Doing Sustainable History

Gosh…it’s been awhile since I’ve updated my website, but it’s not for want of activities!

In 2020 I was honoured to join Andrea Gaynor, Carla Pascoe-Leahy, Daniel May and Yves Rees in preparing a ‘Working Paper on Sustainable History’. We were writing as the smoke of the horrific 2019/20 bushfires cleared and on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, and sought to join a growing conversation about how academic historians (and other academics) can help to address the climate and biodiversity crises in their professional practices. Subsequently, at the 2021 AGM of the Australian Historical Association, Carla Pascoe-Leahy successfully proposed a Sustainability motion:

That the Australian Historical Association recognises that the world confronts a climate emergency, and that historians have a responsibility in these times of environmental crisis to consider how their working lives might become more sustainable.  

The Australian Historian Association commits itself to appraising how sustainability can be incorporated into the work of the organisation, including its investment portfolio. It commits to advocating for sustainability by encouraging history departments, universities, journals, publishers, conferences and funding bodies to move to more environmentally responsible models.

Please follow the link here to join us and add your endorsement!

Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times

I had the pleasure of working with two incredible environmental historians, Katie Holmes (La Trobe) and Andrea Gaynor (UWA), on an article titled, ‘Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times’. Historians Yves Rees and Ben Huf invited us to contribute to a forum for History Australia, on the subject of ‘what it means to be a historian in this alarming historical moment’. Alarming indeed - our responses were framed by rising temperatures, bushfires, smoke, hail storms, biodiversity loss, and just as we submitted the article proofs, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To amplify the forum, the editors of History Australia arranged for responses from across different networks of historians. Jarrod Hore, a rising star in transnational environmental history at UNSW, offered his thoughts and more for the Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network in his essay, ‘Reckoning with Urgency: Crisis and Radical Environmental History’.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Thanks to the amazing support of Monique Ross and the Top 5 program at ABC Radio National, I had the opportunity to share some thoughts about the ways in which urban Australians have come to enjoy fresh water in our homes without giving a thought to where it comes from, or how. In this piece for the ABC, I wrote about the history of water in urban Australia and the importance of understanding urban water supplies to prepare ourselves for the next prolonged drought.

You can read the piece on ABC Radio National Opinion here.

Hilary Harper on ABC Life Matters followed up the story and we had a great chat about the changing understandings of water in urban Australia.