Here’s a really nice essay on that title from Steven Leibo, like me a professor who tries to play a part in the building of the climate movement. Thoughts, reactions?
Here’s a really nice essay on that title from Steven Leibo, like me a professor who tries to play a part in the building of the climate movement. Thoughts, reactions?
I enjoyed this essay because it touches on what we talked about briefly in class the other day. Steven Leibo is a strong believer in studying history’s past climates in order to understand and help change the present climate issue. I think this essay topic was very beneficial for me to read because when I originally think about global warming, I always think of the future and of what I can be doing now to fix it. Although this idea isn’t wrong, it can be improved upon by being knowledgeable about what has happened in the past.
I also liked reading this essay because I thought it was personal. Leibo uses a one of his own personal experiences to show what triggered him to explore the issue of climate change further.
Less of a comment and more of a reflection, I presume: Reforming the educational system can prove to be an amazingly significant stepping stone. For instance, if we were all taught about climate-change science, the historic development of the crisis and man’s relation with climate over the centuries in a geography class (geography being an encompassing subject of geology, human systems and geography, as it was called back in Bombay), I guess we would have been much less skeptical towards such information to begin with. Yes, Gore’s movie/presentation would not have shocked us as much, but we would have intrinsically been more responsible and aware straight out of middle school. Reforming educational systems is a manner of modifying a child’s preconditions and mindset towards climate change. I can use a personal example to highlight this; when I first began junior college (11th-12th grade) I had my first massively eye-opening conversation about climate change with a friend from Italy- he said that what he was telling me was common knowledge for him back home at a school level. I am sure this is the case with many even here in the US.
Additionally, this essay seems to reverberate with a similar message to what Joe Biden highlighted during yesterday’s debate (I hope my bias is not too obvious :P)- that without understanding the causes how can we come up with a solution to climate change? We seem well versed with the scientific causes for global warming, but how important are the social causes? A historical study can be immensely useful in helping us determine how we must conduct ourselves differently as a society and within social institutions. The last of the ‘eight core communication tasks for the climate change movement’ on page. 83-84 of Ignition: ‘Establishing and Spreading New Social Norms’ also touches upon this point- but what needs to change is not only communicating in a manner which an audience recognizes as being ‘normal’ but what we think is ‘normal’ altogether.
Just as Steven Leibo stated, I think it would be wrong for us to only look at the future and forget our past. Indeed, global warming will have its greatest effects sometime in the future; however, as the book, “The Discovery of Global Warming” showed us, we must understand how we got here if we are going to make any attempt to change our fate.
The last 100 years are critical, and as a result, that’s where historians come in. They too have a role to play in this fight against global warming, and as Nial pointed out, they have immense power because they can educate the next generation. Steven Leibo touched on this idea in the last part of his essay, and I believe that it is a concept that is at the center of this movement because if we can educate those around us, we have the potential to reform society. No longer would we see those around us in a state of ignorance or denial, and consequently, it was this idea of education that inspired me the most.
It is something that we can all do, and we do not even have to be historians like Steven Leibo. Rather, all we need is the will to “play a part in the building of the climate movement”; because that is in essence what Al Gore was trying to do, and now “some 15,000 talks [have been given] to well over a million people.”
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Historians are able to give different points of views on climate change that we may not come across by only listening to scientists. Like Leibo, historians can add their own knowledge of history in addition to the information they learned about climate change to make the discussion more meaningful. I agree with Leibo when he says that “knowledge of the past does an excellent job in helping one understand the present and even to make reasonably educated guesses about the future.” Climate change has shown its importance in the past in many ways. One way is by affecting prior civilizations. By understanding the goods and bads of climate change on the past, we can draw ideas and conclusions how to act now.
At the end of Leibo’s essay he states how he has been educating high school students in climate change. In this class, I see the young constantly being emphasized. Maybe we can even go younger and educate 7th and 8th graders on climate change so that by the time they reach high school they can begin to act.
Also, in the beginning of his essay, Leibo tells a story of how after one of his lectures, a member of the audience can up to him and told him a fact was wrong. This made him unsure of himself. It is good when people question each other because it makes them challenge themselves. In Leibo’s case, it made him more interested in discussing climate change. Therefore, we should always be questioning each other and ourselves because it will allow us to learn more and may even inspire us.
I liked everything that has been said so far a lot, but one thing that came to my mind after this essay was Weart’s book. I just think that learning the history, not only of how the climate has shifted, but also the discovery and the mistakes and accomplishments in that aspect has been incredibly important in helping me understand the climate change crisis. In order to know how to act against it, we must be able to learn how the ones who have come before couldn’t fully do so.
I was recently talking to a friend after the stock market drop of about 700 points (after the 1st bailout fell through). He told me something really interesting that his grandpa, who lived through the recession in the 30’s and seen relatives die in the Holocaust, said, which was that if he knew anything was true, it’s that history repeats itself. What better way to prevent tragedies and crises from happening again than by having historians responsible for making known the details of our past.
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