- A model syllabus for historians and other students of the past to engage with issues of anthropogenic climate change through the medium of history and related disciplines. Developed by a small team associated with the Rescue!History network.
The Rescue!History network is a group of practitioners in the fields of humanities and social sciences who “wish to affirm that investigations and findings from our colleagues in the scientific community overwhelmingly support the conclusion that contemporary global warming is anthropogenic.” They assert that this climate change is a “spectre . . . haunting the entire world,” and cite the “unprecedented hurricane sequence in the Gulf of Mexico” in 2005 as evidence of “nature’s payback for what we are doing to our precious planet.” Rescue!History members lament humanity’s response to this evidence:
- bizarrely, the majority of us, academics included, seem to remain in a state of denial. Or, hardly better, in a peculiar limbo of ‘disconnect’. Surely all this talk of impending apocalypse is scare-mongering of the very worst kind? Freak weather conditions and natural catastrophes do happen, do they not? What anyway, can you, or I, do about it? This is something for scientists, the boffins, the ones with the expertise and know-how: the people who can find ‘the’ technical fix, ‘the’ solution to the problem. Or if not them, the politicians; those to whom we have entrusted the security and wellbeing of our societies, and broader international community. To argue that we are involved in a struggle for our very survival, and that we must all respond accordingly, is, surely, not simply to invite unwarranted and unnecessary disruption, bordering on panic and hysteria, but carries with it implicit challenges to the wisdoms upon which our very ‘civilisation’ is founded.
What role do historians–and others in the academic disciplines of the humanities and social sciences–have to play in discussion of global climate change? In what ways historical methods, analyses, and narratives contribute to our understanding of climate change through time?
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Sustainability History Project 
This helps how, exactly? I really love this approach: scare-mongering doesn’t seem to be working, so here’s some more scare-mongering. I don’t doubt that these are sensitive, serious people who truly believe in their purpose (whatever it is; the littany of questions toward the end suggests–according to itself–that there may not be a point at all), but have they not considered the, if you’ll pardon the usage here, unsustainability of negative rhetoric? Suppose the fear tactics worked, and they actually scared everybody green. Then suppose a thousand years of sustainable living, based solely on the desire to save our own skins, passes. Who would remember what the point of it all was? Usage patterns would eventually return to a nonsustainable mode.
There is however much good here. The historical method has much to recommend it, moving forward. It may lay a useful groundwork for future research. As for the notion of finding some mythical sustainable culture in the historical record and applying their practices to the six billion lives on the planet, I affirm that is absolutely impossible. There isn’t enough land for six billion hunter-gatherers, six billion subsistence farmers. And the moment job specialization enters the equation, one arrives precisely at the modern world. The rescue!history message, if it truly seeks some answer from thousands of years ago, is effectively a call for mass genocide on an unimaginably horrific scale, as are all over-population arguments. I am certain that this is not in the minds of the relevant people, but they ought to be aware that comparisons between the world of today and the world of antiquity are nearly impossible. Our ancestors did not face our challenges, and therefore had no answers for them.
Presenting the scientific evidence for global climate change is certainly valuable. Trying to scare people green, however, is not. As a kid in the 80s I heard we had about a decade before global thermonuclear war made an end of us. As a teen in the 90s I heard we had about a decade before we ran out of oil and food, and basically everybody died. At the turn of the millenium, in my twenties, I heard we had a decade before global warming cooked off our brains. Now, in my thirties, it’s all of the above. We have a decade before water, food, and oil all run out and start a nuclear conflagration between the superpowers over the last gas station in existence. And we’d all better be wearing air conditioned hats when it happens. I’m willing to bet I’ll make fifty and then some.
The point of sustainability is not to avoid some short-term bogeyman, but to guide humanity to long-term sustainable practices. Scare tactics won’t work, and searching for the perfect civilization in history won’t work. The only chance our descendants have lies in the development, documentation, and marketing of cost-effective, sustainable alternatives in every sector. This will require hard work, research, policy changes, education, and constant re-evaluation. Sustainability must be valorized on its own merits, not to save our lives but to make us feel good about our place in the world. People want to feel good. The place of the historian in this process is to create the documents that will be used by researchers, educators, and policy-makers to design, valorize, and implement sustainable practices. The totality of the human experience has value, and I am in no way calling for the abandonment of traditional historical research. However, it does not apply to sustainability.
And the exclamation mark has got to go. It’s cornball.
With all due respect to Daniel Gray, it seems that his arguments are against the Rescue!History project are entirely built on a foundation of nonsensical rhetoric that denies the existence of proven facts. First, nuclear proliferation was a true threat, and did almost come to fruition; furthermore, although it is not heavily publicized now, clean drinking water is a problem throughout most parts of the world — fresh water makes up on 2.5 percent of the water on Earth and most of that is encapsulated within the ice sheets of the polar caps. While he has the right to voice his arguments against short-term solutions, I feel that without short-term solutions, the long-term solutions will increase to a point where sustainability will become unachievable. Although scare mongering is not the right approach entirely, we cannot expect people to make the right decision entirely on their own accord. People, Homo sapiens sapiens, are just another form of animal with entirely predictable characteristics; therefore, it can be said with certain degree of accuracy, that in order for one group of individuals to get a larger group of individuals to perform some task (for example, recycle), their must be some incentive in order of the smaller group to convince the larger group to recycle (bottle return). While this is a very straightforward way to convince some to recycle, other methods to convince someone to recycle might be to tell them that if they don’t the world is going to come to an end tomorrow. While this would not work for something mundane like a bottle — humans have developed a high enough process of cognitive though for this to be plan to be thwarted — it does seem to work on a larger scale, a societal scale. What scare mongering does to and individual within a society is more in-depth than he gives it credit for. This level of coaxing has long-term psychological effects on the small-scale (the individual) and the large-scale (the society); however, this form of psychological pressure is vital for a societal shift in the sub-conscious understanding of a given topic. Once engrained within the human mind, action can occur because it is understood by the individual to be a perceived threat to themselves, instead of merely an issue for society as a whole. We as individuals might think that we are uncontrolled by these pressure, and certain individuals like Daniel Gray might chose to fight them in an attempt to avoid this form of mass-psyche; however, this form of deliberate fear mongering is important for change and is unavoidable within society. Fear mongering must be understood as the beginning steps within the process of long-term change.