Mobilising the Environmental Humanities

Andrew McTominey | 18 July 2024

On 13^th March 2024, the UK’s Climate Change Committee announced that the government’s environmental policies ‘fall far short’ of what is required to help tackle the climate crisis. It was fitting, then, that a History & Policy workshop on the environment was held on the same day. The workshop brought together academics, policy makers and practitioners and was organised as part of a British Academy funded project led by Henry Irving (Leeds Beckett University). Environmental history is still a relatively new field of academic enquiry but it is one that provides significant opportunities for understanding people’s lives and behaviours, as well as for helping to inform public policy [see Martin Melosi, 'Public history and the environment', The Public Historian, 14: 4 (1993), pp. 10-20]. It is also a field that History & Policy has previously explored, notably regarding questions of carbon taxation, energy efficiency and particulate pollution.

Engaging with the Environmental Humanities

Those who spoke at the workshop use a variety of approaches to promote engagement with the environmental humanities. The event started with Marianna Dudley (University of Bristol), who spoke on her work on wind power in the Orkney Islands. She stressed the importance of community to this history: focusing on change from below rather than from above. She explained how local communities were able to exert agency over plans, providing a new way to understand the landscape in response to concerns about the impact of wind farms on local ecology. As well as presenting a more nuanced history, Dudley’s argument was prescient as a similar response has since greeted plans for a large on shore wind farm in West Yorkshire.

The next speakers focused on the importance of cultural associations for public engagement. Anna Baatz (Canal and River Trust) and Jenna Ashton (University of Manchester) spoke about Britain’s canal network. Baatz began by showing how formerly industrial canals are now valued as spaces for recreation, health and nature. Ashton then introduced a specific project using geese as a focus for heritage practice. Both Baatz and Ashton stressed the significance of water as a medium of engagement. They argued that creative approaches to heritage practice on the canals has helped to engage the public in different ways, as well as providing research on multi-species coexistence that can inform urban planning in the future.

The environmental significance of waste was the focus of the next discussion, with Claire Shrewsbury (WRAP) and Henry Irving (Leeds Beckett University) talking about efforts to cut household food waste. Irving provided historical context to Shrewsbury’s goals by giving details on government led recycling efforts during the Second World War, showing that behaviour shifted in response to the war-time context. He described this as a positive story about reframing waste as a resource, highlighting lessons for framing current policy changes. This was also tied into a point Shrewsbury made about engaging policymakers: that it is vital to use the right language with politicians and civil servants to start conversations.

The final presentation was given by Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck, University of London) and Hiroki Shin (Queen’s University, Belfast). They spoke about the Material Cultures of Energy project, which explored the way energy was historically experienced, how demand was projected, and how communities dealt with disruption to something that they felt was a part of everyday life. In a stimulating bookend to Marianna Dudley’s work with local communities, Shin also produced a toolkit to engage energy companies on these topics. This was part of a series of knowledge exchange activities supported by the Science Museum and designed to open dialogue between stakeholders.

Opportunities and Challenges

The presenters and participants at the workshop identified various opportunities and challenges for mobilising environmental history in policy making.

On the plus side, academics and practitioners alike agreed that a historical lens provides a wider perspective, can show interconnections, provides direct evidence from the past, and can be an opportunity to collect new evidence. The participants also agreed that historical examples can be topical, with current debates around sewerage and pollution drawing on longer antecedents. In all these senses, environmental history conforms to existing conclusions on the potential of history in policy making.

But various challenges were also discussed. Some of the largest were practical, with academics and policy makers often working to different objectives and different deadlines. It was agreed that this requires academics to engage in a specific way, for example making a clear business case while also understanding that policy makers have other priorities.

One of the most interesting contributions, raised by a civil servant, was that there are relatively few policy makers in government. While analysts and project officers might be fascinated by historical case studies, relatively few are in a position to translate this engagement into meaningful change. The challenge for any historian interested in policy engagement is therefore to find the right entry point. Or perhaps academics and institutions might want to focus greater attention on think tanks and the third sector – with the papers from Irving and Shrewsbury, and Trentmann and Shin illustrating the potential benefits of such an approach. As a recent History & Policy paper drawing on US examples noted, historians are currently underrepresented in the think tank community despite offering a unique set of skills.

Agency and Dialogue

Stepping back from the practicalities, the most obvious lesson from the workshop was the importance of agency, with all the speakers talking about the significance of groups and communities within environmental policy. This leads into a second lesson about the importance of dialogue. The talks showed how creativity can help to break down hierarchies of knowledge. These hierarchies can cut both ways and affect how we present environmental histories to the public. Certain solutions to environmental problems - like wind power - are sometimes presented as a panacea; however, as Dudley’s talk illustrated the environmental cost of such schemes can be just as great in different ways. In all presentations the importance of the human factors - of the humanities - was stressed. The example of recycling is instructive here: while there is a scientific and moral imperative to produce less waste, human stories from a time of struggle can help to show how to positively frame recycling, changing it from an effort-inducing burden to an activity that helps to reproduce useful resources.

If the Climate Change Committee’s warning shaped the discussion in March, subsequent events have underscored the need for environmental historians to engage policymakers more acutely. May 2024 marked the twelfth consecutive month of record global temperatures, with environmental scientists warning that the planet is heading for at least 2.5C of heating above preindustrial levels, one degree above the target. Yet green policies were notably absent from the UK election campaign and the recent European Parliament elections saw a weakening of the ‘green’ vote, particularly in Germany which was once seen as a bastion for green politics. There is a desperate need to confront the realities of a changing climate. Environmental history, with its ability to add colour and humanity to science, and its opportunity for dialogue, provides a way to start these difficult conversations.

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• Environment

About the author

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Andrew McTominey is a KTP Associate at the University of Huddersfield, a research assistant at Leeds Beckett University and Heritage Manager at Pennine Heritage. As an urban-environmental historian, he is interested in the various social and cultural impacts of water infrastructure on urban and rural environments. His first book, Waterscapes: Reservoirs, Environment and Identity in Modern England and Wales is forthcoming with University of London Press.