Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises: What the Future Needs from History

ISBN-13: 9783030941390 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022

Izdebski, Adam

Opis

This is an open access book. Histories we tell never emerge in a vacuum, and history as an academic discipline that studies the past is highly sensitive to the concerns of the present and the heated debates that can divide entire societies. But does the study of the past also have something to teach us about the future? Can history help us in coping with the planetary crisis we are now facing? By analyzing historical societies as complex adaptive systems, we contribute to contemporary thinking about societal-environmental interactions in policy and planning and consider how environmental and climatic changes, whether sudden high impact events or more subtle gradual changes, impacted human responses in the past. We ask how societal perceptions of such changes affect behavioral patterns and explanatory rationalities in premodernity, and whether a better historical understanding of these relationships can inform our response to contemporary problems of similar nature and magnitude, such as adapting to climate change.

Spis treści

Introduction: the future of the past

What stories should historians tell at the dawn of the Anthropocene?

 The Anthropocene Contract. What kind of historian-reader agreement does environmental historiography need?

How history changes: the social science perspective (title tbc)

Participatory Pasts and Fuzzy Futures: Tools to View History as a System

 Geoengineering and the Middle Ages. Lessons from medieval volcanic eruptions for the Anthropocene

 How do pandemics affect early medieval societies?

The societal impacts of livestock plagues 

Queen Rice: modeling human and natural systems of historic rice fields in the Gullah Geechee corridor in the face of climate change and sea level rise

How does an empire reconfigure itself? Rome and Byzantium, 5th - 8th centuries CE

Success and Failure in the Norse N. Atlantic: Origins, Pathway Divergence, Extinction and Survival

 Reverse engineering the history of pastoral nomads:  from climate to history and vice versa

After 1177 BCE: Resilience, Resistance, and the Relevance of the Rebirth of Civilizations for Today’s World

Tsunamis, El Nino, and War on Aceh, Sumatra

Ecological awareness and adaptation after WWII (title tbc)

 Are all unhappy systems alike? Finding Patterns in Historical Collapses

Social forecasting in the time of the Anthropocene

 Futurology of the Past? Historicizing scientific future research in late-socialist Poland

Utopian thinking and history in the Anthropocene (title tbc)

UNESCO’s Principles for Sustainability Science as Guidelines for Formulating Qualitative Scenario Storylines (QSS) and Collaborative Conceptual Modeling (CCM)    

Using History to Understand Current Challenges with Resilience and Systemic Risk