawing on a combination of geographic and historical

approaches, afford insight into the way in which societieshave been affected by, have coped with, and adapted to pastclimate variability and weather or weather-related events.This essay argues thatdetailedinvestigations of relative vulner-ability and resilience could be pivotal for analyzing the adapt-ability of societies and regions that are considered to bevulnerable to future climate change impacts according tocurrent predictions, and it highlights a vitally important and po-tentially politically significant arena for environmental history

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INTRODUCTIONPredicting future climates and determining how communities and their

associated settings might be affected by and respond to climate changehas become an issue of global importance. Debates over the impacts ofan acceleration in anthropogenic global warming and the potentiallylooming and apocalyptic changes in future climate together repre-sent one of the dominant environmental narratives of the twenty-firstcentury, but they have somewhat overshadowed other studies focusingon human adaptation and resilience, and explorations of the institu-tions and cultural coping strategies that may have helped peopleadapt to climate changes in the past.1 Moreover, the recent interest inapparent cultural collapse in the face of dramatic climatic changes inhistory hasobscured the importance of considering the spatial and tem-poral contingency of climate change and its variable impacts, and it hasalso led to anxieties discussed within historical geography and environ-mental history scholarship over the apparent revival of neodeterminis-tic arguments.2

Yet there is a rising concern over the localized impacts of interannualclimate variability and anomalous and extreme weather events suchas droughts, floods, storm events, and unusually high or low tempera-tures. It is expected that these kinds of events will increase in frequency

and intensity with predicted climate changes.3

While social and eco-nomic systems have generally evolved to accommodate some devia-tions from normal weather conditions, this is rarely true ofextremes.4 Such events, therefore, can have the greatest and most im-mediate social and economic impact of all climate changes.5 Moreover,as Mike Hulme has argued, climate interacts with the human psycheand with cultural practice in less material and more imaginativeways, becoming part of the cultural fabric and memory of communi-ties.6 As such, it is important to investigate climate (and weather) as a

function of impact, response, memory, and experience.Such work demands a more local perspective on climate society rela-tionships than globalperspectives canoffer. Consideration of thespatialan

forum_climate change and environmental history

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