Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times

History Australia
ISSN: 1449-0854 (Print) 1833-4881 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raha20
Doing environmental history in urgent times
Katie Holmes, Andrea Gaynor & Ruth Morgan
To cite this article: Katie Holmes, Andrea Gaynor & Ruth Morgan (2020) Doing environmental
history in urgent times, History Australia, 17:2, 230-251, DOI: 10.1080/14490854.2020.1758579
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HISTORY AUSTRALIA
2020, VOL. 17, NO. 2, 230–251
https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2020.1758579
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Doing environmental history in urgent times

Katie Holmesa , Andrea Gaynorb and Ruth Morganc
a
La Trobe University, Australia; bUniversity of Western Australia, Australia; cAustralian National
University, Australia
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The human/nature relationship is at the heart of one of the most Environmental history;
urgent crises of our time: climate change. What does this mean Anthropocene; climate
for environmental historians, trained as we are to examine the cul- change; environmental
ture/nature relationship, its changing temporal expressions, to humanities; activism
challenge the binary which underpins the discipline of history
itself? This article is framed as a conversation between three envir-
onmental historians as we respond to key questions about envir-
onmental history and the climate crisis. Together we ponder the
skills we bring to understanding it, the stories we have found to
move us forward and our thoughts about the interface between
history, science and activism.
Situating Australian environmental history

Katie Holmes: Historians have typically had trouble thinking about nature. The distinc-
tion between natural history and human history has been a central, if often unacknow-
ledged, tenet of the discipline. R.G. Collingwood was one historian who did
acknowledge it, observing that ‘there is and can be no history of nature, whether as
perceived or as thought by the scientist’.1 Climate change, and the Anthropocene more
broadly, have exposed the fallacy of the human/nature distinction. Humans have now
been recognised as a geological force; they are actors in the human dramas of industri-
alisation, colonisation and globalisation as history conventionally shows, and a species
now capable of altering fundamental natural processes.2
Exposing, critiquing and understanding the changing human/nature relationship lies
at the heart of the field of environmental history. Indeed, Tom Griffiths argues that the
radical challenge of environmental history has been to question the culture/nature binary
and seek to expose the complex ways in which ‘the fate of humanity has become inextric-
ably bound up with that of nature and the Earth’.3 A core tenet of environmental history
is the agency of the ‘natural’ world: it is not just something on which humans have acted
– often in highly destructive ways – it has its own agency, its own cycles, and is as cap-
able of shaping humans and human behaviour as vice versa. Understanding this
CONTACT Katie Holmes K.Holmes@latrobe.edu.au

1
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 214.
2
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2004): 213.
3
Tom Griffiths, ‘The Planet Is Alive: Radical Histories for Uncanny Times’, Griffith Review 63 (2018): 65.
ß 2020 Australian Historical Association
HISTORY AUSTRALIA 231
symbiotic relationship and its changing history is a key point of inquiry for environmen-
tal historians. In recent years, scholars working in the broader field of environmental
humanities, including environmental historians, have begun to engage more critically
with the ontological separation of the categories ‘human’ and ‘nature’.4
The Australian context brings a further dimension to environmental history. Our
increasing knowledge about the ancient history of this continent and the length of
Aboriginal occupation brings deep time into focus and has been a key point of engage-
ment for environmental historians. This history adds a further insight into the
Anthropocene. As the Native American philosopher Karl Powys Whyte notes, through
an Indigenous lens the climate injustice that is inherent in the Anthropocene is an
extension of the devastation of colonisation: it ‘is less about the spectre of a new future
and more like the experience of deja vu’.5 Many of the environmental catastrophes pre-
dicted to happen within our Anthropocene age have already been experienced by
Aboriginal people in Australia as a result of colonisation: displacement, local climatic
change, ecological destruction, cultural dislocation, poverty, violence. As the philoso-
pher Kathleen Dean Moore suggests, ‘the Anthropocene would have been better named
the Unforgiveable-crimescene’.6 The desecration of Country has been, and continues to
be, a core component of colonisation. Given this experience, as Tony Birch suggests,
and the deep reservoir of knowledge that Indigenous communities have of ‘both envir-
onment and related cosmologies’, partnerships between Indigenous people, and the
broader intellectual community, offer ‘an opportunity to face the manifestations of cli-
mate change in innovative ways … A responsibility to Country forms the basis of a
dynamic and ever-evolving engagement with land and whatever changes may be
required to adapt to shifts in the local ecology’.7 As Grace Karskens’ work with
Aboriginal people of Dyarubbin (otherwise known as the Hawkesbury River) has dem-
onstrated, non-Indigenous environmental historians can play a crucial role in the two-
way exchange of knowledge about place, history and environmental change.8
Since its emergence as a separate sub-field of history in the 1970s, some Australian
environmental historians have engaged with the deep time of Aboriginal history and
grappled with the legacy of more than 60,000 years of human occupation, knowledge
and memory of the continent. Others have looked at different aspects of colonisation,
including pastoralism, agriculture, mining and forestry, and their environmental lega-
cies. Still others have focused on settler relations with particular places or regions, or
landscape features such as forests, rivers or – more rarely – cities.9 Much of this work
has formed part of the broader academic historical project of finding new and useful
ways to interpret the past, and stories that help us contemplate the present. However, it
4
French theorist Bruno Latour has been an influential contributor to this position. See, for example, his essay ‘Fifty
Shades of Green’, Environmental Humanities 7 (2016): 219–25.
5
Kyle Powys Whyte, ‘Is It Colonial Deja Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice’, in Humanities for the
Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice, ed. Joni Adamson and Michael Davis
(London: Routledge, 2018), 88.
6
Quoted in Rob Nixon, ‘The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea’, 4 November 2014, accessed
30 November 2019, https://edgeeffects.net/anthropocene-promise-and-pitfalls/.
7
Tony Birch, ‘Climate Change, Mining and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge in Australia’, Social Inclusion; Lisbon 4,
no. 1 (2016): 96–97.
8
Grace Karskens, ‘Life and Death on Dyarubbin: Reports from the Hawkesbury River’, Griffith Review 63 (2018): 102–6.
9
Many of these works are surveyed in Tom Griffiths, ‘Environmental History, Australian Style’, Australian Historical
Studies 46, no. 2 (2015): 157–73.
232 K. HOLMES ET AL.
has also been a project aimed at stirring the discipline at large into recognising that the
‘environment’ is not just a backdrop to the real human drama of the past, but a rele-
vant historical agent, enabler and outcome.
That said, environmental historical expertise has not been deployed only in conver-
sations among ourselves. From Keith Hancock’s involvement in the ‘battle for Black
Mountain’ to Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen’s work with the bushfire-affected
community of Steels Creek and Margaret Cook’s engagement with the flood commu-
nity of practice in Brisbane, environmental historians have been leaders in engaging
wider publics and policymakers.10 Our work has informed permanent galleries at major
museums, such as the Western Australian Museum and National Museum of Australia,
potentially shifting the way in which tens of thousands of Australians conceive of
national and regional histories. We have written stories and analyses for mainstream
media and social media, and spruiked our perspectives in public lectures and radio
programs. Environmental history began amid the flourishing of the new environment
movement and has steadfastly maintained its commitment to public engagement over
environmental issues of contemporary concern. That said, individual approaches to
engagement and audience have varied and not all environmental historians have sought
to engage in contemporary debate, or found an avenue through which to do so.
The three authors of this article differ in age and career stage, but we all share the
subject position of white, middle-class tenured female academics. We also bring differ-
ent historical trajectories and interests to our environmental history endeavours. I
began working in feminist and cultural history before moving to the broader canvas of
environmental history. Central to my work has been the interplay between an individ-
ual, their culture and environment. Within the framework of environmental history, it
might be seen as seeking to understand the constitutive relationship between settler
Australians and their ecological surrounds, be that a garden, a farm or an eco-region.
Andrea Gaynor has always worked within an environmental historical frame, start-
ing with research on land degradation in the Western Australian wheatbelt and urban
food production. She has sustained interest in these areas while moving into a range of
collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects – often directly oriented towards
addressing contemporary environmental problems – around fisheries, tree decline,
water, gardens, conservation and more.
Having commenced her academic career as an environmental historian during the
Millennium Drought, Ruth Morgan’s work attends closely to the water and climate his-
tories of both urban and rural settler Australia. She has undertaken comparative studies
of the American West, and is exploring the ways in which colonial schemes of
improvement guided environmental exchanges across the Indian Ocean during the
long nineteenth century. Her interdisciplinary and collaborative research on water his-
tories, and their implications for the present and future, have led to her serving as a
Lead Author to Working Group II’s contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
10
W.K. Hancock, The Battle of Black Mountain: An Episode of Canberra’s Environmental History (Canberra: Australian
National University, 1974); Christine Hansen and Tom Griffiths, Living with Fire: People, Nature and History in Steels
Creek (Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2012); Margaret Cook, A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods
(St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2019).
Environmental history, ‘urgent times’ and temporal thinking

Katie Holmes: There are many factors contributing to the sense of urgency and crisis
about the present historical moment. As French theorist Bruno Latour observes, the
ravages of globalisation and neoliberalism with their ‘increasingly vertiginous explosion
of inequalities’, and a ruling elite that seems not to care, has created a particularly acute
sense of crisis. Global politics of the last 50 years, he suggests, cannot be understood
without recognising the climate denialism of the world’s elites, who instead of leading
in the crisis, have sought shelter from the world.11 Climate change is central to the cri-
sis of our time, as is its denial.
One of the disorienting aspects of climate change is its impact on our concept
and experience of time. The recognition that humans have become a geological force
changes both the understanding of what it means to be human, as well as our per-
ception of time. As Rob Nixon makes so clear in his book Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, the temporal de-coupling of ecological violence from
‘its original cause’ is happening at the same moment as our technological experien-
ces of time in our digital world of ‘perpetual distraction’ are accelerating: ‘In an age
of degraded attention spans it becomes doubly difficult yet increasingly urgent that
we focus on the toll exacted, over time, by the slow violence of ecological
degradation’.12
As ‘temporal thinkers’, to use Tamson Pietsch’s term [this issue], historians are well
placed to consider the ways in which the current moment is playing with time. When
thinking about climate change in particular, there are a number of ways I see this hap-
pening. In Australia we are now trying to grapple with what it means to live on a con-
tinent with a ‘colonial history of 200 years that plays out across a vast Indigenous
history in deep time’;13 we are confronting the environmental impact of past actions at
the same time as projecting forward to the future the impact of present actions – the
present is both history and future; and we are repeatedly being told that ‘we’ have only
a certain number of years left – some put it in terms of months – to act to save our-
selves from the worst catastrophes of climate change. Our temporal realities are being
upended. Deep time and colonial time are on a collision course with the future. And
the future presses ever closer, hurtling towards us at speed while our governments float
in a space of denial and inaction.
In Australia, the urgency of the moment is also shaped by the crushing drought
affecting most of New South Wales and southern Queensland. A brown shadow has
settled on the landscape, shrivelling the soils and souls of the inland. As scientists and
historians search the climate records for a point of comparison, none is forthcoming. It
is ‘the worst drought on record’, with devastating ecological, animal and human impli-
cations. The ‘savage summer’ of 2019–2020 saw bushfires ravage communities and
ecologies from the west coast to the east, north to south, 10 million hectares burned
11
Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 2.
12
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011),
10, 12, 13. Nixon is not only talking about ecological violence here, but a myriad of other forms of ‘slow violence’.
13
Griffiths, ‘The Planet Is Alive’, 68.
and perhaps a billion animals killed.14 As major cities choked on the smoke of our tor-
ment, the inland lay husked beneath our feet.
What are the most urgent tasks for environmental history now?
Andrea Gaynor: Early in 2019, at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, 16-
year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg told the wealthy and influential people
assembled that she didn’t want their hope; she wanted them ‘to act as if our house is
on fire. Because it is’.15 When your house is on fire, do you want a historian or a
firefighter?
We need firefighters, for sure: politicians, businesses, everyday people prepared to
step up and tackle the climate and biodiversity emergencies. But this is no ordinary
fire. We will not be packing away the hoses and heading home when the wind changes.
This is transforming our homes, in many cases beyond recognition, and yet our inner
lives continue. We will remain beings who need stories to understand the world and
place ourselves within it.
Of course, histories are not the only stories. We need poetry, we need theatre, we
need novels. But there are important and particular roles for history. Alexandre
Leskanich proposes that ‘history always does, in the end, leave one stranded exactly
where one already is. Always it comes too late to make any difference’.16 Yet we are
always using history to understand and respond to our current circumstances.
American historian Paul Kramer observes that while we often hear the lament that his-
tory is all but absent from public life, in fact, ‘for better and worse, it is everywhere’.17
Environmental histories are needed now to counter dangerous and proliferating his-
torical falsehoods, and to provide the insights and emotional fortitude we need as we
face the escalating climate and ecological crises. They are essential to diverse forms of
‘radical remembering’ needed to disrupt the accidental or cultivated silences that sus-
tain business as usual.18 And we truly cannot keep going on as before. Industrialising
capitalist societies have grown by turning the ‘free’ work of the biosphere, of ecological
processes, into capital. They have expanded through exploiting these frontiers of what
Jason Moore calls ‘cheap nature’.19 Socialist societies have engaged in similar processes
of exploitative development.20 But nature’s frontiers are closing. The world is running
14
The phrase ‘savage summer’ comes from Tom Griffiths, ‘Savage Summer’, Inside Story, 8 January 2020, https://
insidestory.org.au/savage-summer/. Statistics for areas burned vary. CSIRO estimates more than 10 million hectares
in southern Australia burned (https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/Environment/Extreme-Events/Bushfire/preparing-for-
climate-change/2019-20-bushfires-explainer). Estimates for the number of animals killed have been widely circulated;
see https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-31/fact-check-have-bushfires-killed-more-than-a-billion-animals/11912538.
15
Greta Thunberg, ‘Our House Is on Fire’, 2019 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, 25 January 2019, https://
www.fridaysforfuture.org/greta-speeches#greta_speech_jan25_2019.
16
Alexandre Leskanich, ‘Book Review: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav
Ghosh’, LSE Review of Books, 20 July 2017, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/07/20/book-review-the-great-
derangement-climate-change-and-the-unthinkable-by-amitav-ghosh/.
17
Paul A. Kramer, ‘History in a Time of Crisis’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 February 2017, 2.
18
As Tom Griffiths explains, ‘silences are not just absences, although they can be manifest in that way. Silences are
often discernible and palpable; they shape conversation and writing; they are enacted and constructed’. The Art of
Time Travel (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2017), 96.
19
Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2015).
20
See for example N. Mirovitskaya and M.S. Soroos, ‘Socialism and the Tragedy of the Commons: Reflections on
Environmental Practice in the Soviet Union and Russia’, The Journal of Environment & Development 4, no. 1 (1995):
77–110; Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
out of cheap nature. The sink is full to overflowing. Humanity is running out of time
in which to engage in massive decarbonisation or face increasingly severe fire danger,
water shortages, droughts, floods, coastal inundation, agricultural disruption and mass
migration. Already, the vast numbers of animals and insects being extinguished tell us,
if we will listen, that the global life support system is shutting down. Historians have
been part of the business as usual that has led us here, but this does not mean that the
time for history is over. To the contrary, we need more histories – and we need
them urgently.
One form of radical remembering has grown out of interdisciplinary fisheries research
addressing the problem of ‘shifting baselines’, whereby each generation regards the state
of an environment as they first perceived it as ‘natural’ or ‘pristine’, when in fact it is
already degraded.21 Who would now believe, for example, that in 1833 a colonist on the
Swan River saw ‘thousands and tens of thousands of black swans, which as his party
coasted the shore, rose and darkened the air to the distance of eight or ten miles’?22 We
need this kind of radical remembering – of the once and future possibilities for non-
human flourishing – to help us renew our commitment to put caring for the earth and
each other at the heart of our social and economic projects.
We also need radical remembering to disrupt the perversions of the past that create a
quagmire of untruth and diversion. We hear from climate change deniers, for example,
that ‘the climate has always been changing’. There have indeed been a range of natural
events that have affected past climates. A prime example is the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ –
a period of relatively cool northern hemisphere winters between the early fifteenth and
mid-nineteenth centuries, probably caused by a combination of volcanic activity and sub-
sequent sea ice and ocean feedbacks along with natural variation in solar intensity.23
Climate change deniers offer the Little Ice Age as evidence that recent warming is just
another example of natural variation. Of course it isn’t – though it does provide evidence
that even relatively small variations in average temperatures can produce enormous
social consequences. The Little Ice Age saw famine, epidemics and social unrest – as well
as ingenuity and adaptation – on a vast scale. Yet even at its coldest it represented less of
a deviation from long-term averages than the global heating we are experiencing now.24
Past climate variation should make us more, not less, concerned for the present.
On similar lines we hear in Australia that the massive bushfires and associated
smoke haze of 2019–2020’s ‘savage summer’ are nothing new, that Townsville has
21
D. Pauly, ‘Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10, no. 10
(1995): 430; see also Jeremy B.C. Jackson et al., ‘Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal
Ecosystems’, Science 293 (27 July 2001): 629–38; Jeremy B.C. Jackson, Karen E. Alexander and Enric Sala, ed., Shifting
Baselines: The Past and Future of Ocean Fisheries (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011).
22
W.B. Alexander, ‘History of Zoology in Western Australia. Part III 1829–1840’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal
Society of Western Australia 3 (1917): 39–40, quoted in Joanna Sassoon, ‘“The Common Cormorant or Shag Lays Eggs
Inside a Paper Bag”: A Cultural Ecology of Fish-Eating Birds in Western Australia’, Environment and History 9, no. 1
(2003): 34.
23
G.H. Miller et al., ‘Abrupt Onset of the Little Ice Age Triggered by Volcanism and Sustained by Sea-Ice/Ocean
Feedbacks’, Geophysical Research Letters 39 (2012): L02708.
24
See for example Christian Pfister, ‘Climatic Extremes, Recurrent Crises and Witch Hunts: Strategies of European
Societies in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Medieval History
Journal 10, nos. 1–2 (2006): 33–73; David D. Zhang et al., ‘The Causality Analysis of Climate Change and Large-Scale
Human Crisis’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 42 (2011): 17296–301; Dagomar Degroot,
The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018).
always flooded, that for over a century settlers have thought of Australia, with
Dorothea Mackellar, as a land of ‘drought and flooding rains’.25 Climate variability and
climate change are not the same thing, but historical stories of past extremes are often
used in attempts to confound the difference.
We also hear that environmentalists (and recently scientists) have predicted catas-
trophe in the past and these predictions have not come true – so why should we believe
them this time? It is true that some predictions of environmental problems have been
based on faulty science or no science at all. But others have been subsequently proven
correct.26 For example, by 1988 scientists had predicted an increase in fire risk in
south-eastern Australia associated with anthropogenic climate change.27 In the wake of
the deadly 2002–2003 fire season, a 2004 Council of Australian Governments Inquiry
on bushfire mitigation and management drew on scientific research in asserting the
likelihood that climate change would increase the ‘frequency, intensity and size’ of
bushfires; a 2005 study concluded that climate change would lead to increased fire-wea-
ther risk by 2020.28 In the absence of effective mitigation, these predictions were dra-
matically borne out in the summer of 2019–2020.
Some other predictions turned out to be wrong because the predictions themselves
played a part in changing the future. For example, Rachel Carson was attacked by the
chemical industry for her prediction that indiscriminate use of organochlorine pesticides
would lead to thinning of bird egg shells and ultimately a ‘silent spring’. Her work led to
the phasing out of DDT in the USA, and the silent spring did not eventuate.29
Subsequently, however, the rolling back of environmental policies in the neoliberal 1980s,
and the widespread uptake of neonicotinoid pesticides, has contributed to the collapse of
northern insect populations and the birds that depend on them. In North America alone,
bird populations have declined 29 per cent since 1970 – that’s three billion missing birds.30
Not only have past environmental predictions motivated regulatory change that shifted his-
torical trajectories, but such change was often insufficient or temporary, and the predic-
tions could yet come to pass.
25
Dorothea Mackellar, ‘My Country’ (1908), in The Closed Door, and Other Verses (Melbourne: Australasian Authors'
Agency, 1911). On the 2019–2020 bushfires, see for example Amy Remeikis, ‘Morrison Responds to Fears over
Bushfires but Rejects Censure of Climate Policy’, Guardian, 12 December 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/
australia-news/2019/dec/12/morrison-responds-to-fears-over-bushfires-but-rejects-censure-of-climate-policy; see also
Jack Weatherall, ‘The Only Unprecedented Thing about These Fires Is the Hyperbole’, Spectator, 12 December 2019,
https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/12/the-only-unprecedented-thing-about-these-fires-is-the-hyperbole/.
26
See for example Zeke Hausfather, ‘Analysis: How Well Have Climate Models Predicted Global Warming?’, Carbon
Brief, 5 October 2017, https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-models-projected-global-warming;
Keynyn Brysse et al., ‘Climate Change Prediction: Erring on the Side of Least Drama?’, Global Environmental Change
23, no. 1 (2013): 327–37; S. Rahmstorf, G. Foster and A. Cazenave, ‘Comparing Climate Projections to Observations
up to 2011’, Environmental Research Letters 7, no. 4 (2012): 044035/1–044035/5.
27
T. Beer, A.M. Gill and P.H.R. Moore, ‘Australian Bushfire Danger under Changing Climatic Regimes’, in Greenhouse:
Planning for Climate Change, ed. G. I. Pearman, (Melbourne: CSIRO, 1988), 421–27.
28
S. Ellis, P. Kanowski and R. Whelan, Report of the National Inquiry on Bushfire Mitigation and Management
(Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2004), 119; K. Hennessy et al., Climate Change Impacts on Fire-Weather in
South-East Australia (Melbourne: CSIRO, 2005). See also Ross Garnaut, The Garnaut Climate Change Review: Final
Report (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118.
29
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1962); Mark Stoll, ‘Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: A Book that
Changed the World’, Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions 2012, no. 1, Rachel Carson Center for
Environment and Society, http://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/silent-spring/overview.
30
Kenneth V. Rosenberg et al., ‘Decline of the North America Avifauna’, Science, 4 October 2019, 120–24.
As I will discuss below, history can provide hope and inspiration for everyday lead-
ers and provide proof of the possibility of social priorities and values more compatible
with a flourishing earth. However, we also need barbed and incendiary histories that
hold wrongdoers to account and keep watch over the present. There is no justice with-
out history.
We need to remember that fossil fuel companies and politicians knew about the
atmospheric effects of burning fossil fuels, and indeed in the 1980s some – including
Margaret Thatcher – were ready to act on that knowledge. But momentum for change
was thwarted by political commitment to a neoliberal vision for economic growth. As
the opportunity for action was sacrificed in the service of market freedom and small
government, the fossil fuel companies and their allies in the automotive industry dug
in and began sowing seeds of doubt about climate science.31 Turning closer to home
we should remember, for example, that successive Western Australian governments
knowingly sacrificed millions of hectares of stolen Noongar land to the scourge of dry-
land salinity.32 We need to keep telling these histories because the perpetrators should
be brought to account and bear the burden of remediation. If such historical injustices
are allowed to disappear into the mists of time, it is no wonder that present-day perpe-
trators believe they can get away with wrongdoing underpinned by similar strategies of
denial and misinformation.
Paul Kramer argues that histories are also good for ‘widening the horizons of
empathy’.33 Not only can they potentially help us empathise with human others, but
they can also draw the non-human into our moral sphere as co-inhabitants of a shared
planet. It is entirely remarkable, for example, that so many histories of agricultural
development leave out precisely what this transformation meant for the land’s prior
non-human inhabitants. Histories that include this critical perspective can, for
example, inform and support contemporary efforts to have land clearing legally recog-
nised as an animal welfare issue. Histories that attend to the diversity and particularity
of a more-than-human world can also help to shift our subjectivity away from the fan-
tasy of humans as individual, autonomous subjects, and support patterns of thought in
which we are always already entangled with non-human others.34
Finally, we need to be telling the complicated and intimate more-than-human his-
tories that excavate the strategies through which settler peoples have always tried to
reconcile our situation as agents of both destruction and life, and which expose our
vulnerability yet attachment to a complex and destructive political economic
31
Nathaniel Rich, ‘Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change’, New York Times Magazine, 1
August 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html; Sybille
van Den Hove, Marc Le Menestrel and Henri-Claude de Bettignies, ‘The Oil Industry and Climate Change: Strategies
and Ethical Dilemmas’, Climate Policy 2, no. 1 (2002): 3–18; Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt:
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2010). See also responses to Rich that argue for the significance of the neoliberal moment of the
1980s, for example Naomi Klein, ‘Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”’, The Intercept, 3
August 2019, https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/climate-change-new-york-times-magazine/.
32
Andrea Gaynor, ‘Looking Forward, Looking Back: Towards an Environmental History of Salinity and Erosion in the
Eastern Wheatbelt of Western Australia’, in Country: Visions of Land and People in Western Australia, ed. A. Gaynor, A.
Haebich and M. Trinca (Perth: W.A. Museum, 2002), 105–24; Andrea Gaynor and Keith Bradby, ‘Soil Salinity in
Australia: A Slow Motion Crisis’, Australian Policy and History, 4 December 2018, http://aph.org.au/soil-salinity-in-
australia-a-slow-motion-crisis/.
33
Kramer, ‘History in a Time of Crisis’, 6.
34
Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor, ‘More-than-Human Histories’, Environmental History, 25, no. 4 (2020), in press.
machinery. Perhaps our historical empathy might open up the space in which to have
difficult conversations and find common ground in the quest for a just and habit-
able world.
As I will discuss below, it is not sufficient for us to produce these histories for each
other. They must be translated into forms and media that will reach diverse audiences,
of policymakers, activists and citizens. Another urgent task is expanding the reach of
environmental historical education within and beyond universities. Each student with
whom we (successfully) engage will go out into the world with a more nuanced under-
standing of the origins and nature of present environmental problems, and keep envir-
onmental history among their suite of tools for responding to present and future
environmental challenges.
Katie Holmes: This is a great list Andrea. And I share your sense of urgency. But I’m
also cautious about it: the slow, painstaking labour of archival excavation and historical
reconstruction; the intellectual work of thinking – carefully, deliberately, deeply –
seems particularly unsuited to the pressure of a moment when time is seen to be finite;
patient thought and labour seem an obscene retreat from the cacophonous imperative
to act. Now. Before it’s too late. Thoughtful reflection, and the slow work it requires, is
also a counterforce to the experience of a rapidly changing world and the accelerating
media which is forever encroaching on our lives.35
In the age of ‘alternative facts’, our work and rigorous thinking is especially import-
ant. I think it is imperative that we interrogate the apocalyptic narratives that are so
readily engaged when discussing climate change.36 Similarly, I think it is important to
historicise the idea of the climate apocalypse and the language of climate deadlines, as
geographer Mike Hulme has done, and be reflective about the impacts that doomsday
language has.37 At a global level the environmental crisis of climate change is unlike
any other. As historian John R. McNeill writes, ‘there is no precedent in human history
for a global disaster that affects whole societies in multiple ways at different times in
different locations all at once’. [COVID-19 has upended this claim – see postscript.]
But, he continues, its effects will be/are being ‘felt locally and regionally rather than
globally’.38 The climate apocalypse then will be experienced less as an apocalypse than
‘a slow, uneven unravelling. … ordinary danger amplified, enduring injustice height-
ened’.39 In Australia we know that our continent is more vulnerable than some to the
ravages of climate change, and the 2019–2020 fires felt more intense than ‘ordinary
danger amplified’. But even they were experienced in specific ways depending on ecol-
ogy, locale and history.40
35
See Libby Robin et al., ‘Three Galleries of the Anthropocene’, The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 3 (2014): 207–24.
36
Greg Garrard, ‘Never Too Soon, Always Too Late: Reflections on Climate Temporality’, Wiley Interdisciplinary
Reviews: Climate Change 11, no. e605 (2020): 1–5.
37
Mike Hulme, ‘Is It Too Late (to Stop Dangerous Climate Change)? An Editorial’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews:
Climate Change 11, no. e619 (2020): 2.
38
John R. McNeill, ‘Can History Help Us with Global Warming?’, in Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National
Security Implications of Climate Change, ed. K.M. Campbell (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 44.
39
Casey Williams, ‘Apocalypse How? What Novels Screw Up About Climate Change’, HuffPost UK, 22 April 2018,
accessed 27 October 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/earth-day-eco-fiction-climate-change_n_
5ad92237e4b0e4d0715ec872.
40
Tom Griffiths, ‘The Story of Fire in the Australian Landscape’, Radio National Rear Vision, 30 January 2020, https://
www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/tom-griffiths/11913562.
I think this opens up really important areas for our work. Andrea, to your list of the
contributions that environmental historians can make, I would add that as story
archaeologists, we can find and tell histories that ‘move us forward’.41 We need histor-
ies that speak to the local, regional experiences of our communities and readers. If I
think about the book Mallee Country that we have both worked on together, one of the
key stories that the book tells is of how a complex ecosystem that had evolved over mil-
lions of years was transformed in a handful of decades into a monoculture of wheat.
I’ve always believed that transformation was possible because settlers imagined a radic-
ally different kind of landscape – they imagined vast fields of wheat where thousands
of acres of dense mallee scrub grew.42
There are other stories we tell in the book however: about the ways in which people
have come to understand and adapt to mallee country, living on it for millennia as
Aboriginal people have done, farming it as settlers have done, loving it, even leaving it.
Stories from the mallee lands are about destruction and denial, and also about caring
for country, about stewardship, cultivating, healing and restoring.43 These stories speak
to complex histories and understandings of place and identity. They are about complex
entanglements between humans and their environments. Within them we can find the
values which must guide our relationship with the ecological world.
As we adapt to the realities of our climate changed world, and support the urgent
work of mitigating ecological destruction, we need to find new kinds of stories that can
frame our futures in different ways. We know that the climate change scenarios that
are playing themselves out across our continent and world are part of a big story, but
people don’t live at a global level. Responding to the local, regional experiences of cli-
mate change requires local and nuanced approaches which speak to the ways people
understand their relationship with place, identity, family, community. It requires an
understanding of people’s history with that place.
If we are to change the story about our future, we must first imagine it in radically
different ways. History is crucial here, for ‘the stories we tell about who we were and
what we did shape what we can and will do’.44 Different kinds of stories help us
imagine other possible futures. Rebecca Solnit writes: we ‘row forward looking back’.45
One of the huge challenges we have as we imagine different kinds of futures, futures
without fossil fuels, is to find the past stories that offer us different ways of reimagining
our relationship with the ecological world and with each other. Sometimes the past
offers us vibrant springs of such stories, at other times they are much harder to find.
But finding them, telling them, connecting the past to the present and future, working
to change the story to one based on values of care, stewardship and justice, is a crucial
task for us in these urgent times.
41
Imani Perry in conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being, 27 September 2019, accessed 1 November 2019, https://
onbeing.org/programs/imani-perry-more-beautiful/. Paul Kramer suggests that one of the key contributions historians
can make to public debate is that we can be ‘archaeologists of the roads not taken’. Kramer, ‘History in a Time of
Crisis’, 7.
42
Richard Broome et al., Mallee Country: Land, People, History (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2019).
43
Mike Hulme, ‘Beyond Climate Solutionism’, Nobel Conference 55, 25 September 2019, accessed 1 November 2019,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = IBEJ2fq7Ir4&feature = youtu.be.
44
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016), xviii.
45
Ibid., xxiv.
Ruth Morgan: These are all vital tasks that allow environmental historians of different
stripes to play to their strengths. I echo Katie’s call to connect people to place, and in
doing so, make the planetary personal. I also share Andrea’s position on environmental
history as a necessary corrective to the temptation to mythologise particular environ-
mental pasts that legitimise ‘business as usual’. To my mind, these are connected proj-
ects that demand of environmental history compelling narratives that situate real
people and real places in the real past. Situating radical remembering in place encour-
ages not only temporal thinking, but also collective thinking of shared places, of com-
munity, as an antidote to the prevalence of atomistic self-interest.
As much as the language of crisis and emergency can help to gather momentum for
transformative change, I am cautious about its proliferation as its use has so often pro-
duced lasting undemocratic and unequal effects. Frustratingly slow as policy responses
to ecological challenges have been, and for all the shortcomings of Western democra-
cies, declaring an emergency frames climate change as a discrete, albeit, global threat –
as an enemy that, with sufficient resources, can be thwarted. From this position,
climate change is not of us and warrants a ‘state of exception’.46 But history and science
tell otherwise. Climate change is the product of particular historical processes of extrac-
tion, industrialisation, colonialism and development, of particular ways of living for the
few, at the expense of the many. It amplifies existing social and environmental injust-
ice. Environmental histories can show the continuities and pathways that have led to
this predicament, as well as offer critical historical insights into possibilities that
lie ahead.
I am mindful too of the privileged position from which the three of us write, teach
and research. For better or worse, we are fairly typical of the wider community of aca-
demic environmental historians in the Global North, as well as the wider environmen-
tal movement, historically at least. These are both groups that must continue to reckon
with their exclusionary pasts and presents if they are to have any constructive role in
imagining more just and equitable futures.47
What is, or should be, our relationship with climate and ecological sciences?
Ruth Morgan: Environmental history’s engagement with the sciences has been one of
the distinguishing features of the field, and also one of its most debated characteris-
tics.48 Given that science has long spoken for nature, environmental history has found
in the sciences a valuable means by which to access the material world and to account
for the ways in which environmental change has unfolded. Such uses of science may
once have been uncritical, as some questioned in the 1990s, but more sophisticated and
nuanced engagements with other disciplines (scientific ones among them) have
46
See Mike Hulme, ‘Climate Emergency Politics Is Dangerous’, Issues in Science and Technology XXXVI, no. 1 (2019),
https://issues.org/climate-emergency-politics-is-dangerous/.
47
See for example Mark Dowie, Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and
Native Peoples (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the
Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Miles
Powell, Vanishing America: Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2016).
48
Christine Keiner, ‘How Scientific Does Marine Environmental History Need to Be?’, Environmental History 18
(2013): 112.
developed as the field has matured.49 What remains at the core of environmental his-
tory is that nature is a historical agent, and science can help environmental historians
to show how the natural and cultural worlds are fundamentally entangled.50
Of course, environmental historians are not the only ones who do history. Our col-
leagues in ecology and geology, for instance, both seek to explain change over time.51
Likewise, climate scientists also engage in historical research of a kind in their studies
of past climates that shed light on current and projected trends.52 Lest environmental
historians are thought to be scientifically under-cooked, there are many among us who
have qualifications in the sciences, and draw on this training and experience in their
historical work.53 Establishing baseline data for fisheries research, interpreting histor-
ical climate data and providing empirical examples of past fire behaviour are just a few
cases where historians and historical thinking have proven productive in applied set-
tings.54 These examples demonstrate that in addition to the vital role of environmental
historians as storytellers, environmental historians can also inform environmental deci-
sion-making. In either role, we have a responsibility to recognise the particular agendas
and voices we advance and those we omit.
Environmental history can also offer a useful corrective to scientific modelling. In
the context of glacier research, for example, Mark Carey has argued that mathematical
models can obscure the cultural, socioeconomic, legal and technological factors that
affect water supply and demand in the Peruvian Andes. The result, he argues, renders
‘a world without humans, without politics and economics, and without social relations
and cultural values’.55 Although many scientific models are entirely robust, there are
still opportunities for modelling to involve the expertise of historians in order to
adequately account for environmental change, and the ways in which different people
have responded to such change.
49
For these early critiques, see Richard White, ‘Environmental History, Ecology and Meaning’, Journal of American
History 76, no. 4 (1990): 1111–16; for a recent reflection on these debates, see Ted Steinberg, ‘Subversive Subjects:
Donald Worster and the Radical Origins of Environmental History’, and Frank Zelko, ‘Seeing Like a God:
Environmentalism in the Anthropocene’, in A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History, ed. Mark D. Hersey
and Ted Steinberg (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019), 17–27; 40–56.
50
Linda Nash, ‘Furthering the Environmental Turn’, Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 134.
51
Stephen Dovers in Sarah Brown et al., ‘Can Environmental History Save the World?’, History Australia 5, no. 1
(2008): 03.4.
52
Paul Sabin, ‘“The Ultimate Environmental Dilemma”: Making a Place for Historians in the Climate Change and
Energy Debates’, Environmental History 15 (2010): 78.
53
See for example Richard C. Hoffman et al., ‘AHR Conversation: Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis’,
American Historical Review 113, no.5 (2008): 1431–65.
54
For fisheries, see for example Steve Mullins in Brown et al., ‘Can Environmental History Save the World?’,
03.6–03.8; Jodi Frawley, ‘“Dancing to the Billabong’s Tune”: Oral History in the Environmental Histories of
Murray–Darling Basin Rivers’, in Telling Environmental Histories, ed. Katie Holmes and Heather Goodall (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 51–80; for climate history, see Sam White, ‘The Real Little Ice Age’, Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 44 (2014): 327–52; for fire, see Stephen J. Pyne, ‘Environmental History without Historians’,
Environmental History 10, no. 1 (2005): 72–74.
55
Mark Carey, ‘Science, Models, and Historians: Towards a Critical Climate History’, Environmental History 19 (2014):
358. Kate B. Showers similarly interrogates the development of databases and models for global biofuels research in
‘Biofuels’ Unbalanced Equations: Misleading Statistics, Networked Knowledge and Measured Parameters. Part 1:
Evolution of Globalised Soil, Land and Terrain Databases’, International Review of Environmental History 5, no. 1
(2019): 61–83; ‘Biofuels’ Unbalanced Equations: Misleading Statistics, Networked Knowledge and Measured
Parameters. Part 2: Networks, Consensus and Power’, International Review of Environmental History 5, no. 2
(2019): 41–65; ‘Biofuels’ Unbalanced Equations: Misleading Statistics, Networked Knowledge and Measured
Parameters. Part 3: Modelled Marginal and Spare Land Versus Observed Ecosystems’, International Review of
Environmental History 6, no. 1 (2020): 51–70.
On a related note, the work of environmental historians fleshes out the true mean-
ing of historically informed scientific markers, such as a ‘100-year flood’, for example.
Bringing archival and memory sources into conversation with scientific data reveals
the lasting effects of devastating events such as droughts, floods and bushfires for
more-than-human communities that quantitative data can belie or diminish. Here are
important opportunities too for engaging local communities in these conversations so
that local knowledge informs research findings, while fostering collaborative research
programs that benefit and empower local people. Both environmental historians and
our scientific colleagues can afford to listen to other worldviews.
Although interdisciplinarity is an alluring approach for many environmental histori-
ans, disciplinary hierarchies and misunderstandings can set the stage for unequal rela-
tionships with the sciences.56 However, experience suggests this doesn’t have to be the
case. Environmental historians are currently working with bodies such as the
Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions Over the Earth; the Integrated History and
Future of People on Earth; the International Commission on Stratigraphy; the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the Oceans Past Initiative; and the
Swedish Climate Policy Council. Their involvement suggests that our colleagues in
other disciplines see a seat for us at scientific and policy tables, that our insights and
research can inform current and emerging ecological challenges.
Rather than pursuing competing agendas, we might recognise that we share vital
expertise for the future. Historian of science Naomi Oreskes, whose research over the
past decade has engaged directly with the history of climate science, policy and denial,
identifies a clear and urgent role for historians:
While scientists can document the rate of anthropogenic change and compare it to
changes that have occurred in the absence of human effects, it takes historians,
sociologists, and anthropologists to explain why it matters that the current rate of
change is so rapid. And it will take us to explain why rapid environmental change is
likely to have profound social, cultural, political and economic effects.57
I would go further by adding that it is up to us to demonstrate how issues such as
energy use, pollution and insect decline are just as much structural questions of power
and social values as they are about engineering, science and markets.58
I am mindful, however, of other risks associated with working ‘with’ and ‘on’ the cli-
mate and ecological sciences. Although there may be great gains for those involved,
collaboration across the ‘two cultures’ may provide ammunition for those who seek to
obfuscate and undermine the motives and results of these interdisciplinary endeavours.
Likewise, scholarly interrogations of the production of science as historically and cul-
turally contingent potentially fuel concerted efforts to erode the legitimacy of scientific
research. As historians familiar with the uses and misuses of the past, we well know the
56
Andrea Gaynor in Brown et al., ‘Can Environmental History Save the World?’, 03.2.
57
Naomi Oreskes, ‘Scaling Up Our Vision’, Isis 105, no. 2 (2014): 390. Emphasis in original. See also Oreskes and
Conway, Merchants of Doubt.
58
Sabin, ‘“The Ultimate Environmental Dilemma”’, 76–93; Judit Gil Farrero and Stefania Barca, ‘Environmental
Historians Are Uniquely Equipped to Contribute to the Emerging Research Domain of Anthropocene Studies’, UAB
2017, accessed 30 November 2019, https://www.uab.cat/web/news-detail/8220-environmental-historians-are-
uniquely-equipped-to-contribute-to-the-emerging-research-domain-of-anthropocene-studies-8221-1345680342044.
html?noticiaid = 1345737304258.
ways in which disciplines can become political battlegrounds to further particular ends.
Do we shy away from these undertakings? No, but we go in with our eyes wide open.
Katie Holmes: Ruth, I would add to this another important role we have as historians
in this area, which is to explicate the ways in which climate is not just about a physical
system, the workings of which most of us will never fully understand, but also some-
thing that is deeply cultural: local, embodied and thoroughly enmeshed with the wea-
ther. If we extend this to think about climate change, we have a role in broadening the
dominant, scientific understanding of this complex phenomenon, one communicated
primarily as a question of physics, a matter of metrics and a problem to be solved.
Climate is not just an atmospheric system, it is an idea that ‘takes shape in cultures and
can therefore be changed by cultures’.59 It is through cultural practice and imagination
that we endow climate with meaning and value.60
In Australia, the idea of our climate as one of ‘droughts and flooding rains’ has
become the shorthand by which we understand the extremes of our continent, its unique
variability, the rugged challenge of this frontier where ‘love’ for the ‘sunburnt’ land was
hard won by colonists. As Tim Sherratt observes, it has become the ‘background against
which the resilient character of [the country’s] people could be celebrated’.61 (And now it
is a disabling narrative in the context of climate change – a way of insisting that climate
extremes are normal, and battling them part of our nation’s DNA.)
If we accept that our understanding of climate is as cultural as it is scientific, a lived
experience as well as an idea, then we can begin to see other important contributions that
environmental historians can make. In understanding how, for example, settlers experi-
enced and began to interpret the Australian climate, enacted and adapted to long-term
environmental transformation, we undertake essential climate research. So I would also go
further than Naomi Oreskes and argue that without understanding the nexus between cli-
mate or environment and culture, and how that dynamic interaction has changed, we will
never fully understand how we can enable the imaginative revolution and cultural trans-
formation that are necessary if we are to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
I would also add that configuring climate change as a problem to be solved, which is a
dominant way in which discussions about climate change progress, belies the human com-
plexity at the core of the problem. It frames climate change as something ‘outside’ of us,
and feeds discussions about technological ‘solutions’ that completely ignore questions of
ethics, justice, power or values – the very issues that humanities scholars are trained to
examine and understand. Canadian literary scholar Greg Garrard suggests that climate
change is a ‘predicament we must face rather than a problem we can solve’.62
Andrea Gaynor: I entirely agree that there is an important role for historians to play in
injecting a human dimension into our understanding of climate breakdown and devel-
oping imaginative social responses to the challenges of adaptation – though I see
59
Hulme, ‘Beyond Climate Solutionism’.
60
Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 14.
61
Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, ed., A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia
(Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005), 3.
62
Greg Garrard, ‘Never Too Soon, Always Too Late’, 4.
mitigation as indeed a political problem to be solved. However, we also need to look

beyond climate to the escalating eradication of biodiversity that is at least as threaten-
ing. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Services recently found that urgent transformations across social, cultural, economic
and technological domains are required in order to head off the critical loss of bio-
diversity and ecosystem services that has accelerated over the past 50 years.63 Working
with scientists on biodiversity-related topics has given me not only immense respect
for what they do, but also a renewed understanding of the particular skills, knowledge
and perspectives that historians can bring to such inquiries – as storytellers, contextual-
isers, translators and interrogators. While, as Ruth says, many other disciplines are
engaged with change in the non-human world over time, the recovery of data from the
past is not history, just as our inductive and narrative practices are not science. Both
have value – and they need each other. Amid a growing recognition that rigorous sci-
entific studies are necessary but insufficient to head off the crises we face, there is a
growing interest in collaboration across the arts–science divide, and increasing oppor-
tunities for environmental historians to be part of that.
What is, or should be, our relationship with environmental activism?

Andrea Gaynor: At the Australian Historical Association conference 2006, just after the
earth’s atmosphere reached 400 ppm carbon dioxide, a panel of emerging and estab-
lished historians tackled the somewhat tongue-in-cheek question, ‘Can environmental
history save the world?’ Each of the contributors, while critical of aspects of environ-
mental history as then practised, recognised the field’s power to ‘change the world’
through work engaged with various social actors: policymakers, scholars and the public
at large.64 Environmental history has always possessed this somewhat ‘activist’ orienta-
tion. As a historical sub-discipline emerging out of the rising wave of 1970s environ-
mental activism, environmental history has retained close personal and intellectual
links with environmentalism – though in some contexts at least as a critical friend. In
the USA, Paul Sutter wondered whether the field’s homing in on ‘entanglement,
hybridity, messiness and contingency’ would lead to a disabling moral relativism, but
concluded that many historians were in fact ‘openly reaching for innovative ways to re-
engage and improve environmental advocacy in a hybrid world’.65
The deep thinking that attends scholarly commitments is essential, though I argue
that in the midst of the sixth great extinction and climate breakdown they are not suffi-
cient. There is a long and rich tradition of environmental historians as public intellec-
tuals, from Marc Bloch to Ramachandra Guha to Tom Griffiths. At a time when the
higher education sector is under pressure and academics are constantly being asked to do
more with less, it seems increasingly difficult to carve out the time in which to perform
these roles. Yet we need to escalate efforts to bring our forms of radical remembering to
63
S. Dıaz et al., ed., Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Bonn: IPBES secretariat,
2019), 10–16.
64
Brown et al., ‘Can Environmental History Save the World?’, 03.1–24.
65
Paul Sutter, ‘The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History’, Journal of American History 100
(2013): 99, 119.
wider audiences: to intervene in debates, engage with policymakers, build communities,

make films. We need, of course, to maintain faithfulness to the past and to the tenets of
our craft, carefully documenting our sources and letting current concerns shape our ques-
tions, not our findings. But this kind of careful, conventional historical practice is in no
way incompatible with an engaged, activist orientation. Environmental and other histori-
ans’ responses to the catastrophic southern Australian fire season of 2019–2020 demon-
strate an awareness of our responsibility to bring our expertise to public debates;66 in
calling for particular forms of public and institutional action, they straddle the boundary
between traditional public intellectual advocacy and more urgent, explicitly change-seeking
activism. Those with the privilege of academic freedom and of working in institutions that
accept climate science have a safe platform from which to speak on this issue (but not all
issues, as the example of Gerd Schr€ oder-Turk has shown).67 Furthermore, studies of scien-
tists have shown that advocating for action on particular issues is unlikely to harm their
credibility; the same likely applies for historians.68
As Anna Tsing has observed, ‘it takes concrete histories to make any concept come
to life’,69 and at a (pre-COVID) time when business as usual seemed utterly
entrenched, history was providing essential evidence that far-reaching and rapid social
change is possible. Greta Thunberg, in a 2019 speech to American Congress, invoked
the spirit of Martin Luther King and the other civil rights leaders who marched from
Selma to Montgomery in protest over ongoing discrimination against black voters in
Alabama.70 Extinction Rebellion meetings routinely referred to civil rights and suffrage
movements. Even the journal Nature published a call for scientists to engage in ‘non-
violent civil disobedience’, invoking the examples of Rosa Parks, Emmeline Pankhurst,
Martin Luther King, Jr and Mohandas Gandhi.71 Then there are the intimate histories
of sustained, local environmental action – the tree planters, the landcarers, the ‘friends
of’ particular bushland patches. While not revolutionary or indeed sufficient to head
off the crisis, this work has often generated flourishing multi-species communities, and
a way of re-orienting human values. In our current environmental predicament, we
must, as China Mieville proposes, ‘learn to hope with teeth’,72 and history yields inspir-
ing stories of how thoughtful and committed people have achieved significant change.
Finally, we need to be activist within our own discipline and its professional struc-
tures. We do not inhabit a separate ‘planet history’, but consume the living earth to
66
See for example Lynette Russell et al., ‘Open Letter from Australian Historians: Climate-Linked Fires Summer 2020’,
https://climatelinkedfires.wordpress.com/; Griffiths, ‘Savage Summer’; Daniel May, ‘To Burn or Not to Burn is the
Question’, Inside Story, 17 January 2020, https://insidestory.org.au/to-burn-or-not-to-burn-is-not-the-question/;
Griffiths, ‘The Story of Fire in the Australian Landscape’.
67
See for example Christopher Knaus, ‘Murdoch University Sues Whistleblower after Comments on International
Students’, Guardian, 11 October 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/11/murdoch-university-
sues-whistleblower-after-comments-on-international-students.
68
John E. Kotcher et al., ‘Does Engagement in Advocacy Hurt the Credibility of Scientists? Results from a
Randomized National Survey Experiment’, Environmental Communication 11, no. 3 (2017): 415–29.
69
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 66.
70
Greta Thunberg, ‘I Have a Dream that the Powerful Take the Climate Crisis Seriously. The Time for Their Fairytales
is Over’, Independent, 19 September 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/greta-thunberg-congress-speech-
climate-change-crisis-dream-a9112151.html.
71
C.J. Gardner and C.F.R. Wordley, ‘Scientists Must Act on Our Own Warnings to Humanity’, Nature Ecology and
Evolution 3 (2019): 1271–72.
72
China Mieville, ‘The Limits of Utopia’, in Utopia, ed. Thomas More (London: Verso, 2016), 46.
undertake our research, deliver our teaching, confer with peers and develop scholarly
networks. We must develop new academic practices more aligned with ecological real-
ities. This might mean, as Loura et al. suggest, dematerialising many of our interac-
tions, optimising and extending the benefits of less frequent personal engagement
through travel and nurturing local scholars and networks.73 A group of us have already
begun this process with a working paper on sustainable history.74
It remains essential that we maintain our conversations with each other: that we do
the conceptual and theoretical work that gives rise to new questions, and new under-
standings. But we must also strive to use our historical expertise and empathy to listen
to voices less often heard, to engage with new publics and to have the difficult conver-
sations beyond the academy that the future demands.
Ruth Morgan: To Andrea’s impressive reflections, I would also suggest environmental

historians can contribute to ‘commodity activism’ – that is, to inform the choices of
consumers. Reducing consumption (and waste) is imperative, and there are ample
opportunities for shrinking the footprints of everyday lives, especially in the Global
North. Environmental histories of capitalist commodity extraction trace the environ-
mental and labour processes of systems of production and consumption. As a key
player in these systems, the consumer’s choice affirms or rejects these very material
processes, and has the capacity, therefore, to signal demand for more sustainable and
ethical ways of living. This endeavour suggests an individualistic approach to environ-
mental action that runs counter to the more community-oriented arguments we have
put forward, but it is one that empowers each of us in modest ways to think beyond
ourselves, just as we do at the ballot box.
What role is there for environmental historians in challenging the narrative of

growth and opening up space for imagining just and habitable futures?
Ruth Morgan: The explanatory power of narrative is perhaps one of environmental his-
tory’s most acclaimed characteristics. Crafting stories that can comfort or confront,
that elicit emotion and empathy, is a tool not to be underestimated as environmental
crisis conjures all kinds of feelings, from grief and fear to shock and denial.
Environmental historians have long challenged the narrative of growth, whether
Worster’s Dust Bowl, McNeill’s twentieth century, or Langston’s Lake Superior.75
These are stories of reality falling far short of rhetoric, of the humans and others who
are left behind and left out, and of the Herculean efforts to recover and resist.
73
Celeste Rodriguez Louro et al., ‘Sustainable Linguistics: A Working Paper’, https://www.dropbox.com/sh/
kkl8kplwkdj86kl/AAA_uplh65hcOim85GOs66XSa?dl=0, and see also Simon Sleight and Toby Green, ‘Historians and
Sustainability: A Working Paper’, The Blog of the Royal Historical Society, 31 October 2019, https://blog.royalhistsoc.
org/2019/10/31/historians-and-sustainability/.
74
Andrea Gaynor, Carla Pascoe Leahy, Ruth Morgan, Daniel May and Yves Rees, ‘Working Paper on Sustainable
History: The Responsibilities of Academic Historians in a Climate-Impacted World’, 2020.
75
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); J.R. McNeill,
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World (New York: W.W. Norton,
2000); Nancy Langston, Sustaining Lake Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2017). http://sustainablehistorywp.wordpress.com.
Declensionist histories are familiar fare in the corpus of environmental history, but
they have not been without critique. Such is the power of narrative storytelling, critics
argue, that environmental historians should be more mindful of their impact. Some
suggest that doom and gloom can be disabling and paralysing, rather than a corrective
or reality check.76 I share their concern – in these urgent times, we need to galvanise
and empower our audiences, not leave them hopeless. Now more than ever, environ-
mental historians must inspire and energise through our work. These histories need
not be fairy tales; evidence-based narratives can show the paths not taken, the opportu-
nities missed, as they so often have in the case of climate change. In doing so, we have
the chance to show why they were not, for whose gain, and at what cost.77 These urgent
histories are already taking effect, as Exxon Mobil has found, but more of them are
desperately needed to counter insidious, well-funded campaigns of disinformation.78
Such campaigns seek to silence alternative pathways to more just and inhabitable
futures. They appeal to the comfortable and complacent in the developed world, for
the narrative of growth has been a seductive one for a long time now, even to those
who have little to show for it. As Oreskes argues, the story of climate change ‘is the
story of the failure of global capitalism to recognise the external costs of carbon and to
find effective means to deal with social costs more broadly’.79 Environmental histories
can show that there have always been material limits to economic growth, and that
recklessly reaching beyond those limits has resulted in enormous human and ecological
costs that we can no longer afford, if we ever could. These are questions of environ-
mental justice that are international, intergenerational as well as interspecies – environ-
mental histories can lay bare the ways in which we are connected to each other and
foster more ethical ways of being that seek not to benefit at the expense of others.
Environmental histories that trace such connections and relationships can usefully
overcome unhelpful mindsets that position labour against the environment.
Progressive environmental action comes at the expense of jobs, while those very jobs
are inimical to a greener future, or so the arguments go.80 Yet there are ample opportu-
nities to make work the common ground here, drawing on the arguments of environ-
mental historians that nature is known through human labour, and that environments
are produced, in part, by human labour. Further still, we might appreciate that all work
happens in the environment, whether it is an office, a factory or a mine. From sick
building syndrome to colliers’ strikes and safety on the factory floor, labour efforts to
improve working conditions and mitigate risks to lives and livelihoods are environ-
mental in nature.81
76
Nash, ‘Furthering the Environmental Turn’, 135.
77
Kramer, ‘History in a Time of Crisis’, 7.
78
John Cook et al., America Misled: How the Fossil Fuel Industry Deliberately Misled Americans about Climate Change
(Fairfax: George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 2019).
79
Oreskes, ‘Scaling Up Our Vision’, 385.
80
For an exploration of this tension in the US context, see the classic essay by Richard White, ‘“Are You an
Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?”: Work and Nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Human Place in
Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 171–85.
81
See also Stefania Barca, ‘Laboring the Earth: Transnational Reflections on the Environmental History of Work’,
Environmental History 19 (2014): 3–27; Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to
Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Michelle Murphy, Sick Building
Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006); Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA:
Where and how work is undertaken, therefore, becomes a matter of environmental

justice that fosters a more inclusive approach to the kind of social transformations that
environmental challenges demand. Historians, environmental or otherwise, as Andrea
has already mentioned, know well the power of the people to bring about enormous
change. These resistance movements offer a wealth of intellectual and practical insights
into of the roots of uneven development that have produced the uneven distribution of
climate-related costs. As historian Kavita Philip notes, ‘Put simply, it is the poor and
marginalised in every nation who have already had to pay the costs of extreme climate-
events. They are the canaries in the coal mine, the markers of our climatic futures’.82
Paul Sabin reminds us that whether we like it or not, ‘historical thinking and ana-
logues already powerfully influence energy and climate policy’.83 It is up to us to con-
tribute to these policy processes in order to ensure that these debates and
conversations include fundamentally historical questions of political power, social val-
ues and environmental justice.
Andrea Gaynor: Ruth you’re absolutely right to emphasise the power of narrative.
As environmental historian Bill Cronon wrote 27 years ago now in his influential navi-
gation of the postmodernist challenge:
narratives remain our chief moral compass in the world. Because we use them to
motivate and explain our actions, the stories we tell change the way we act in
the world.84
However, I think the problem of growth highlights one of the limits of our
‘environmental’ storytelling. You note that histories of work are also environmental
because of their resource or health implications. But they are also ‘environmental’ in that
everything we do and work with is in and of ‘the environment’, even when it appears not
to be so. This is an effect of our enduring tendency to put certain objects and activities
(such as agriculture, climate and conservation) into the ‘environment’ box, and leave
others (such as fashion, the global arms trade, sexuality and industrial labour) out of it.
Every aspect of our activities is entangled in a more-than-human world, but the denial of
this fact has nourished the fantasy that we can endlessly choose ‘jobs and growth’ over
‘environment’. Environmental historians have an important role to play in storying the his-
torical dimensions of those entanglements to highlight the absurdity of this claim.
More immediately, history might be more effectively deployed in the quest for satis-
factory post-growth societies. Histories of recent periods of economic contraction –
such as the Great Depression – do not provide an encouraging template for the future.
While there have been histories of non-capitalist and peri-capitalist households, com-
munities and livelihoods, the left-wing observation, commonly attributed to Fredric
Jameson, that ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’,
suggests that these have not been sufficient – or perhaps effectively framed – to inform
Harvard University Press, 2010); Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in
Gary, Indiana, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
82
Kavita Philip, ‘Doing Interdisciplinary Asian Studies in the Age of the Anthropocene’, Journal of Asian Studies 73,
no. 4 (2014): 983.
83
Sabin, ‘“The Ultimate Environmental Dilemma”’, 77.
84
William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History 78, no. 4
(1992): 1375.
thinking on scalable options for degrowth.85 We urgently need more ‘environmental’

histories of economic transitions and alternatives to growth – including histories of
Indigenous economies and women’s work in non-capitalist and peri-capitalist settings.
These are histories for what Frances Flanagan calls the ‘new work order’, in which a
common social project unites material security and work engaged with renewal and
care in a more-than-human world.86
Conclusion
Katie Holmes: As this discussion illustrates, the vibrancy of the field of environmental
history shows no sign of declining. Indeed, as the health of the ‘Green Stream’ at the
Australian Historical Association conferences indicates, the number of historians
engaging with environmental topics continues to expand, and historians working in
other areas are gravitating to the field or integrating environmental questions in aspects
of their research.
Environmental historians have much to say as we rise to the challenge of ensuring
our work speaks to the most pressing crisis of our time. As we do so, the ways in which
we work, and who we work with, are changing. We are reaching across the disciplines
to engage with our colleagues in the environmental and physical sciences, and adding
our insights to the expanding field of environmental humanities as we join with col-
leagues in Indigenous Studies, philosophy, creative arts, literature, politics and the
Social Sciences. We are engaging audiences through new collaborations with our key
cultural institutions – museums, libraries and galleries – and taking our work into the
communities most affected by our research. It is through such engagement that we can
become co-collaborators in imagining and working towards a world where care, justice
and stewardship are the values that illuminate our path.
Postscript
Katie Holmes: This article is going to press as the COVID-19 pandemic breaks across
our world and Australia goes into lockdown. We are still learning about the likely ori-
gins of it – believed to be a mutation from bats to pangolins to humans – but it is not
too early to know that the broader origin of the virus can be found in the relationships
between humans, ‘other animals, and the broader environment’.87 COVID-19 is an
Anthropocene pandemic. It collapses the human/nature distinction. Along with other
recent viruses such as SARS, MERS, Ebola and Hendra, it tells us about the destruction
of habitat that brings particular animal species into closer contact with each other and
with humans; about the global trade in exotic animals; about changing farming practi-
ces that increase the risk of such viruses developing; about changes in living conditions
85
See for example the mushroom collectors in Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
86
Frances Flanagan, ‘Climate Change and the New Work Order’, Inside Story, 28 February 2019, https://insidestory.
org.au/climate-change-and-the-new-work-order/.
87
Thom van Dooren, ‘Pangolins and Pandemics: The Real Source of this Crisis is Human, not Animal’,
newmatilda.com, 22 March 2020, accessed 30 March 2020, https://newmatilda.com/2020/03/22/pangolins-and-
pandemics-the-real-source-of-this-crisis-is-human-not-animal. See also Liam Mannix, ‘The Perfect Virus: Two Gene
Tweaks that Turned COVID-19 into a Killer’, The Age, 29 March 2020, accessed 30 March 2020, https://www.theage.
com.au/national/the-perfect-virus-two-gene-tweaks-that-turned-covid-19-into-a-killer-20200327-p54elo.html.
which create the perfect conditions in which viruses can thrive; and about a globalised,
mobile world which has seen international travellers spread the virus to every country
at alarming speed. But while COVID-19 might have been initially carried by the weal-
thy, as it begins to wreak havoc in developing countries, it will further expose the
inequalities across our world: millions are expected to die in countries that have no
access to the respirators, testing kits or health care workers that are even in short sup-
ply in the Global North.
In the cacophony surrounding COVID-19, the tension between treating it as a
health crisis or an economic crisis is very apparent. But the virus is a symptom of the
broader environmental crisis engulfing our world. When the noise fades, the dead are
counted and the economic cost tallied, environmental historians will have much to
contribute to understanding the antecedents which enabled the pandemic, its
anthropogenic nature, and the differences and parallels between the response to
COVID-19 and the climate and ecological crises. As climate change-denying conserva-
tive governments around the world adopt Keynesian economics and begin to listen to
scientific experts as they formulate responses to the virus, activists are beginning to
work towards something other than business as usual in a post-pandemic world. In
this context, space potentially opens up for historians to intervene with stories that
encourage concerted, coordinated, effective and just action on climate change and bio-
diversity.88 The health of us all, and our planet, depends on such action.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Yves Rees and Ben Huf for the invitation to contribute to
this special issue on Urgent Histories, and to our anonymous reviewers for their encourage-
ment and helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
About the authors

Katie Holmes is Professor of History at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Director of the
Centre for the Study of the Inland, an environmental humanities research centre. Her work
integrates environmental, gender and oral history to understand the experience of Australian
settlement. She has also published on the history of emotions and the history of mental illness.
She is the author of Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries of the 1920 & 1930s
(1995) and Between the Leaves: Australian Stories of Women, Writing and Gardens (2011), and
most recently, with Richard Broome, Charles Fahey and Andrea Gaynor, co-author of Mallee
Country: Land, People, History (Monash University Publishing, 2020).
Andrea Gaynor is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Australia.
An environmental historian, her research seeks to use the contextualising and narrative power
88
Jonathon Watts, ‘Delay is Deadly’, Guardian, 24 March 2020, accessed 30 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2020/mar/24/covid-19-climate-crisis-governments-coronavirus. See also Damian Carrington,
‘Coronavirus: “Nature Is Sending Us a Message”, Says UN Environment Chief’, Guardian, 25 March 2020, accessed 30
March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/coronavirus-nature-is-sending-us-a-message-says-un-
environment-chief?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other.
of history to assist transitions to more just and sustainable societies. Her most recent book,
co-authored with Richard Broome, Charles Fahey and Katie Holmes, is Mallee Country: Land,
People, History (Monash University Publishing 2020). She is Convenor of the Australian and
New Zealand Environmental History Network and Vice-President of the European Society for
Environmental History. Her teaching encompasses world environmental history and historical
methods, and she is currently researching histories of community-led land management in
Western Australia, water in Australian urbanisation and nature in Australian
urban modernity.
Ruth Morgan is an Associate Professor in the School of History at The Australian National
University, Australia. She has published widely on the climate and water histories of Australia
and the British Empire, including her award-winning book, Running Out? Water in Western
Australia (2015). Her current project, on environmental exchanges between British India and
the Australian colonies, has been generously supported by the Australian Research Council
and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is also a co-investigator on the ARC
Discovery Project, “Water and the Making of Urban Australia,” and a Lead Author on the
Water chapter in Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's
Assessment Report 6.
ORCID
Katie Holmes http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8589-1612
Andrea Gaynor http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5633-9797
Ruth Morgan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2842-4441

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ISSN: 1449-0854 (Print) 1833-4881 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raha20

Doing environmental history in urgent times

Katie Holmes, Andrea Gaynor & Ruth Morgan

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