What is an Environmental Historian?

In January 2015, the United States Senate again voted against measures that said climate change can be attributed to human activity. This is not the first time that the most powerful government on earth has denied the existence of anthropogenic climate change — at least they have acknowledged that climate change is not a hoax.

Over 98% of scientists working on climate change science attribute the changes to human activity. But whether climate change is anthropogenic or not — most people agree that climate can change — and these changes will affect everyone. But how will the changes affect us as humans?

We have chemists and physicists who look at the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; weather scientists who can model the effect of increased temperature on the climate and environment and the weather patterns we will see in the future. But who is it that considers how climate change affects humans?

The Answer is Blowin’ in the Wind?

One of the reasons people study history is to gain an understanding of how and why past events happened. We can also use what happened in the past to help us find solutions to our present questions. Historians can study the evidence of the past to determine what happened and why — a historian might be able to predict what happens when a treaty is broken by looking at the evidence available from previous episodes where treaties were broken. Why should it be any different for the environment?

By studying how the environment has reacted to human intervention in the past — we can improve our predictions of how the environment might react to future human interactions. Welcome to the role of the Environmental Historian.

Environmental History

Although humans have probably used local environmental knowledge to make their lives easier for millennia — farmers using companion planting to reduce pest attacks, the use of stone circles and the sun to determine the solstice — environmental history as a modern academic discipline was only born in the 1960s and 1970s. A growing awareness of environmental problems from pesticides, ozone depletion in the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect — all problems with human origins — caused historians to look for the origins of these problems using the knowledge from the past centuries in disciplines like ecology and geography.

Environmental Historian — A Multidisciplinary Field

The roots of environmental history are to be found in several fields besides ecology and geography — anthropology and archaeology are two that have been mentioned — with ecological ideas used to analyse past environments and geographers stressing the importance of the physical environment on how civilisations have developed.

So, environmental history looks at how humans interacted with the natural environment in the past, how have we affected the environment and how have those changes have affected human development.

An example of using environmental history that affects many people, is studying rainfall records and land management practices to predict where floods might occur — a topic discussed in this article: Predicting and Mitigating the Risk of Floods.