Editorial: Climate and Environment

Read Teaching History 194: Climate and Environment

The current ecological and climate crisis is, without doubt, human-induced. Even those who previously disputed this claim have switched from outright denial to arguing that the threat is exaggerated.¹ Meanwhile, many young people are responding to the crisis with strong emotions, such as anxiety and anger.² There are calls for schools to teach more about the crisis across the whole curriculum, to increase young people’s understanding and sense of agency.³ Learning about climate change in science alone cannot fully explain the human actions and decisions that underpin its causes, nor fully explore what we could do about it. Taught in isolation, a focus on scientific explanations may exacerbate young people’s anxiety.

So far, the humanities have made few contributions to understanding climate change.⁴ While the current national curriculum for history in England recognises the role of history in helping young people to understand the ‘challenges of our time’, it does not specifically mention the climate crisis.⁵ Yet there is, space within the curriculum to add ‘environmental’ to the familiar political, social and cultural ‘perspectives’.

For those who fear that responding to the climate crisis in history is too presentist, we point to recent examples of current concerns, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, where critical commentary from historians has built a more accurate public understanding of the past. This is a necessary public function of history. As Peter Frankopan has argued: 

Rather as a doctor should have full knowledge of an illness before trying to devise a cure, so too is investigating the causes of the current problems essential if we are to suggest a way to deal with the crises now confronting us all.⁶  

So urgent is this task that the Historical Association commissioned simultaneous issues of Teaching History and Primary History dedicated to the same theme. In both cases, the first article has been written by Michael Riley and Alison Kitson (from UCL’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education), outlining the potential of school history to educate young people about the climate crisis in ways that inform their thinking about how to create a more sustainable future. Alison, who acted as a guest editor for this issue, also contributed another article, focusing on new ways of framing the industrial revolution as the third of four turning points in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. Nebiat Michael reflects within the article on her students’ experience of ‘zooming out’ to tackle the history of energy use over time, noting their fascination with the topic and their appreciation of how it connected the past with the present and the future. Peter Langdon also wanted his students to think big about the relationship between humans and climate, across the whole history of our species. He focuses on the judicious combination of macro- and micro-history, with deliberate pauses at particular ‘thresholds’ in order to help his students to grasp the scale and evaluate the significance of what they are studying.

We are particularly pleased to include an article by Kate Hawkey, who has long advocated for history education to play its essential role in helping young people to understand the history of the climate crisis, and to draw appropriately on disciplinary knowledge in making sense of it and in considering how we might respond. While Kate has invested significantly in thinking about these issues (as revealed in her recent book, History and the Climate Crisis), she and her co-authors – Paula Worth, David Rawlings and Dan Warner-Meanwell – were keen to illustrate the different ways in which teachers have just begun to explore these issues, sharing initial accounts of the professional wrestling required by any new curriculum planning.

Verity Morgan is similarly committed to illustrating possible first steps. She reports on three strategies intended to help teachers to integrate the teaching of environmental history within existing schemes of work. Focusing on the Black Death, the British Empire and World War I, she shows how teachers can rebalance the stories that they tell by placing the relationships between humans and nature centre stage. Nebiat Michael and Nini Visscher pick up the focus on empire and conflict in their Cunning Plan, examining the environmental impact of various forms of colonialism. Barbara Trapani takes a similar theme, looking specifically at Europeans’ relationships with trees in Madeira, the Banda Islands and Britain. The stories are painful ones – examining the exploitation of natural resources and its devastating effects on ecosystems – but her article also highlights ways in which such study can nurture hope.

Working positively with young people is another way to build hope. Helen Snelson’s article, written with advice from Adrian Gonzalez, a senior lecturer in sustainability, illustrates how her thinking about history beyond the classroom was challenged and developed through the input of undergraduate students engaged in a sustainability action project. The article offers lots of practical advice related to the study of historical sites, while also issuing new challenges to all history educators to think hard about the sustainability issues inherent in their practice.

References

 
1. Center for Countering Digital Hate (2024) ‘The new climate denial’, www.counterhate.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/CCDH-The-New-Climate-Denial_FINAL.pdf

2. Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R.E., Mayall, L.E., Wray, B., Mellor, C. and van Susteren, L. (2021) ‘Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey’ in The Lancet Planetary Health, 5, no. 12, pp. e863–e873.

3. See, for example, www.teachthefuture.uk

4. Hulme, M. (2011) ‘Meet the humanities’ in Nature Climate Change, 1, no. 4, pp. 177–179.

5. Department for Education (DfE) (2013) National Curriculum in England: history programmes of study, www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study   

6. Frankopan, P. (2023) The Earth Transformed: an untold history, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 6.