Anticipatory History - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene 21/05/2024, 23:37

ClimateCultures – creative conversations for the

Anthropocene
exploring cultural responses to environmental change

Anticipatory History

Writer Mark Goldthorpe reviews Anticipatory history, a

book that explores the possibilities for ‘looking back’ at

histories of environmental change in places to help us ‘look

forward’ to what futures might be in store, and we might

shape.

2,220 words: estimated reading time 9 minutes

A copy of Anticipatory history goes to Jennifer Leach for her contribution to our series, A

History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.

***

This 2011 book grew from the experiences of the Anticipatory History Research Network, a

one year project within AHRC’s Landscape and Environment Programme. Led by Caitlin

DeSilvey and Simon Naylor at Exeter University, the network brought together fellow

scholars in humanities, social, natural and physical sciences, writers and artists, and

environmental practitioners in wildlife, coastal, landscape and heritage management. I had

the good fortune to be doing my MA Climate Change at Exeter at the time. So, although my

involvement was at the latter stages of their research, I was able to contribute some work

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locally with the National Trust — on ‘Storying adaptation’ — to the network’s final

symposium.

Here, I want to introduce Anticipatory history the book — as a process, a product and a

provocation. It’s a slim volume but written in many voices, offering rewarding encounters on

different levels.

Process

Publication often seems the natural endpoint of research activity, but the group assembled

around this network’s central question — what roles do “history and story-telling play in

helping us to apprehend and respond to changing landscapes, and to changes to the wildlife

and plant populations they support?” — found themselves creating this book almost as a

byproduct of their discussions. Something that I’ve encountered when researching how

large, multi-partner climate change projects successfully incorporate very different academic

fields and societal stakeholders is that the new interdisciplinary teams very often spend 18

months — typically up to half the project lifetime — coming to terms with each other’s

vocabulary and ways of seeing the world. They have to find ways to achieve that in parallel

with ‘doing the job’. Often an ad hoc and iterative process, this frequently catalyses creative

approaches to ‘getting to know each other’. One large network developed their own glossary

for terms that engineers, sociologists, modellers and planners might have ‘in common’ but

which had different meanings and usages for each ‘tribe’.

It seems that Anticipatory history developed in a similar way:

“Over the course of four meetings a number of people participated in an

extended discussion about the meaning and efficacy of anticipatory history as a

concept and a mode of engagement with the past. As we followed debates we

noted down key terms on index cards – words or phrases that have a bearing

on aspects of environmental change over time and in place, and our responses

to these changes. We then went through a process of culling entries and

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drafting collective definitions. Lastly, participants were asked to adopt particular

key terms and to produce entries. This book is then a work of many hands and

can in no way claim to be the product of a single vision. It was never our

intention to provide a definitive statement on the means and ends of

anticipatory history, even if that was possible to do.”

At what point that exercise crystallised into a book for a wider readership, I don’t know, but

it has been offered as a glossary or work of reference for those wanting to know more about

… Well, what is ‘anticipatory history’?

“Looking to pasts and futures” – redundant lighthouse lenses at Orford Ness, Suffolk coast

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Photograph: Mark Goldthorpe © 2012

The introductory essay that includes the passage above starts by noting that while reports of

climate and environmental change are “the daily fare of a twenty-first century media diet”

our ability to take in and respond personally to the implications or lived experiences of

change’s impacts often disconnects from scientific data.

“Many of these changes … will register as subtle (or not so subtle) alterations in

familiar landscapes: a lost section of coastal path, a favourite flower vanished,

dwindling populations of waterbirds in a local saltmarsh, the removal of a

customary fishing quay. But the range of available responses to these changes

is limited – usually cast in terms of loss and guilt – and we often do not have

the cultural resources to respond thoughtfully, to imagine our own futures in a

tangibly altered world.”

As a clutch of the book’s entries explain, our personal sense of time and the ‘natural’ state of

things is shaped by our generational timeframes: what one entry (Shifting baseline

syndrome) calls “’generational amnesia’, due to relatively short life spans and memories” and

another (Tempocentrism) describes as “the tendency to take for granted the premises,

expectations and values of one’s own timeframe.” We struggle to acknowledge unwelcome

changes in our environment (either locally or in places with treasured memories) — or, if

acknowledged, to accept what is often the naturalness of processes we cannot halt. A third

entry (Presentism) raises the risks of extending these mental frames into how we imagine

the past, where we inevitably filter, select and assemble our own data on what that famously

‘foreign country’ was really like; “We make our stories about the past; we don’t find them

fully formed … Do we have any chance of transcending our present point of view when we

approach the making of history, and should we be pretending to?”

Our relationship with past and future, caught as we always are in the interval of uncertainty

between the two, can be emotionally and culturally complex and unsettling. Anticipatory

history offers ways to interrogate our uncertainties; the example of Orford Ness lighthouse

suggests how impermanent features in our landscape can become stabilised in our

imagination, and natural processes then threaten both the physical and cultural permanence

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which seems so natural to our tempocentric selves. The lighthouse, already at risk of erosion

of the Orford Ness shingle bank, was also deemed redundant as coastal wayfinder: a

combination which undermines the future of this 220-year-old Suffolk landmark. Indeed, the

lighthouse has now been decommissioned and the sea continues its advance on the brick

building. What was once an aid to navigation in space might slip into a new, symbolic role as

navigational aid between past and future; there was a time with no lighthouse on the

shingle, and this seems likely again. ‘Anticipatory history’, as conceptual framework, explores

how looking back in a place might help us look ahead to its plausible futures. Highlighting

the potential for Palliative curation as one approach to this predicament, Anticipatory

history suggests an end-of-life ethic of care and attention, taking our leave of loved but

transient features.

With these subjective, limited perceptions and judgements in mind, it can be tempting to see

scientific and technical expertise as the prized location for all useable knowledge about

historical and future change, the only reliable base for our policies. That, time and again, it

still surprises us when this fails to deliver everything we expected is not an argument against

expertise or evidence, but for a broadening of what we mean by these, and what counts.

Picking up the book’s introduction again,

“History and storytelling … might seem a surprising place to begin an

investigation into the potential consequences of environmental change …

However, our argument is that the humanities have much to contribute to these

debates. [Some forms of history,] guided by a concern for the future, [look] to

the past to find intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resources to help us direct

this concern towards sustaining specific communities – both human and

ecological.”

‘Anticipatory history’ borrows that future orientation from the notion of ‘anticipatory

adaptation’ to prospective changes rather than ‘reactive adaptation’ after the fact. Looking

back can inform a more experimental gaze forward, exploring our imaginations and stories of

environmental change, our different versions of ‘here and ‘now’ as well as ‘there and then’.

The authors quote two historians:

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“Our ability to project ourselves into the future, imagining alternative lives that

lead us to set new goals and work toward new ends, is merely the forward

expression of the experience of change we have learned from reflecting on the

past.” – William Cronon

“We study the past not in order to find out what really happened there or to

provide a genealogy of and thereby a legitimacy for the present, but to find out

what it takes to face a future we should like to inherit rather than one that we

have been forced to endure.” – Hayden White

Product

Book cover
Photograph: Shaun Pimlott / Colin
Sackett / Uniform Books © 2011
http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/anticipator

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yhistory.php

The book’s different authors were therefore engaging with the past(s) not out of nostalgia

but out of a desire to see how “the stories we tell about ecological and landscape histories

shape our perception of what we might call future ‘plausabilities’”, complementing the

scientific study of climate change probabilities. As such, anticipatory approaches to history

might “intersect with other areas of concern – including the communication of science, the

pragmatics of land management and the practice of art.” Relying solely on any one of these

approaches — or even a naïve combination of all three — in situations of contention,

controversy and conflict over threats to valued wildlife, landscapes, heritage or livelihoods

can be a damaging experience. When a partnership of agencies culled the ‘invasive’ rats on

Lundy island in order to restore breeding populations of birds, they acted solely on scientific

grounds and without public consultation. Recounting the outcry from animal welfare

protestors wanting to “save the Lundy rats” , the book exposes the moral judgements that

scientific justifications rested upon: “that introduced species should be removed to support

indigenous species; that less charismatic animals should make way for more popular ones;

and that people’s emotional responses to the killing of the rats were not relevant to the

decision-making process.”

“Terms like ‘slaughter’ were used to describe the cull. The risk to other animals

from possible ingestion of the poisons was highlighted. Protesters also noted

that the rats had been on the island for over 400 years, and in doing so

questioned the implication that the rats were recent interlopers – unwanted

immigrants that disrupted a settled indigenous nature on the island.”

How different interests, communities and individuals “know the past in place” is as crucial

and meaningful as the professional expertise informing our decisions on how we respond to

change.

“Anticipatory history may be capable of tapping into these meanings, in that it

does not attempt to construct a singular, authoritative historical narrative. As

an approach, it leaves room for expressing the ‘small stories’ and ‘lay

knowledges’ that are layered in place, and then linking these to a hoped-for

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future.”

Provocation

So, back to the glossary. The 50 terms explored in this book range from the technical-

sounding (Acclimatisation, Coastal squeeze, Entropy, Equilibrium, Managed realignment,

Monitoring) to the deceptively simple (Birds, Ebb and flood, Living landscapes, Memory,

Museum, Place, Rhododendron, Tides, Woods) via the playful or provocative (Besanded,

Dream-map, Liminal zone, Palliative curation, Rewilding, Story-radar, Unfarming, Zone of

exclusion).

When to let go? Coastguard cottages at Birling Gap, Seven Sisters, East Sussex
Photograph: © National Trust Images / John Miller
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/birling-gap-and-the-seven-sisters/

You can move between these personal explorations guided simply by your curiosity, the

convenience of the alphabetical ordering, the threads of different authors’ reappearances, an

index map that ties each entry to a place in the British Isles — or by the handy signposting

under each entry, pointing you to: (Erosion) “See: Art, Coastal squeeze, Cycle of erosion”, or

(Equilibrium) “Do not see: Entropy. See: Shifting baseline syndrome”; (Entropy) “Do not

see: Equilibrium. See: Aspic, Discontinuity”, and so on. It’s a book that calls you to explore,

revisit and share.

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The variety of voices, styles, genres, directions and intents found even within the confines of

an academic and professional network makes for a very partial glossary, whose cumulative

effect is to hint at alternative ‘meanings’ that could have found their way into these entries

via different authors, and at the ghosts of other terminologies and common words which

might just as easily have featured in the discussions sparking this work. Being partial but

being open about partiality and to inviting in more seems to me to be one value of an

anticipatory learning from our subjective histories and imagined futures.

In a later post, I will look at some of the entries in the book and the themes these explore.

Find out more

You can read a response to this review from environmental artist Linda
Gordon, illustrated with a recent example of her ephemeral art.

Anticipatory history (2011), edited by Caitlin DeSilvey, Simon Naylor and Colin Sackett, is

published by Uniform Books. All the indented passages and unattributed quotations are

taken from the book’s Introduction, which you can download as a sample. There is more

information on the research network activities that produced the book at the Arts and

Humanities Research Network programme pages.

The quotation from William Cronon is taken from his 2000 article Why history matters,

(Wisconsin Magazine of History, 84, 2-13) available at his website.

The quotation from Hayden White is taken from E Domanska (2008) A conversation with

Hayden White, (Rethinking History, 12, 3-21) and might be found through a web search…

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Mark Goldthorpe
An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on
environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting
and delivering cultural and creative responses.

Read More

Questioning a word? Space for creative thinking...

"One of the entries in Anticipatory history is Enclosure. What does this word mean
to you, in the conext of environmental change and how we imagine and discuss
pasts, places and futures?"

Share your thoughts in the Comments box below, or use the Contact Form.

/ 13th August 2017 / Review / Adaptation, Artists, Climate Change, Collaboration, Culture,
Ecology, Environmental Change, History, Ideas, Key Words, Language, Loss, Meanings, Nature,
Researchers, Spaces, Words

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