I find this week’s topic and readings extremely interesting because of the questions it raises about the practice of doing history and what counts as history. While I had heard of environmental history, and fondly remember reading (I think) some of the works listed in Andreas Malm’s 2017 blogpost ‘Who lit this fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy’ such as Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century on the Little Ice Age in MO1008, I was unaware of how extensive the field of non-human history is. I do remember the tone that Malm critiques this work for in how this study of the Little Ice Age makes the climate change we face today seem normal, almost inevitable. This blog post is careful to specify that there is nothing accidental about the current climate change situation and that it is instead the fault of humans in the last two centuries. I was fascinated to learn how empire contributed to this climate crisis, specifically the British Empire in India or the Soviet Union.
In Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor’s ‘‘More-Than-Human Histories’ from 2020, I was first struck by the number of terms they employ: more-than-human approach, environmental humanities, multispecies studies, co-constitution. Additionally, there is such a diversity of fields that connect to more-than-human histories as the article talks about academics that classify themselves as ecofeminists, multispecies ethnography, Marxist geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists. This terminology and the focus on seeing all environments as cultural and natural hybrids, overcoming the privileging of some worlds and lives over others, and ridding of conceptual divisions of human life versus other life forms made me think about how absurd this article might sound to a traditional eighty-year-old national historian. Maybe it’s just me, but I am always happy to read articles that make me feel like I haven’t thought about things enough. I am glad we are exposed to such a breadth of ideas about the future of history as I think it’s important for us as students to understand that there is always space for more evolution of historical thought.
In both articles, I was not surprised by the immense pressure put on historians to explain the past in a way that positively influences the future. I feel like this is a common thread in histories that focus on phenomena that hurt people or other things. In Malm’s, he specifically writes that in a warming world the central task of climate historians is to study history-in-climate rather than climate-in-history as this can lead to exit strategies and solutions. Similarly, O’Gorman and Gaynor’s article gives an example of the power of using non-traditional historical sources in the evaluation of the non-human: “historians might also use sources like whale ear wax, which registers signs of stress like whaling and climate change, to reconsider these histories from the perspective of the whales while also attending to changing scientific interests and questions” (727). By demonstrating the detrimental histories of something like whaling from this non-human perspective, she argues that this could change the future ethical engagement of humans with non-human worlds. Overall, I really enjoyed the reading from this week and how it forced me to expand my definition of “history.”