Climate Histories Seminar: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The Climate Histories Interdisciplinary Seminar is about bringing together and expanding a network of people from different backgrounds (sciences, arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as people working in policy, media, and industry) to tackle questions about climate and environmental change in the past, present, and future.
The general questions we ask as a network are: Why does environmental knowledge matter? What can we learn about climate change from history? How can different disciplines work together to develop our understanding? (See our website created for a one-year AHRC network project at http://climatehistories.innerasiaresearch.org/ )
The aim of the seminar series will be to share knowledge, start conversations, and work towards new ways of thinking for future research projects.
For this second season of CRASSH-sponsored discussions on climate (and other environmental) processes, we are generating another interdisciplinary programme which combines attention to academic research, questions of application, and communication strategies. Roughly speaking the year is divided into three large themes, which will occupy one term each: water; ice; and ‘what is to be done?’ – the exploration of failed as well as successful projects designed to respond in some way to changing environmental conditions.
A critical assessment of exploitation and stewardship in a rapidly warming Far North
Subhankar Banerjee (Independent artist and environmental humanities scholar and Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall)
Help! Avoiding Civilisation-threatening Climate Change: Reflections of a sustainability practitioner
David Bent (Director of Sustainable Business at Forum for the Future)
David Bent will be discussing the political-economy of climate change, including stories from inside the private sector with examples from The Guardian, O2, and Unilever. More broadly David will comment on how action within the current political economy will not address the existential threat of climate change and how we might move towards a working hypotheses on what can be done.
Hildegard Diemberger (Social Anthropology, Cambridge University) in discussion with: Christos Lynteris (Social Anthropology, Cambridge University)
Hildegard will be discussing the use of historical archives for understanding environmental change in the Himalayas, and Christos will share his comparitive insights on tracing the flow of epidemics through an historical lens. Christos will also discuss how climate change is one of the key threads in plague studies today, not only in studying the ways environmental change impacts epidemic patterns but how plague itself has been shaping the environment over the centuries.
Mayesha Alam (Associate Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security) Briana Mawby (Hillary Rodham Clinton Research Fellow, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security)
Mayesha and Briana will be presenting via Skype on the disproportionate impact of climate change on women and the role of gender at COP21.
Report
Richard Fraser (Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, Cambridge) Jonathan Wooley (Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Marc Ozawa (Energy Policy Research Group, Cambridge)
Marc's research focuses on the role of trust in international energy trade, partnerships, and negotiations. For this seminar, he will be discussing the geopolitics of energy and how to approach the COP21 climate negotiations through a geopolitical lens.
Mark Aldenderfer (University of California) Richard Fraser (Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, Univerity of Cambridge)
Ken Webster & William Scott (Ellen Macarthur Foundation)
Ken Webster is Head of Innovation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity which works to develop the idea and practice of 'the circular economy', and to change how business operates. Ken will discuss the idea of the circular economy and the evolving work of the Foundation, especially as it relates to higher education.
William Scott is professor emeritus at the University of Bath, and worked for three years with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation as an evaluator of the work of its education team. He will discuss aspects of this work, and identify particular issues that affect the capacity of educational institutions and programmes to deal with circular economy ideas.
Annual cycles among Eastern Tukanoan indians. Collaborative research towards environmental and climate-change monitoring in the Northwest Amazon.
Aloisio Cabalzar - Insituto Socioambiental ((Brazil) / IHEID (University of Genève, Switzerland))
Abstract
The Northwest Amazon has been identified as the center of highest precipitation in the Amazon Basin (3600 mm/year), exhibiting low seasonality - many short dry periods (each lasting only a few days) permeating an overall humid annual cycle – forming a very complex climatic system. The Eastern Tukanoan peoples, native inhabitants of this region, rely on an astronomical calendar as their main temporal reference, while adopting a seasonal naming system that also combines climatic, ecosystem and river-level indicators. Since 2005, a collaborative investigation of these phenomena developing by a cross-cultural team has been under way in the Tiquié River, an affluent of the Uaupés and Upper Rio Negro rivers of Brazil. The project has taken as its starting point the narratives of elder knowledge-holders about the annual cycle, and has continued through daily observations and notes taken by young adult indigenous researchers, informed by their elder relatives. The objective is to describe how this annual calendar incorporates this inter- and intra-annual seasonal variability.
Climate Change Histories, Alpine Flood Refuges, and Resilience among the Tlingit of Alaska
Dr Thomas Thornton (Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford)
Tourism in the Taiga: Eco-Museums, Ethnic Minorities and the Politics of Cultural Heritage .
Richard Fraser (Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)
Steve Waters (Theatre Director, Cambridge & Norfolk) Professor Edvard Hviding (Social Anthropology, Bergen University)
Professor David Vaughan (Director of Science) Dr Robert Mulvaney (Science Leader ‐ Chemistry and Past Climate Programme, British, Antarctic Survey, Cambridge) Dr Chris Hope (Reader in Policy Modelling, Judge Business School, Cambridge)
Catherine Alexander (Social Anthropology, Durham) Richard Fraser (Social Anthropology, Cambridge)
Film: Jan van der Berg & Pipaluk Knuden-Ostermann, 2011 Netherlands
Discussants: Rob Doubleday (Centre for Science and Policy, Cambridge) John Ash (Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge)
Travelling on ocean currents and carried in snowfall, chemical residue accumulates in the once-pristine Arctic. These pesticides are poisoning both the Inuit people and the animals, causing illness and even threatening the unborn. Pipaluk Knudsen-Ostermann travels from her home in Greenland to communities in Uganda, India and Costa Rica to find local causes of the contamination that makes its way to the Arctic.
The Challenge of Producing Official Accounts that Rearch beyond Academia
Forum Discussion:
Roz Almond (Forum for Environment and Sustainability, University of Cambridge)
Professor Simon Schaffer (History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)
Marcos Pelanur (Sustainable Engineering, University of Cambridge)
Rob Doubleday/tbc (Centre for Science and Policy, Cambridge)
Dr Francis Ludlow (Historical Climatologist, Harvard University Centre for the Environment)
Dr Hildegard Diemberger (MIASU, University of Cambridge)
James Montgomery (Sustainable Engineering, University of British Columbia)
Dr Marta Magalhães (Research Associate. Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge).
Dr Hannah Knox (Research Fellow, ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, University of Manchester)
Professor John Robinson (Associate Provost, Sustainability, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver and Director of UBC Sustainability Initiative)
Glenn Juday (Professor of Forest Ecology, School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences, University of Alaska)
The first - as part of our Climate Histories Discussion Series - Fire and Ice is a consideration of both of these factors in the continuing shifts in the boreal ecosystem of interior Alaska.