Making Tracks in Environmental History

Last year I was lucky enough to spend 3 months at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. Their wonderful team invited me to contribute to the Making Tracks blog series. Here's what I had to say about my journey into environmental history...

Undertaking doctoral studies in environmental history led me to people, places, and subjects that I had never imagined. Photograph: Richard Aitken.

I’m probably the person least likely to have ended up in the environmental humanities. I grew up in the suburbs of perhaps the world’s most isolated city—Perth, Western Australia—seemingly far from the great outdoors and environmental concerns. Or so I thought. It has only been in retrospect that I have been able to piece together the fragments that led me into environmental history, and so to the Rachel Carson Center.

It had taken me some time to even recognize that I had long been fascinated with the past, and that this interest in different places and cultures had influenced my eclectic choice of undergraduate studies at the University of Western Australia. Following a combined Bachelor of Arts & Bachelor of Economics and a brief foray into the world of journalism, I returned to the university to undertake doctoral research under the supervision of RCC alumna Andrea Gaynor. I shared with Andrea a desire to explore something “relevant,” something that was of interest to the wider community, something that would allow me to unravel the present. She introduced me to environmental history, and the rest, they say, really is history.

Within the year I was embarking on a project that spoke to the prevailing anxieties about water scarcity and anthropogenic climate change in twenty-first century Australia. Mammalologist Tim Flannery had just declared that Perth was going to be Australia’s first ghost metropolis, a city dead for want of water. At this time, Perth, the Western Australia wheatbelt, most of southern Australia, and the Murray-Darling basin in the southeast, were all in the grip of drought, and anthropogenic climate change was in the headlines. Western Australian politics was focused on whether Perth’s next water supplies should come from the state’s northwest, seawater desalination, or the South West Yarragadee Aquifer. Not long after, Al Gore was telling us the Inconvenient Truth and Australia voted in what was then labeled the world’s first climate change election, which led to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd signing the Kyoto Protocol in 2008.

Undertaking doctoral studies in environmental history led me to people, places, and subjects that I had never imagined: from frontier conflict in Perth’s swamps, to dunghills and typhoid, gold fever, wheat and resources booms, and the inevitable busts. Since at least the turn of the twentieth century, it seems as though Western Australians have been tormented by recurring fears that they will, sooner or later, run out of water. It is largely this anxiety about running out that has prompted support for the near-continuous development of new sources, including ambitious plans to transport water from the north of the state for Perth and the southwest. All the while, many Western Australians have maintained a profligate water culture, living beyond their environmental limits and rendering themselves vulnerable to running out. How this fear of running out has been experienced, and how these experiences have changed over time, is the subject of my research.

Researching water history, I soon realized that this was not only about water but was also a story about Western Australia and Western Australians—how we’ve come to where we are, why, and how things might have turned out differently. Some will find cautionary tales, others will be relieved at how far we’ve come. Others will think we still have a very long way to go. Going forward, these are the kinds of discussions I hope that my research will prompt—because conversations about water are also conversations about the kinds of societies we want to live in. And, living in a part of the world where the climate continues to become drier and warmer, few conversations are quite as important.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can trace the faint outlines of this research project in my own past. My suburban upbringing was not divorced from nature, as I had once thought—the boundaries between nature and culture are, of course, blurred. The nature with which I was familiar was more often than not a resource, something to be consumed—whether it was water from the tap, forest to be husbanded, or chickens to lay eggs for breakfast. Environmental history gave me the tools and insights to see the connections and flows that bound me, my family, and our way of life to a much wider network of processes, organisms, and technologies.

Seeing the world in this entangled way led me to my current project, which I commenced during my time at the Rachel Carson Center. My research into colonial understandings of climate in Western Australia had alerted me to the environmental connections between the Australian colonies and British India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I explore the origins, impacts, and legacies of the traffic in environmental ideas, practices, and species that crossed the Indian Ocean during the colonial period. Examining the environmental connections between Australia and India will not only recover Australia’s environmental history, I hope, but also illuminate the wider imperial processes and networks shared across multiple empires and between multiple colonies that created the modern world.

Undertaking research in the environmental humanities has introduced me to a wonderfully collegial community in Australia and around the world. During my doctoral studies, I was soon drawn into the tight-knit scholarly networks based at the Australian National University, under the leadership of Tom Griffiths (future RCC Fellow) and Libby Robin (RCC Board Member). It was under their guidance in particular that I learned how Australian researchers must travel to overcome the tyranny of distance: even in our ultra-connected world, the importance of face-to-face interaction cannot be overstated. It’s the RCC’s efforts to bring scholars together that have helped me—and others—to continue making tracks in environmental history.

Check out the Making Tracks blog here.

Foreign Bodies, Intimate Ecologies Symposium

Last month I co-convened the international symposium, Foreign Bodies, Intimate Ecologies: Transformations in Environmental History, at Macquarie University in Sydney, with Emily O'Gorman (Macquarie University), Alessandro Antonello (University of Oregon), Cameron Muir (ANU) and Christof Mauch (Rachel Carson Center).

Ian Tyrrell (University of New South Wales) launches Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand (Palgrave, 2014), edited by James Beattie, conference co-convenor Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry. L-R: Tyrrell, O’Gorman, Beattie, and contributors Chris O’Brien and Ruth Morgan. [Photo by conference co-convenor Alessandro Antonello]

Over three days, scholars from Scandinavia, Germany, South Asia, the Philippines, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States joined Australian environmental historians to discuss the latest issues, questions and challenges in the field of environmental history.

The Royal Australian Historical Society hosted the symposium’s opening plenary, presented by renowned Australian environmental historian Tom Griffiths (The Australian National University). His paper, ‘The Transformative Craft of Environmental History’, traced the development of environmental history in Australia and showcased the innovative research of emerging scholars.

On the following day, we delved further into these transformations of environmental history with a roundtable on the aesthetics of conservation as well as sessions exploring resources, records, collecting and exploration. Keynote speaker Dolly Jørgensen (Luleå University of Technology, Sweden) sustained the enthusiasm of these sessions with a provocative plenary examining the history and politics of rewilding in North America and Western Europe.

Buoyed by the first day’s success, the symposium continued with a stream of sessions focusing on water in its many forms – from the ice of Antarctica to the Georges River, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Southern Ocean, and from oyster harvesting to whaling.

After a delicious symposium dinner in the heart of Sydney, delegates returned for the final day of the meeting. The day’s sessions centred largely on the transformation of landscapes, taking delegates to the Mallee, Gippsland, Brisbane, and the Victorian goldfields. Keynote speaker Vinita Damodaran (University of Sussex, United Kingdom) highlighted the cultural and ecological impacts of such transformations in eastern India, and urged environmental historians to engage more closely with social movements in the Anthropocene. To conclude the symposium, Australian filmmaker Robert Nugent treated delegates to a sneak preview of his haunting documentary, Night Parrot Stories.

Crossing boundaries, whether temporal, geographical, cultural or disciplinary, was at the heart of the discussions and debates that the symposium papers raised. The co-conveners were delighted that the speakers shared new research that addressed the related themes of borders, space and scale; conflict and contestation; and methods and interdisciplinarity.

Selected papers will be published in the Rachel Carson Center's Perspectives series and a special issue of International Review of Environmental History.

You can find the program on the symposium website.

Foreign Bodies, Intimate Ecologies would not have been possible without the generous support of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; the Faculty of Arts, Monash University; the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney; the Centre for Environmental History, The Australian National University; the Department of Geography and Planning, Macquarie University; and the International Water History Association.

A Sense of Time and Place for Water Sensitive Cities

In August 2014, I sat down with Professor Jenny Gregory (University of Western Australia) and Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt (Mind Your Way) to discuss the important role of History and historians in understanding urban water management in Australian cities. Here's what we had to say:

(from the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, August 2014)

Ruth (left) and Jenny (right), Credit: CRC for Water Sensitive Cities

History is a binding force. Historical narratives have the power to connect people with place, uniting environmental organisations and the public with a common goal: to protect the places they love. This binding power has brought a number of historians to the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities (CRCWSC), with fascinating stories to tell about water in Australia. Professor Jenny Gregory and Dr Ruth Morgan are both Western Australians whose narratives have promoted a love of their hometown Perth – but also a concern for its future.

Ruth’s interest in water histories begins with her own family, some of whom grew up in the state’s goldfields before a water pipeline was established. This inspired her family’s culture of water frugality even after their move to Perth, she explains. Such personal narratives maintain Ruth’s attraction to her research.

Jenny also feels the pull of personal history. “I’m interested in attachment to place,” she says. “I think it probably goes back to the fact that, as a child, my family moved a number of times – Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney – before we ended up in Perth. All my historical work has touched on that notion of attachment to place.”

Jenny and Ruth are in a group of historians piecing together the water histories of Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth. These histories explore the changing institutions, infrastructure, and cultures that surround water usage, and form part of the CRCWSC’s Project on societal innovation and behaviour change (Project A2).

Both women encourage historical research that is relevant to the present. In their eyes, the very same “sense of place” that drives their research can motivate people to change their use of water. The aim is to give people “a sense of place and attachment to their particular suburb, their region,” Ruth notes. “People will make positive changes toward more water sensitive cities if they have that attachment to a place.” In Perth this personal attachment is particularly significant. The metropolis is predicted to become the “world’s first climate change city”, where declining rainfall will make life significantly harder. It is therefore paramount, Ruth says, that future policies – along with their implementation and consequent usage behaviour – benefit from the lessons of the past.

Illuminating this context is central to Ruth and Jenny’s research, which provides insight into “how we got to where we are”, and what foundations are in place for developing water sensitive cities. Their work focuses on such questions as Why have certain water use cultures developed? and Why have things happened at those particular times? One interesting finding: triggers for relevant cultural change may themselves have little to do with water.

For Jenny, it is exciting to come into the CRCWSC as a historian – and to help a younger generation of engineers understand how past events have influenced the issues they now deal with. While engineers commonly develop an interest in their discipline’s history late in their careers, Jenny finds a lack of historical understanding in the younger generation.

Appreciation of historical context is vital for establishing rapport between the CRCWSC and the public. “I think we as historians know how to present information persuasively,” says Jenny. “We have a greater interface with the public than some of the highly technical disciplines. History can contribute so much to public understanding.” Ruth adds that the empathy of the historian can also help engineers and scientists better understand the public: “Quite often the assumption in the disciplines we work with here is that human beings are highly rational and will perform accordingly, and that would be great. But history can demonstrate our frailties, and historians are taught to be empathetic and ask, ‘Well why wouldn’t we act in a particular way?’ ”

So history builds attachment to place – but it also forges links between organisations like the CRCWSC and society. These connections are critical for encouraging a sense of environmental responsibility. “We can’t create these water sensitive cities without that larger understanding,” says Ruth.

Watch us in conversation here.

Courtesy: Christina Majoinen and Lisa Curtis-Wendlandt for the Mind Your Way team.