ASEH Presidents' Initiatives

Last week, flying back from Iceland, the Swedish geneticist sitting next to me described his research on cancer genes and then politely asked me about my research.  I told him that I was considering a project in Iceland that would try to distentangle competing hypotheses about the extent, timing, and causes of deforestation.  Iceland is one of the least forested countries in the world, and many scientists argue that a combination of sheep grazing, woodcutting, and pasture clearing led to an extraordinarily rapid loss of forests one thousand years ago, accompanied by some of the most extreme soil erosion ever recorded. Iceland’s forests never recovered, and today only a few remnants of birch woodland struggle to survive.

Sheep farmers in Iceland, on the other hand, prefer the argument that climate change, not people and their sheep, led to the loss of forests and soil in Iceland. The incredible richness of Iceland’s archival records, combined with paleoecological research, might provide a means of testing these various hypotheses, I explained to my seatmate. 

He considered for a moment, and then asked, “who cares?”  I blinked, surprised.  He tried again, more delicately this time: “why does it matter what caused deforestation? Does it affect what people do today?” Of course, I assured him.  Of course environmental history matters—local people trying to restore a landscape need to know why degradation occurred in the first place. Foresters need to know why most forests recover after logging, but some forests do not.  Communities trying to live responsibly on earth need to understand why sometimes human efforts to do so succeed, and sometimes they fail. People across the globe who are faced with rapid deforestation and erosion might be able to learn something from Iceland’s past.

 Many community activists, environmental advocates, and resource managers are increasingly recognizing that environmental history research can help them understand their past and make better decisions about their future. But because they don’t know about our work, they often try to do history on their own, in isolation from the larger scholarly and academic community that could help them. At the Baton Rouge ASEH conference, we learned that journalists and minority communities trying to understand patterns of flooding in New Orleans had laboriously pieced together the environmental history of flood control on their own.  They were unaware of historians who might have been able to guide them with this task. Similarly, community activists seeking to understand toxic exposures along the Chemical Corridor assembled historical information about chemical plants in the area, but they often found themselves bewildered by documents that historians have been trained to interpret.

One of my priorities during my tenure as President of ASEH is to help bridge these divides between scholars and the public.  We have formed a new diversity committee that will work on ways to encourage and fund research by members of underrepresented groups, and to help foster collaborative research guided by the concerns of affected communities.  An internship subcommittee, part of the Education committee chaired by Aaron Shapiro, is establishing programs that train students in applied public history, working with communities and agencies that need to know more about their past.  The outreach committee, chaired by Kate Christen, has created an expert’s roster to help members of ASEH connect with journalists, and the outreach committee is considering new programs to help bring our members’ research to a broader public.

The plane from Iceland landed long before I could explain all this to my Swedish cancer researcher. If I had time, I would have argued to him that environmental history, like all humanities research, doesn’t need to be useful to be worthwhile.  Research for its own sake, research completely disconnected from concerns over environmental degradation and human justice, deserves an audience.   But environmental history has enormous potential for helping us live sustainably and equitably on earth, and ASEH has an important role to play in this effort.