History of indigenous mapping

 This CBC story seems like good news about good sense.  The Prairie Climate Centre at the University of Winnipeg produces the Climate Atlas of Canada which "combines climate science, mapping and storytelling to bring the global issue of climate change closer to home, and is designed to inspire local, regional, and national action and solutions,... Various aspects of climate change can be explored using maps, graphs and climate data for provinces, local regions and cities across the country. Plain-language description and analysis make climate science understandable and meaningful."

The CBC story notes how deeply indigenous knowledge and indigenous research and documentation are imbedded into the Atlas. It particularly focusses on the work of Hetxw'ms Gyetxw, a Gitxsan working with the University of Winnipeg, though Silla Watt-Cloutier who is Inuk, and others are also involved. 

This seems like it ought to be absolutely normal.  Not yet.  

History of Climate change II: a role for historians?

I read recently that the authoritive history of climate change studies is The Discovery of Global Warming ("this book is a history of how scientists came to imagine [climate change]") by Spencer R. Weart, an American physicist who retrained as a historian of science.

Browsing through Weart's Discovery, I find the quotation above is very precise. Weart's book is entirely about scientists.

Briefly, Weart reports that the role of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, in keeping the earth's surface warm -- and the potential of their absence to bring on glaciation -- was established by John Tyndall in 1859. But most considerations of climate change continued to look to sunspots or orbital fluctuations. The possibility of human influence was discounted until the 1950s, when some California weather scientists and geochemists began to consider the possibility of human contributions to carbon-dioxide production. Concern about a human-driven rise in global temperatures were widespread enough by the 1990s to produce the Kyoto Accords on the reduction of carbon gas emissions. But conclusive confirmation of human-caused climate change, Weart reports, had to wait until 2001, with the publication of the famous "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures over a thousand years. The first edition of his book appeared in 2003.

Weart notes that a lack of communication of scientists in different diciplines long impeded research into the subject of climate change and its causes. What strikes me is how his book lacks any suggestion of communication between scientists and historians.

Historians have long been aware that climates change. The "little ice age" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was familiar to European historians, and equivalant shifts had been observed elsewhere in the world. The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published "Histoire et Climat" in the journal Annales in 1959. His Times of Feast, Times of Famine: History of Climate Since the Year 1000 first appeared in French in 1967, drawing on many indicators from historical sources  (such as centuries of data on the advance and retreat of viable agriculture in the French Alps) as well as scientific sources (such as ancient tree ring analysis). 

Today environmental history thrives. Historical studies often make large speculations that climate change, including human-caused climate change, lay behind all sorts of historical changes. Did the population decline and consequent reforestation that followed the Black Death cause the Little Ice Age? Maybe. Did worsening climate doom the failed European settlement efforts in North America before 1600? Worth proposing. 

Now, Weart is probably right to assume that the scientists had to find their own way to measure global warming and its causes.  Historical studies could and did document changes in climate over time, but they did not identify causes for such changes. But a certain ambition for history was always there.  Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie was part of a generation of historians who argued that history, far from being dependent on other disciplines, should be "the federative discipline," the one that brought the work of scientists, social scientists, and other scholars together to produce greater understanding.

Weart's book, a history of science with no interest in the history of historical studies, does not give support to that argument, let us say. There is no sense that historical studies did much to provoke the scientific curiosity about the causes of climate change that developed after 1950. So is environmental history -- history generally, if you like -- "federative?" Or mostly dependent?

 

History of climate change I

The Atlantic has an eye-opening article about (yawn) the price of construction lumber. Sure, the pandemic has encouraged people stuck at home to start renovations and home-addition projects. And housebuying by the millennial (or baby-boom echo) demographic is also increasing demand. And this all comes just as timber stocks of construction timber are declining in the Pacific Northwest, particularly British Columbia. Lumber that used to cost $384 now goes for $1104.

Production troubles in the B.C. forests rose with the pine beetle invasion that killed 60 per cent of the merchandisable pine across 18 million hectares of the province in the last two decades. Pine beetles achieved that feat because warmer climates in British Columbia mean they are not killed off by winter frosts anymore. Less pine timber: prices rise.  

BC loggers have been furiously harvesting those stands of dead timber before they becomes unusable. But the massive forest fires of the last couple of seasons have been concentrated in those same vast stands of dead and pitch-soaked forests. What drove the forest fires? Mostly, climate change. So the salvage harvest is coming to an end, and a long decline in slowgrowing B.C. timber stocks is setting in. More price rises.

“There are people who say, ‘Climate change isn’t affecting me,’” Janice Cooke, a forest-industry veteran and biology professor at the University of Alberta, told me. “But they’re going to go to the hardware store and say, ‘Holy cow, the price of lumber has gone up.’”

History of climate, no wonder it's a growth field. 

History and Politics

This isn't a partisan blog.  You have never seen an electoral prediction here, and certainly no electoral endorsements, in all the time it has been running.

But there is one party in the current Canadian election that has me thinking -- historically, I hope, not trying to be a pundit -- about the role of one of our major parties in how we deal with the world we live in.

This came to me after I opened the door the other day to an election canvasser seeking support for the local Conservative Party candidate.

"Not going to find any support in this house," I said and then, without really expecting to, found myself saying "I don't know how anyone can support the Conservatives and look themselves in the mirror these days."

Then I thought I had said enough to this poor guy, and wished him luck or something. He seemed quite willing to back away from the door, actually. People put up with a lot for their party loyalties.

This was right around the time of the students' climate strike.  It underlined, not that it was unclear previously, that deciding how to respond the climate crisis is the great issue of our time. In a strange halting kind of way the world is beginning to accept that.  even if we are not exactly taking decisive action.

But the Conservative Party of Canada? Its standout policy on climate issues is a pledge to cancel the federal climate carbon levy.  The day of the students' climate strike Andrew Scheer announced a highway building policy, because better highways would... save energy and reduce emissions.

I'm not keen on their indigenous policy, their ambiguous position on minorities and immigrants, their spending and tax policies, or even their Senate policy. (Back to patronage? Srsly?)  But it's the climate issue that really has me thinking about reality-based policy making.

You know that line about conservatives standing athwart history yelling stop?   It does seem relevant to this election.