Histories for an Uncertain Future: Environmental History and Climate Change

Abstract

In the wake of a decade of crippling droughts, cyclones, floods and fires, and warnings that as a result of anthropogenic climate change such events will be more frequent and intense in the future, historical research into Australian weather and climate is growing. The focus of these studies ranges from the quotidian to the extreme and from the lay to the scientific, offering insights into the experience, measurement, interpretation and prediction of weather and climates since British colonisation. In doing so, they engage with familiar themes of Australian environmental history, such as adaptation, local knowledge, expertise, Western science, sustainability and economic development, as well as demonstrating emerging interests in anxiety, risk and resilience. Here I consider this recent historical research on Australia's climate and its variability, as well as the implications of anthropogenic climate change for the ways in which we undertake writing history.

Notes

* I am grateful to the editors of Australian Historical Studies, Christina Twomey and Cathy Coleborne, for their invitation to participate in this forum. My sincere thanks to Bain Attwood, Clare Corbould, Andrea Gaynor, and the anonymous referees for their indispensable patience and insight.

¹Ed Hawkins and Phil D. Jones, ‘On Increasing Global Temperatures: 75 Years after Callendar’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (2013), in press. See also James R. Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 113–18; and The Callendar Effect: The Life and Times of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898–1964), the Scientist Who Established the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change (Chicago: American Meteorological Society, 2007).

²Robert Kunzig, ‘Climate Milestone: Earth's CO₂ Level Passes 400ppm’, National Geographic, 9 May 2013, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/05/130510-earth-co2-milestone-400-ppm/ (accessed 20 May 2013).

³Johan Rockstroem et al., ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Nature 461 (2009): 472–5.

⁴John Cook et al., ‘Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature’, Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (2013): 024024.

⁵Geoffrey Blainey, ‘Climate and Australia's History’, Melbourne Historical Journal 10 (1971): 5–9; Will Steffen, Lesley Hughes and David Karoly, The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather (Canberra: Climate Commission Secretariat, 2013), 4.

⁶Rather than a ‘new field’, argues environmental historian Richard Grove, environmental history has its origins in historical geography. See Tom Griffiths, ‘How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates about Vegetation Change in Australia’, Australian Journal of Botany 50 (2002): 376.

⁷Stephen R. Dovers, ‘Sustainability and “Pragmatic” Environmental History’, Environmental History Review 18, no. 3 (1994): 33.

⁸Daniel Connell, ‘Managing Climate for the Murray-Darling Basin (1850–2050)’, in A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, eds Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005), 82–91; Donald Garden, Droughts, Floods and Cyclones: El Niños that Shaped Our Colonial Past (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009); Joelle Gergis, Donald Garden and Claire Fenby, ‘The Influence of Climate on the First European Settlement of Australia: A Comparison of Weather Journals, Documentary Data and Palaeoclimate Records, 1788–1793’, Environmental History 15, no. 3 (2010): 485–507; Richard H. Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History 1400–1940 (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1997), 143–6; Richard H. Grove, ‘Revolutionary Weather: The Climatic and Economic Crisis of 1788–1795 and the Discovery of El Niño’, in A Change in the Weather, 128–40; Emily O'Gorman, Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2012).

⁹Deb Anderson, ‘Drought, Endurance and “the Way Things Were”: The Living Experience of Climate and Climate Change in the Mallee’, Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): 67–81; Deb Anderson, ‘Drought, Endurance and Climate Change “Pioneers”: Lived Experience in the Production of Rural Environmental Knowledge’, Cultural Studies Review 16, no. 1 (2010): 82–101; Ruth A. Morgan, ‘Dry Horizons: Exploring the Responses of Western Australian Water Managers to the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect in the Late 1980s’, History Australia 8, no. 3 (2011): 158–76; Ruth A. Morgan, ‘Diagnosing the Dry: Historical Case Notes from South-West Western Australia, 1945–2007’, Osiris 26 (2011): 89–108; Ruth A. Morgan, Running Out? Water in Western Australia (Perth: UWA Publishing, forthcoming 2014).

¹⁰Chris O'Brien, ‘Imported Understandings: Calendars, Weather and Climate in Tropical Australia’, in Climate, Science and History in Australasia, eds James Beattie, Matthew Henry and Emily O'Gorman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, forthcoming 2013); Libby Robin, ‘Migrants and Nomads: Seasoning Zoological Knowledge in Australia’, in A Change in the Weather, 42–53; Libby Robin, Chris Dickman and Mandy Martin, eds, Desert Channels: The Impulse to Conserve (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2010); Libby Robin, Robert Heinsohn and Leo Joseph, eds, Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2009).

¹¹Joseph M. Powell, ‘Environment-Identity Convergences in Australia, 1880–1950’, in (Dis)placing Empire: Renegotiating British Colonial Geographies, eds Lindsay Proudfoot and Michael Roche (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 117.

¹²Non-Australian examples include: Mark Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Georgina Endfield, Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability (Melbourne: Blackwell, 2008).

¹³Donald Garden, ‘El Niño, Irrigation Dams and Stopbanks: Examining the Repercussions of the 1876–78 El Niño in Australia and New Zealand’, History of Meteorology 4 (2008): 2; Eric Pawson and Stephen Dovers, ‘Environmental History and the Challenges of Interdisciplinarity: An Antipodean Perspective’, Environment and History 9 (2003): 67; and Tim Sherratt, ‘Human Elements’, in A Change in the Weather, 1–17.

¹⁴Kirsty Douglas, ‘Under Such Sunny Skies’: Understanding Weather in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Bureau of Meteorology, 2007); O'Brien; Emily O'Gorman, ‘Colonial Meteorologists and Australia's Variable Weather’, University of Queensland Historical Proceedings 16 (2005): 67–87; Emily O'Gorman, ‘Unnatural River, Unnatural Floods? Regulation and Responsibility on the Murray River in the 1950s’, Australian Humanities Review 48 (2010): 87–107; Emily O'Gorman, ‘Local Knowledge and the State: The 1990 Floods in Cunnamulla, Queensland, Australia’, Environmental History 17, no. 3 (2012): 512–46; Sherratt, ‘Human Elements’, 1–17; and Tim Sherratt, Inigo Jones: The Weather Prophet (Melbourne: Bureau of Meteorology, 2007).

¹⁵Sverker Sōrlin and Paul Warde, ‘The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-Reading of the Field’, Environmental History 12, no. 1 (2007): 113; and Jeffrey Stine and Joel Tarr, ‘At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Environment’, Technology and Culture 39, no. 4 (1998): 601–34.

¹⁶George Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science 156 (1967): 611–22.

¹⁷Roderick Home, ‘Introduction’, in Australian Science in the Making, ed. Roderick Home (Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), x–xi; Roderick Home and Sally Kohlstedt, ‘Introduction’, in International Science and National Scientific Identity, eds Roderick Home and Sally Kohlstedt (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 2; Ian Inkster, ‘Scientific Enterprise and the Colonial “Model”: Observations on Australian Experience in Historical Context’, Social Studies of Science 15 (1985): 677–704; and Ray MacLeod, ‘On Visiting the “Moving Metropolis”: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science’, Historical Records of Australian Science 5, no. 3 (1982): 1–16.

¹⁸Tony Ballantyne, ‘The Changing Shape of the Modern British Empire and Its Historiography’, Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (2010): 429–52.

¹⁹See Greg Bankoff, Cultures of Disaster: Society and Natural Hazard in the Philippines (London: Routledge, 2003); Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

²⁰Greg Bankoff, ‘Constructing Vulnerability: The Historical, Natural and Social Generation of Flooding in Metropolitan Manila’, Disasters 27, no. 3 (2003): 224–38.

²¹Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); and Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

²²See, for instance, Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

²³James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1.

²⁴James Beattie, ‘Rethinking Science, Religion and Nature in Environmental History: Drought in Early Twentieth Century New Zealand’, Historical Social Research 29 (2004): 82–103; Roderick Home, ‘Rainmaking in CSIRO: The Science and Politics of Climate Modification’, in A Change in the Weather, 656–79; and Robert Wooding, ‘Populate, Parch and Panic: Two Centuries of Dreaming about Nation-Building in Inland Australia’, in Australia under Construction: Nation-Building—Past, Present and Future, ed. John Butcher (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2008).

²⁵Ranajit Guha, ‘Not at Home in Empire’, Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 483.

²⁶Many thanks to Graeme Davison for sharing his thoughts on this topic.

²⁷Patrick Troy, ‘The Future of Cities’, Australian Planner 36, no. 3 (1999): 162–70.

²⁸Martin V. Melosi, ‘Path Dependence and Urban History: Is a Marriage Possible?’, in Resources of the City: Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe, eds Dieter Schott, Bill Luckin and Genevieve Massard-Guilbaud (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 262–75.

²⁹Paul Sabin, ‘“The Ultimate Environmental Dilemma”: Making a Place for Historians in the Climate Change and Energy Debates’, Environmental History 15 (2010): 76–93.

³⁰Johan Rockstroem et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009), http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/main.html.

³¹Johan Rockstroem et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009), http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/main.html.

³²John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

³³Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene’, Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 14–17; and Paul Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415, no. 23 (2002): 23.

³⁴Ian McEwan, Solar (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), 109.

³⁵Claire Fenby and Joelle Gergis, ‘Rainfall Variations in South-Eastern Australia Part I: Consolidating Evidence from Pre-Instrumental Documentary Sources, 1788–1860’, International Journal of Climatology (2012): DOI:10.1002/joc.3640; and Gergis et al., 485–507.

³⁶Libby Robin and Will Steffen, ‘History for the Anthropocene’, History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1711.

³⁷Sverker Sōrlin, ‘The Contemporaneity of Environmental History: Negotiating Scholarship, Useful History, and the New Human Condition’, Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 3 (2011): 630.

³⁹Griffiths, ‘How Many Trees’, 377–8.

³⁸Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change’, New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 13.

⁴⁰Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 222.

⁴¹Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonial Studies’, 11.

⁴²Tom Griffiths, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007); and Brigid Hains, The Ice and the Inland: Mawson, Flynn and the Frontier (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002).

⁴³Linda Nash, ‘The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?’, Environmental History 10 (2005), 67–9.

⁴⁴Richard White, ‘From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History’, The Historian 66 (2004): 557–64.

⁴⁵Richard White, ‘From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History’, The Historian 66 (2004): 564.

⁴⁶Paul Sutter, ‘The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History’, Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 95–119; Paul Sutter, ‘Nature is History’, Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 145–8.

⁴⁷Linda Nash, ‘Furthering the Environmental Turn’, Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 132–5.

⁴⁸Mike Hulme, ‘Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism’, Osiris 26 (2011): 245–66.

⁴⁹See also Mark Carey, ‘Climate and History: A Critical Review of Historical Climatology and Climate Change Historiography’, WIREs Climate Change 3 (2012): 233–49.

⁵⁰Patricia Limerick, ‘The Repair of the Earth and the Redemption of the Historical Profession’, in The Future of Environmental History: Needs and Opportunities, eds Kimberly Coulter and Christof Mauch (Munich: Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, 2011), 11.

⁵¹Sarah Brown et al., ‘Can Environmental History Save the World?’, History Australia 5, no. 1 (2008): 03.1–03.24.

⁵²Notable exceptions include Sarah Brown, ‘Surveying Our Past and Building Our Future: An Environmental History of an Australian Suburb’, Limina 13 (2007): 23–33; Nancy Cushing, ‘Coalopolis to Steel City: Perceptions of Newcastle 1797–1859’, Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 57 (1998): 61–71, and ‘Australia's Smoke City: Air Pollution in Newcastle’, Australian Economic History Review 49, no. 1 (2009): 19–33; and Luke Keogh, ‘The First Four Wells: Unconventional Gas in Australia’, M/C Journal 16, no. 2 (2013), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/617.

⁵³See, for example, Graeme Davison, ‘Australia: The First Suburban Nation?’, Journal of Urban History 22, no. 1 (1995): 40–74, and ‘Down the Gurgler: Historical Influences on Australian Domestic Water Consumption’, in Troubled Waters: Confronting the Water Crisis in Australia's Cities, ed. Patrick Troy (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2008), 37–65; Lionel Frost and Tony Dingle, ‘Sustaining Suburbia: An Historical Perspective on Australia's Urban Growth’, in Australian Cities: Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia in the 1990s, ed. Patrick Troy (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20–38; Grace Karskens, ‘Water Dreams, Earthen Histories: Exploring Urban Environmental History at the Penrith Lakes Scheme and Castlereagh, Sydney’, Environment and History 13, no. 2 (2007): 115–54; and Ruth A. Morgan, ‘“Our Most Precious Mineral”: Water for Perth, Western Australia, in the 1970s Resource Boom’, in Urban Transformations: Proceedings of the 11th Urban History/Planning History Conference, eds Jenny Gregory, Andrea Gaynor and Sarah McQuade (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2012), 179–93.

⁵⁴For instance, Andrea Gaynor, Harvest of the Suburbs: An Environmental History of Growing Food in Australian Cities (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2006); Tony Hall, The Life and Death of the Australian Backyard (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2010); and Patrick Troy, ‘Saving Our Cities with Suburbs’, Griffith Review 2 (2005), https://griffithreview.com/images/stories/edition_articles/ed2_pdfs/troyed2.pdf.

⁵⁵Exceptions include: Andrea Gaynor, ‘Shifting Baselines or Shifting Currents? An Environmental History of Fish and Fishing in the South-West Capes Region of Western Australia’, in Historical Perspectives of Fisheries Exploitation in the Indo-Pacific, eds Joseph Christensen and Malcolm Tull (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, forthcoming 2013); Andrea Gaynor and Brooke Fowles, ‘The Challenge of Creating a Scientifically-Robust Historical Description of Changing Finfish Populations in the Ningaloo Marine Park’, Studies in Western Australian History 27 (2011): 99–123; and Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow, Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney's Georges River (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009).

⁵⁶The CRC for Water Sensitive Cities is one such interdisciplinary project involving researchers across Australia, including historians, which seeks to inform water management practices around the world. See http://watersensitivecities.org.au/.

⁵⁷William Cronon, ‘Presidential Address: Storytelling’, American Historical Review 118, no. 1 (2013): 1–19.

⁵⁸William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’, Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1375.

⁵⁹Tom Griffiths, ‘The Humanities and an Environmentally Sustainable Australia’, Australian Humanities Review 43 (2007), http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-December-2007/EcoHumanities/EcoGriffiths.html.