Luci Attala (University of Wales/St David’s) 

Knowledging and Futuring: UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES, using transdisciplinary Humanities-informed sustainability science to co-creatively design inclusive local futures 

BRIDGES is the only humanities-informed sustainability science programme in UNESCO. It is considered innovative as it maintains that the humanities must play a core role in sustainability science research if social transformation and adaptations for the future are to be understood and embraced by the public. 

However, recognising that sustaining current conditions is insufficient and incapable of creating a better, fairer future, BRIDGES also intends to support unexpected collaboration that draws in knowledges less heard to produce solutions that avoid Euro-American, colonial human exceptionalist thinking and opens doors to genuine multispecies flourishing. 

Using a story about a dream, this paper seriously rethinks research methods, working with societal partners, communications across discipline boundaries, dethroning academics and explores how to meaningfully co-design using deeply alternative perspectives as facts into projects within the current dominant research environment. 

Martin Bauch (Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe [GWZO], Leipzig) 

Visualizing risk, remembering disaster, creating resilience: Medieval precipitation extremes and what they can teach the 21st century 

Pre-modern flood events in Central Europe surpassed the floods of the 20th and 21st centuries in terms of their dimensions. Nevertheless, they are still largely unknown in the public debate and, unlike other disasters, are not formally remembered. Above all, they have not yet been used for infrastructural risk assessment by state authorities because they preceded the period of instrumental measurements. Despite all this, a robust source base does exist for these floods that allows conclusions to be drawn about the height of such extreme events. In the context of anthropogenic climate change and its expected heavier extreme precipitation regime, this paper argues that these overlooked ‘freak’ medieval floods can no longer be disregarded in risk prevention. 

In addition, the pre-modern approach to cope with flood disasters can also hold other lessons for the 21st century: Particularly in religious contexts, the concern for the salvation of fellow citizens who died in the disaster and the prevention of future floods through the elevation of moral behavior based on arguments of penal theology, Central European cities established long-term strategies of flood commemoration that reminded citizens of events and hazard zones within the urban area for centuries via inscriptions and performative practices. However, these memorial strategies were not the only form of pre-modern reaction: in parallel, they developed early forms of collectively organized flood protection through water infrastructures. The extent to which these two forms of adaptation were implemented was ultimately strongly determined by the circumstances of the political system that prevailed in the societies concerned. The idea that there could be innocent victims of extreme natural events also played an important role. As probably the most pronounced flood event of the Middle Ages in Central Europe, the empirical examples focus on the so-called Magdalen Flood of July 1342: it is extremely well documented in narrative sources and inscriptions and can also be easily grasped in infrastructural and normative reactions. The focus of urban memory practices and the anchoring of disaster memorialization in space through performative practices is on late medieval Frankfurt am Main. 

For the present, these empirical findings and their conceptual interpretation show that pre-modern studies can provide application-oriented data for modern flood protection on the one hand; on the other hand, they underline the importance of socio-cultural factors in the development of social resilience. 

Gina Charnley (Imperial College London) 

Cholera, an ancient disease, with present-day climate-change-related epidemic risks 

Cholera is an ancient disease, with the pathogen possibility endemic in some regions as early as the 5th century. There have been six previous cholera pandemics and the current seventh pandemic, beginning in the 1960s, is now the most long-lasting. Why the current cholera pandemic has persisted is likely to be multi-factorial, and some suggested mechanisms include strain virulence, globalisation, urbanisation, and climate. However, weather, climate and climate change are not new phenomena, and untangling how we link the current cholera pandemic and the climate is highly important, not just for cholera, but for all other climate change-related infectious disease research. Learning from previous outbreaks and changes to the environment, weather and climate are very important in our current and future understanding of how climate change may impact infectious disease. Our long-standing relationship and therefore history with cholera may help to shine a light on these relationships. 

Joanne Clarke (University of East Anglia) 

Past climate change, present challenges: coastal erosion and African futures 

Climate change literacy is critical for successful adaptation. Climate change literacy has been increasing exponentially in the heritage sector in High Income Countries but this is not the case for Africa. This short presentation explores climate change literacy amongst African heritage managers from the perspective of coastal heritage at threat of sea- level rise and coastal erosion. The types of knowledge and skills required for heritage adaptation will likely be determined by highly context-specific heritage characteristics, localised climate impacts and what is valued. Understanding what those specific knowledges and skills are will likely be key to locally-led adaptation. Three case studies of African heritage at threat will be explored with a view to determining whether climate change literacy is a key intervention in climate change-heritage action. 

Pedro Conceição (Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Programme) 

Why and how can insights from History help to advance human development? 

Is advancing human development feasible as we confront narratives of limits to growth, planetary boundaries, ecosystem collapse? In framing, and addressing, this question, the natural sciences dominate, as we can see from the influence of the IPCC on climate policy and debate. It is right to draw from the natural sciences. But it is clear that the natural sciences are not enough because people are the protagonists in shaping how we address the question. 

To fully account for the possibilities to advance human development at a time of dangerous planetary change also needs a much deeper engagement with the humanities. Much of the policy debate is framed under a fairly narrow set of assumptions about human motivations and behaviors. In particular, humans are seen as “Malthusian agents,” bound to exploit resources with no end until their backs are against the wall and environmental degradation drives, or threatens to drive, societal collapse. These may be plausible approximations under some conditions, but fall short when the aspiration is, as the subtitle of the 2030 Agenda argues, to transform our world towards sustainable and inclusive development pathways. And history, and environmental history in particular, are central. 

First, history helps to bring human agency to the fore, and not describe humans as passive recipients of environmental change, which results in environmental determinism. For example, the emerging field of history of climate and society has shown that narratives of societal collapse linked to environmental change are over-represented in popular and policy accounts of the dangers that we confront, downplaying human capacities to adapt, transform, and change societies. Insights from history reinforce the idea that enhancing human development is not only about improving wellbeing but also agency. This shows the importance of seeing people as agents, not patients, to use a phrase by Amartya Sen. 

Second, history brings to the fore contingency, including intended and unintended consequences of actions taken to respond to specific threats or shocks. This implies having as an integrated a perspective as possible in recognizing how deeply intertwined social, economic, and planetary processes are, as clearly articulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Seeing challenges as isolated problems can have unintended consequences. For instance, a focus on electrification to mitigate climate change may ignore demand for minerals that destroy ecosystems and lead to the violation of human rights. Such narrow framings of separate problems to be solved are broadened when we mobilize insights from history, presenting the challenge of transforming our world as a “predicament to be navigated.” 

In short, by engaging with history, we bring the human back in, recognizing people as informed agents. That is what is required to succeed in “transforming our world,” as called for in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

Stefani Crabtree (Utah State University and the Santa Fe Institute) 

What Archaeologists Talk About When They Talk About Climate Change 

For the past decade archaeological research has moved toward discussions of past climate change, how past societies were impacted by climate change, and how archaeology can help understand present and future climate change. Further, archaeologists have been proponents of extending the term ‘the Anthropocene’ back to the invention of agriculture or earlier, while many geoscientists suggest the Anthropocene was brought in with the nuclear age. The recent rejection of a golden spike for an Anthropocene epoch highlights this debate, and how science hasn’t yet reached a consensus. 

In this paper I talk about what we can know about archaeological societies and past (natural) climate change, and how to understand ecological change brought on by human societies in the past. I suggest that there is much archaeological work that can help us understand the human position in ecosystems worldwide, but highlight the misuse of archaeological research by the Trump administration to discuss the potential pitfalls for studying ‘the archaeology of climate change.’ Ultimately, this work aims to show the things archaeologists know best—how people interacted with each other and ecosystems in the past—and how to avoid pitfalls of becoming fodder for right wing agendas. Statement from the Trump administration: "The BLM does not agree that the proposed development is inconsistent with maintaining a livable planet (i.e., there is not a climate crisis). The planet was much warmer within the past 1,000 years, prior to the Little Ice Age, based on extensive archaeological evidence (such as farming in Greenland and vineyards in England). This warmth did not make the planet unlivable; rather, it was a time when societies prospered." 

Dagomar Degroot and Rachel Singer (Georgetown U) 

Lessons from the Past? How Studies in the History of Climate and Society Establish Relevance 

Can the study of human responses to past climatic changes inform the fight against present-day global warming? Scholars in the History of Climate and Society (HCS) often make that claim. They argue, for example, that the purported collapse of ancient empires, dynasties, city-states, and settlements can provide lessons to strengthen climate adaptation policies today. By examining 1,070 publications published between 2017 and 2021, we evaluate how HCS scholars extract these lessons from the past. We reveal that although most publications in the field claim to have relevance for present-day activism and policymaking, only a tiny minority include takeaways that are actionable for policymakers. We show how these takeaways are influenced by the region, period, discipline, and method of each study. Quantitative studies are more likely to include lessons, for example; so are publications that focus on Europe or Asia in the modern or early modern periods. 

Ultimately, we argue that there is a disconnect between what HCS publications claim to contribute to the fight against global warming, and what they actually do. While we suggest a set of best practices for extracting lessons from the past, we also conclude that studies about the past should not need to justify their existence by identifying these lessons. 

Alex De Sherbinin (Columbia) 

Understanding the past to plan for the future: climate change and migration 

Throughout history, humans have responded to past changes in climate conditions by either adapting in place or by migrating to new areas. The relative balance of adaptation versus migration depended on a number of factors – culture, the development of technology, as well as physical limits. Increasingly geographers are raising new questions about future habitability and limits to adaptation in some regions owing to factors such as extreme heat or the frequency of flood or drought conditions. This paper first looks at the evidence for staying or going under changing climate conditions in the past. It then seeks to engage understandings of past in situ adaptation vs out-migration with current and potential future adaptation and migration. 

Andrew Dugmore and Rowan Jackson (University of Edinburgh) 

What makes for resilience? Size, structure, conjuncture. Information flow, legacies of childhood learning and climate change adaptation 

Information availability, how it is perceived, understood and utilised can play a key role in determining resilience and sustainability. We explore two aspects of this: firstly, how information flows across lived and utilised environments; and secondly, how it passes between generations. Different information behaviours, information inequality and information poverty can shape societal resilience and sustainability. In the study of information literacy and information practice, a key idea is that of information landscapes—where tangible landscapes are used as an analogy rather than a metaphor. People navigate a metaphysical information landscape each time they interact with an actual landscape, and thus the tangible analogy that underpins the concept of an information landscape can itself be viewed in those terms- for example, tangible landscapes viewed scientifically will have areas rich or poor in potential proxy environmental records, such as pollen-rich sediments, some of which may have be investigated and other not; the same landscapes may have rich cultural associations related to personal experiences, placenames, stories and texts- or not. We explore spatial and temporal aspects of information flow through case studies from the North Atlantic islands. Insights drawn from the contrasting information flows and outcomes for Norse and Inuit society in the past have implications for our approaches to childhood learning in the 21st century and the unfolding climate crisis. We could avoid pitfalls revealed by past experiences, and whilst not immediate and readily measurable, innovative approaches to childhood teaching and learning could promote, societal resilience and sustainability. 

George Hambrecht (University of Maryland College Park) 

Addressing Natural Resource Management Challenges Through Archaeology and History 

The Central North Atlantic Marine Historical Project (CAMHEP) seeks to better understand the dynamics between people and Atlantic Cod in the waters around Iceland over the last 1100 years. Alongside the purely historical and archaeological investigations CAMHEP is also producing data of direct relevance to contemporary fisheries industries. Examples of this are age and size at death of key marine species, data on changing trophic and ecological conditions, paleoclimate data, marine primary productivity proxies, and pre-modern mortality curves for Atlantic Cod. A collaboration between the University of Iceland, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and the University of Maryland, CAMHEP is employing historical archival data, archaeological data, and biochemical (SI and compound specific) data. This presentation will give a general overview of the project and then discuss the data most relevant to contemporary fisheries industries and how we intend to communicate this data to them. 

Travis Hayes Folk (Folk Land Management, Green Pond, SC) with Edda Fields-Black (Carnegie Mellon University), Rob Baldwin (Clemson University), Ernie Wiggers (Green Pond, SC), Daniel Hanks (Weyerhaeuser Company, Clemson, SC), Andrew Bridges, (Nemours Wildlife Foundation, Yemassee, SC), Dan Richter (Duke University), Andrew Agha (Charleston, SC) 

Historic Rice Fields along the Atlantic Coast: landscape features with historical, cultural and conservation significance 

Rice was a major commodity crop across the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida from the late 17th century until after the Civil War. Previous mapping efforts (by this team) documented hundreds of thousands of acres of rice fields, constructed and maintained by slaves, across the coast of South Carolina. To fully describe the landscape impact of rice as a commodity crop, we have now documented rice fields from Florida to North Carolina and totaling nearly 350,000 acres (141,600 hectares). This final, multi-state mapping effort relied on several methodologies including digital elevation models, historical plats, historical references, older aerial photographs, and expert input. 

Rice fields in South Carolina became a major landscape feature for conservation of natural resources across the coast. Many of these rice fields (and the surrounding uplands) have voluntarily been placed under conservation easements and are managed by both state and federal entities but also private landowners. As Waters of the United States and therefore regulated by the Clean Water Act, the Charleston District of the Corps of Engineers developed the Managed Tidal Impoundment General Permit in 2010. This specific federal regulation streamlines policy and regulation related to these wetlands and allow continued conservation of this historic landscape and management of these wetlands for the benefit of numerous wildlife species. 

Adam Izdebski (MPI-GEO, Jena) 

Science for Policy 2.0 in the European Union and Getting History into the midst of EU Policy-making on Biodiveristy 

As our planet enters into the state of a profound crisis, with its destabilised climate, endangered biodiversity, and accumulating pollution, scientists increasingly feel the need to engage with policy making. As we as scientists are trained to do research, not networking or governing, doing "science for policy" remains a challenge. In my talk, I will introduce the audience to how the science for policy landscape works in the European Union, drawing on my personal experience of being involved in different policy-related activities. I will present and discuss in detail three ways of engaging with policy-making: (1) creating an expert network; (2) working with a parliament; (3) responding to an executive branch's request. At the end, I will make some personal observations on what worked and what did not, and I will share some recommendations for how scientists can engage in science for policy activities. 

Luke Kemp (Cambridge University) 

Systems of a Down: A Unified Systems Perspective on Collapse and Resilience 

I present a new definition, lexicon, and framework for understanding societal collapse. Collapse is a term mired in debate and controversy. Existing definitions rooted in ‘societal complexity’ are inappropriately loaded and nonsensical. Many have advocated for the use of alternatives such as resilience, transformation, and ‘shatterzones’. None of these are suitable replacements. Instead, we need a neutral and accurate definition: the abrupt and/or enduring loss of hierarchy, energy capture, and population density within a hierarchical political system (such as a state, empire, collection of states, or a world-system). Collapse need not carry apocalyptic connotations: it has both costs and benefits, as well as winners and losers. The proposed framework blends together the studies of catastrophic risk, systemic risk, socio-ecological resilience, and historical collapse. The result is a lens and lexicon that can be applied to both past and future studies of societal collapse. 

Sarah Klassen (University of Toronto) 

Provisioning a preindustrial city: Communal organization of labor, water management, and the intensification of agriculture in the Greater Angkor region, 9th-15th centuries CE 

The Greater Angkor region was home to several successive capitals of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to 15th centuries in present-day Cambodia. In recent years, archaeologists have traced the foundation of new agricultural communities as they emerged on the landscape in relation to the construction of extensive state-sponsored hydraulic infrastructure. Together, these two forms of water management transformed over 1000 km2 of the Greater Angkor Region into an elaborate engineered landscape that proved highly sustainable and resilient to climate challenges for centuries. As the non-farming population continued to grow within the civic-ceremonial centers of the Greater Angkor Region, Angkor's agricultural production was increasingly organized so that supra-household-level organization generated increasing returns to farming labor. As the system became more centralized it was able to support up to 700,000-900,000 people in the Greater Angkor region at its height; however, this centralization also introduced vulnerabilities that potentially threatened the sustainability of the system. 

Marilyn Masson (State University of New York) 

The how and why of periodic recovery and long-term resilience in the late pre-Hispanic Maya region from an interdisciplinary perspective 

Since the beginning of Maya studies over 100 years ago, “Postclassic” Maya civilization (1100-1500 CE) has been regarded as emblematic of a collapsed society. The very term “Postclassic” implies an aftermath of glory, in this case, the “Classic” periods (250-1100 CE) in Maya history. Not helpful to this narrative is the fact that the Classic period Maya collapse (850-1100 CE) has captured the modern public imagination and regularly serves as a parable for apocalyptic forecasts of civilizations’ demise. Newer scholarship, including that of my team, indicates that the Postclassic period saw the rapid recovery of most important institutions of Maya statehood, economic foundations, and population, and as such, it represents an important case study in resilience following a period of societal collapse. In this presentation, I offer a long-term view of demographic patterns associated with a population zenith, collapse, and recovery, using archaeological settlement data and ethnohistorical accounts extending across the time frame of 1000 to ~1560 CE. In the study area of the northern Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, rural zones were of particular importance during these cycles, hosting robust populations approaching the population zenith around 1000 CE and persisting during the collapse, despite the abandonment of political capitals. Rural localities served as places for storing cultural knowledge, and as hubs for boosting regeneration of state and society as observed after 1100 for the Postclassic Maya. 

Kathleen D. Morrison (University of Pennsylvania) 

What price success? Environmental and human costs of South Indian agrarian histories 

The United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability in 1987 as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Implied in this definition are conditions to be avoided – environmental degradation and climate change, for example – foundational considerations for future sustenance. Presumably, this middle ground between the present and the future could also be compromised by social disorder; war, economic collapse, or some other event not specifically environmental. The concept of sustainability thus entails considerable ambiguity, and while this may be part of its appeal, the concept has also been widely critiqued. In this paper, I address a more specific question: whose needs? Using evidence from the last 5,000 years of South Indian agriculture, I discuss both rainfed and irrigated farming in terms of their ‘sustainability.’ How the latter is assessed depends entirely on our chosen subject; even ‘sustainable’ forms of land use may involve both human and environmental costs. 

John Murphey (Northern Illinois University) 

Institutional Resistance and Functional Failure: Challenges of Implementing Policy Change 

The challenges that have arisen in the 21st century, especially the global challenge of climate change and the myriad symptomatic events that seem to grow ever larger and more intense, might be considered to be of a different scale from anything in the archaeological record. It might reasonably be asked how the past could offer any guide to these unprecedented risks. In the face of these challenges, it seems equally reasonable to ask if the only plausible solutions will be those that have the advantage of a larger scale than any in the past: that the solutions will come from the largest and most powerful institutions, whose reach and means exceed any from past societies. Although these institutions will necessarily play a role, a difficulty will be that they have limitations that derive not from the limits of their apparent powers, but from their natures. Here the archaeological record can be of great use, for it can give us insight into a wide array of kinds of institutions, and provide for us a way to understand how they responded - either successfully or not - to the challenges they faced. There are many ways to consider past complex societies and the institutions that they contained (e.g. systems theoretical approaches or cybernetics, inter alia), and many ways to conceive of how their limitations might have contributed their ability to adapt to the challenges they faced and to their eventual failures. We can ask about the operations of these past institutions, and especially about their processes for gathering input and for decision-making, and find instances where the institution was mismatched with the problems they were confronting. This kind of lesson carries to our modern institutions well: we can critique whether existing large institutions will be able to respond well to the challenges they are facing, and examine how these institutions may be both inflexible and incapable of designing certain kinds of solutions. Ultimately we may level a further critique as well: that what we term ‘institutions’, and what we consider ‘power’, may need to be reconsidered in light of the wider range of examples (including very successful ones) that we can find across the archaeological record. This will have important implications for how we try to approach and engage with these institutions to try to bring the lessons of the past into our contemporary policy discourse. 

Jason Nesbitt (Tulane University) 

Mountain Urbanism? Settlement and Resilience in the Peruvian Highlands 

The mountainous environments of the Central Andes present significant challenges and opportunities for human settlement. For this reason, scholars studying the region have long debated the unique, low-density, nature of Andean urbanism. Among the best -known examples of highland Andean cities are the sites of Huari, Tiwanaku, and Cuzco. Yet despite the attention paid to these sites, there are earlier examples of large, spatially extensive, communities in the Peruvian highlands that are quite different and often described as anomalies. In this paper, I present some of the characteristics of these sites based on extant settlement pattern data from the Early Horizon (c. 800-200 BCE) and Early Intermediate Period (c. 100-800 CE) in the Conchucos region of north-central Peru. Based on this, I argue that there may be many types of Andean highland settlement systems that represent different kinds of resilience to adapt to the limitations and affordances of living in mountain ecosystems. The paper concludes by comparing the Andean case studies with other parts of western South America. 

Jeffrey S. Reznick (National Library of Medicine & National Institutes of Health) 

Bridges between academia and the public sector 

This presentation will offer perspectives on a career trajectory from academe to the public sector, building professional bridges in and between both, and lessons learned along the way which have informed personal and professional resilience and sustainability. It will argue that federal civil service can afford PhD historians much opportunity to expand their knowledge, skills, and abilities, to explore subjects beyond the scope of their initial research training, and to contribute directly and indirectly to public policy. The presentation will spotlight several characteristics and perspectives which are key to pursuing, growing, and sustaining such a career trajectory, but which are too often not articulated clearly, understood, and/or embraced, including: 

• remaining aware that focused expertise in one field does not equate to expertise beyond that field, and that others around you have such awareness. 
   
• being open to collaboration across disciplines—indeed to expanding the practice of history from an individual enterprise to a collaborative one—and to embracing new knowledge, skills, and tools to enable such collaboration. 
   
• counting on reprioritizing your goals depending on circumstances, as well as recognizing that many circumstances 
  are beyond your control. 
   
• embracing the perspective that “it is the journey not the arrival that matters.”
  While this presentation is designed to appeal primarily to individuals in the audience who are in the early or middle stages of their career, the presenter hopes it will contribute to broader conversations of the colloquium as it addresses challenges for individuals and teams to move from isolated and often superficially understood “lessons of history” to deliver actionable advice to managers and decision makers. 
   

Gwen Robbins Schug (UNC, Greensboro) 
Planetary Heath and ONE Paleopathology: Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Infectious Disease in the Holocene 

Initially conceptualized as One Medicine, One Health (OH) is a global strategy for interdisciplinary research on intersecting aspects of environmental, animal, and human health that has been promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) for decades as a critical way to think about zoonotic infection risk. Recently OH has also been applied to thinking about health risks in the face of global climate change—zoonotic disease spillover, food security, and toxic environments. Paleopathologists and bioarchaeologists have also recently become interested in the OH perspective, combining it with more established paradigms in anthropology such as biocultural theory, the concept of epidemiological transition, and structural violence. Most paleopathologists, however, are deeply focused primarily on human health. Thus, in some ways, the concept of Planetary Health (PH) is more appropriate to describe the research that paleopathologists are doing in this arena. This presentation summarizes the PH paradigm and uses case studies to demonstrate how it integrates anthropological, biological, and climate science evidence for policy makers with the goal of avoiding a planetary crisis. My goal is to demonstrate how environmental health research in archaeology informs policy makers, providing an understanding of the limits within which human societies can flourish. I also demonstrate how this paradigm mobilizes public health and archaeology as a powerful vehicle for communicating the urgency of the threats posed by global warming and for catalyzing social change. 
 

Marcy Rockman (University of Maryland, College Park/Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting) 

What climate needs from heritage: How to better align policy and practice with the past for climate action 

What climate needs from heritage now is for heritage fields to engage with their own history and challenge existing structures of power. Just that! Relationships of science and research to policy are often framed as a directional arrow: scholars produce information that is then used by policy makers. But this is only part of the cycle; policy makers also create the environment in which such information creation is funded and channeled and this in turn shapes their expectations of such information. Here I review more than a century of US federal legislation for heritage, structures and definitions for heritage that have come from this history, and how these do - and more often do not - relate to the structures, definitions, and overall program of US federal action on climate change. Amidst the challenges and deficits in this review there is also opportunity. The US has passed a major piece of heritage legislation approximately every 30 years, once a generation. In 2024 we stand 34 years beyond the most recent major piece. So it is in our space to now ask: what should heritage legislation in our time of climate change look like? 

Mike Smith (Arizona State University) 

Were Ancient Cities Resilient to Shocks? How Would we Know? 

Cities are the places where climate change is having the most severe impacts on the greatest numbers of people, yet next to nothing is known of urban resilience in the past. There is little intersection between archaeological/historical research on cities, and archaeological/historical research on (societal) resilience and adaptation to environmental and social shocks. I single out two approaches that illustrate the potential and pitfalls of this kind of past-to-present transfer of knowledge: shocks and persistence. The responses of urban residents and institutions to particular shocks is a kind of specified resilience, focused on particular times and places and empirically measurable. The temporal fates and persistence of cities over time, on the other hand, provides insights on the general resilience of early cities. While these two approaches hold promise, professional limitations within the disciplines of history and archaeology currently limit the advance of knowledge of early urban adaptations and the resulting resilience (or lack thereof) of cities in the past. 

Arlene Miller Rosen (University of Texas at Austin), Alison Damick (University of Tennessee), Samantha Krause (Texas State University)

Heritage of Fire in the American Southwest: Ancient Landscape Management, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and Contemporary Challenges 

In recent decades, residents and land managers in the American Southwest have been plagued by persistent wildfires that have caused devastation to natural resources, property, and loss of life. They also have had destructive effects on wildlife and biodiversity in this region which is already stressed by long periods of recurring droughts. Much of this destruction is exacerbated by our increasingly warming planet, enhanced by ignition due to human error or vandalism. Many of these fires accelerate due to an abundance of undergrowth which has thickened across the Southwest due to nearly 150 years of fire suppression policies. In recent decades, however, there is increasing understanding that fire cycles play an important role in the maintenance and sustainability of ecozones across this region. Over the last 40 years, Western scholars have drawn attention to the fact that Native Americans have accumulated traditional knowledge about these landscapes and the importance of fire cycles for maintaining ecozones, biodiversity, as well as economically important plants. 

Our recent work in the upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico has shown that these beneficial fires have not only impacted plants and animals of the Southwest, but have also changed hydrology, and stream drainage patterns. Our geoarchaeological and phytolith evidence from three drainages (Dixon, Tesuque Creek, Arroyo de los Chamisos) show that natural fires appear to have occurred very infrequently throughout the Pleistocene from ca. 30,000 BP, until the early Holocene when fire frequency accelerated and intensified with time throughout the past 9,000 years. This suggests that naturally ignited fires were infrequent before humans arrived in the Southwest, and that most fires were ignited on a regular basis by Archaic foragers throughout much of the Holocene. This is supported by the presence of exogenous wild plants brought in by foragers, within some of the burn levels from our alluvial profiles. The character of the drainage hydrology was also changed by the fire and revegetation cycles. This study suggests that traditional knowledge of sustainable landscape management is rooted in deep time extending back to the early Holocene, and that there is much to learn from this traditional heritage of controlling ‘firescapes’ across the American Southwest. 

Katharine Snow (CCHRI and HMEI, Princeton) 

A second look at “policy relevance”: How history can help us avoid “solutionist” representations of our environmental past and future 

My talk will introduce the relevance of the environmental realism position to the subjects under discussion in this colloquium. I will interrogate from this position what people often appear to mean when they award certain pieces of environmental history the badge of being "policy relevant," and propose an environmental realist's take on why history needs to be very wary of "solutionism" in this context. Solutionism (which environmental realism opposes), roughly put, uses a problem-solution (or problem-lack of solution-catastrophe) template to make meaning. Solutionism dominates most discussions of sustainability on the policy side, and it also seeps into most academic disciplines attempting to engage with policymakers on sustainability. Arguably, the very term "sustainability" is itself wedded to a solutionist mindset: tacitly, the "problem" is "unsustainability" and the solution is "sustainability," never mind that both wings of this dyad are unmoored in fact, precedent (at the contemporary scale of human society), etc. What an environmental realist might argue is that instead of continuing to let solutionist approaches seep into its self-harvesting for the benefit of policymakers, coloring which methods or findings get the badge of being deemed policy relevant, history could instead seek to problematize solutionism itself for policymakers, drawing from a deep well on both the methodological and the factual sides. 

Amit Tubi & Lee Mordechai (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; CCHRI, Princeton University) 

Challenges in learning from the past through analogies 

A burgeoning literature argues that past environmental impacts and societies’ responses to them can provide useful lessons to guide adaptation to contemporary environmental changes. Yet despite considerable differences between past and present societies much of this research uses historical antecedents uncritically, assuming that past societal impacts and responses are directly analogous to contemporary ones. We argue that this approach is unsound both methodologically and theoretically, thus drawing insights that might offer an erroneous course of action. To illustrate the challenges in drawing historical analogies, we outline several fundamental differences between past and present societies as well as broader limitations of historical research. We then illustrate the lack of critical engagement and the inadequate use of analogies with the results of a meta-analysis focusing on research that analyzes the interactions of the ancient Maya with their environment – a common case study examined in the literature. Based on our findings and theoretical arguments, we suggest a number of ways to improve past-present analogies, such as defining more explicitly what we can learn from the past, clarifying the rationale for using the analogy, and engaging in closer dialogue with adaptation practitioners. 

Daniel Wortel-London (New York University) 

Environmental History and Policy: Approaches and Challenges 

Drawing from my experience as both an urban historian and a policy specialist for the Center for the Advancement of The Steady-State Economy (CASSE), this presentation examines how theories of historical change and policy studies can enrich one another while improving sustainability efforts in the present. 

While the field of urban history has long been concerned with policy changes, it has only recently become concerned with changes in environmental policy more specifically. The beginning of this presentation traces how recent strains of urban historical methodology, particularly historical institutionalism and the theories of William H. Sewell Jr., has informed both my manuscript The Menace of Prosperity: Private Growth, Public Costs, and the Struggle for Economic Development in New York City (under advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press) and my work as an environmental policy specialist at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEALL) and CASSE. 

The rest of my presentation examines how the process of developing and lobbying for sustainability policies can inform our research priorities as historians. Writing bills, communicating with policymakers, and conferring with policy practitioners has provided me with a deeper understanding of how historical research can aid the work of sustainability advocates today. Such research needs include: developing ambitious but realistic "theories of change," appreciating how different "policy mixes" can complement and layer on one another, and identifying obstacles and opportunities for far-reaching policy-shifts. Filling these gaps, however, will likely require fostering deeper understandings and collaboration between scholars and policy practitioners within graduate education itself, and addressing substantive - but not insurmountable - differences in goals and culture within the academic and policy communities.