Forum - Climate Change and Environmental History

Forum: Climate Change and
Environmental History
Adrian Howkins, Experiments in the Anthropocene: Climate Change and
History in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica
Georgina H. Endfield, Exploring Particularity: Vulnerability, Resilience, and
Memory in Climate Change Discourses
Lawrence Culver, Seeing Climate through Culture
Sam White, Animals, Climate Change, and History
Sherry Johnson, When Good Climates Go Bad: Pivot Phases, Extreme
Events, and the Opportunities for Climate History
James Rodger Fleming, Climate Physicians and Surgeons
Philip Garone, Mission Convergence?: Climate Change and the
Management of US Public Lands
Mark Carey, Science, Models, and Historians: Toward a Critical Climate
History
Mark Carey, Philip Garone, Adrian Howkins, Georgina Endfield, Lawrence Culver, Sherry Johnson,
Sam White, and James Roger Fleming, Forum: Climate Change and Environmental History,
Environmental History (2014): 281 364.
Downloaded from http://envhis.oxfordjournals.org/ at California State University Stanislaus on April 17, 2014
Mark Carey and Philip Garone, Forum Introduction
Mark Carey and Philip Garone
Abstract
This Forum explores global climate change, one of this
centurys most prominent environmental issues. Authors
answer two critical questions: (1) How does the study of
climate history enrich the field of environmental history
more broadly? (2) How can environmental historians contribute to present-day understandings of and responses to global
climate change? This introductory essay (and the Forum more
generally) contribute to both environmental history research
and climate change discussions by grappling with several key
issues including the agency of nonhuman nature and environmental determinism, environmental governance, climate as a
cultural construction, the history of environmental ideas and
discourse, environmental narratives, the commodification of
nature, and the politicization of the natural and life sciences.
This essay also shows how the study of climate history provides
methodological and practical tools for environmental historians. It analyzes the role of interdisciplinary sources and
archives, scale, the place of science in environmental history
scholarship, and the relevance of environmental histories
for present-day policymaking and public discussions about
climate change.
# The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American
Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
doi:10.1093/envhis/emu004
Forum Introduction
Climate Forum | 283
INTRODUCTION
Climate change has become one of the twenty-first centurys most important and debated environmental issues. And yet relatively few environmental historians are studying climate or have examined it in the
past, despite Robert Claxtons prediction in 1983 that climate history
was becoming a new focus within environmental history.1 Historians
of science have published substantially on climate history, and the field
of historical climatology has thrived in Europe since the 1970s after Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published his classic Times of Feast, Times of
Famine and Christian Pfister launched his influential career studying
climate and society.2 Many other climate histories have been written
by nonhistorians, especially journalists and natural scientists. Climate
scientist and geographer Mike Hulme, for example, has become one of
the most influential voices in climate history.3 To inspire more environmental history research on climate, this Forum highlights diverse new
research and underscores accomplishments, deficiencies, discrepancies, and debates about climate history. The goal is to jump-start
climate history research among environmental historians while simultaneously invigorating the field of environmental history and contributing to ongoing discussions about climate change today.
To these ends, we posed two fundamental questions to each contributor: (1) How does the study of climate history enrich the field of environmental history more broadly? (2) How can environmental historians
contribute to present-day understandings of and responses to global
climate change? More than just answering these questions, the Forum
essays are provocative: they are written to raise questions, challenge
conventional wisdom, and arouse debate. They cover diverse topics
across various world regions and over disparate time periods, from Pleistocene animals and colonial Caribbean history to the Antarctic Treaty
and twenty-first-century US national park management. The essays
tackle topics that environmental historians have long analyzed: wilderness, human animal relations, public land management, natural disasters, water management, narratives of nature, and environmental
determinism. But here authors showcase new angles of analysis.
Climate histories contribute to a host of issues at the center of
environmental history scholarship. Essays in this Forum, for example,
analyze the agency of nonhuman nature without devolving into
environmental determinism. They discuss environmental governance
to examine not only the atmosphere, but also the ways in which
climate change impacts, adaptation, and perceptions yield new environment society interactions. Authors illustrate various ways in
which climate is culturally constructed in specific places and periods.
In this way, the discussion traces the history of environmental ideas
and discourse. Some authors also touch on the commodification of
nature; others scrutinize the politicization of the natural sciences and
284 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)
WHAT IS CLIMATE ANYWAY?

Climate historyand even the word climatedoes not mean the same
thing to everyone, and there is disagreement and variation about
what climate means within this Forum. Some think of climate as
weather over time, conceptualizing it as a material or physical force
that influences societies. Within this framing, however, scholars explicitly or implicitly make other distinctions among climate change, climatic variability, and extreme weather events. Some of the essays in
this Forum (by Adrian Howkins, Sam White, Philip Garone, and Mark
Carey) construe climate change as long-term processes, such as the
late Pleistocene or Holocene, or the 150-year post Little Ice Age era of
global warming. Others like Sherry Johnson focus on particular
extreme weather events, which she ties to pivot points in longer
term climatic variation. Georgina Endfield also calls attention to these
particular weather events because they affect human vulnerability
and adaptation, though she also tends to see climate as acting over
the long term. Still others in the Forum, such as Lawrence Culver, conceptualize climate as variable and human influenced as well as simply
average weather over time, thereby deemphasizing its fluctuations
and variations to instead emphasize perceptions and climate impacts
regardless of climatic variability.
Then there is the issue of anthropogenic versus natural climate
change, which has come to the forefront in recent decades with global
warming, the greenhouse effect, and the ozone hole. Why the climate
changes is less important to many historians than understanding
impacts or perceptions of those changes. For others it is critical to recognize that humans have caused or contributed to climate change. This
has led some to conceptualize the Anthropocene, this recent era of
human-induced changes in the world that Howkins discusses extensively. But the notion of anthropogenic climate change is not new.
For centuries, people worried about the effects of deforestation on regional climate change.
Yet another conceptualization of climate gets at the root of the word
itself: climes. Clime underscores the powerful link between weather
and place that was historically so prevalent, such as in ancient Greek
views of the world or in more recent racist and imperialist
the ways in which climate science emerges from particular sociopolitical contexts. In addition to these thematic and theoretical issues, the
study of climate history has important methodological and practical
implications for environmental historians. The essays in this Forum
offer insights into various topics along these lines including interdisciplinary sources and archives, scale, the role of science in environmental
history research, and the place of environmental histories in presentday policy discussions.
Climate Forum | 285
CLIMATIC DETERMINISM
Climate history opens up other important issues for historians to confront. Although most environmental historians long ago rejected the
idea of environmental determinism, it remains a key subject for
climate historyboth as an historical topic of research because these
ideas influenced past societies and as a real concern today because of
its resurgence in global warming discussions. Climatic determinism in
the past helped justify European imperialism and racism by explaining
why Africans were suitable for slavery or why tropical regions were
backward and in need of help from the North.5 Now researchers
such as Hulme contend that a form of climatic determinism has
returned in climate models that are devoid of human variables and
rely on the predictive quantitative sciences to project future scenarios.6
The essays in this Forum tackle this issue of environmental determinism by trying to understand how climate could both shape societies and
be a cultural construction, often at the same time. In short, the Forum
interpretations of the worlds climates and races at the height of European colonialism.4 Culver illustrates not only how ideas about these
climes led past peoples to see weather as regions (and vice versa), but
also how those beliefs about climes led North American settlers to see
and settle landscapes. They associated certain climesand certain
environments such as swampswith stresses to the human body and
to disease. Historical human anxieties concerning climate have led physicians to study linkages between climate and health for thousands
of years, right up to the present-day schemes. Perceptions of climate have thus shaped expectations of the land as well as the historical
consequences that follow from those expectationssuch as the
nineteenth-century American conquest and acquisition of northern
Mexico. Perceptions of climate, Culver explains, even helped shape national destinies.
The notion of climes points to ways in which climate is a cultural and
scientific construction. Culver and James Fleming reveal in their essays
that climate exists in the imagination, memory, metaphors, and discourse as much as in the atmosphere. Fleming and Carey also analyze
the climate that scientists create through their rhetoric and mathematical models, thereby underscoring additional conceptualizations of
climate: the predicted climate that exists primarily in models. Clearly,
neither historical actors nor the historians studying them have a singular definition or conception of climate. This lack of consistency is not a
hindrance or problem, but rather shows the richness of the field, the
importance of keeping an open mind about the meaning of climate
(not simply anthropogenic global warming), and the multiple angles
of entry open for environmental historians examining climate
society dynamics.
grapples directly with the agency of nonhuman nature. Anthropogenic

climate change affected Antarctica, a place without a history of human
habitation, Howkins reminds us, even before scientists set up their research stations and started studying the region after the mid-twentieth
century. Climatic variability, Johnson reveals, also caused dramatic
social and political change, thereby demonstrating quite overtly how
climate can literally shape historical trajectories. Johnson examines
the border region between Spanish Florida and the British colonies to
the north during the late 1730s to demonstrate that a pronounced
shift in climate led to a breakdown of order and social dislocation. But
she also shows how the results of such climate-induced crises are not
simply deterministic. Drawing on disaster theory, she argues that the
outcome of rebellion depends on the level of control that authorities
are able to maintain during crisis. This argument is part of a historiographical trend in recent years to attribute (or sometimes misattribute)
significant historical change to weather. Such strains of climatic determinism also appear in the climate-related models that Carey analyzes,
whereby projections about future climate change impacts are at odds
with the historical reality once more human variables are explored
and set alongside the models available to policymakers.
The Forum also shows that environmental variables like climate can
alter the course of history, though without a predetermined influence,
as Garone demonstrates. He argues that in response to rapid climate
change, the management approaches of the US Forest Service, US
Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land
Management are beginning to converge as they seek to build resilience
into systems and as they accept system transitionsall while moving toward multijurisdictional management involving state, local,
and tribal governments. He suggests that these new policy directions
offer numerous opportunities for environmental history, including
incorporating responses to climate changeoften grounded in conservation biologyinto agency histories, bringing contested notions of
wilderness into dialogue with climate change, and drawing on methodologies from political science to examine the implications of new public
lands management paradigms for American federalism and climate
governance. Garone is thus suggesting that conservation, wilderness,
and public lands histories need to consider more overtly the role of
the physical environment in shaping management practices over time.
The Forum reminds scholars to uncover the agency of climate while
also recognizing that nature is socially constructed in particular places,
by particular cultures, and at particular times. Endfields theoretical
analysis proposes a movement away from global generalizations
which can devolve into apocalyptic narratives that overshadow the
possibilities of human adaptation and resiliencetoward regionally
specific climate histories and a study of the societal responses to
extreme weather events. Endfield is concerned with lived experiences
Climate Forum | 287
and how those experiences of relative vulnerability or resilience affect

whether the impacts of climate change become inscribed into cultural
memories. Analyzing those memories of past events, she argues, can
shed light on popular perceptions of the risks of future environmental
change and of how communities respond to and cope with risks.
Analysis of climate ideas through time and space helps show researchers
how to decipher the cultural construction of the natural world, whether
through art and literature or memory and metaphor.7 Uncovering these
historical perceptions about climate also helps reveal, for example,
European colonists ideas about land in the Americas or British identity
in the eighteenth century.8 With recent discussions of global warming,
new climate narratives and metaphors have emerged, with the atmosphere coming to represent something quite different than it did previo,
ously. New narratives about air, temperature, precipitation, El Nin
droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events have emerged in
the recent era of climate change awareness.9 But these narratives have
undergone countless changes in the past and among diverse societies
worldwide as well. Most recently, an apocalyptic global warming narrative has gripped Western societies. Yet simplistic declensionist narratives are precisely what many environmental historians have tried to
make more complex and nuanced. And while our field may have
moved on from declensionism, the constant reiteration of crisis, catastrophe, and apocalypse in climate change reports, media coverage,
college classes, and environmental groups statements shows just how
rampant the declensionist environmental narrative remains. Given its
prevalence, it is important for environmental historianswho have extensive experience with both declensionism and narratives of nature
to critically examine these apocalyptic tales common not only in the
media and among environmental groups, but also within environmental history scholarship itself because too often scholars uncritically
accept the climate crisis narrative without asking rigorous questions
about it, as Carey notes in his essay on critical climate history.
Another way climate history opens up new inroads into environmental history is by revealing how the atmospherelike forests, oceans,
animals, natural resources, landscapes, and most everything elsehas
been commodified over time due to the recent actions of climate
science, policies, rhetoric, and, most importantly, emissions agreements that have transformed the air into a commodity to be regulated,
litigated, traded, contested, and redefined from the way it was previously conceptualized.10 These policies and regulations may not be very successful in terms of slowing global warming or even reducing emissions.
But they have resulted in other, perhaps unintended outcomes. All the
discussion about the atmosphere, the emphasis on its science, the
NARRATING AND QUANTIFYING THE CLIMATE
SOURCES AND ARCHIVES

Effective climate histories often hinge on sources gathered from diverse
geographic locations well beyond researchers regions of expertise.
Whats more, the sources themselves are also quite varied. Historians
reconstructing past climatic conditions can use proxy records such as
ice cores, tree rings, ocean and lake bed cores, and coral records. They
can also use archaeological data, ship logs, diaries, river flow rates, flowering dates for plants and trees, artistic depictions of weather and
clouds, agricultural records, and a host of other sources. Putting these
kinds of historical records in dialogue with other sources can yield
new information about the past, about periodization, and about
drivers of historical change. A climate focus in research, such as in
Johnsons analysis of the 1730s Caribbean, often utilizes new sources
that help expand geographic and temporal scales, and sometimes
even rethink pivotal periods and events in world history.
Sometimes using fresh sources or analyzing novel topics allows environmental historians to uncover new insights into topics already well
visited by other historianssuch as witch trial explanations in
fifteenth-century Europe, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, or the
course of the American Revolution.12 In this Forum, Sam White offers
a new link between livestock and climate. He maintains that animals
have so far played only a minor role in climate change discourse. Yet
he shows how climate extremes affected clashes between pastoralists
and agriculturists in the ancient world. He further suggests that past societies reliance on livestockfrom medieval Europe at the beginning of
the Little Ice Age to the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empirehas been a
critical factor in determining the vulnerability or resilience of those societies during periods of climatic stress. And White makes compelling
claims about the importance of revisiting animals and climate in part
efforts to govern it, and the relentless focus on carbon dioxide and parts
per million has transformed the air into particular units that can be measured, categorized, controlled, and sold. Such is the history of so many
natural resources and other aspects of nonhuman nature that were similarly identified, measured, governed, and commodified. As climate took
on new economic and political meanings, and as new international
climate treaties and agreements emerged, environmental governanceas well as economicsshifted in turn. The history of this commodification and transformation of the atmosphere has only barely
been studied, and even less by environmental historians. And yet the
roots run deep: climate change today has its roots in the industrialization
of the planet due in part to the global rise of capitalism.11 Since the birth of
environmental history, the relationship between capitalism and the environment has been at the center of the field, so this issue as related to
climate holds particular promise for additional research.
Climate Forum | 289
based on a unique source base for his research. The study of climate
history often requires integrating sources that span from archaeology
and the natural sciences to diaries and ice cores. These kinds of linkages
are precisely what environmental historians do so welland could do
much more with climate-related research.
The study of climate history obviously raises important issues of scale,

both temporal and spatial. Environmental historians have a particular
affinity for the longue duree. A focus on climate often makes the longue
duree essential, not just a historians choice. Covering the longue duree
requires analysis of diverse sources, especially stretching back to the
post-Pleistocene period, as White shows. Like researchers, often nonhistorians, who have similarly conducted multi-millennia studies of
climate, environmental historians canand shouldtackle these longterm chronologies to inform histories, rethink the past, and gain greater
insight into human environment dynamics.13 The longer time frames
allow historians to see patterns and processes not visible on time scales
of decades or even centuries.
Beyond chronological scale, there are issues of spatial scales in climate
studies. Although climate pays little attention to national boundaries,
climate adaptation agendas, policies, perceptions, and values do matter
on national scales. Endfield calls for a more local and particularized analysis of climatesociety dynamics because todays more global framing of
climate change misses too many of the particularities. Howkins tackles
these issues of scale in another direction. Focusing on the relatively
brief human history of one particular isolated and remote place, Antarctica, he scales upward to probe issues of global significance about the
interactions between human activities, perceptions of climate change,
and the material environment, as well as to experiment with the idea
of the Anthropocene. Among the provocative questions he poses is
this: If anthropogenic climate change is altering the material environment in a place where the direct impact of humans has been relatively
minimal, then what are the implications of this for the central place
awarded to humans by the discipline of history? Together, Howkins
and Endfield point to the merits of both upscaling and downscaling.
More broadly, the Forum demonstrates how climate operates on every
scale in both space and time. Like the diverse definitions of climate,
these variations and inconsistencies should not be construed as problematic, but rather as invitations for environmental historians to
tackle climate histories on multiple, often intersecting, scales. Our
field tends to be better at dealing with time and place than with space.
In other words, we deal with particular geographic places or a sense of
place better than we analyze spatial relationships. Studies in climate
history could thus build on environmental historians proclivity for
SCALE
chronology and enhance research on spatial relations because the study

of climate invites or even demands both.
THE NATURAL SCIENCES AND HISTORIANS

Essays in the Forum also remind environmental historians that we

cannot accept the natural sciences at face value, that we have to
remain critical of the social contexts in which science is produced in
both the past and presenteven as we remember that collaboration
with natural scientists and use of their studies can enrich our field and
enlighten present-day discussions about climate change. Most environmental historians rely on research from the natural or life sciences.
However, historians have also shown how even the bestand best
intentionedscience can produce unintended consequences, exacerbate social inequality, or support certain political-economic agendas.
Historians of science and, to a lesser degree, environmental historians
have consistently shown how power structures and inequality have
been embedded in the production, circulation, and application of
science. The historical study of climate suggests how certain depictions
of and approaches to climate science, climate change impacts, mitigation, and adaptation also have embedded power dimensions, whether
during past centuries or in the presentand the framing of Earths
climate by natural scientists and geoengineers might even trigger
what Fleming believes are potentially dangerous technoscientific
schemes to control Earths climate. His essay argues that these latter-day
planetary physicians, participating in a modern-day Hippocratic
revival, are advancing and perpetuating anxiety-ridden metaphors
such as planet as patient that are not historically informed, but that
provide an opportunity for critical review by historians and a means
for historians to engage in current climate debates. Without such engagement, the rhetorical excesses surrounding these unexamined metaphors have the potential to turn anxieties stemming from climate
perceptions into ill-conceived actions that may have dangerous and unpredictable consequences.
Carey charges environmental historians with this task of critically
analyzing recent depictions of nature, focusing in particular on
climate models and their neglect of ground-level historical trajectories.
He suggests that climate modelsas currently understood and utilized
in present-day policymakingcan lead to a form of environmental determinism that excludes human factors such as adaptation, politicaleconomic influences, technology, and innovation. The models have
limitations in part because of the way they are produced, the expertise
of the scientists and economists generating them, and the contexts
in which they are used. He contends that environmental historians
should both scrutinize model production and contribute to model
making by providing historical information that might rethink or at
Climate Forum | 291
CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH

Although relatively few environmental historians have made their
climate research relevant for present-day discussions about climate
change, this Forum demonstrates how climate histories can contribute
both to an understanding of the past and to public debates about climate
change and natural resource management today. The latter point offers
broader implications for the field of environmental history that has for
decades discussed the need for research to be relevant for policy. The
Forum shows that if people and human cultures are not directly inserted
into climate discussions (as these essays explicitly seek to do), then
climate change adaptation will be more difficult because peoples
actual lived experiences will be ignored in future planning.
In the end, these eight provocative essays push environmental history
and climate conversations in new directions. They analyze novel
least alter the underlying assumptions driving model production and

applications. Environmental historians should thus be asking what
underlying assumptions and historical data go into climate models
or any environmental modelsas well as how scientists and quantitative economists have produced the historical trajectories that
nourish these models, which can influence the trajectory of policies
and debates.14 Carey thus critiques the dominant climate discourse
while also indicating how environmental historians can contribute to
ongoing climate science and policies to help advance mitigation and
adaptation plans.
The broader implication is about how environmental historians use
the natural and life sciences in their research. Critics have accused environmental historians of accepting recent so-called Western science uncritically, even as the historians critique past science for its embedded
social, political, and economic agendas. Essays in this Forum that rely
on scientific data are careful to avoid accepting climate science at face
value. Rather, they challenge embedded ideas about climate change
that exist in both public perceptions and scientific paradigmseven
todays climate science. Climate histories also open up potential
avenues to analyze and understand diverse knowledge systems, such
as folk science or indigenous knowledge, topics not well represented
in this Forum in part due to the lack of environmental historians studying them. Indigenous climate knowledgefrom Arctic sea ice thickness
o events and droughtscan
and wind patterns to the timing of El Nin
offer key insights not only into past climatic conditions and societal
impacts or responses, but also about cultural practices more generally.15
Keeping with the politicization of science theme, it is important to recognize how indigenous knowledge has often been excluded from recent
climate assessments and policies.16 There is a great need for environmental historians to investigate these issues.
Notes
This Forum is based on work supported by the US National Science Foundation under
grants 1010132 and 1253779. The authors wish to thank Lisa Brady and Nancy Langston for guiding the Forum through to publication, and the anonymous reviewers
who provided extremely helpful and detailed comments for this introduction as
well as all the individual essays.
1
Robert H. Claxton, Climate and History: From Speculation to Systematic Study,

The Historian 45, no. 2 (1983): 220.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since
the Year 1000 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971); Christian Pfister, Climate and
Economy in Eighteenth-Century Switzerland, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
9 (1978): 22343. On European historiography, see Rudolf Brazdil et al., Historical Climatology in EuropeThe State of the Art, Climatic Change 70, no. 3 (2005):
363430.
Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy,

Inaction and Opportunity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western
Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1967), chap. 12.
David N. Livingstone, The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations

on Race, Place and Virtue, Journal of Historical Geography 17, no. 4 (1991): 413 34.
Mike Hulme, Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism

and Reductionism, Osiris 26 (2011): 245 66.
Matthias Heymann, The Evolution of Climate Ideas and Knowledge, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 1, no. 4 (2010): 58197.
James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of
English Weather, 1650 1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Stephen Daniels and Georgina H. Endfield, Narratives of Climate Change: Introduction, Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 2 (2009): 21522.
environmental narratives and rethink histories by using diverse archival sources and databases. They argue for longer time frames and
more cross-disciplinary studies while also breaking out of strict regional
confines to deal with global forces. Some of the essays scrutinize science,
including the production and use of current climate science, and they
offer tools of analysis that historians can employ when interpreting
climate history. The implication is thus clear: environmental history
scholarship can be linked with public policy and ongoing environmental debates. Ultimately, we hope this Forum is only the beginning, not
the end point, of a conversation about climate change and environmental history. We hope it inspires significant discussion, dissent, and
debate.
Climate Forum | 293
10 Diana M. Liverman, Conventions of Climate Change: Constructions of Danger

and the Dispossession of the Atmosphere, Journal of Historical Geography 35,
no. 2 (2009): 27996.
11 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History: Four Theses, Critical Inquiry 35,
no. 2 (2009): 197222.
13 William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control
of Climate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Brian Fagan, The Great
Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (New York:
Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
14 On climate models, see Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate
Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); Kirsten
Hastrup and Martin Skrydstrup, eds., The Social Life of Climate Change Models:
Anticipating Nature (New York: Routledge, 2013).
15 For example, Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial
Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia
Press, 2005).
16 James D. Ford, Will Vanderbilt, and Lea Berrang-Ford, Authorship in IPCC AR5
and Its Implications for Content: Climate Change and Indigenous Populations
in WGII, Climatic Change 113, no. 2 (2012): 20113.
12 Wolfgang Behringer, Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the

Little Ice Age on Mentalities, Climatic Change 43 (1999): 33551; Sam White,
The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011); Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the
Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011).
Adrian Howkins
Abstract
This essay suggests that the McMurdo Dry Valleys in East Antarctica offer a useful place for thinking about the relationships
between climate change and environmental history. The Dry
Valleys have become an important site for climate change research over the past fifty years, and they are now an important
case study for the ecological consequences of a warming planet.
The atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen has suggested the term
Anthropocene to describe how humans have created a distinctive geological epoch through anthropogenic climate change
and other large-scale environmental impacts. The history of
the McMurdo Dry Valleys offers a useful place to experiment
with this idea and think about its implications. In particular, the
short and relatively simple history of this unique region both
encourages and facilitates a focus on the historical interactions
between human activities, human perceptions, and the material environment, which are key to understanding the relationships between climate change and environmental history.
INTRODUCTION
Measuring the flow of a meltwater stream in Antarcticas McMurdo Dry
Valleys is a laborious process. A scientist stands in the water counting
the clicks on a flow-tracking device for a 45-second period, then calls
out the number to a colleague on the bank who records the figure.
The flow-tracker is moved 6 inches, a new depth measurement is
Experiments in the
Anthropocene: Climate
Change and History in the
McMurdo Dry Valleys,
Antarctica
Climate Forum | 295
Figure 1: The Taylor Glacier and Lake Bonney in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, 2013. Credit: Adrian
Howkins.
taken, and then the counting process is repeated. In this manner it can
take an hour or more for the necessary measurements to be made to calculate stream flow. On a bright, still day this can be a most enjoyable
task, with the sunlight bringing a sense of life to one of the few
ice-free landscapes in the Antarctic continent. Nestled among the spectacular Trans-Antarctic Mountains and located thirty minutes by helicopter from the main US Antarctic station at McMurdo Sound, the
Dry Valleys have been described as a curious mosaic of glaciers and
streams and deeply etched stone.1 The rocky landscape contrasts
starkly with the surrounding ice sheet, and there is something comforting in its relative familiarity. On windy, overcast days, however, the environment can quickly turn brutal, and the pleasures of measuring a
stream can wear thin, especially if your gloves get wet or the stream
water seeps into your boots. Not infrequently, scientific work of any
kind is made impossible by the raging katabatic winds that pour down
from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and help to keep the region largely
free of snow and ice.
For scientists, the measurement of summertime stream flow in the
McMurdo Dry Valleys has an obvious utility. Streams come from
melting glaciers, thereby giving an indication of climatic change over
time. In turn, the relative simplicity of the regions ecology makes this
a useful place to investigate the impact of climate change on the
CONTRIBUTIONS TO ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Starting with the question of how climate history can enrich the field of
environmental history, the McMurdo Dry Valleys raise interesting ideas
about the nature of history and the place of humans within it. Much of
regions microscopic ecosystems, where nematodes, rotifers, and tardigrades comprise the largest species.2 The McMurdo Dry Valleys can also
have utility for environmental historians interested in the two central
questions raised by this Forum: How does the study of climate history
enrich the field of environmental history more broadly? How can environmental historians contribute to present-day understandings of and
responses to global climate change? Answers to these questions are
rooted in the complex interactions between human activities, human
perceptions, and the material environment. In much the same way
that the biological simplicity of the region makes it a good place to
think about ecological interrelationships, the relative simplicity of the
human history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys makes it a useful place to
think explicitly about these interactions and to ask what can be
learned about the relationships between climate change and environmental history.
Climate change helps to make the McMurdo Dry Valleys relevant to
the field of environmental history not because of the regions intrinsic
value or interestfascinating though its history may bebut because
the questions raised by studying this distinctive place have global significance. That the McMurdo Dry Valleys can be included in a forum
such as this already begins to suggest an answer to the question of
what climate change does to the field of environmental history: it
shifts perceptions of scale, creates global interconnections, and gives
relevance to even the most isolated and obscure of places. If the
McMurdo Dry Valleys have been tangibly affected by climate change,
then it is legitimate to ask what environment has not? The themes of
scale, interconnection, and relevance are repeated in several of the
essays in this Forum and are perhaps some of the biggest implications
of climate change for environmental historians. The atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen has popularized the term Anthropocene to describe
the way in which humans have created a distinctive geological epoch
through anthropogenic climate change and other large-scale environmental impacts.3 Although it has provoked fierce debates and has not
been universally accepted, the concept of the Anthropocene offers a
useful way to think about the scope and scale that human activities
have had on the geophysical world and the interconnections that
have been created. The history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys offers a
useful place to experiment with the concept of the Anthropocene
and consider the implications of anthropogenic climate change for
the field of environmental history.
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the scientific research conducted in the region asks questions about how
human activity on a global scale has changed the physical environment
in this unique location, and then what these changes can tell us more
broadly about the global consequences of climate change. The
concept of the Anthropocene and Bill McKibbens related idea of the
end of nature raise the intriguing possibility that human activity
was altering the environment of the region before people had even set
foot in it.4 This in turn engages with important debates within the
field of environmental history about the idea of wilderness.5 The
McMurdo Dry Valleys remained unseen by humans until 1903, when
a British sledging party led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott stumbled
across what they described as a curious valley on their way down
from the ice sheet.6 Several perspectives on the Anthropocene posit
that human activities were discernibly changing the global atmosphere
before this date, which, if correct, could mean that the landscape seen by
Scott and his two companions was already partially a human creation.
On one level, such a possibility is only of esoteric significance and probably not provable one way or the other. On another level, however,
simply by asking the question of how direct human influence needs
to be for a place to have a human history explicitly raises many of the
prejudices and assumptions about the centrality of humans within
the discipline of history. An acknowledgment of this continued anthropocentricism is of relevance to environmental historians far beyond the
confines of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, with the idea of the Anthropocene potentially making us more anthropocentric than ever.
Another way in which the McMurdo Dry Valleys can help us to see
how climate history can enrich the field of environmental history is
in its reminder of the way in which the physical environment shapes
human activities. Climate and climate change have tangible material
implications for what people can and cannot do, and this is a fact that
should never be forgotten, even in the most theoretical of discussions.
Upon entering the McMurdo Dry Valleys in 1903, Captain Scott
and his two companions had to leave behind their sledges, since the
usual form of polar transportation was useless without snow and ice.7
Another sledging party, led by the Australian geographer Griffith
Taylor, explored the region early in 1911.8 Although they were better
prepared for what they would find, Taylor and his companions
quickly tired of having to carry everything they needed and living off
cold food because fuel was too heavy. It remains logistically difficult
and expensive to work in Antarctica, and the remote location and
extreme climate of the McMurdo Dry Valleys have arguably contributed
more than anything else to limiting human activity in the region and
maintaining its pristine wilderness environment. At the same time,
it is interesting to note that, since the time of Captain Scott, research
in the McMurdo Dry Valleys has largely been made possible by the
same industrial economy that has produced the Anthropocene and
CONTRIBUTIONS TO CLIMATE SCIENCE

At the same time as enriching the field of environmental history, the
historical study of climate change provides a critical context for
understanding climate science. Such contextualizing is by no means
limited to the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and it is a task that
historians can perform in many other situations, as other essays in
this Forum demonstrate. This leads into the second central question
of this Forum: What can environmental historians contribute to
anthropogenic climate change. Without fossil fuels there would almost

certainly have been no ships, planes, or helicopters to transport scientists to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and no heating to keep them warm
while they are there. In this way, the Anthropocene has helped to
produce the conditions for scientific self-reflection, although it is
perhaps the tragedy of the age that the knowledge produced by
climate science and associated academic disciplines (including environmental history) has done little to halt the inexorable march of the
carbon economy.9
Another climate-related theme that can enrich the field of environmental history is the question of how changing environmental
perceptionsprincipally through scientific developmentshave influenced human activities in the McMurdo Dry Valleys and beyond. The
increasing threat of global warming has encouraged more climate research to be done in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. In this way, the
science of climate change helps to account for human activity taking
place at all in this remote corner of the world.10 On a much broader
scale, the self-perpetuating nature of scientific research has long
been studied by historians of science, and it offers a critical insight for
environmental historians studying climate change. Science also
shapes politics, and Antarctica offers a useful place to think about this
connection, since, as a result of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, scientific research is a prerequisite for any country to participate fully in the politics
of Antarctica.11 By conducting climate change research in the McMurdo
Dry Valleys, New Zealand, the United States, and other countries periodically involved all seek to reinforce their political positions in Antarctica. The contested political history of Antarctica, and indeed the
Polar Regions more generally, offers a useful reminder that climate
change research has political implications that go far beyond a simplistic climate change science versus climate change skeptic dichotomy.12 Insights from Antarctica as a continent for science offer a
useful perspective for thinking about relations between science and politics in other parts of the world.13 On a global scale, the production of
useful climate science increases a countrys strength within climate
change negotiations, creating a hierarchy of power relationships
based on scientific productivity that are not always acknowledged.
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present-day understandings of and responses to climate change?

Perhaps most basically, a study of the McMurdo Dry Valleys suggests
that historical research has the potential to investigate histories of
science and exploration and potentially contribute data for use in collaboration with scientists. The Long-Term Ecological Research conducted in the McMurdo Dry Valleys has a clear historical dimension,
and the data draw their utility from history. It is because scientists
have stood in streams to measure stream flow year after year since the
1960s that we have the data that allow us to understand change over
time in this region. In this example, and in numerous others, historians
might be able to draw on these historical dimensions to make practical
contributions to the collection and analysis of climate data. In the
McMurdo Dry Valleys, historians can potentially extend the length of
records by gleaning additional environmental information from the expedition accounts of Scott and Taylor.14 If historians hope to be taken
seriously in scientific conversations about climate change, then contributing where possible to the collection and analysis of data is a
good place to start, and this is something that is already being done in
a number of climate reconstruction examples around the world.15
Environmental historians are well positioned to ask how actual material changes in the McMurdo Dry Valleys have shaped scientific thinking over time. This raises important questions about attribution: To
what do we owe our understanding of climate change? As soon as
Scott and his companions entered the McMurdo Dry Valleys, they
were struck by its otherworldly environment. This is truly a valley of
the dead, wrote Scott in his diary, even the great glacier which once
spanned the valley has since withered away.16 Every visitor to the
region since then has been influenced in some way by the landscape.
But as a result of environmental change over time, later visitors were
viewing a somewhat different landscape to that which Scott saw at the
very beginning of the twentieth century. The frozen lakes have risen,
streams have meandered, and soils have blown around. The history of
the McMurdo Dry Valleys offers a number of examples of physical
changes shaping perceptions of the region, and the idea of absolute wilderness has largely been replaced by the concept of Antarctica as a vulnerable environment. Perhaps most dramatically, in the early 1990s the
rising level of Lake Vanda forced the New Zealanders to move the research station they had built on its shores. A number of authors have
attributed this move to the consequences of climate change.17 With
much of climate change history being the history of future predictions,
rising lake levels in the McMurdo Dry Valleys offer a useful example of
physical environmental change shaping perceptions. Taking this question of attribution to a much broader scale, the more directly climate
change science can be connected to actual material change, the more
likely it is that the threat of climate change will be taken seriously.
CONCLUSIONS
By encouraging a sustained analysis of the interactions between human
activities, human perceptions, and the material environment over time,
the short and relatively simple human history of the McMurdo Dry
Valleys offers environmental historians an excellent location for thinking about the central questions raised by this Forum. Such an approach
can deepen our understanding of environmental history and move
beyond a simple empirical approach to the problem of climate
change.21 It also suggests a number of ways that historians can contribute to the study of climate change, both practically and theoretically.
Perhaps most importantly, by offering a useful place to experiment with
the idea of the Anthropocene and its implications, the history of the
McMurdo Dry Valleys suggests that climate history deepens our understanding of environmental history most of all by encouraging, even
compelling, environmental historians to engage profoundly with the
science and politics of climate change.
Adrian Howkins is an assistant professor in the History Department at
Colorado State University. He has published a number of articles on the history
of Antarctica and is currently completing a book manuscript on the environmental history of the Antarctic Peninsula.
It is the science of climate change broadly conceived that allows scientists to go to the coldest continent on earth and ask questions about
warming. Such an observation offers a useful reminder to environmental historians that our understanding of material reality is filtered
through scientific perceptions, and it raises important questions
about scale and place within climate history. Interestingly, climatic
data from the Dry Valleys and from East Antarctica more generally
show that this is one of the few regions of the world not experiencing
dramatic warming trends over the past thirty or forty years.18 Atmospheric scientists attribute this to the hole in the ozone layer that is
keeping continental Antarctica artificially cool by strengthening the circumpolar vortex; as the hole in the ozone layer recovers over the next
fifty years, temperatures in East Antarctica are expected to increase dramatically.19 Although climate involves far more than average temperature, this lack of temperature increase also suggests that much of the
association of the McMurdo Dry Valleys with global warming comes
from outside the region, from the theories and models of climate
change that scientists bring with them, attesting to the importance of
theory and modeling to our understanding of climate change.20 An important task for historians in any given location might be to untangle
the relative importance of tangible local factors and abstract global
factors in shaping ideas about climate change, again linking back to
the question of attribution.
Climate Forum | 301
Notes
Bill Green and Craig Potton, Improbable Eden: The Dry Valleys of Antarctica (Nelson:
Craig Potton, 2003), 12.
For an overview of the science conducted by the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term
Ecological Research site, see http://mcmlter.org/.
See, for example, P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoemer, The Anthropocene, Global

Change Newsletter 41 (2000).
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
See, for example, Michael L. Lewis, American Wilderness: A New History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
Robert Falcon Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery, 2 vols. (New York: Cooper Square
Press, 2001).
Ibid.
Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford, Griffith Taylor: Visionary Environmentalist Explorer (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008).
Julia Adeney Thomas, Comment: Not Yet Far Enough, The American Historical
Review 117, no. 3 (2012):794 803.
10 For an overview of the history of Antarctic science, see G. E. Fogg, A History of Antarctic Science, Studies in Polar Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992).
11 For the text of the Antarctic Treaty, see http://www.state.gov/t/avc/trty/
193967.htm.
12 Adrian Howkins, Melting Empires? Climate Change and Politics in Antarctica
since the International Geophysical Year, Osiris 26, no. 1 (2011). For the Arctic,
see, for example, Matthias Heymann et al., Exploring Greenland: Science and
Technology in Cold War Settings, Scientia Canadensis 33, no. 2 (2012); Ronald
Doel, Cold Conflict: The Pentagons Fascination with the Arctic (and Climate
Change) in the Early Cold War, in Circumpolar Studies 8: History of Resource Exploitation in Polar Areas, ed. Louwrens Hacquebord (Groningen: Arctic Center, University of Groningen, 2012).
13 Richard S. Lewis, A Continent for Science: The Antarctic Adventure (New York: Viking
Press, 1965).
14 Alia Khan, Adrian Howkins, and Berry Lyons, Taylors Missing Lake: Integrating
History into LTER Research in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, LTER Network News 25,
no. 2 (2012).
15 Mark Carey, Climate and History: A Critical Review of Historical Climatology and
Climate Change Historiography, WIRES Climate Change 3, no. 3 (2012).
16 Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery.
I would like to thank the National Science Foundation (Grant ANT-1115245) and
everybody associated with the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research
(LTER) site for making this research possible. I have had a number of very useful discussions about the theme of climate change and environmental history with my colleague Mark Fiege. Mark Carey, Philip Garone, and the anonymous reviewers
provided excellent suggestions for improving earlier versions of this essay.
17 Tom Griffiths, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 32526.
18 John Turner, Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment: A Contribution to the
International Polar Year 2007 2008 (Cambridge: SCAR, 2009).
19 Ibid.
21 M. Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy,

Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
20 Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of
Global Warming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
Georgina H. Endfield
Abstract
Though frequently referred to in the risk, hazards, and disaster literature, vulnerability has become an important
concept in the field of environmental change and for understanding peoples susceptibility to harm in the context of
uncertain climatic futures. Resilience has similarly become a
popular concept for exploring the complexities of linked
human nature systems but focuses on capacity building,
learning, and adaptation in response to threats or harm. In
recent years, there have been efforts to propose synergies
between research on vulnerability and on resilience in linked
social-environmental systems. Integrated studies of vulnerabilities and resilience to climate change in the past, effectively drawing on a combination of geographic and historical
approaches, afford insight into the way in which societies
have been affected by, have coped with, and adapted to past
climate variability and weather or weather-related events.
This essay argues that detailed investigations of relative vulnerability and resilience could be pivotal for analyzing the adaptability of societies and regions that are considered to be
vulnerable to future climate change impacts according to
current predictions, and it highlights a vitally important and potentially politically significant arena for environmental history
research.
Exploring Particularity:
Vulnerability, Resilience,
and Memory in Climate
Change Discourses
INTRODUCTION
Predicting future climates and determining how communities and their

associated settings might be affected by and respond to climate change
has become an issue of global importance. Debates over the impacts of
an acceleration in anthropogenic global warming and the potentially
looming and apocalyptic changes in future climate together represent one of the dominant environmental narratives of the twenty-first
century, but they have somewhat overshadowed other studies focusing
on human adaptation and resilience, and explorations of the institutions and cultural coping strategies that may have helped people
adapt to climate changes in the past.1 Moreover, the recent interest in
apparent cultural collapse in the face of dramatic climatic changes in
history has obscured the importance of considering the spatial and temporal contingency of climate change and its variable impacts, and it has
also led to anxieties discussed within historical geography and environmental history scholarship over the apparent revival of neodeterministic arguments.2
Yet there is a rising concern over the localized impacts of interannual
climate variability and anomalous and extreme weather events such
as droughts, floods, storm events, and unusually high or low temperatures. It is expected that these kinds of events will increase in frequency
and intensity with predicted climate changes.3 While social and economic systems have generally evolved to accommodate some deviations from normal weather conditions, this is rarely true of
extremes.4 Such events, therefore, can have the greatest and most immediate social and economic impact of all climate changes.5 Moreover,
as Mike Hulme has argued, climate interacts with the human psyche
and with cultural practice in less material and more imaginative
ways, becoming part of the cultural fabric and memory of communities.6 As such, it is important to investigate climate (and weather) as a
function of impact, response, memory, and experience.
Such work demands a more local perspective on climate society relationships than global perspectives can offer. Consideration of the spatial
and temporal contingency of climate changeand the localized, or particularized experience of its manifestationscould help us to be better
placed to prepare for different configurations of this relationship in the
future.7 In short, there is a recognized need for a greater appreciation of
how climate is experienced by different groups of people in different
places and at different points in time. It is only with the benefit of
such information that people can prepare for or at least better understand the nature of the climate changes, and associated implications,
that they may face in the future.
Geographers and historians have been at the forefront of both historical climatology and climate history research.8 Long-term paleoenvironmental reconstructions have yielded valuable insight into the
Climate Forum | 305
VULNERABILITY, RESILIENCE, AND MEMORY

As two increasingly interlinked concepts, vulnerability and resilience
have gained momentum in recent decades as offering insights into
the complexity of relationships between human and natural systems.13
Although there are many different definitions of the term, vulnerability
can be broadly defined as the potential for loss, or the degree to which
human and environmental systems are likely to experience harm due
to a perturbation or stress.14 People are made vulnerable by a combination of social, economic, demographic, and environmental factors.
Vulnerability represents an important mechanism for evaluating
peoples susceptibility to harm in the context of uncertain climatic
futures. Originally developed by C. S. Holling for modeling change in
ecological systems, resilience is becoming a similarly popular concept
for exploring the complexities of human nature relationships.15 Resilience, however, is concerned with adaptive capacity and implies a more
positive take on risk. Relative vulnerability or resilience can be influenced by a range of contextual (as well as external forcing) factors including socioeconomic parameters or, as Sam White demonstrates in
this Forum, through long-standing agropastoral practices.
Integrated studies of vulnerabilities and resilience to historical
climate change in Mexico, drawing on a combination of geographic
and historical approaches, afford potential insights into impacts, adaptation, and societal behavior.16 Such studies are starting to demonstrate
that vulnerability to and experience of the impacts of climate variability
can challenge but also improve societal resilience, increasing
timing and possible implications of past episodes of prolonged extreme

events, and specifically megadroughts.9 While building on the work
of the French Annales School of History, scholarship drawing specifically on historical documentary evidence, including nontraditional
historical records, is shedding light on climate variability and
climate society interactions over the historical time period.10 Such
studies are central to understanding the nature of the climate changes
that might take place in the future and their impacts.11 Yet work on
past climate society relationships could also prove fruitful arenas for
interrogation by environmental historians. There is particular scope
for the environmental history community to engage in work exploring
how society has conceptualized, apprehended, and responded to
climate changes in different contexts and at different points in time, a
point acknowledged by Lawrence Culver in this Forum. Moreover,
there is an imperative to do so, given that it is increasingly acknowledged that the [climate change] agenda needs to include consideration
of the strategies for human adjustment to future changes and to
address the factors that influence human perceptions and behavior,
all of which may contribute to relative vulnerability or resilience.12
opportunities for learning and opening up space for transformations

from one behavior to another, from one perspective to another.17 Archival investigations in colonial Mexico, for example, have demonstrated
how different societies developed institutions and cultural coping strategies to deal with environmental changes at different scales, highlighting how vulnerability to change might have led to an improved
understanding of risk.18 The context in which a climate change takes
place is also vitally important in shaping the level of its impact.
Recent multidisciplinary research into the environmental history of
communities in the North Atlantic, for example, has demonstrated
how plague-related depopulation on Iceland was followed by reduced
pastoral impact on the soil balance. This, however, may have eventually
improved environmental resilience in the face of the climatic changes
associated with the Little Ice Age.19 Such work highlights adaptation
through time and the dynamics of human resilience to environmental
transformations and points toward the potential for environmental historians to research and produce positive narratives charting human capacity to deal with past changes.20
Yet there are other opportunities for environmental historians to seize
within this arena. Perceptions of relative societal vulnerability and resilience to climatic variability, for example, might also be investigated
through the collection of empirical knowledge based on past experience
of climate change. The lived world of experience, or what Ingold refers
to as an individuals (or communitys) weather world, informs
peoples understandings and perceptions of their own relative vulnerability or resilience.21 The relational context of climate has a significant bearing on how individuals and communities experience and
live with climate variability and change. Different regional circumstances, particular physical conditions, an areas social and economic
activities, and embedded cultural knowledges, norms, values, practices,
and infrastructures all affect personal and community experiences,
reactions, and responses.22 Experience in turn determines whether
the impacts of climate changes become inscribed into memory in the
form of oral history, ideology, custom, behavior, narrative, artifact,
technological and physical adaptation, including adaptations to the
working landscape and built environment. Experience of climate
change through local weather can also become inscribed into everyday
practices such as farming, gardening, and recreation pursuits.
Recent work considers how climate change can be understood
through farming practices on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, and is
constructed through memory, observation and conversation as well as
materialised in farming practices in this area.23 Extreme events that
resulted in trauma, like flood events, and the epigraphic records of
such events can also become a focus of community memorial and
mourning.24 These different forms of recording, remembering, and memorializing the past represent central media through which information
Climate Forum | 307
on past events is collected and transmitted across generations and thus

may serve an important orientating function with respect to understanding popular perceptions of risk to potential future climate change.
Environmental history affords a holistic view of environmental and
climatic change. The places where people live, their histories, cultures,
or values, and their perceptions of what constitutes normal weather are
critical for understanding how different groups of people in different
places comprehend, respond to, and narrate unexpected climate
change including extreme events.25 Yet exploring this kind of situated
or relational view of climate change could be central to understanding
the particular or differentiated view of its implications past, present,
and future.26 Moreover, by exploring how trajectories of vulnerability
and resilience to climate change in specific locations or within particular communities have changed over time, it may be possible to identify
those regions and communities considered to be most sensitive to the
impacts of future climate changes.27
As recent scholarship is beginning to demonstrate, it should also be
possible to glean insight into how such communities, and individuals
within those communities, perceive their own vulnerability toand
may respond to cope withperceived risk. Repeated devastating flood
events, for example, in colonial Guanajuato, Mexico, led to the establishment of flood commissions and water management and storage
projects, including social capital oriented projects designed and implemented by the affected communities themselves.28 Similarly, more
recent glacial floods and avalanches in the wake of melting glaciers in
the Andes have resulted in the formation of community organizations
to learn about precarious glacial lakes.29
The ways in which people recall and remember particular types of
weather, and their nostalgia about past climate and weather events,
offers another little-explored area of research yet could prove pivotal
to gaining a clearer insight into individual and collective memory of
past climates and popular understanding about climate change over
lived experience. This would allow us to identify the type of events
that become inscribed into the social, cultural, and infrastructural
fabric of a community and, through comparison with available instrumental weather records, those events that do not. According to what
Harley refers to as the recency effect, for example, more recent dramatic events tend to seize popular attention more than normal conditions, and memories thus tend to be distorted with respect to extreme
events.30 Tapping into local weather memories through oral history
work will yield very useful information on past extreme events, and
the impacts and responses they engendered, as well as revealing how
people are conceptualizing and contextualizing the risks of any future
events based on perceived changes.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Georgina Endfield is professor of environmental history in the School of

Geography, University of Nottingham, England. She works on climate history
and historical climatology and has published widely on the impacts of and
responses to climate variability in historical perspective. While much of her
work has focused on colonial Mexico and nineteenth-century Africa, she has
recently started to explore the implications of historical extreme weather
events in the United Kingdom.
Notes
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of the essay for
their helpful and constructive comments on various drafts of the manuscript.
1
Mike Hulme, The Conquering of Climate: Discourses of Fear and Their Dissolution, The Geographical Journal 174, no. 1 (2008): 5 16; 6; E. D. G. Fraser,
W. Mabee, and Olaf Slaymaker, Mutual Vulnerability, Mutual Dependence. The
Reflexive Relation between Human Society and the Environment, Global Environmental Change 13 (2003): 137 44.
Andrew Ross, Is Global Culture Warming Up? Social Text 28 (1992): 3 30, cited
in Hulme, The Conquering of Climate, 13; Paul Coombes and Keith Barber, Environmental Determinism in Holocene Research: Casualty or Coincidence? Area
37, no. 3 (2005): 303 11.
David R. Easterling, Gerald A. Meehl, Camille Parmesan, Stanley A. Changnon,

Thomas R. Karl, and Linda O. Mearns, Climate Extremes: Observations, Modeling, and Impacts, Science 289, no. 5487 (2000): 2068 74.
For an example of a society normalizing extremes, see John McNeill, Of Rats and
Men: A Synoptic Environmental History of the Island Pacific, Journal of World
History 5, no. 2 (1994): 299349.
There have been recent exhortations to encourage greater involvement

in climate debates from scholars in the social sciences, arts, and humanities than has previously been the case.31 Environmental historians in
particular have much to offer in terms of investigating a deeper cultural
and historical reading of climate and its meaning for human society.32
Benefiting from a unique interdisciplinarity and a tool kit that draws
from both historical and geographic approaches, environmental historians are well placed to engage in the construction of regionally specific, particular, climatic histories, but also to investigate the experiences
and memories of past climate changes and events. Such studies will
prove pivotal for assessing how different communities in diverse contexts might be affected by, might comprehend, and might respond to
future changes. Moreover, the topicality, currency, and political saliency of such themes and their relevance for the future could endorse
the value of environmental history research and, perhaps more importantly, ensure that it reaches beyond the confines of the academy, potentially influencing the views of policymakers in real and tangible ways.
Climate Forum | 309
Anthony J. McMichael, Rosalie E. Woodruff, and Simon Hales, Climate Change

and Human Health: Present and Future Risks, Lancet 367, no. 9513 (2006):
85969.
Hulme, The Conquering of Climate, 6.
David N. Livingstone, Reflections on the Cultural Spaces of Science, Climatic

Change 113 (2012): 9193.
For the purposes of this essay, I am defining historical climatology as research that
focuses on the reconstruction of regional climate chronologies, whereas climate
history refers to explorations of the social impacts of and responses to past
climate change and variability (including extreme weather events) and of changing conceptualizations of climate change and variability over time.
See, for example, David A. Hodell, Mark Brenner, and Jason H. Curtis, Climate
and Cultural History of the Northeastern Yucatan Peninsula, Quintana Roo,
Mexico, Climatic Change 83, no. 1 2 (2007): 215 40; David A. Hodell, Mark
Brenner, and Jason H. Curtis, Terminal Classic Drought in the Northern Maya
Lowlands Inferred from Multiple Sediment Cores in Lake Chichancanab
(Mexico), Quaternary Science Reviews 24 (2005): 1413 27.
10 See, for example, Christian Pfister, Rudolf Brazdil, Rudiger Glaser, Mariano Barriendos, Dario Camuffo, Matias Deutsch, Petr Dobrovolny, et al., Documentary
Evidence on Climate in Sixteenth-Century Europe, Climatic Change 43 (1999):
55 110; David J. Nash and Georgina H. Endfield, Splendid Rains Have Fallen:
o and Rainfall Variability in the Kalahari, 1840 1900, CliLinks between El Nin
matic Change 86, no. 3 4 (2008): 257 90; Rudolf Brazdil, Hubert Valasek, and
Katarina Chroma, Documentary Evidence of an Economic Character as a
Source for the Study of Meteorological and Hydrological Extremes and Their
Impacts on Human Activities, Geogfiska Annaler 88 (2006): 7986; Georgina
H. Endfield and David J. Nash, Drought, Desiccation and Discourse: Missionary
Correspondence and Nineteenth-Century Climate Change in Central Southern
Africa, Geographical Journal 168, no. 1 (2002): 3347; Phil D. Jones and Keith
R. Briffa, Unusual Climate in Northwest Europe during the Period 17301745
Based on Instrumental and Documentary Data, Climatic Change 79 (2006): 36179.
11 Lisa V. Alexander, Nigel Tapper, Xuebin Zhang, Hayley Fowler, Claudia Tebaldi,
and Amanda Lynch, Editorial Climate Extremes: Progress and Future Directions, International Journal of Climatology 29, no. 3 (2009): 31719.
12 Sarah E. Curtis and Katie G. Oven, Geographies of Health and Climate Change,
Progress in Human Geography 36, no. 5 (2012): 65466, 656.
13 Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke, eds., Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management
Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.
14 Gilberto C. Gallopin, Linkages between Vulnerability, Resilience and Adaptive
Capacity, Global Environmental Change 16 (2006): 293 303; Susan L. Cutter, Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards, Progress in Human Geography 20, no. 4
(1996): 52939, 529; Amy L. Luers, David B. Lobell, Leonard S. Sklar, C. Lee
Adams, and Pamela A. Matson, A Method for Quantifying Vulnerability,
Applied to the Agricultural System of the Yaqui Valley, Mexico, Global Environmental Change 13 (2003): 255 67, 255.
15 Brian H. Walker, John M. Anderies, Ann P. Kinzig, and Paul Ryan, Exploring Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems through Comparative Studies and Theory
Development: Introduction to the Special Issue, Ecology and Society 11, no.
1(2006). http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art12/.
16 Maria E. Ibarraran, Elizabeth I. Malone, and Antoinette L. Brenkert, Climate
Change Vulnerability and Resilience: Current Status and Trends for Mexico, Environment, Development and Sustainability 12(2010): 36588, 366.
18 Georgina H. Endfield, The Resilience and Adaptive Capacity of SocialEnvironmental Systems in Colonial Mexico, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 109,no. 10(2012): 367681.
19 Richard Streeter, Andrew J. Dugmore, and Orri Vesteinsson, Plague and Landscape Resilience in Pre-Modern Iceland, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences109, no. 10 (2012): 366469.
20 John R. McNeill, Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental
History, History and Theory 42, no. 4 (2003): 5 43.
21 Tim Ingold, Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing,
Knowing, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute(N.S.) (2010): 12139.
22 Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman, eds., The Angry Earth. Disasters in
Anthropological Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1999); Jean Palutikof, Maureen
Agnew, and M. R. Hoar, Public Perceptions of Unusually Warm Weather in the
UK: Impacts, Responses and Adaptations, Climatic Research 26 (2004):43 59;
Greg Bankoff, Georg Frerks, and Thea Hilhorst, eds., Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People (London: Earthscan, 2004).
23 Hilary Geoghegan and Catherine Leyshon, On Climate Change and Cultural
Geography: Farming on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, UK, Climatic Change
113, no. 1 (2012): 55 66.
24 Neil Macdonald, On Epigraphic Records: A Valuable Resource in Reassessing
Flood Risk and Long-Term Climate Variability, Environmental History 12 (2007):
136 40.
25 Jean Palutikof, Maureen Agnew, and M. R. Hoard, Public Perceptions of Unusually Warm Weather in the UK: Impacts, Responses and Adaptations, Climate
Research 26 (2004):4359.
26 Curtis and Oven, Geographies of Health, 660.
ez, and Christian
27 Bruno Messerli, Martin Grosjean, Thomas Hofer, Lautaro Nun
Pfister, From Nature Dominated to Human Dominated Environmental
Changes, Quaternary Science Reviews 19, no. 1 5 (2000): 459 79.
28 Georgina H. Endfield, Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
29 Mark Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
30 Trevor A. Harley, The British Obsession with the Weather, in Weather, Climate,
Culture, ed. Sarah Strauss and Benjamin S. Orlove (London: Berg, 2003), 10318.
31 Mike Hulme, Geographical Work at the Boundaries of Climate Change, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 (2008): 5 11, 6.
32 Ibid., 6.
17 Carol Folke, Social-Ecological Behavioural Responses, in Anders Beil, Bengt

Hansson, and Mona Martennsson, Structural Determinants of Environmental Practice (Surrey: Ashgate, 2003), 226 42, 227.
Lawrence Culver
Abstract
Climate has undoubtedly shaped history, but so have human
perceptions of climate. This was especially true in settler societies, where outsiders arrived with climatic preconceptions
but no prior experience with the climatic history of these
landscapes. Climatic perceptions and misperceptions led to
debates over climate, and in the United States these influenced national conflicts and events, from the question of
westward territorial expansion to the spread of cotton and
slavery. Americans also argued about whether or not human
actions could change climate, most notably in the case of the
disastrous climatic myth claiming that rain follows the
plow and if human agriculture could transform arid regions
into humid ones. Perceptions of climate also influenced the
histories of other nations including Australia and Russia.
By connecting the environmental and cultural histories of
climate, this essay demonstrates how climate history can
inform broader historical themes as well.
INTRODUCTION
The field of environmental history has grown exponentially in recent
decades. Yet in the United States, university students can still take a
survey course in national history and encounter little environmental
history. The Columbian Exchange, the Dust Bowl, conservation in the
Progressive Era, and perhaps the near extinction of the bison might
appear, but otherwise the environment remains largely outside the
mainstream narrative of US history.1 Yet if we look at North American
and US history through the lens of climate history, environmental
history can suddenly appear very important indeed. This is not just a
matter of climate as an environmental factor, but also a question of
how individuals and societies thought about climate. Climate is an
Seeing Climate through

Culture
SETTLER PERCEPTIONS OF CLIMATE

In North America, settlers speculated about climate to evaluate the agricultural or healthful potential of new regions. Perceptions of climate
were informed by science, religion, folk belief, and prior agricultural
experience. Their observations appeared in diaries and travel accounts,
government survey reports, photographs, and art. These perceptions,
when they drove questions of where to settle, what crops to plant, how
to farm, or large national questions such as territorial expansion, could
have profound environmental and human consequences.
The first Europeans arrived in the Americas with a set of expectations,
all formed by their prior experience in Europe. They had also gleaned information from the geographic knowledge of Islamic societies. These
Europeans initially assumed that climate was determined by geography.
Climate in the ancient world had originally meant region rather
than weather. In this worldview, horizontal belts of climate stretched
out to encompass the world, ranging from north to south, and from
frigid to torrid. Yet the eastern coast of North America was certainly
much cooler than the Mediterranean, and its continental climate
both warmer in summer and colder in winter than northern Europes
oceanic climate, moderated by the Gulf Stream current. The first permanent English settlement in the region, Jamestown, had the climatic
misfortune to be founded during the Little Ice Age, making the climate
even colder, and during a severe drought that placed both settler and
Native American societies under stress, making the colony even more
vulnerable.2
In New England, once settlers had denuded its forests to clear fields for
agriculture, a debate about climate change began. Had the deforestation
of New England made winters milder or more severe? Colonists argued
avidly about these issues, arguing that yes, humans could indeed change
climate, or instead asserting that climate was part of a divinely inspired
and unchanging natural order. Such debates stretched back to ancient
Greece and Rome. Romans noted how often the Tiber froze in winter
and how its freezing varied over time. In Greece, writers noted that
environmental fact but also a cultural construction. Climatic perceptions, and no less importantly misperceptions, have played a repeated
and crucial role in US history. Climate was also a subject of fierce
debate, sometimes serving as a proxy for other conflicts, from the
spread of slavery to federal land policy. Nor was the United States
unique in this regard. In other colonial settler societies, outsiders
arrived with their own preconceptions of climate but little knowledge
of the climatic histories of the new regions in which they hoped to
prosper. Understanding this interplay of climates, real and imagined,
can enrich US and environmental history and make environmental
history integral to broader historical narratives.
Climate Forum | 313
the ability to grow temperature-sensitive crops could change in areas

that had been deforested or places where rivers had filled harbors with
silt. They believed that humans could change climate, at least in specific
places.3
Many settlers and prospective setters in North America were subsistence farmers, people for whom climate was not an abstract
topic of debate but rather a matter of intense concern. As settlers
moved inland, they read landscapes. They looked at flora and fauna,
at surface water, and at the consistency of the soil. Settlers also believed
that climate played an intimate role in human health. They believed
that places such as swamps emitted miasmas, unhealthful air that
could enter the lungs or permeate the skin, and cause illness. Such ideas
were incorrect but hardly illogical. While miasmas might not emanate
from swamps, disease-carrying mosquitoes certainly did. Though
their scientific knowledge was limited, their basic assumptionthat
human health and the environment were relatedwas entirely
correct. Human health, like agricultural concerns, made settlers intensely interested in climate.4
By the late colonial era, and all the way to the Civil War, one single
agricultural question preoccupied many Americans, at least in the
South: Where could cotton grow? Once cotton emerged as the
nations largest cash crop, its most significant export, and the key raw
material for northern industrialization, the viability of cotton agriculture loomed large in the national consciousness. Cotton, domesticated
in both Old and New Worlds, originally grew in tropical and subtropical
regions. It requires warmth, copious rainfall, and an exceptionally
lengthy growing season, as much as 250 days. It was viable only in
the humid and warm Deep South. One strain of long-staple cotton,
brought to Georgia from the Caribbean, prospered in the coastal
South. Inland, however, only a short-staple variant flourished. Eli
Whitneys cotton gin greatly accelerated the processing of this cotton.
While the cotton gin is remembered as a technological innovation,
albeit one that accelerated the spread of slavery, it was also a technological response to a climatic problem. It allowed southern planters to
profit greatly from cotton that could grow in their specific climate. It
would later be supplemented by another climatic innovation, the successful introduction of long-staple Mexican cotton that produced
more cotton fibers than shorter varieties. Together, these technological
and agricultural innovations allowed King Cotton to begin its reign in
Dixie, supplanting other crops.5
Humans had spread this crop worldwide, and technology aided its
processing, but climate determined where cotton could grow. In the
United States, climate also shaped the spread and geographic distribution of slavery, thus influencing the geographic contours of slave
states and ultimately the boundaries of the Confederate States of
America. In a warmer world, the Confederacy might have been larger
in number than the states that seceded from the Union in 1861. If cotton
had prospered in Indiana, to say nothing of New York or Massachusetts,
US history might have been radically different.
CONTESTED PERCEPTIONS OF CLIMATE

Another key issue is the role climate and perceptions of climate played in
the territorial expansion of the United States as a nation. Here we can especially see how climate is not solely a matter of long-term weather. It is
also emphatically a matter of human perceptions and cultural constructions. Westward expansion was driven by the ideology of Manifest
Destiny, the belief that Anglo Americans were meant to occupy North
America and this occupation was driven by divine providence and by
their supposed racial, religious, political, and economic superiority.
Yet implicit in all these ideological assumptions were ecological
assumptions. White Americans believed that the continent itself
would cooperate with their ambitions, providing a West like the
Easthumid, temperate, and with perhaps a relatively small and traversable mountain range like the Appalachians. The West they encountered was an entirely different place.
The federal government funded a series of scientific expeditions of
this region, and it sometimes spent more on the lavish publications
resulting from these surveys than on the surveys themselves. Aside
from tariffs imposed on imported goods, the sale of western lands was
the primary means of funding the federal government prior to the
Civil War. In the twenty-first century, as Philip Garone demonstrates,
the federal government acts as the steward of vast swaths of public
land, but in the nineteenth century the federal government instead
had a keen interest in the successful sale of this land. Even before the creation of the US Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established a system under which all western lands annexed into the
nation would become federal land. That land would then be surveyed
into a grid of mile-square sections and then smaller parcels intended
for sale. Federal survey reports conveyed geographic and scientific
data. Yet with their lavish illustrations and maps, they were also sometimes akin to real estate advertisements, and Americans pored
through them, looking for lands that might be good for settlement, especially after lands in New England and parts of the Midwest were
already occupied.6
To sell all that western land, however, the government had to convince citizens and immigrants that these lands were viable for agriculture. And that proved to be a problem. A map created in 1823 after the
Stephen H. Long expedition termed part of the southern Great Plains
the Great Desert, and, in 1836, Washington Irvings popular novel
Astoria, his account of the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, labeled
much of the West the Great American Desert. That name would
Climate Forum | 315
CLIMATIC PERCEPTIONS AND MYTHS

After the Civil War, the Homestead Act of 1862, and the completion of
the transcontinental railroad in 1869, interest in western settlement
increased. So did interest in a new climatic theory, one with disastrous
consequences. In the twenty-first century we worry about climate
change as a danger, but many Americans of this era imagined it as an
asset. Wetter than average years on the high plains, plus a rise in the
level of the Great Salt Lake after the Mormons settled in Utah, gave credence to a climatic theory that rain follows the plow. Purportedly,
plowed earth released moisture into the atmosphere, retained more
moisture from rain, and as a consequence made plowed regions more
humid. Supporters of this theory, a mix of regional boosters and a few
scientists, heralded the end of the Great American Desert. Other scientists, such as John Wesley Powell, director of the US Geological Survey,
realized this theory was incorrect. He surmised that the level of the
Great Salt Lake had risen not because of increased rainfall, but because
Mormon settlers had cut down trees and channelized streams for irrigation, resulting in more runoff reaching the lake. His Report on the Lands of
the Arid Region warned that the Far West was arid, could not support
linger on maps of the West for much of the nineteenth century. Its contours varied but finally settled on a distinct region: the high plains
between the hundredth meridian and the easternmost ranges of the
Rocky Mountains. The grasslands of the high plains were not a desert
in a true climatic sense, but if this treeless expanse was perceived as a
desert, then it could deter settlement in the Far West.
The Great American Desert soon became a central issue of contention
in the most divisive issue in antebellum America, the westward expansion of slavery. Some northerners took comfort in the idea of a worthless
West that would halt the spread of slavery. In the South, planters imagined a future plantation garden in the West, one that seemed to have
already been realized in the humid eastern portion of the Mexican
state of Texas. That success led to a war for Texan independence and
then a US war with Mexico. An optimistic imagining of western
climate, not climatic reality, had led the United States into a war that
would result in the annexation of more than half of the territory of
Mexico in 1848.7
After that war, dueling views of western climate remained, as the fate
of the US-Mexico Boundary Survey demonstrated. New Yorker John
Russell Bartlett, head of the survey party, was relieved of his office
after reporting that much of the new American Southwest appeared to
be desert and worthless for agriculture. He was replaced with a new
boundary commission leader from the South who instead asserted
that with limited irrigation and slave labor, cotton production in the
region was bound to prosper.8
CONCLUSION
This essay has presented a few historical junctures when climatereal,
perceived, and imaginedshaped US history and suggested how
it influenced history in other places as well. Thinking about climate
across history can help us better understand popular perceptions
of nature. It can contribute to comparative and global history. Understanding climate history can also inform other facets of environmental
history, from the climatic natural disasters highlighted by Sherry
Johnsons essay in this Forum, to environmental migrations and
environmental change.
Seeing climate through culture gives historians a powerful lens
through which to view US and world history. Science can reconstruct
past climates, but history can recreate past societies and examine how
they adapted to climate regimes and climate change. As Mark Carey
argues persuasively in this Forum, the recreated climatic pasts and
agricultural homesteading as had been practiced in the Midwest, and

would require large dam and irrigation projects to sustain agriculture
and a sizable population. Congress largely ignored his report. Railroad
companies, paid in the form of federal lands for rail construction,
were only too happy to use this climatic myth to sell their lands as
well.9 When the wetter than average years ended, the result was blizzard,
drought, and disaster for individual homesteaders and speculative
cattle barons alike, a premonition of the far larger calamity to come
during the Dust Bowl.
Climates, both real and imagined, also shaped other national histories. As in the United States, climate change myths motivated settlers in
South Australia. There, land surveyor George Goyder asserted that while
areas relatively near the coast received enough rain for agriculture, lands
further north did not. The boundary between these two regions became
known as Goyders Line. Yet Goyder, like Powell, went unheeded.
Despite his warnings, settlers moved north into the interior, away
from the more humid coastal regions where rain was more reliable.
Droughts subsequently forced the abandonment of these agricultural
ventures.10
Arid or treeless regions were also a concern elsewhere. As the United
States expanded westward, Russia had already expanded eastward.
Both nations encountered vast grasslands that did not resemble European landscapes. The United States and Russia might have been very different societies, but both were states that encountered regions and
climates that threatened to thwart national ambitions. Similarities
between the climates of the North American prairie and the Russian
steppes even led to a long dialogue between scientists and government
officials on two continents. This dialogue continued after Russia had
become the Soviet Union, even during the Cold War.11
Climate Forum | 317
Lawrence Culver is an associate professor in the Department of History

at Utah State University. His first book is The Frontier of Leisure: Southern
California and the Shaping of Modern America (Oxford University Press,
2010). In 2010 and 2013, he was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center
for Environment and Society at LMU Munich.
Notes
Thanks to Christof Mauch and the Carson Fellows Works in Progress Group at the
Rachel Carson Center.
1
Mark Fieges The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012) and Ted Steinbergs Down to
Earth: Natures Role in American History, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012) both present compelling environmental history narratives of US
history, but US history textbooks have not incorporated environmental history
in a consistent manner.
See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early
Colonial Period, The American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (December 1982):
1262 89; Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007).
Clarence C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western
Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1967).
Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
Steinberg, Down to Earth, 81 83.
ckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and NaMartin Bru
tional Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); William
H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the
Winning of the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966); Donald
models of climate futures designed by scientists remain incomplete

without historical perspective. As historians, we can illuminate how
past societies perceived climate and responded to changes in it, as
Georgina Endfields essay suggests.
Climate history can connect natural and human history, and enrich
the field of environmental history. Climate history also has the potential to make historians more active participants in debates over
climate change and climate policy. People have been arguing about
climate for centuries, and now, as in the past, that debate remains a
mix of science, culture, politics, economics, and other issues. The interplay of climate and human perceptions of climate can tell us a great deal
about the interactions of humans and nature, from the scale of an individual settler or farmer to an entire nation. In seeing climate through
culture, we can enrich environmental history, enlarge national and
transnational histories, and perhaps even inform our own future as well.
Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Henry Nash Smith noted this regional debate about the West and its climate in
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950).
Amy S. Greenberg, Domesticating the Border: Manifest Destiny and the Comforts of Life in the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission and Gadsden Purchase,
1848 1854, in Land of Necessity: Consumer Culture in the United States Mexico Borderlands, ed. Alexis McCrossen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 83112.
Climate fabulist William Gilpin trumpeted the idea of rain following the plow in
Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1873); John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid
Region of the United States, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing
Office, 1879).
10 Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds., A Change in the Weather:
Climate and Culture in Australia (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press,
2005); D. W. Meinig, On The Margins of the Good Earth: The South Australian
Wheat Frontier, 1869 1884 (New York: Rigby, 1970).
11 David Moon, The Debate over Climate Change in the Steppe Region in
Nineteenth-Century Russia, The Russian Review 69 (April 2010): 25175.
Sam White
Abstract
This essay explores the place of animals and human animal
relations in past natural climate fluctuations and present
global warming, considering several case studies from Pleistocene extinctions, to Little Ice Age panzootics, to present livestock conditions. It makes the case that animals, especially
livestock, have played a crucial and often overlooked role in
the historical and current experience of climate change
whether as victims and vulnerabilities, or as sources of adaptability and resilience. While current discussions of climate
change rarely mention animals, except in relation to biodiversity or desertification, the future of humananimal relations
will remain critical to any viable mitigation and adaptation
strategies. This perspective emphasizes the value of environmental history to raise neglected issues in discussions of global
warming and perhaps to offer lessons or parallels from the past.
INTRODUCTION
Animals figure little, if at all, in most discussions of climate change. Yet
human ecology, even in the modern world, has been inextricably bound
up with the animals we have usedboth the wild and especially domesticated animals that for most of history have outweighed and outnumbered us and shaped most of our land use. Any understanding of climate
impacts, vulnerabilities, resilience, or even mitigation will have to take
these animals into account.
PLEISTOCENE PARALLELS
The current interglacial has witnessed significant climate swings, but for
parallels to the present rapid warming we may have to turn to the end of
the Pleistocene. Against a background of rapid temperature shifts and changing sea levels, humans developed new subsistence strategies and reached
Animals, Climate Change,

and History
DOMESTICATION
With the transition to farming over the past ten millennia, humans have
depended much more on domesticated livestock, which have come to
far outnumber their wild cousins. While we conventionally think of domestication as a human achievement putting us in control of other
species, for the sake of climate and environmental history it is useful to
adopt a different viewpoint. Domestication is a coevolutionary process
that has reshaped both the plants and animals ecology and also
our own. Consequently, relationships with plants and animals have
strongly shaped human vulnerability and resilience to climate change
and extremes (concepts explored by Georgina Endfield in this Forum).
In essence, some humans gathered large-seeded grasses they could
consume directly; others focused more on hardy natural grasses that
their animals could eat. In this regard, pastoralism has often been viewed
as less vulnerable or more resilient than farming, particularly less diversified agriculture in more marginal environments.4 Animals are more
mobile than planted fields and can serve as insurance when harvests fail.
Nevertheless, reliance on animals could also create new climatic vulnerabilities and in certain cases undermine resilience. To begin with,
new lands including the Americas. At the same time, many of the worlds
most remarkable large animal specieswhat Alfred Russell Wallace
called the hugest and fiercest, and strangest formsdisappeared.1
For four decades, debate has swirled among Paul Martins overkill
hypothesis and various nonhuman explanations for the loss of so
many large species, from mammoths and ground sloths to giant kangaroos. However, recent work has forged a firmer consensus implicating
both climate and people acting together. While the end of past ice
ages suffered similar losses, none gave up so many or such predominantly large types as the terminal Pleistocene. Even where direct evidence of
human hunting remains rare, the coincidence of new human arrivals
and megafaunal decline is overwhelming.2 Work in ecological modeling has progressively affirmed that in times of climatic stress, human
hunting would have been decisive for slow-growing large mammal
populations in Eurasia and the Americas.3 Our ancestors did not have
to be crazed predators to deliver the coup de grace to mastodons or glyptodonts. They needed only to adapt, multiply, and increase their consumption a little faster than their fellow creatures during climatic
shifts. These late Pleistocene extinctions illustrate how climate and
human effects together can have greater environmental impact than
either alone and how animals could prove especially vulnerable to a
combination of human predation and climatic change. Though thousands of years removed, the event still underscores current concerns
over declining biodiversity through the combined effects of anthropogenic habitat loss and global warming.
Climate Forum | 321
LITTLE ICE AGE

In the late medieval and early modern world, even as pastoral nomadism retreated, animals continued to play a key role in climate-related
vulnerabilities. While some societies scaled back the role of ruminant
livestock, others, particularly Europe and its colonies, embraced an
agropastoralism in which animals remained central. Although some
though agriculture and pastoralism have usually complemented each

other, at other times they have competed for the same land or resources.
The very mobility of pastoralists in the face of climate change, and their
animals needs for water and pasture, could prove a threat to farmers at
the edge of cultivation. In such cases adaptation through migration
could mean pastoral invasions of agricultural lands already destabilized
by adverse weather.5
Connections between climate events and pastoralist migrations have
grown more clear and convincing since the vague climate determinism
of Elsworth Huntington a century ago.6 Perhaps the most striking examples come from the 2200 BCE mega-drought, which marked the end of
the Akkadian Empire and provoked widespread pastoral inroads into
semiarid regions of the Middle East.7 Some archaeologists have proposed similar interpretations for events in the late Bronze Age Mediterranean and northern China as well.8 In subsequent centuries, although
climate shifts were less extreme, the rise of horse-based nomadism gave
pastoralists a military edge that they could use when pushed by extreme
cold or drought or pulled by agricultural crisis in neighboring civilizations. Altogether, the timing of Old World nomad incursions with
cold spells and droughts appears too close for mere coincidence.9 In
certain instances, including Persia in the eleventh century and the
Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth, historians have recently uncovered specific sources connecting adverse climate, weakness in agrarian
empires, and pastoral nomadic invasions.10 Also in the 1600s, a drier
climate along the Sahel may have pushed back the range of tsetse flies,
enabling the invasion of horse-riding raiders from the Sahara into
farming regions.11 Similarly, a cooling climate and a southward migration of bison during the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300 1850) helped bring
Apaches and Comanches into the Southern Plains.12
It would be simplistic to say that empires rose and fell just because of
animals or because of climate. Yet it seems clear that climatic change
could bring crop failures and drive instability in agrarian empires
while forcing pastoralists into migrations or invasions in an effort to
keep their animals alive. In regions still showing strong links among
climate, migration, and conflictparticularly conflict among pastoral
and farming communitiesit would be worthwhile to examine how
the needs and vulnerabilities of livestock continue to play an important
mediating role.13
Figure 1: Jan Smit, Gods Punishment on the Netherlands through the Cattle Plague, 1745; etching and
engraving on paper. Credit: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, The Netherlands (http://hdl.handle.net/10934/
RM0001.COLLECT.479868).
historians have praised the latter strategy as more resilient, or even credited it with European hegemony, it carried major risks during the
cooling climate and periodic extremes of the Little Ice Age.14 In many
respects, the vulnerabilities of domesticated animals came to parallel
those of their people. Population pressures and poor nutrition weakened their defenses to infection, and expanding trade and migration
exposed them to new pathogens. In diseases such as rinderpest and
anthrax, animals suffered their equivalents of the Black Death and
typhus in humans.
Major livestock plagues of the late medieval and early modern era followed a common pattern. In the 1310s, possibly the worst panzootic of
all time swept from Central Asia through Europe, killing most of the
cattle and sheep it reached. The mortality (probably rinderpest) was a
perfect storm of climatic and ecological circumstances. The Mongol
Empire had opened exchange across Eurasia, population growth put
pressure on pasture and fodder, and Northern Europe had suffered
through years of the coldest, wettest weather in centuries.15 Almost
three centuries later, when the Ottoman Empire suffered the worst
murrain in its history, circumstances proved remarkably similar.
Human and animal numbers had grown rapidly, pasturage was scarce,
the region was suffering its coldest winters and worst drought in centuries, and the contagion spread rapidly along imperial supply lines from
eastern Anatolia through the Balkans.16 Even Europes great cattle
plagues of the 1700s, which drove the rise of modern veterinary
Climate Forum | 323
[W]ee grieve asmuch to beholde the miserie of our poore

Cattell (in this frozen-hearted season) as it doth to looke
upon our owne Affliction. Our Beastes are our faythfull Servants, and doe their labours truely when wee set them to it:
they are our Nurses that give us Milke; they are our Partners,
and helpe to inrich our State; yea, they are the very Upholders
of a poore farmers Lands and Living.
Alas then! what Maister (that loves his Servant as hee ought)
but would almost breake his owne heartstringes with sighing to
see those pine and mourne, as they doe. Nay to see Flockes of
Sheepe lustie and lively to day, and to morrow, lying in
heapes strangled in the Snow
The Ground is bare and not worth a poore handfull of
Grasse. . . . By which meanes, the lustie Horse abates his
flesh, and hanges the head, seeing his strength goe from him:
the Oxe stands bellowing, the ragged Sheepe bleating, the
poore Lamb shivering and starving to death.19
As his description shows, animal disasters made for human disasters as
well and strongly influenced human vulnerabilities to climate change
throughout the Little Ice Age.
Animals did not usually die as easily as crops, and they could prove an
important source of resilience. Yet when they did die, particularly in
major livestock disease outbreaks, they could not grow back in a season
either. They represented a major loss not only in food and fiber, but
also in capital and labor, and the basic business of farming and transporting food could collapse without them. The death of livestock was central
to Europes Great Famine of the 1310s, whose legacy of malnutrition
and compromised immune systems may have contributed to the Black
Death a generation later.20 Following the Ottoman panzootic of the
1590s, the loss of animals may have been the single greatest factor in
the rural flight, rebellion, and depopulation that afflicted Anatolia at
the turn of the seventeenth century.21
In extreme circumstances, the viability of animals in a changing
climate or extreme weather could be a matter of human survival. For
the Vikings of Greenland, even as they learned to diversify their resource
base, the inability of livestock to survive Little Ice Age winters likely
spelled the end of the colonies in the fifteenth century. In America,
medicine, reveal significant parallels. The cattle trade had been expanding in size and geographic distance, and the two worst outbreaks followed exactly upon the two coldest winters of the century.17
References to these animal disasters are scattered throughout early
modern literature, even in Shakespeare.18 His contemporary playwright
Thomas Dekker left us a particularly vivid account of animals dying in
the fierce cold of the early 1600s:
the death of bison during the unusual cold of the 1780s played a key role
in famine, migration, and disease outbreaks among Indians of
the Northern Plains, and in the same region a century later, exceptional winters with great losses of cattle contributed to a collapse of
ranching.22
ANIMALS AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

In contrast to the Little Ice Age, we commonly view contemporary
climate change as a human-made technological challenge, making
it easy to overlook the still vital role of other species. The modern
world uses more, not fewer, animals than ever before, and they face
new threats under global warming. Herds in marginal environments
Figure 2: As many contemporaries observed, animals and people suffered together in natural disasters such
as the 1607 Severn River flood. Credit: Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Climate Forum | 325
Sam White is assistant professor of history at the Ohio State University,

author of The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman
Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and cofounder and website
editor of climatehistorynetwork.com.
remain at risk to drought. Animals may prove the chief victims of

expanding disease vectors in a changing climate; tightly packed concentrated animal feeding operations, declining genetic diversity, and antibiotic resistance lower their defenses. Additionally, global trade and
travel and global warming may aggravate the risk of zoonotic diseases
spreading from livestock to humans.23
Moreover, animals have become not only sufferers but causes of
climate change. Talk of modern human-made global warming usually
conjures images of gas-guzzling cars, but we may as well imagine cornguzzling cows. Livestock, especially cattle, are now directly or indirectly
responsible for around 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions
and perhaps more.24 Taken together, their methane burps, decomposing
waste, agricultural consumption, and role in deforestation may contribute more to climate change than passenger vehicles. By some respectable
estimates, a mostly vegetarian world would cut the costs of climate
change mitigation by up to half while seriously alleviating threats that
warming might pose for adequate global food supplies.25
Unlike the pastoralists or peasant farmers described in previous paragraphs, consumers in industrialized nations raise large numbers of livestock and eat them out of choice, not necessity. While often taken for
granted in discussions of climate change, todays intensive meat production is a legacy of particular cultural circumstances, economic pressures, and policy choices, as explored by a number of recent scholars.26
One of historys most powerful contributions to climate change discussions could be to emphasize the contingency of the current system, as
well as its environmental costs.
There is a good case to be made that we have entered an Anthropocene epoch, where nearly every aspect of our environment feels the
human touch. Yet we should be careful not to write other species out
of the picture too quickly. We might one day opt for a human ecology
that extracts energy and nutrition most directly and efficiently from
the environment for human use. However, historically and still today,
we have used flows of energy and elements that pass through animals,
whether game, livestock, pets, or vermin. This fact has tied us into
wider ecological webs that have mediated or magnified the impacts
of environmental change, sometimes for better and sometimes for
worse. Understanding climate change, past or present, will mean
taking nonhuman actors into account.
Notes
The author would like to thank the Forum organizers and journal editors for comments, and the Huntington Library, which supported research related to this article.
Alfred Russell Wallace, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, vol. 1 (London:
Macmillan, 1876), 150.
Overview in P. Koch and A. Barnosky, Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the

Debate, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 37 (2006): 21550.
For example, Eline D. Lorenzen et al., Species-Specific Responses of Late Quaternary Megafauna to Climate and Humans, Nature 479 (2011): 35964, and
Graham W. Prescott et al., Quantitative Global Analysis of the Role of Climate
and People in Explaining Late Quaternary Megafaunal Extinctions, Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 452731.
Examples in Michael H. Glantz, ed., Drought Follows the Plow: Cultivating Marginal
Areas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Cf. Carole L. Crumley, The Ecology of Conquest: Contrasting Agropastoral and

Agricultural Societies Adaptation to Climatic Change, in Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, ed. Carole L. Crumley (Santa Fe: School
of American Research Press, 1994), 183 201.
Elsworth Huntington, The Pulse of Asia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907).
See contributions in H. Dalfes, G. Kukla, and H. Weiss, eds., Third Millennium B.C.
Climate Change and Old World Collapse (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1997).
For example, D. Kaniewski et al., Late Second-Early First Millennium BC Abrupt

Climate Changes in Coastal Syria and Their Possible Significance for the History of
the Eastern Mediterranean, Quaternary Research 74 (2010): 20715, and Chun
Chang Huang, Climatic Aridity and the Relocations of the Zhou Culture in the
Southern Loess Plateau of China, Climatic Change 61 (2003): 36178.
For example, Jin-Qi Fang and Guo Liu, Relationship between Climatic Change
and the Nomadic Southward Migrations in Eastern Asia during Historical
Times, Climatic Change 22 (1992): 151 69, presents a statistical correlation but
without an attempt at historical explanation.
10 Richard Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World
History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Ronnie Ellenblum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950
1072 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011). Possible links between climate and the Mongol invasions have been the
subject of an ongoing investigation of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute (last
reported at http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2013/05/13/climate-and-conquesthow-did-genghis-khan-rise/. Accessed September 3, 2013).
11 George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western
Africa, 1000 1630 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); James Webb, Desert Frontier:
Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 16001850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); T. Shanahan et al., Atlantic Forcing of Persistent
Drought in West Africa, Science 324 (2009): 377 80.
12 Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2008), 22.
Climate Forum | 327
13 For example, John OLoughlin et al., Climate Variability and Conflict Risk in East
Africa, 19902009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012):
18344 49.
14 For example, E. L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1981).
16 White, Climate of Rebellion.

17 C. A. Spinage, Cattle Plague: A History (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2003), on the
history and routes of the disease; John D. Post, Food Shortage, Climatic Variability,
and Epidemic Disease in Preindustrial Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985),
on the cold winters; and Ekkehard Westermann, ed., Internationaler Ochsenhandel
(1350 1750) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), for details of long-distance cattle
trade.
18 A Midsummer Nights Dream, 2.1.95.
19 Thomas Dekker, The Great Frost (London: Henry Gosson, 1608), fol. B4r-v.
20 William C. Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Sharon DeWitte and Philip Slavin,
Between Famine and Death: England on the Eve of the Black DeathEvidence
from Paleoepidemiology and Manorial Accounts, Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 44 (2013): 37 60.
21 White, Climate of Rebellion, chap. 6.
22 L. K. Barlow et al., Interdisciplinary Investigations of the End of the Norse
Western Settlement in Greenland, The Holocene 7 (1997): 489 500; Andrew
J. Dugmore et al., Cultural Adaptation, Compounding Vulnerabilities and Conjunctures in Norse Greenland, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109
(2012): 3658 63; Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human
and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2001); Adam R. Hodge, In Want of Nourishment for to Keep
Them Alive: Climate Fluctuations, Bison Scarcity, and the Smallpox Epidemic
of 1780 82 on the Northern Great Plains, Environmental History 17 (2012):
365403; Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Natures Role in American History, 3rd ed.
(Oxford University Press, 2013), 130 33.
23 Smita Sirohi and Axel Michaelowa, Sufferer and Cause: Indian Livestock and
Climate Change, Climatic Change 85 (2007): 285 98; Roland Zell, Global
Climate Change and the Emergence/Re-emergence of Infectious Diseases, International Journal of Medical Microbiology 293 (Suppl 37) (2004): 1626; Kenneth L
Gage et al., Climate and Vectorborne Diseases, American Journal of Preventive
Medicine 35 (2008): 436 50; Irene Hoffmann, Climate Change and the Characterization, Breeding and Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources, Animal
Genetics 41 (Suppl 1) (2010): 32 46; Sally J. Cutler, Anthony R. Fooks, and Wim
15 Bruce Campbell, Nature as Historical Protagonist: Environment and Society in

Pre-Industrial England, Economic History Review (2009): 1 34; Tim Newfield, A
Cattle Panzootic in Early Fourteenth-Century Europe, Agricultural History
Review 57 (2009): 15590; Philip Slavin, The Fifth Rider of the Apocalypse: The
Great Cattle Plague in England and Wales and Its Economic Consequences,
1319 1350, in Le interazioni fra economia e ambiente biologico nellEuropa preindustriale secc. XII XVIII, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Prato: Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica F. Datini, 2010), 16579.
H. M. van der Poel, Public Health Threat of New, Reemerging, and Neglected
Zoonoses in the Industrialized World, Emerging Infectious Diseases 16 (2010): 1 7.
25 Elke Stehfest et al., Climate Benefits of Changing Diet, Climatic Change 95

(2009): 83102; Anthony J. McMichael et al., Food, Livestock Production,
Energy, Climate Change, and Health, Lancet 370 (2007): 1253 63.
26 See, for example, contributions in Philip Scranton and Susan R. Schrepfer, eds.,
Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (New York: Routledge,
2004).
24 Mario Herrero et al., Biomass Use, Production, Feed Efficiencies, and Greenhouse
Gas Emissions from Global Livestock Systems, Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences 110 (2013): 20888 93. Lower estimates in Livestocks Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome: FAO, 2006). http://www.fao.org/docrep/
010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM; higher estimates in Robert Goodland and Jeff
Anhang, Livestock and Climate Change, World Watch 22 (2009): 1323. Estimates depend on calculations of livestock numbers, animal respiration, alternative land uses, and especially the weighting of methane versus CO2.
Sherry Johnson
Abstract
This essay hypothesizes that as the earth moves from one temperature norm to another (pivot phases), extreme weather
events may occur and may become the catalyst for historical
processes. Extreme weather conditionssevere drought and
storm eventswere present on the frontier between English
Carolina and Spanish Florida in the late 1730s, suggesting
the presence of one such chronological horizon of disequilibrium. Weather conditions impacted all sectors of society, but,
until now, only two groups have been studied to any degree: a
group of slave fugitives from Carolina who successfully
escaped to Spanish Florida in 1738 and a second group who
attempted but failed to escape barely a year later in 1739.
This essay revisits the success of the Mose fugitives as compared to the failure of the Stono rebels, and both groups
experiences are contextualized within the regionwide social
dislocation caused by extreme weather events.
INTRODUCTION
In November 1738, twenty-three slaves escaped from plantations in
British Carolina and fled to St. Augustine, where they were welcomed
by the Spanish authorities and settled into the first free black town in
North America, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, known simply as
Mose.1 Barely a year later in 1739, another group, the Stono rebels,
attempted a similar escape. This time, the efforts were unsuccessful.
When Good Climates

Go Bad: Pivot Phases,
Extreme Events,
and the Opportunities
for Climate History
THE SCIENCE
Within the past few decades, new knowledge has identified oscillations
such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, and more
detailed studies show that within the Little Ice Age, warm and cold
cycles alternated roughly every seventy to eighty years.5 The pivot
phases, that is, those crucial times (sometimes longer than a decade)
when the earth moved out of one cycle and into another, offer the opportunity to investigate the effect that climate (the long-term characteristics of a region) and weather events (short-term phenomena that
contribute to climate characteristics) had on historical processes.
With worldwide temperatures in disequilibrium (relative to what had
been the norm for longer periods of time), one would expect to find
an increase in weather-generated hazards along this chronological
horizon of disequilibrium. Such hazardsrapid-onset events such as
hurricanes and floods or slow-onset events such as droughtimpacted
societies, which struggled to survive. The extreme weather conditions
on the frontier in the late 1730s suggest the presence of one such
chronological horizon of disequilibrium. By the early part of the eighteenth century, one of the coldest periods in recorded history, the
Maunder Minimum (ca. 1650 ca. 1715), was giving way to a warm
and wet cycle that lasted through the end of the century.6 At the same
When that group of fugitives chose to fight instead of to surrender, they

became rebels, and their unsuccessful escape attempt became known as
the Stono Rebellion, for the place where the conflict took place.2 The
story of the slave fugitives who founded Mose has been told over and
over, and the Stono Rebellion has also been the topic of extensive academic scrutiny. Yet in neither instance have events been investigated
within the framework of climate history; nor has the impact of
extreme weather and the resulting environmental crisis been factored
into the analysis.
This essay establishes the extreme weather conditions that existed on
the frontier between English Carolina and Spanish Florida in the late
1730s and argues for their importance in contributing to the Mose fugitives success and to the Stono rebels failure. The region as a whole was a
hive of activity because of the already volatile political situation.3 Such
conditions were exacerbated by prolonged drought and suffocating
heat that extended well into the summer of 1738, followed by torrential
rainfall that impacted an ecosystem already under stress.4 All inhabitants of the regionMose fugitives, Stono rebels, European settlers,
and indigenous communitieswere affected by the extreme weather
conditions. This study contextualizes their experiences, highlighting
how the authorities dealt with the crisis and the residents responses.
It further analyzes the outcome within the theoretical frameworks of
climate history and disaster studies.
Climate Forum | 331
o phase was
time, the earth was moving from a cycle in which the El Nin
a cycles were the rule.7
predominant into one in which La Nin
CASE STUDY
The region that divided Spanish Florida from the British colonies was
contested territory as English settlers routinely violated the prohibition
against crossing the frontier and expanded southward. In 1702 South
Carolina governor James Moore attempted but failed to conquer
Spanish Florida, but he did burn St. Augustine to the ground. The establishment of Georgia in 1732 led to further encroachment, and the Spaniards were unable to stem the British tide.8 During the War of Jenkins
Figure 1: Temperature fluctuations in the Northern Hemisphere over a 1,800-year period. The sharp upward
or downward shifts offer potential opportunities to investigate whether or not, and to what extent, pivot
phases affected historical processes. Credit: Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes,
Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni. Proxy-Based Reconstructions of
Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations over the Past Two Millennia, Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 36 (September 9, 2008). Copyright 2008, National Academy
of Sciences, U.S.A.
Ear (1739 41), James Oglethorpe invaded Florida, advancing close to

St. Augustine until his forces were beaten back by a combination of
regular soldiers and militia.9 The British justified the attacks on
Florida by the sanctuary policy implemented in the 1680s that encouraged black slaves to seek asylum in Spanish territory, where they were
settled in Mose.10
Along the length and breadth of the frontier, the inhabitants suffered
from famine, disease, a breakdown of order, and social dislocation.11
Carolina was particularly hard hit with drought conditions and
back-to-back epidemics of smallpox and yellow fever.12 In the European
settler community in Georgia in July, daily life came to a standstill when
many people stopped venturing outside to avoid the stultifying heat.
When the provincial court adjourned early to avoid the dangerous conditions, the functions of law enforcement and adjudication of cases
were suspended.13 Taking advantage of the situation, indentured servants, especially those in the countryside plagued by famine, fled
north to Savannah or Charleston hoping to melt into the general population. In Florida, eight convicted criminals sentenced to hard labor on
the limekiln near St. Augustine slipped away from their guards and
made it northward to Georgia, but a similar attempt by eighteen convicts and three soldiers to flee from Apalachee was thwarted.14 Black
slaves in Carolina fled in the opposite direction toward Florida and
freedom. Their goal was even more difficult to attain since slavery was
prohibited in Georgia until 1750, and any person of color in the
colony was detained as a runaway.15 In August, one such group was
intercepted en route to Florida, and its members were returned to
Carolina, but in November, the Mose fugitives made it safely to Spanish
territory.16
The crisis was not confined to the European settlers, their servants,
and their slaves. As early as February 1738, the indigenous communities
that lived in the backcountry also faced starvation, subsisting on
foraged roots and berries. Indigenes allied with the British in Georgia
raided the frontier into Florida, setting in motion a domino effect
marked by brutal internecine warfare.17 Warfare impacted native populations as far south as the Mayami living along Lake Okeechobee, who
fled their home territories and sought refuge among the Spaniards.18
Anthropological studies have shown that crisis can have an even more
serious effect on groups that rely on subsistence agriculture than on
economies linked to a regional (or Atlantic world) economy based on
trade.19 Unlike the European settlers, the indigenous societies in interior Georgia could not rely on trustees in faraway London to send relief
supplies when drought destroyed their subsistence crops. Instead,
they turned to time-honored practices to deal with scarcity: raiding
neighboring villages, especially those belonging to their enemies.
During rapid-onset events, certain sectors of the population are
impacted immediately, and the most common reaction is to flee until
Climate Forum | 333
AN AGENDA FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

The 1730s is but one period that when analyzed as a pivot phase presents
an opportunity for research.24 Other eras when the climate was moving
into disequilibrium, for example, the 1650s, the 1840s, the 1880s, and
the 1930s, may be fertile ground for employing pivot phase concepts
as analytical tools. As more research is accomplished, climate history
will allow the reevaluation of existing narratives and make important
contributions to many new narratives. In the end, scholars may be
able to move beyond a discussion of climate change to evaluating the
the immediate danger has passed. A rapid-onset event can lead to mass
migration and depopulation of an affected area. In slow-onset emergencies, the reaction is less rapid yet often significant as the population
gradually comes to the conclusion that life is unsustainable. Disaster
theory also posits a correlation between the destabilizing effect of disaster and political unrest, and it argues that disaster can be both a positive
and negative force behind political change. The authorities behavior in
the aftermath determines how the population will react, thus determining whether the outcome is stability or chaos.20 In an emergency situation, certain subordinate groups often take advantage of the
confusion to press their advantage. When all systems of authority are
strained, people who are oppressed will capitalize on a vacuum
in power to ameliorate their status.21 In some societies, postdisaster
chaos fosters rioting and looting; in unfree societies, the most common
reaction is flight, which, if unsuccessful, can then be followed by fullscale rebellion.22
Conditions suggest that in 1738, the frontier was on the brink of, if not
fully enveloped in, catastrophe. With colonial officials in South Carolina and Georgia preoccupied with dealing with environmental crisis
(and in spite of the arrival of a military force led by James Oglethorpe),
in November 1738, the time was opportune for the Mose slaves to
attempt to escape to Florida and freedom. At the time, neither the authorities nor the settlers along the way to Florida were in a position to
prevent their flight. Even if the native people were inclined to help
the British to gain favor, the indigenes in the interior were distracted
by their own emergency. Like the Mose fugitives, the Stono rebels
could have believed the time was propitious since colonial authorities
struggled to cope with the environmental crisis, but a year later, royal
officials had the emergency under control. Shipments of food and
seed had been sent from London, and the authorities had mandated
that the population carry arms at all times to prevent disorders. By
autumn 1739, the colonial government had reestablished its authority,
the Stono fugitives were intercepted, their leaders chose to fight rather
than be reenslaved, and they were defeated.23
Sherry Johnson is professor of history in the School of International and

Public Affairs at Florida International University in Miami. Her most recent
book, Climate, Catastrophe, and Change in the Atlantic World in the
Age of Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), was
awarded the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis prize for the best book in Caribbean
studies by the Caribbean Studies Association in 2012. Her current project
investigates the consequences of extreme weather events in the eighteenth
century in the Caribbean and southeastern borderlands.
Notes
The author thanks the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich;
the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research; the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University; the German Historical Institute; the
School of International and Public Affairs and the Latin American and Caribbean
Center, Florida International University, Miami, for generous funding for this research. Colleagues Christof Mauch, John R. McNeill, Franz Mauelshagen, Eleonora
Rohland, Jean-Francois Mouhot, Louis Kyriakoudes, Connie Lester, and Joshua Souliere offered valuable comments on earlier conference and workshop versions.
significance of climate cycles, relatively long phases in which cooler or

warmer temperatures were predominant.
Climate history, in and of itself, can provide new knowledge, but it
also complements existing historical narratives by incorporating
climate and weather as causal factors in historical processes. Science
can provide data about temperature fluctuations to provide a structural framework, much like the trunk of a tree provides structure, but
climate historians can add the branches and leaves, providing details
and context and fleshing out the narrative. These details can only be
gleaned by searching for evidence of extreme weather events in documentary sources, by contextualizing the evidence of such events
within a known narrative, and by demonstrating to what extent such
events contributed to change over time. The analysis can be enriched
by incorporating multidisciplinary theories from anthropology, sociology, and political science, and comparative studies from other
regions.
Research into the short-term and long-term consequences of climate
and weather on history may be combined with disaster studies to determine the effect that an emergency has on the structures of everyday
life. By understanding fluctuations of the past, climate historians can
contribute to debates that are of current interest worldwide. This knowledge, in turn, can promote policy-oriented research that can encourage
informed decisions in public and private sectors including projects such
as those dedicated to cultural heritage preservation.25 With so much
contemporary interest in the potential hazards of global warming, historical climatology is of signal importance.
Climate Forum | 335
Jane Landers, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish
Colonial Florida, American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 9 30.
Peter Wood, Black Majority; Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the
Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1974); John K. Thornton, African Dimensions
of the Stono Rebellion, American Historical Review 96 (October 1991): 110113;
Mark M. Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), Remembering Mary, Shaping
Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion, Journal of Southern History 67
(August 2001): 513 34; Jack Shuler, Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion
and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2009); Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Paul E. Hoffman, Floridas Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002);

Diana Reigelsperger On the Edge of Empires: The Coastal Presidio of Spanish
St. Augustine, 16681763 (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2013); Verner
Winslow Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670 1732 , reprint ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956); John Jay TePaske, The Governorship of Spanish Florida,
1700 1763 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1964); David J. Weber, The Spanish
Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); John
H. Hann, Apalachee: The Land between the Rivers (Gainesville: University Presses
of Florida, 1988); J. Leitch Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971); Verne E. Chatelain, The Defenses
of Spanish Florida, 1565 1763 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of
Washington, 1941).
North American Drought Index, www.ncdc.noaa.gov, provides tree-ring data

for hundreds of points in North America. This research used the points for Charleston, southeastern Georgia, and northeastern Florida. See also http://iridl.ldeo.
columbia.edu/SOURCES/.LDEO/.TRL/.NADA2004/.pdsi-atlas.html. The three
data points are 239, 240, and 249. The 1738 drought was so severe that it had no
counterpart until the Dustbowl of the 1930s. William Stephens, A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia, beginning October 20, 1737, Vol. 1 (London, 1742). Accessed via
Sabin Americana, Gale, Cengage Learning, Florida International University, October
2012. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/Sabin?af RN&ae CY103315315&
srchtp a&ste 14.
o Events in Climate
W. H. Quinn and V. T. Neal, The Historical Record of El Nin
Since AD 1500, in Climate since AD 1500 Database, ed. R. Bradley. NOAA/
NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, World Data Center for Paleoclimatology,
Boulder, CO. www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo; Cesar N. Caviedes, Five Hundred
Years of Hurricanes in the Caribbean: Their Relationship with Global Climate Var o in History: Storming Through
iations, Geojournal 23 (April 1991): 30110; El Nin
the Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001); Brian M. Fagan, The
Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300 1850 (New York: Basic Books,
2000). Michael C. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Malcom K. Hughes, Raymond
S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni, Proxy-based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations over the
Past Two Millennia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 36
(September 2008): 1325257. Accessed on NOAA paleoclimatology website,
www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2008/mann2008.html; P. D. Jones and
M. E. Mann, Climate Over Past Millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, 42 (2004): 1
42. The authors warn that the term Little Ice Age may be overly simplistic and
suggest specific studies to determine variations within the overall cooler phase
that lasted nearly five hundred years.
For the Maunder Minimum, see http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/Sunspot
Cycle.shtml; for the warm anomaly, see Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe
in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2011). For similar phenomena in Europe, see Christian
Pfister et al., The Meteorological Framework and Cultural Memory of Three
Severe Winter-Storms in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe, Climate Change 101
(2010), 1 30.
Joelle Gergis and Anthony Fowler, A History of ENSO Events since A.D. 1525,
Implications for Future Climate Change, Climatic Change 92 (2009): 36973.
Hoffman, Floridas Frontiers; Reigelsperger On the Edge of Empires; Weber,

Spanish Frontier; Hann, Apalachee; Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry; Chatelain,
Defenses of Spanish Florida. For Georgia, see S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise
in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Julie
Anne Sweet, William Stephens: Georgias Forgotten Founder (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2010).
Crane, Southern Frontier; Hoffman, Floridas Frontiers; TePaske, Governorship;

Wright, Anglo-Spanish Conflict.
10 Landers, Gracia Real.

11 Stephens, Journal.
12 Robert Pringle to Jonathan Medley, December 28, 1738, in The Letterbook of Robert
Pringle, ed. Walter Edgar (Columbia: South Carolina Historical Society, 1972).
13 Stephens, Journal.
emes y Horcasitas, St. Augustine,
14 Manuel de Montiano to Juan Francisco Gu
August 8, 1738, in Manuel de Montiano and Manuel Joseph de Justis, Letters of
Montiano; Siege of St. Agustine [sic] (Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1909).
15 Sweet, William Stephens, 11, 1001, 151 52; Stephens, Journal.
16 Stephens, Journal; Landers Gracia Real.
17 Montiano to the Marques de Torrenueva, St. Augustine, June 12, 1738, legajo
2593, Audiencia de Santo Domingo (SD), Archivo de Indias, Seville, Spain, microfilm in Stetson Collection (hereafter, Stetson) Special Collections, University of
Florida, Gainesville; John H. Hann, Demise of the Pojoy and Bomto, Florida Historical Quarterly 74 (Fall 1995): 184 200.
18 Hann, Demise, 191; Montiano to Torrenueva, St. Augustine, October 28, 1738,
legajo 835, SD, AGI, Stetson.
19 Anthony Oliver-Smith, Anthropological Research on Hazards and Disasters,
Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996), 30328, Theorizing Disasters: Nature,
Power, and Culture, in Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster, ed.
Susanna M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith (Oxford: J. Currey, 2002), 23 47.
20 Richard Stuart Olson, Towards a Politics of Disaster: Losses, Values, Agendas, and
Blame, International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18, no. 2 (August
2000): 26587.
21 Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe, 88 89, 112 14, 166 67, 170.
22 Rebellion theories of the 1970s and 1980s would argue that the marginalized
groups reaction would depend on their perceived ability to succeed. Ted Robert
Climate Forum | 337
Gurr, ed., Handbook of Political Conflict: Theory and Research (New York: Free Press,
1980).
23 Wood, Black Majority, 31820.
25 May Cassar, Impact of Climate Change on Cultural Heritage: From International

Policy to Action, The Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 26, no. 1 (Spring
2011).
24 Recently, other scholars of different regions of the North Atlantic basin have identified severe weather events in their respective areas of expertise: Mexico, the
Caribbean, Louisiana, England, Scotland, and Ireland. Along with this author,
they have formed the Working Group on Extreme Weather events to collaborate
on a transnational project that will compare and contrast the effects of severe
weather in the 1730s and 1740s. Geographers in the working group will
examine the spatial distribution of the data and hypothesize about the impact
of historical weather patterns. The inspiration for this group comes from the
article by Pfister et al., Meteorological Framework.
James Rodger Fleming
Abstract
Medical metaphors involving Earth and its atmosphere have a
very long history. Both ancients and moderns anchored their
environmental thinking in analogies of bodily growth and
decay, health and disease. This tradition found its way into
dynamic meteorological analysis in the first two decades of
the twentieth century. Now dynamic climatology is appropriating this medicalized language, with some practitioners referring to themselves as climate physicians and
surgeons. This essay examines the historical dimensions of
the metaphor that the earth, especially its atmosphere, is
coming under managed care by atmospheric scientists and
is being prepped for invasive techniques administered by
barber surgeons posing as climate engineers. It provides an
example of how environmental historians can use their knowledge of the past to analyze language involving the control
of nature and contribute effectively to current public policy
debates.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, leading figures in the climate modeling community
have called themselves planetary physicians and have appropriated
descriptive metaphors from medical practice. The earth is out of
balance, running a fever of one degree compared to a century ago,
and the prognosis is not good. The fever will likely worsen substantially
in the century to come, leading to melting ice caps, rising sea levels,
killer heat waves, and stronger hurricanes. Humans, by adding to the
greenhouse effect, are morally culpable through overconsumption
and addiction to fossil fuels. The planetary physicians recommend
drastic lifestyle changes such as a strict carbon diet to stabilize the
amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere and other
Climate Physicians and

Surgeons
Climate Forum | 339
THE TRADITION
An ancient tradition of medical topography links weather, climate, and
health from the perspective of the patient, not the planet. The Hippocratic tradition viewed health as an expression of the balanced interplay
between persons and their surroundings, emphasizing the importance
for health and disease of water, place, topography, and orientation to
sun and wind.3 An eighteenth-century revival of this tradition by
John Arbuthnot, William Falconer, and others popularized the notion
that conditions in the atmosphereespecially seasonal changes and
rapid changes of temperaturewere related to the recurrence and
spread of disease.4 The bodily humors got out of balance, but not the
earth as a whole.
Climate change in this era literally meant changing climesthe result
of long ocean voyages and resettlement. Dr. John Lining, who arrived in
Charleston, South Carolina, about 1730, found the climatic conditions
radically different from those of his native Scotland. In 1740 he decided
to observe both the weather and the intake and output of his own body
for a period of one year in an effort to understand their relation to epidemic disease: I began these experiments . . . [to] discover the influence of our different seasons upon the human body by which I might
arrive at some certain knowledge of the cause of our epidemic diseases
which regularly return at their stated seasons as a good clock strikes
twelve when the sun is on the meridian.5 In a related effort, Dr.
Edward Holyoke, a promoter of medical education in Massachusetts,
provided a monthly tabulation of meteorological data, observations
mitigation strategies such as renewable energy sources and energy efficiency to avoid the most dangerous climatic consequences. Compliance with this advice, however, will involve the entire population of
Earth and will likely necessitate complete restructuring of policies and
even polities worldwide. Others, on the fringe, advise an invasive
form of planetary surgery called geoengineering.1
Undoubtedly, our use of language is saturated in metaphor, some of
which, as in Darwins distinction between natural and artificial selection, had clear explanatory power.2 Modern climate physicians and surgeons, however, often conjure with metaphors unreflexively and with
little to no regard for either history or the limitations of their language.
Firmly grounded in the physical sciences, most have no training in
medicine or for that matter in social sciences or humanitiesMark
Careys essay in this Forum notes how climate modelers often incorporate human history and societal factors into their models even though
they have no formal training in social theory. Yet many freely don the
mantle of planetary philosopher or even savior. Such rhetorical
lacunae can provide fruitful points of entry for environmental historians to contribute to interdisciplinary climate discussions.
CURRENT PRACTICE
A revival in environmental medicine is now underway. Some twentyfirst-century physicians are hesitantly exploring climate change as a
possible etiological explanation for allergies and other seasonal conditions. The more vociferous are going much further, insisting that
climate change kills, and that climate-induced changing geographic
patterns of disease involving the likes of cholera, malaria, dengue
fever, and Lyme disease threaten epidemics that require our urgent, concentrated, and coordinated responses.11 The emerging theory of biocomplexity links an upward spiral of influences from bacteria and
viruses to larger and larger levels of life through the cell, the organism,
the community, the ecosystem, and ultimately, the climate system.12
Early physicians focused on the effects of good airs and bad on the
well-being of individuals while paying some attention to regional epidemics. Most aimed to do no harm. Yet modern medicine, rooted in
the traditions of the iatrochemists and barber surgeons, emphasizes
on the prevailing diseases, vital data on the number of persons dying,

and the causes of the 139 deaths in Salem in 1786.6 Leading medical
institutions such as the College of Physicians in Philadelphia also
joined the cause. Its charter, written in 1787, forged an explicit link
between recording meteorological observations, investigating diseases
and epidemics, and advising the government on medical matters.7 As
the eighteenth century came to a close, ideas regarding medical geography were epitomized by Noah Websters two-volume review of the
relationships between pestilential epidemics and sundry other phenomena of the physical world. Webster included weather conditions,
comets, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and meteors as epidemiological factors.8 Organized groups of physicians also served as observers
of weather and climate. During the War of 1812, US army surgeon
general James Tilton, motivated by prevailing environmental theories
of disease that linked illness and epidemics to weather and climate,
issued a general order directing all physicians under his command to
keep a diary of the weather and prepare quarterly reports as part of
their official duties.9 For the next six decades, the army Medical Department continued its support for meteorology by observing, recording,
and analyzing airs, waters, and places for the protection of the health
of the troops. Weather and climate history, it seems, is firmly based on
medical foundations, but its practitioners never claimed to be planetary
physicians or surgeons.
There are other precedents too. On regional and national scales, the
anti-desiccationist physicians and foresters involved in island and
forest management and their eventual transformation into forest,
water, wildlife, and soil conservation services represent direct manifestation of an interventionist therapeutic discourse.10
Climate Forum | 341
Figure 1: Medicalization of global warming. Bert Bolin, John Houghton, and Luiz Gylvan Meira Filhov are
caricatured. Credit: John Houghton, Meetings That Changed the World: Madrid 1995: Diagnosing
Climate Change, Nature 455 (2008). Reproduced by permission of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
radical interventions via pharmaceuticals, chemotherapies, and

surgery. Todays medical researchers speculate about systematic connections between health and the global environment. Some climate scientists, playing doctor, are expressing concern about the health of the
planet as a whole. Richard Somerville of Scripps Institution of Oceanography claimed in an editorial, We climate scientists are planetary physicians, and while climate science is admittedly incomplete, it is still
good enough to provide advice well worth following.13 The patient
is Earth, and the doctor recommends swearing off carbon (a mixed
metaphor equivalent to quitting smoking, giving up alcohol, or adhering to a strict diet). Somerville later shifts his voice to that of a planetary
public health official encouraging humankind to muster the wisdom
and the will to make such difficult changes. He concedes that our
planetary well-being is ultimately in the hands of the patient, but the
patient has no handsor literally, 14 billion of them!with no one
having the authority to sign a medical release form.
A colorful cartoon in Nature depicts suffering Earth with a fever
induced byCO2 being tended by three planetary physicians in charge
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As Bert
Bolin (Sweden) records vital signs on a clipboard, John Houghton
(United Kingdom) applies a comforting touch to the planets brow,
and Luiz Gylvan Meira Filho (Brazil) gestures toward a thermometer
inserted into Earths mouth somewhere near Madagascar in the
Indian Ocean.14 Assuming the daylight side of the planet is illustrated,
there is another thermometer insertion point near La Jolla, California,
where the sun is not shining.
The ill-planet metaphor is the organizing principle of the book

Climate Change: Picturing the Science by Gavin Schmidt and Joshua
Wolfe. Major sections carry the labels Symptoms (taking the temperature of the planet), Diagnosis (the prognosis for the climate), and
Possible Cures (preventive planetary care).15 The authors employ
these chapter headings uncritically as loose medical metaphors but do
not follow up with analysis in the text. In the destructive wake of 2012
Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy, noted rhetorician George Lakoff has
coined a new metaphor in an attempt to link severe weather events with
global climate warming: systemic causation. He writes, Smoking is a
systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working
in coalmines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. . . . Global
warming systemically caused the huge and ferocious Hurricane
Sandy.16 Others have called such rhetorical excess a form of tabloid
climatology.17
Climate change discourse is not, and perhaps never was, owned by
the diverse and far-flung climatological science community, yet the
field was built, over the longue duree, on concerted attempts to apprehend climate change, stake out authoritative positions, and forge
climate consensuses from antiquity to the IPCC. Throughout
history, understanding of climate change has been built on layer after
layer of authority, prestige, data, experiments, theory, modeling, technology, and ultimately, consensus. It has also been built on metaphors.
Atmospheric scientists, however, have lost controlthat is, whatever
sense of control they had gainedof the grand narrative of scientific
interdisciplinary and technological progress central to their field.18
In recent years, new voices from the press, the public, the state, and
the environmental movement have flooded the literature, adding
polarizing voices, while venerable but vulnerable practices of peer
review and journal publication have taken backseats to the new
electronically facilitated peer-to-peer review and ubiquitous blogs,
tweets, and quacks. A division of climate labor has not produced a
unified productinstead it has generated interdisciplinary status
anxiety in which most mainstream atmospheric scientists are wary of
the excessive control claims of would-be climate engineers. Such is
the power of metaphor gone awry.19
What about planetary surgery? An emerging breed of so-called geoengineers thinks that Earth will heat up destructively in the near future,
that voluntary compliance with emissions reductions is highly unlikely,
and that invasive techniques to cool the planet will be necessary. Shoot
sulfates or reflective nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere, turning
the blue sky milky white. Make the clouds thicker and brighter. Fertilize
the oceans to stimulate massive algae blooms that turn the blue seas
soupy green. Suck CO2 out of the air with hundreds of thousands of
giant artificial trees. Has managed care failed? Is Earth, the patient,
Climate Forum | 343
CONCLUSIONS
Metaphors provide a vehicle for historians to examine assumptions involving the control of nature, contribute to current public policy
debates, and avoid presentism while doing so.25 When communicating
to the public, climatologists often use and misuse medical metaphors
without carefully considering their limitations and power to mislead.
The death of Lake Erie in 1970 is a powerful metaphor familiar to all
environmental historians. But planet as body/ planet as patient metaphors have a much larger reach; they imply the mortality of Earth, itself
an ancient trope. If, as rhetorician Suzanne Romaine has argued, it
matters which metaphors we choose to live by, so too, if we choose unwisely or fail to understand their implications, we will die by them.26
now being prepped for invasive procedures? Is there a planetary

anesthesiologist available?
James Lovelock, celebrated originator of the Gaia hypothesis (itself
a metaphor), refers to himself as a geophysiologist, or planetary physician. He has diagnosed Earth as having a fever induced by the parasite
Disseminated primatemia (the superabundance of humans). As treatment, he recommends a low-carbon diet combined with nuclear medicine (nuclear power), but does not advocate population reduction or
geoengineering, which he likens to crude planetary surgery, as practiced
by the butcher/barber surgeons of old. Our ignorance of the Earth
system is overwhelming. . . . Planetary scale engineering might be
able to combat global warming, but as with nineteenth-century medicine, the best option may simply be kind words and letting Nature
take its course.20 These sentiments are misleading, since Lovelock
and Chris Rapley have recently proposed their own version of a geoengineering fix for the pathology of global warming, specifically, a vast
array of vertical pipes placed in the oceans to bring colder nutrient-rich
water to the surface to spur the growth of CO2-absorbing plankton. But
many worry that the idea might interfere with fishing, disrupt whale
populations, and release more CO2 into the atmosphere than it captures.21 Todays would-be geoengineers insist that theirs is an unprecedented practice. Yet if they hope to make a positive contribution to
looming environmental challenges, they need to study the checkered
history of their enterprise, rooted, in many cases, to highly questionable
practices from the Cold War era.22
Rhetoricians Brigitte Nerlich and Rusi Jaspal have examined a number
of metaphors involving geoengineering.23 They trace the planet as
body metaphor back to (who else?) Edward Teller, who called for
a planetary sunscreen in 1997.24 They link this to the planet as
patient metaphor, with Earth being not just out of balance, but a critically ill patient who needs invasive surgery, a medical/technological
fix that the geoengineers promise to provide.
By participating unreflectively in metaphorical language that medicalizes climate change, we enable what Mike Hulme has called a new
climate reductionism, driven by the hegemony of the natural sciences
over more nuanced and historically informed accounts of social life and
visions of the future.27
Notes
1
For details, see James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of
Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1980).
Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places, Hippocratic Writings, trans. Francis

Adams (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 9 19. See also Of the Epidemics, in ibid., 44 49, and Frederick Sargent II, Hippocratic Heritage: A History
of Ideas about Weather and Human Health (New York: Pergamon, 1982), 49 59.
John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London,
1731); and William Falconer, Remarks on the Influence of Climate, Situation,
Nature of Country, Population, Nature of Food, and Way of Life, on the Disposition
and Temper, Manners and Behavior, Intellects, Laws and Customs, Form of Government,
and Religion, of Mankind (London, 1781).
John Lining to Secretary of the Royal Society, January 22, 1741, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 42 (174243): 491509; (1744 45): 31830.
Edward A. Holyoke, Observations on Weather and Diseases at Salem, Massachusetts, for the Year 1786, Extracted from a Communication by Edward Augustus
Holyoke, M.D. to the Massachusetts Medical Society, in An Historical Account
of the Climates and Diseases of the United States of America, comp. William Currie
(Philadelphia, 1792), 1328.
The Charter, Constitution and Bye Laws of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
(1790), 3, quoted in Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary
America, 1735 1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 296.
Noah Webster, A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases with the Principal
Phenomena of the Physical World, Which Precede and Accompany Them, and Observations Deduced from the Facts Stated, 2 vols. (Hartford, 1799).
US Army Medical Department, Regulations for the Medical Department, in

Military Laws and Rules and Regulations for the Army of the United States (Washington,
DC, 1814), 22728.
10 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and
the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
11 Dina Fine Maron, Doctors Prepare Their Professions to Explain and Treat
Climate-Related Symptoms, New York Times, June 15, 2011; http://tinyurl.
James Rodger Fleming is a professor of science, technology, and society

at Colby College and a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York
City. He has written extensively on the history of weather and climate.
Climate Forum | 345
com/cs24bv5; Paul Epstein and Dan Ferber, Changing Planet, Changing Health
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
12 Rita Colwell, Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases: Biocomplexity as
an Interdisciplinary Paradigm, Ecohealth 2 (2005): 244 57.
13 Richard Somerville, Medical Metaphors for Climate Issues: An Editorial Essay,
Climatic Change 76 (2006): 1 6.
15 Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, Climate Change: Picturing the Science (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2009).
16 George Lakoff, Hurricane Sandy: Global Warming, Pure and Simple, Salon.com
(October 31, 2012). http://tinyurl.com/cmz2ynl.
17 Warren Pearce, Short Circuiting the Language of Sandy How to Balance Literalism and Lucidity, Making Science Public (November 14, 2012). http://tinyurl.
com/cktpat6.
18 James Rodger Fleming, Convergence: Atmospheric Science, Technology, and Society,
1900 to 1960 (forthcoming).
19 Gaining it/Losing It/Regaining It(?) Knowledge Production in Climate Science,
Status Anxiety, and Authority across Disciplines, Symposium S103, International Congress on the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Manchester, UK,
July 22 28, 2013. http://ichstm2013.com/.
20 James Lovelock, A Geophysiologists Thoughts on Geoengineering, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 366 (2008): 3883 90.
21 James E. Lovelock and Chris G. Rapley, Ocean Pipes Could Help the Earth to Cure
Itself, Nature 449 (2007): 403.
22 James Rodger Fleming, Will Geo-Engineering Bring Security and Peace? What
Does History Tell Us? Geoengineering: An Issue for Peace and Security Studies.
Sicherheit und Frieden/Security and Peace 4 (2012). http://www.sicherheit-undfrieden.nomos.de/1/current-issue-and-archive/2012/issue-4/.
23 Brigitte Nerlich and Rusi Jaspal, Metaphors We Die By? Geoengineering, Metaphors, and the Argument from Catastrophe, Metaphor and Symbol 27 (2012):
13147.
24 Edward Teller, The Planet Needs a Sunscreen, Wall Street Journal, October 17,
1997, A22.
25 Recently, but only after intense deliberations, the German government voted to
reject climate surgery. Axel Bojanowski, Absage ans Geo-Engineering. Regierung lehnt Klima-Operationen ab, Spiegel, July 17, 2012. http://tinyurl.com/
cn25bcx.
26 Suzanne Romaine, War and Peace in the Global Greenhouse: Metaphors We Die
By, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 11 (1996): 175 94.
27 Mike Hulme, Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism
and Reductionism, Osiris 26 (2011): 245 66; reprinted with commentary in
rlin, and Paul Warde (New Haven:
The Future of Nature, ed. Libby Robin, Sverker So
Yale University Press, 2013), 50625.
14 Nature 455 (October 9, 2008).
Philip Garone
Abstract
Rapid anthropogenic climate change is initiating significant
transformations in the ways in which public lands management agencies carry out their mandates. The US Forest
Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service,
and Bureau of Land Management are each acknowledging
and responding to the reality that management techniques
that may have been effective in the past will need to change
in the current period of accelerated climate change. This
essay proposes that climate change offers environmental historians new lenses through which to study the historical trajectory of these agencies as well as the broader issues of American
federalism and climate governance. As they adapt their management tools and techniques, the disparate public lands
agencies may be experiencing a form of mission convergence. Responding to the agency of climate, they are reconceptualizing the meanings of conservation, preservation, and
wildernessthemes central to environmental history.
INTRODUCTION
Federal agencies are responsible for nearly 650 million acres of land
almost 30 percent of the land area of the United States.1 These public
lands are managed primarily by the US Forest Service (USFS) within
the Department of Agriculture, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service
(USFWS), National Park Service (NPS), and Bureau of Land Management
(BLM) within the Department of the Interior. Public lands management
agencies are charged with stewardship of natural resources and are
Mission Convergence?:
Climate Change and the
Management of US
Public Lands
Climate Forum | 347
governed by mission statements, often elaborated in congressional

organic act legislation, but global climate change is forcing a fundamental reevaluation of their objectives. Traditional management techniques directed toward species-specific or ecosystem-level protections
are not always well suited to a changing world in which both individual
species and entire biomes are migrating and will need to be modified in
favor of management regimes that accept change and integrate adaptation strategies into the planning process. Federal public lands agencies
have begun to take a leading role in US government responses to
climate change and thus deserve detailed study within the larger fields
of the history of US climate governance and of American federalism.
Recognizing that the effects of climate change transcend boundaries,
federal public lands agencies are involving state, local, and tribal governments in their climate adaptation plans. As these agencies attempt
to manage for a future climate that will be unlike that of the present
or the recent past, the means by which they carry out their individual
missions will change and are likely to converge. Environmental historians who in the future attempt to write the overall histories of public
lands management agencies will therefore need to take into account
climate change in ways that extant histories of these agencies do not.2
As environmental historians seek to investigate societal responses to
climate change, a fruitful approach will be to examine the ways in
which public lands agencies are positioned to adapt to an altered
climate regime. Such an approach could expand the scope of environmental history by incorporating methodological and theoretical
approaches from disciplines such as political science and conservation
biology.
Political scientists have examined how progress in natural resource
protection is often affected not only by interagency power differentials
and competition, but also by the current structure of land management
and the relationships between different levels of government in the US
federal system.3 Political science methods of conceptualizing the adoption and proliferation of climate change policies within a federal system
are highly relevant to present and future studies of public lands management agencies precisely because the newest round of agency initiatives,
which will set the course for the foreseeable future, are based on the principles of multilevel governance and permeable boundaries. Conservation biologists and restoration ecologists are rethinking the meanings
of conservation in a climatically unstable world, and these reconceptualizations are already proving crucial to the evolving missions of the
public lands agencies. By combining insights from these disciplines
with the study of the historical adaptability of public lands agencies to
changing cultural and environmental priorities, environmental historians can effectively contextualize responses to climate change within
the overall histories of these agencies. At the same time, they can
demonstrate how the agency of climate itself is shaping the agencies

historical trajectories.
FEDERAL PUBLIC LANDS AGENCIES

Despite several decades of federal research on climate change by the US

Global Change Research Program and other initiatives, only during the
past several years has the federal government engaged systematically
with climate change policy, particularly in regard to actions taken
by the public lands agencies.4 As recently as 2007, a Government Accountability Office report concluded that the agencies had not prioritized climate change and had not provided resource managers with
direction on how or whether to address the effects of climate change.5
The Obama administration has attempted to remedy this shortcoming.
On September 14, 2009, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued Secretarial
Order 3289 that established a department-wide approach for applying
science, including traditional (i.e., tribal) ecological knowledge, to increase an understanding of climate change and to coordinate an effective response to its impacts. Just three weeks later, on October 5,
President Obama issued Executive Order 13514, which required each
federal agency to develop, implement, and annually update an integrated sustainability plan that includes a climate plan. Both orders are
demonstrative of the increasing use of executive branch policymaking
as one pathway by which environmental policy continues to be made
in an age of partisan gridlock.6
The USFS, USFWS, NPS, and BLM have each moved toward developing, adopting, and implementing climate plans, although at different
speeds and within different parameters. Yet despite agency-specific constraints, the overarching nature of the challenges associated with
climate change may result in a form of mission convergence. The disparate historical missions of US public lands agencies are poised to be
recast as they increasingly employ common tools, such as managing
ecosystems for resiliencythe ability to recover quickly from disturbances such as prolonged drought, fire, and flood, all of which are
already intensifying in extent and frequencyeven while they are
forced to accept longer term ecological transitions from current states
to new conditions brought about by a changing climate. This change
in perspective parallels the paradigm shift that has taken place in ecological theory since the 1970s from an emphasis on equilibrium and stability to an emphasis on disturbance and instability.7 The already visible
result will be a shift in emphasis from preservation to adaptation in
natural resources conservation policy. A brief review herenot
intended to be encyclopedichighlights the individual agencies
recent efforts as well as some lessons and opportunities for environmental history.
Climate Forum | 349
The USFS manages 193 million acres of public forests and grasslands
across the United States, and it also partners with states, tribes, and
private landowners to support 430 million additional acres. In 2008
the agency produced its Forest Service Strategic Framework for
Responding to Climate Change, which became the basis for its subsequent planning including the 2010 National Roadmap for Responding
to Climate Change. The Roadmap calls for a threefold management
response of adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable consumption.
Adaptive management strategies include building resistance to climaterelated stressors such as drought, wildfire, insects, and disease; increasing
ecosystem resilience; and facilitating large-scale ecological transitions in
response to changing environmental conditions.8 This approach reflects
the findings of conservation biologists and restoration ecologists who
have argued that attempts to maintain or restore past conditions could
create forests that are ill adapted to current or future conditions.9 The
Roadmap differs profoundly from the Organic Act of 1897, which provided for the forest reserves (antecedents of national forests) to be
managed simply for the protection of forests and watersheds and the production of timber, and even from the considerably more recent National
Forest Management Act of 1976, which required a management program
based on multiple-use, sustained-yield principles but still relied on a
model of a persistent climate. The Roadmap is based instead on a transition model that is responsive to climate change, thus adding a new layer
to the complexity of forest management and beginning a new era in the
history of the USFS. This change in management priorities suggests the
possibility of rethinking the periodization of not only USFS history, but
also of US history more broadly because these climate-driven changes
are not limited to any one federal agency and signify a fresh chapter in
the expanding responsibilities of the federal government.
Reflective of its long history that includes numerous predecessor
agencies dating back to 1871, the USFWS has a variety of responsibilities
including managing fish and wildlife populations; conserving endangered and threatened species; protecting migratory birds; enforcing
conservation conventions, treaties, and agreements with foreign
nations; and managing the National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS).
Encompassing over 150 million acres, the NWRS comprises approximately 560 refuges as well as dozens of wetland management districts.
Its contemporary mission is set forth in the National Wildlife Refuge
System Improvement Act (NWRSIA) of 1997, which gave the USFWS
its first true organic act. The NWRSIA is distinctly ecological, mandating
that the USFWS administer a national network of lands and waters for
the conservation, management, and where appropriate, restoration of
the fish, wildlife, and plant resources and their habitats. Yet the challenges posed by climate change to the USFWS are daunting, in no
small part because many of the species the agency is charged with protecting are migratory. Furthermore, it has been nearly three decades
since conservation biologists pointed out that anthropogenic climate

change will present a new and major threat to species within reserves
species already stressed by the effects of habitat fragmentation.10
Because species ranges shift in response to climate, whereas protected
areas are fixed in space, conservation biologists have argued that isolated
conservation fortresses managed to resist change will not work.11 In a
pathbreaking 2010 report, Rising to the Urgent Challenge: Strategic
Plan for Responding to Accelerating Climate Change, the USFWS outlined substantive strategies for addressing these concerns including the
establishment of Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), publicprivate partnerships that will provide the science and technical expertise
required to support conservation planning at landscape scales.12 The
nearly two dozen LCCs hold great promise for cooperative conservation
among federal, state, tribal, and private conservation entities.13 The
USFWS has also taken a leading role in the preparation of a National
Fish, Wildlife & Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy. The strategy is the
first joint effort of three levels of government (federal, state, and tribal)
to be directed toward protecting the living resources of the United
States in the face of a warming climate,14 and its eventual implementation and outcome will offer a fresh lens through which to study the evolution of American federalism in the face of climate change.
The NPS manages national parks, monuments, recreation areas, and
historic sites that encompass over 84 million acres of land, 4.5 million
acres of oceans, lakes, and reservoirs, and 43,000 miles of shoreline.
The NPSs 1916 Organic Act mandated a particularly preservationist
mission for the parks, and the agency has found itself engaged at
times in contradictory roles, preserving natural resources while developing tourism that, by its nature, affects those resources. As challenging
as that dual mandate has been for the NPS, climate change has dramatically increased the difficulty of static preservation. Traditional ideas
of conserving communities and ecosystems in their present form may
soon be rendered obsolete, and conservation success may require some
combination of new protected areas, increased connectivity, adaptive
management, managed relocation, and even ex situ conservation.15
The 2010 National Park Service Climate Change Response Strategy,
which emphasizes science, adaptation, mitigation, and communication,
directly addresses the fact that most of the resource protection laws by
which the NPS is bound were written under the assumptions of a stable,
rather than a changing, climate. As a result, the methods by which the
NPS carries out its mission need to be reinterpreted within the context
of climate change.16 As is the case with the other public lands agencies,
a shift is occurring within the NPS in the underlying values of environmental management. There are interesting parallels between how
climate change is forcing natural resource managers to rethink the meanings of wilderness preservationenshrined in public policy for the USFS,
USFWS, and NPS since the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964and the
Climate Forum | 351
CONCLUSION
Climate change is clearly altering the trajectory of natural resource management for these four agencies. How effective they will be in mitigating
and adapting to climate change will at least in part be a function of their
particular histories and mandates. The organic legislation for each of the
agencies varies widely, as the preceding examples have shown, and
ways in which environmental history has exposed wilderness myths,

blurred the artificial dichotomy between nature and culture, and challenged the notion of a pristine and static pre-contact landscape.17
Although environmental historians did not advance these arguments
with climate change directly in mind, they arguably laid the groundwork
for a more nuanced way of thinking about the mutability of nature and
of the long history of human management of the environment now
reflected in climate policies on public lands. Environmental history in
this instance is thus crucial for understanding current climate policies.
The BLM faces its own particular climate-related challenges. It is responsible for more federal land than any other agency: over 260
million acres of public lands, primarily in the eleven Western states
and Alaska. Yet for the first thirty years after its creation in 1946 (by a
merger of the Department of the Interiors General Land Office and
the US Grazing Service), the bureau lacked organic legislation. The
1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) reaffirmed
the agencys historical multiple-use management based on grazing,
minerals, and energy, but it also mandated new forms of environmental
preservation and protectionincluding the extension of the provisions
of the Wilderness Act to BLM landsthat required a greater variety
of scientific expertise. The agency became considerably more interdisciplinary, hiring a new generation of professionals that included
environmental planners, wildlife biologists, and archeologists.18 The
importance of a diverse staff of scientists has become even more pronounced as the agency continues to try to balance its traditional resource programs not only with protecting its public lands, as required
by FLPMA, but also with finding ways to mitigate and adapt to climate
change while at the same time rapidly increasing the development of
both renewable and nonrenewable energy sources on the lands it
manages. As the BLM and all the public lands agencies seek to respond
to climate change, they are increasingly finding it necessary to move
away from specializing in a single profession, such as forestry or range
management, and to embrace interdisciplinarity within their ranks of
scientists as well as managersaccelerating a trend that began in the
late 1980s and 1990s in response to the rise at that time of the holistic
ecosystem management approach. This new orientation can provide a
fresh template for environmental historians to study the dynamics of
public lands agencies, both singly and in relation to each other.
Philip Garone is associate professor of history at California State University Stanislaus. He is the author of The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of
Californias Great Central Valley (University of California Press, 2011).
He is currently beginning a project on the history and ecology of terminal
lakes in the Great Basin.
Notes
The author wishes to thank Mark Carey, Kurt Johnson, Maria Boroja, David Colnic,
Teresa Bergman, Liesl Carr Childers, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful
comments and suggestions.
1
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations. http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/

fedlands.html.
For recent agency histories, see Samuel P. Hays, The American People & the National
Forests: The First Century of the U.S. Forest Service (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009); James G. Lewis, The Forest Service and the Greatest Good: A
Centennial History (Durham: Forest History Society, 2005); Alfred Runte, National
Parks: The American Experience, 4th ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010);
Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History, rev. ed.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); James R. Skillen, The Nations Largest
Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). An overall history of the USFWS remains to be written,
but for the services role in managing national wildlife refuges for migratory waterfowl, see Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Robert M. Wilson, Seeking
Refuge: An Environmental History of the Pacific Flyway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); Philip Garone, The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of Californias
Great Central Valley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2011).
therefore presents different sets of constraints and opportunities.

National political priorities will of course be a factor as well. But as the
mandates of the public lands agencies have changed as they confront
climate change, the methods by which they carry out their missions
appear to be converging. This shift suggests a rethinking of the histories
of national forests and national parks, and of wildlife refuges and rangelands. The trend emerging within the federal bureaucracy toward more
comprehensive land management practices presents opportunities to
examine the workings of the American federal system before and in response to contemporary rapid climate change. And it opens possibilities
to investigate a broader role of the state and of governance in the longue
duree of human environment interactions, a point also touched on in
this Forums Introduction and in Mark Careys discussion of hydroelectric development in the Peruvian Andes. These are yet other ways that
environmental historians can contribute directly to the discourse of
climate change and expand the already diffuse boundaries of environmental history itself.
Climate Forum | 353
See Jeanne Nienaber Clarke and Daniel C. McCool, Staking Out the Terrain: Power and
Performance among Natural Resource Agencies, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1996); Barry G. Rabe, ed., Greenhouse Governance: Addressing
Climate Change in America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010);
Edella C. Schlager, Kirsten H. Engel, and Sally Rider, eds., Navigating Climate Change
Policy: The Opportunities of Federalism (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011).
The USGCRP began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was subsequently mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-606).
US Government Accountability Office, Climate Change: Agencies Should

Develop Guidance for Addressing the Effects on Federal Land and Water
Resources, GAO-07-863, August 2007, 9 10.
Christopher McGrory Klyza and David Sousa, American Environmental Policy,

1900 2006: Beyond Gridlock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 2.
For a historical discussion of this paradigm shift, see The Ecology of Order and
Chaos, in Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 156 70.
USDA Forest Service, Forest Service Strategic Framework for Responding to

Climate Change, Version 1.0. http://www.fs.fed.us/climatechange/documents/strategic-framework-climate-change-1-0.pdf; USDA Forest Service, National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change. http://www.fs.fed.us/
climatechange/pdf/roadmap.pdf.
Constance I. Millar, Nathan L. Stephenson, and Scott L. Stephens, Climate

Change and Forests of the Future: Managing in the Face of Uncertainty, Ecological
Applications 17, no. 8 (2007): 2145 51.
10 Robert L. Peters and Joan D. S. Darling, The Greenhouse Effect and Nature
Reserves, BioScience 35, no. 11 (1985): 70717.
11 Brad Griffith et al., Climate Change Adaptation for the US National Wildlife
Refuge System, Environmental Management 44, no. 6 (2009): 1043 52.
12 US Fish and Wildlife Service, Rising to the Urgent Challenge. http://
www.fws.gov/home/climatechange/pdf/CCStrategicPlan.pdf.
13 Kurt Johnson, US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Climate Change Scientist,
personal correspondence.
14 National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Partnership, National
Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy (Washington, DC: Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Council on Environmental Quality, Great
Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, and US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012), 3.
15 Lee Hannah, Climate Change, Connectivity, and Conservation Success, Conservation Biology 25, no. 6 (2011): 1139 42.
16 National Park Service, Climate Change Response Strategy. http://www.nature.
nps.gov/climatechange/docs/NPS_CCRS.pdf.
17 For a seminal example of these arguments, see William Cronon, The Trouble with
Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996),
69 90.
18 Skillen, The Nations Largest Landlord, 109 11.
Mark Carey
Abstract
Environmental historians are largely absent from current
climate change conversations. This essay outlines an agenda
for critical climate historyasserting that it is critical for environmental historians to be more involved today and that
they ought to be more critical of climate change discourse,
policies, and scientific modeling of climate scenarios and the
data that nourish those models. Using a case study from the
Peruvian Andes and briefly describing parallel situations in
the Himalaya and US Pacific Northwest, the essay shows that
climate-glacier-hydrology models are inadequate and can
even be misleading without the integration of historical
human variables. Environmental historians are well poised
to analyze and contribute to climate modeling that brings
together science/knowledge, the physical environment, and
societal forces. Moreover, a goal of critical climate history is
to inject historical perspectives into present-day climate
science and policy to help rethink the hegemony of climate
science, to question the dominant climate discourse and
framing, and to critique mainstream approaches to climate
change mitigation and adaptation. This Forum on climate
change and environmental history illustrates on a broader
scale both the contributions and the unfulfilled opportunities
for future scholarship in critical climate history.
INTRODUCTION
This essay calls for a more critical climate history. By critical, I mean
three things. First, history is critical for understanding present-day
and even future climate-related issues. Environmental historians have
Science, Models, and

Historians: Toward a Critical
Climate History
Climate Forum | 355
SANTA RIVER BASIN, PERU

The prospect of future climate change has many societies worried not
only about the weather but also about dwindling water supplies, especially in glaciated parts of the planet. Glaciers are some of the great
water towers of the world. Hundreds of millions of people in mountain
ranges worldwide live in river valleys fed by glacier runoff (meltwater),
such as the Ganges in India, the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China, the
Indus in Pakistan, the Columbia in North America, and the Santa in
Peru. They depend on the water for drinking, irrigation, hydroelectricity, spirituality, and livelihoodsparticularly in the dry season when
melting ice releases water at a time when little precipitation falls. But
the impact of glacier retreat on water use and societies has often been
oversimplified and even overstated.
long recognized this, but very few are involved with climate research.1
Second, environmental historians should be more critical of climate
change discussions, media coverage, policies, science, and modeling.
Here the lesson comes from science and technology studies that tend
to question science and discourse more than environmental historians
do.2 Such critiques, however, should not deny or ignore climate change
and its potential impacts; nor should they diminish climate scientists
excellent contributions. Third, historians should be self-consciously
critical of our own field, of our own analysis of climate and history. As
this Forum shows, there is great diversity in terminology and underlying
assumptions about what climate is and how scholars analyze it, about
how different spatial and temporal scales intersect and interact (or do
not), about the interplay between natures agency and environmental
determinism, about environmental historians responsibility to
engage the general public and policymakers, about whether historians
use or criticize contemporary natural sciences, and about our capacity
and willingness to collaborate with scientists, engineers, and other disciplines even beyond the academy. All of these issues are central to
climate history. Yet scholars treat them differently and unevenly.
Remaining self-consciously critical of these issues and others can significantly strengthen the field of climate history.
Critical climate history, as I see it, should thus be useful for analyzing
and approaching the past as well as for understanding the present
something historians often shy away from. It should engage with
current climate discussions, put historians into the conversation, and,
most importantly, bring the fruits of environmental history scholarship
to bear on both broader histories and current climate issues. Sometimes,
environmental historians critical interventions on environmental
issues can help rethink agendas and even yield policy shifts, such as
with wilderness. A brief case study of climatic and hydrologic modeling
shows how historians can contributeand why they must.
Figure 1: Map of the Cordillera Blanca and Santa River watershed, 2013. Credit: Jeffrey Bury.
Scientists and journalists have suggested that water shortages in the

Andes are particularly worrisome. Lima is a desert city with 8 million
people. La Paz and Quito, as well as rural areas where millions more
live, are also in desert-like locations where people depend on glaciated
watersheds for water. The environmental writer Mark Lynas represents
journalists climate-related concerns, saying quite darkly that in a few
decades when glaciers in the Cordillera Central above Lima vanish,
meltwater from the rapidly-retreating ice fields, will suddenlyand
disastrouslydry up for half the year. As a result, he says, life will
quickly become impossible. . . . [T]he massive majority of Limas population, who already have difficulty accessing reliable water supplies, will
be forced to move or die.3 For Lynas and many others, climate change
will yield a very clear (environmentally determined) path forward.
Scientists also have offered similarly dire predictions. For Perus Cordillera Blanca mountain range, the most glaciated tropical mountain
range in the world, some scientists have used global climate models to
simulate future glacier behavior and downstream water supplies. And
they project dismal consequences stemming from future climatecaused glacier shrinkage, such as a 20 percent decline in Santa River
flow by midcentury and an 11 percent reduction in hydroelectricity
generation if 50 percent glacier loss occurs.4
But to forecast certain socioeconomic impacts or even to tie human
water use for hydroelectricity solely or primarily to the availability of
water paints a misleading portrait of both the future and the past.
Water availability in glaciated basins depends on many factors, from environmental variables such as climatic conditions and glacier size to the
o Southern
influence of groundwater, weather patterns such as El Nin
Oscillation, and ecological factors like vegetation coverage. How
Climate Forum | 357
much the glaciers influence downstream water suppliesand at what

point in timeremain unanswered questions in most mountain
regions. Human factors such as water withdrawals, consumption patterns, land use change, and many other variables that environmental
historians can expose are perhaps even more important in watershed
hydrology than these environmental forces, even though these societal
aspects are almost entirely overlooked in climate-glacier-hydrology
models. A look at the history of Perus Santa River basin and actual
water use since about 1950 shows that the picture is significantly
more complicatedand that the Lynas interpretation is off target,
even counterproductive, for tackling future water issues.
Peruvians in the Santa River valley have significantly expanded their
water use over the last half centurydespite continuous glacier retreat
and a 17 percent reduction in water flow between 1954 and 1997.5
Glacier size must thus be disentangled from downstream water use.
Two examples illustrate this increased water use in the Santa River
basin.6 First, state and private hydroelectric companies using glacier
runoff in the Santa River have boosted energy production at the
on del Pato Hydroelectric Station, Perus seventh largest, from
Can
zero megawatts before it opened in 1958 to 263 megawatts since 2001
when it was last expanded.7 In other words, they generated more megawatts with less water and a loss of nearly 30 percent of glacial ice, despite
dire predictions to the contrary. Various hydroelectricity expansions
since 1958 thus had less to do with available water in the Santa River
than with the political climate in Peru that facilitated (or thwarted) investment, the government in place in Lima that funded (or ignored) the
on del Pato, the cost and
state hydroelectric companies running Can
availability of technology, and the views of diverse local populations
and authorities who either invited, accepted, or rejected new hydroelectric projects. The biggest boost in hydroelectric production came in
2001, right after the US company Duke Energy arrived in Peru as a
result of neoliberal restructuring that privatized the state hydroelectric
company and sold it to a private company with capital to invest. Global
political-economic trends and the amount of glacial meltwater have
both simultaneously influenced the last fifty-five years of hydrology
and water use. It is therefore crucial in all studies of climate change
and climate history to put these dynamic intersecting social and environmental forces together and not simply accept model projections
without concomitant historical analysis.
Second, export crop cultivation in the Santa watershed has increased
by nearly 16,000 percent since 1960. Coastal irrigation in the lower
Santa River valley grew from an estimated 7,500 irrigated hectares in
1958 to 174,000 hectares today.8 Peru has become one of the worlds
top exporters of asparagus, artichokes, and avocados, among other
crops. A notable portion of this booming agriculture occurs in the Chavimochic Irrigation Project on the Santa Rivers north bankthanks in
HUMAN VARIABLES IN CLIMATE-WATER

MODELS
The water use history in the Santa River basin unveils a remarkably different portrait of water use below shrinking glaciers than the various
mathematical models simulating past and future water availability in
the watershed. The historical data challenge climatic and hydrologic
models, making them more uncertain when they project into the
future. Of course, if the glaciers disappear completely in a few centuries
and annual water flow declines by 30 percent, as Baraer and others
suggest, then impacts would be significant.
Nevertheless, history reveals steady growth in water use despite a
steady decline in water supply. And the main drivers of those water
use changes were social, cultural, economic, political, and technological factorsnot just temperature, precipitation, and glacier mass
balance. Economic policies, technological innovations, political reforms fluctuating between authoritarian and democratic governments,
neoliberal reforms, and other societal factors shaped water management below shrinking glaciers. Thus, when mathematical models
ignore human adaptation practices, new technologies, changing upstream water management, water and energy laws, new capital investments, and the national and international political-economic
climate, they distort how water actually works as it flows from the
snout of a glacier to the Pacific Ocean. Yet models of hydrology under
certain future climate scenarios neglect these human factors at play in
the watershed, reducing the climate scenario to a simplified (environmentally determined) story in a world without humans, without politics and economics, and without social relations and cultural values.
This is why we need more environmental historians thinking about
present-day climate changeand why collaboration among historians,
scientists, and modelers is essential, and doable.10 Human factors and
historical variables have to be part of the future scenarios presented in
models, which are then popularized by the media and inserted into
part to glacier runoff but also thanks to the vast irrigation infrastructure
of the Chavimochic Project constructed largely when Alan Garcia of the
American Popular Revolutionary Alliance party was president of Peru in
the 1980s and early 2000s. Other factors beyond the supply of glacier
runoff further explain Perus rapid growth in export agriculture during
the last five to ten years, including its political-economic conditions favorable to businesses; free trade agreements with the European Union,
China, and the United States; a cheap and abundant labor supply; and a
favorable climate.9 Again, climate-induced glacier shrinkage is only one
among many social and environmental variables affecting water use in
glaciated watersheds.
Climate Forum | 359
public dialogue and policymaking. Projections of climate-induced sea

level rise, for example, will be much more robust and useful if they consider historical trajectories for real people and actual trends in demographics, infrastructure development, urban planning, living preferences,
and leisure activities that drive people to coastal areas.
Scientists and activists worries about climate-caused glacier melting
and ensuing water shortages also exist elsewhere. In the US Pacific
Northwest, studies demonstrate sustained glacier shrinkage over at
least a half century, with important implications for downstream
water supplies for hydroelectric energy, irrigation, and livelihoods in
the Columbia River basin, north Cascades, and surrounding the large
ice-covered volcanoes such as Mounts Rainier, Hood, and Adams. But
scientists have only just begun to question how downstream hydrology
is influenced not only by glacier runoff but also by myriad other forces
such as bedrock conditions and annual snowpack, as well as by the Columbia River treaty, salmon protection efforts, irrigation practices,
hydroelectric generation, forest management, and tourism and recreation activities.11 Though mentioned briefly by scientists, these political, agricultural, energy, and economic variables have unfortunately
not yet been the focus of social scientific or environmental history research, thereby leaving the climate-glacier-water-society equation
largely unknown in the Pacific Northwest.
In the greater Himalayan region, most climate-glacier models calculating ice loss have offered dire forecasts.12 And environmental groups
like Greenpeace explain that the rapid melting of glaciers caused by
global warming is jeopardizing the water supply for 1.3 billion Asians
who live in the watershed of the 7 great rivers that originate in the
region including the Yangtze, Yellow, Ganges, Indus, and others.13
But the story is more complicated than many scientists and environmental groups have suggested. New studies show that glacier recession
in the Himalaya is not as uniform or rapid as previously suggested.14
Others question how shrinking Himalayan glaciers actually affect
downstream water supplies. As the US National Academy of Sciences recently concluded, retreating glaciers over the next several decades are
unlikely to cause significant changes in water availability at lower elevations, which depend primarily on monsoon rains.15 Suddenly, the
claim of 1.3 billion people thirsty from glacier retreat looks extremely
exaggerated, even though the National Academy nonetheless recognizes that climate-induced glacier retreat will reduce higher-elevation
water availability. Importantly, the report says that groundwater depletion and increasing human water useas opposed to reduced supply
from glacial runoffwill reduce low-elevation water supplies, thus
signaling that, like in the Andes, human forces intersect with climate,
glaciers, water, and topography to influence downstream hydrology.
Moreover, even people in the upper watershed, at least in the Khumbu
region of eastern Nepal, get their potable water not from glacier-fed
rivers, but rather from tributaries that depend on snowfall, not glaciers.
Precipitation affects glaciers, but the direct link between glacier size and
water supplies for residents misses on-the-ground reality.16
CONCLUSIONS
Critical climate history could analyze these and other aspects of climate
modeling. Projecting climate change up to 2100, for example, requires
not only data about climatic conditions, but also, among other things,
the effects of greenhouse gases on climate. But these greenhouse gases
are emitted by people. That is to say, climatic conditions in the future
will be affected by a host of human variables and factors, such as population, energy use, economic development, energy sources and emissions, consumption patterns, and regulatory policiesall issues that
are or should be fed into climate models. Inferring these future scenarios
requires inputting historical data and trajectories, even though historians do not seem to be involved with model production. We learn
from Sherry Johnsons essay in this Forum that any predictions about
the severity of societal disruption caused by climate crises must include
considerations of power dynamics and the response paths chosen by, or
available to, institutional authorities and affected populations.
Critical climate histories could also analyze who has historically done
the climate modeling, and who benefits (and loses) from it. Historian
Paul Edwards points out that The elite world of global climate simulation still includes no members from South America, Central America,
Africa, the Middle East, or south Asia.17 Yet we know that when certain
regions, countries, or social groups control the science, then even wellintentioned science can alienate people, facilitate imperialism, or yield
injustice and inequality. James Fleming argues in the Forum that geoengineers who act on metaphors that medicalize climate change run the
risk of unleashing unforeseeable and potentially dangerous consequences that may weigh inequitably on different societies around the
worldperhaps yet another technoscientific agenda originating in
the Global North that affects everyone worldwide.
There is a key role for historical information from local people in
climate models, such as in the Himalaya where local herders in Tibet
can contribute vital proxy information about changing environmental
and snow conditions to climate models.18 It is thus essential for social
scientists familiar with particular places and peoples to collaborate
with climate modelers. Adrian Howkins shows the importance of collaborating with scientists because the researchers in Antarctica help
expose the long-term environmental change and how it might be
related to the Anthropocene that Howkins provocatively analyzes.
More self-consciously critical climate histories might allow environmental historians following Howkinss lead both to collaborate with
Climate Forum | 361
scientists and to critically examine the sociopolitical contexts in which

science is produced, circulated, and utilized.
Climate models tend to emphasize environmentally deterministic
scenarios, as in the Andes water story, but collaboration and critical
analysis may help avoid climatic determinism. Referring to these
models, climate researcher Mike Hulme calls this practice climate reductionism because the future is reduced to climatic conditions that
serve as universal predictors of future social performance and human
destiny.19 Unlike historians, modelers tend to be natural scientists
and quantitative economists, not social theorists. Yet their models try
to predict human behavior whenever they estimate future climatic conditions given the importance of emissions, regulatory policies, industry
compliance, consumption behaviors, energy use, governance, and
other issues that shape future climate scenarios. Models also tend to emphasize certain quantifiable outcomes and atmospheric constructions,
such as meters of sea level rise or, especially, the changing atmospheric
conditions represented by degrees of warming or quantities of carbon
dioxideaspects profoundly influenced by human behavior, not just
environmental variables. Environmental groups such as Bill McKibbens
350.org help reinforce this quantitative conceptualization of the atmosphere, a view emerging in part from climate models. Climate treaties,
cap-and-trade initiatives, and emissions policies also depend on and
build from climate models. And these efforts have all helped commodify
the air.20 Of course any commodification process yields winners and
losers. Climate models are amazing tools. But, as Fleming makes clear
in his critique of planetary physicians, environmental historians
should be both contributing to them and analyzing them to understand
how they have helped radically transform the way societies interact
with air and manage the atmosphere.
Historians should, in short, be asking critical questions about the
production, circulation, and use of climate-related modelsor about
the role of natural and life sciences in environmental history research
and the place of our research in public policy. These models not
only could benefit from greater input from historians, such as in the
climate-glaciers-water case in the Andes, Cascades, and Himalaya. But
the models also have implications well beyond climate changefor humanity as well. Environmental historians are well poised to analyze and
contribute to climate modeling that brings together science/knowledge,
the physical environment, and societies. Philip Garone points to the
various ways that public lands management agencies are responding
directly to climate modeling predictions to adapt their policies and
retool their missions, increasingly integrating federal, state, and tribal
expertise and perspectives into their planning. Yet historians are often
quick to state that our knowledge is about the past, not the future,
and most would balk at the thought of modeling future scenarios,
whether of human societies or of flora and fauna. But we cringe and
recoil at our own peril. It makes us lose control not only of the future, but
also the past because modelers generate incomplete and simplified historical data to simulate future scenarios. The example of increased water
use in Peru demonstrates, in contrast to modeled simulations, that
human and nonhuman variables intersect in critical (but still largely unexamined) ways that shaped history and will no doubt influence the
future.
The discussion of climatic determinism in scientific models points to
a larger issue from this entire Forum: the line between environmental
determinism and the agency of nature, or the capacity for climate to
shape history without predetermining it. Lawrence Culver, for instance,
points to how climate created definite limits and possibilities for European settlement in the Americas, but also how private and public
effortsbased on perceptions of climateresponded to those climatic
conditions or overcame them to maximize societal benefits. Sam
White also shows, on the one hand, the role of climate change and panzootics on pastoral societies while, on the other hand, showing how pastoralist societies often weathered climatic extremes more successfully
than agriculturalists, thereby navigating the interplay in the agency of
both humans and nature. Critical climate history means keeping
these sometimes thorny questions about agency at the forefront of
the research.
Another goal of critical climate history is more present-day focused: to
inject historical perspectives to help rethink the hegemony of climate
science, to question the dominant climate discourse and framing
even among environmental groups perhaps exaggerating apocalyptic
climate change narratives, and to more broadly critique mainstream
approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation. In the
context of vulnerability and resilience, Georgina Endfield calls attention to the importance of particularized lived experiences and cultural
memories for understanding how societies perceive and respond to
climate risks, and for avoiding neo-deterministic approaches. As some
scholars pushing for climate justice increasingly recognize, existing
climate science and discourse are structured by social power and can
thus reinforce colonialist, capitalist, and patriarchal power structures.21
Geographer Erik Swyngedouw claims that current climate framing
embraces a rather uncritical acceptance of apocalyptic climate change
narratives and technoscience, what he refers to as a post-political
and post-democratic regime because so few people are deeply or critically analyzing the historical portrayal of climate change and climate
science.22 This is not to disregard the effects of climate change or to
dismiss climate science. Rather the goal is to probe deeper into current
climate change discussions by approaching it from historically
informed cultural perspectives, by asking who wins and who loses
with certain discursive framings of climate, by uncovering the socioeconomic and political contexts of climate science, and by refining
Climate Forum | 363
the knowledge base available to analyze climate change impacts,

responses, and perspectives in the past and present, and for the future.
Notes
This article is based on work supported by the US National Science Foundation
under grants 1010132 and 1253779. For helpful comments I thank Phil Garone,
Emily Wakild, Jim Fleming, Adrian Howkins, Vera Keller, Dan Rosenberg, Melissa
Grayboyes, and the anonymous reviewers.
1
Sam White, Historians and Climate Change, Perspectives on History 50 (October

2012). http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2012/1210/Historians-andClimate-Change.cfm.
For example, James Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and
Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Paul N. Edwards,
A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); Kirsten Hastrup and Martin Skrydstrup, eds., The
Social Life of Climate Change Models: Anticipating Nature (New York: Routledge,
2013).
Mark Lynas, High Tide: The Truth about Our Climate Crisis (New York: Picador,
2004), 237.
Raymond S. Bradley et al., Threats to Water Supplies in the Tropical Andes,

Science 312 (2006): 175556; Walter Vergara et al., Economic Impacts of Rapid
Glacier Retreat in the Andes, EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 88,
no. 25 (2007): 261 68.
Michel Baraer et al., Glacier Recession and Water Resources in Perus Cordillera
Blanca, Journal of Glaciology 58, no. 207 (2012): 134 50; Bryan G. Mark et al.,
Climate Change and Tropical Andean Glacier Recession: Evaluating Hydrologic
Changes and Livelihood Vulnerability in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru, Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 100, no. 4 (2010): 794805.
Jeffrey Bury et al., New Geographies of Water and Climate Change in Peru:
Coupled Natural and Social Transformations in the Santa River Watershed,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 (2013): 36374.
Mark Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Bury et al., New Geographies of Water.
Birgit Meade, Katherine Baldwin, and Linda Calvin, Peru: An Emerging Exporter of
Fruits and Vegetables (Washington, DC: USDA/Economic Research Service,
Report #FTS-345-01, 2010).
10 Mark Carey et al., Toward Hydro-Social Modeling: Merging Human Variables and
the Social Sciences with Climate-Glacier Runoff Models (Santa River, Peru),
Journal of Hydrology (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2013.11.006.
Mark Carey is associate professor of history in the Robert D. Clark Honors

College at the University of Oregon. He is the author of In the Shadow of
Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society (Oxford, 2010).
His current research, funded by the National Science Foundation, is a global
environmental history of glaciers and icebergs.
11 Anne W. Nolin et al., Present-Day and Future Contributions of Glacier Runoff to

Summertime Flows in a Pacific Northwest Watershed: Implications for Water
Resources, Water Resources Research 46 (2010): W12509; Andrew Bach,
Snowshed Contributions to the Nooksack River Watershed, North Cascades
Range, Washington, Geographical Review 92, no. 2 (2002): 192212.
12 For example, N. M. Kehrwald et al., Mass Loss on Himalayan Glacier Endangers
Water Resources, Geophysical Research Letters 35, no. 22 (2008): L22503.
14 J. Graham Cogley, Climate Science: Himalayan Glaciers in the Balance, Nature

488 ( August 23, 2012): 468 69.
15 National Academy of Sciences, Himalayan Glaciers: Climate Change, Water
Resources, and Water Security (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences,
2012).
16 G. McDowell, J. D. Ford, B. Lehner, L. Berrang-Ford, and A. Sherpa,
Climate-Related Hydrological Change and Human Vulnerability in Remote
Mountain Regions: A Case Study from Khumbu, Nepal, Regional Environmental
Change 13 (2013): 299 310.
17 Paul N. Edwards, History of Climate Modeling, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews:
Climate Change 2 (2011): 128 39.
18 Hildegard Diemberger, Deciding the Future in the Land of Snow: Tibet as an
Arena for Conflicting Forms of Knowledge and Policy, in The Social Life of
Climate Change Models, 100 27.
19 Mike Hulme, Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism
and Reductionism, Osiris 26 (2011): 245 66.
20 John E. Thornes and Samuel Randalls, Commodifying the Atmosphere: Pennies
from Heaven?, Geografiska Annaler: Series A, Physical Geography 89, no. 4 (2007):
273 85.
21 Andrei L. Israel and Carolyn Sachs, A Climate for Feminist Intervention: Feminist
Science Studies and Climate Change, in Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the
Gendered Impacts of Climate Change, ed. Margaret Alston and Kerri Whittenbury
(New York: Springer, 2013), 33 51.
22 Erik Swyngedouw, Apocalypse Forever? Post-Political Populism and the Spectre
of Climate Change, Theory Culture & Society 27, no. 2 3 (2010): 21332.
13 Greenpeace, 100 Days to Save the Climate, August 28, 2009. http://www.
greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/countdown-copenhagen100days280809/ (accessed December 17, 2012).

Forum - Climate Change and Environmental History

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Forum: Climate Change and

Mark Carey and Philip Garone, Forum Introduction

Mark Carey and Philip Garone

Climate Forum | 283

284 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

WHAT IS CLIMATE ANYWAY?

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286 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

grapples directly with the agency of nonhuman nature. Anthropogenic

Climate Forum | 287

and how those experiences of relative vulnerability or resilience affect

NARRATING AND QUANTIFYING THE CLIMATE

288 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

SOURCES AND ARCHIVES

Climate Forum | 289

The study of climate history obviously raises important issues of scale,

290 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

chronology and enhance research on spatial relations because the study

THE NATURAL SCIENCES AND HISTORIANS

Essays in the Forum also remind environmental historians that we

Climate Forum | 291

CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH

least alter the underlying assumptions driving model production and

292 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

Robert H. Claxton, Climate and History: From Speculation to Systematic Study,

Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy,

David N. Livingstone, The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations

Mike Hulme, Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism

Climate Forum | 293

10 Diana M. Liverman, Conventions of Climate Change: Constructions of Danger

12 Wolfgang Behringer, Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of the

Climate Forum | 295

296 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

CONTRIBUTIONS TO ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

Climate Forum | 297

298 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

CONTRIBUTIONS TO CLIMATE SCIENCE

anthropogenic climate change. Without fossil fuels there would almost

Climate Forum | 299

present-day understandings of and responses to climate change?

300 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

Climate Forum | 301

See, for example, P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoemer, The Anthropocene, Global

302 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

21 M. Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy,

304 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

Predicting future climates and determining how communities and their

Climate Forum | 305

VULNERABILITY, RESILIENCE, AND MEMORY

timing and possible implications of past episodes of prolonged extreme

306 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

opportunities for learning and opening up space for transformations

Climate Forum | 307

on past events is collected and transmitted across generations and thus

308 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)

Georgina Endfield is professor of environmental history in the School of

David R. Easterling, Gerald A. Meehl, Camille Parmesan, Stanley A. Changnon,

There have been recent exhortations to encourage greater involvement

Climate Forum | 309

Anthony J. McMichael, Rosalie E. Woodruff, and Simon Hales, Climate Change

Hulme, The Conquering of Climate, 6.

David N. Livingstone, Reflections on the Cultural Spaces of Science, Climatic

310 | Environmental History 19 (April 2014)