A good-enough platform for change

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Today’s post is also the introduction to the born-digital publication “Public History in a Changing Climate,” available now to NCPH conference registrants and to other readers by summer 2014.

In a television interview last year, American writer and neo-agrarian icon Wendell Berry spoke about the “dreadful situation” facing young people who are grappling with the cascading environmental, economic, and social challenges linked with runaway capitalism and anthropogenic climate change.  Berry noted that the recognition of our big problems creates an expectation of equally big solutions, but added that our own answers and fixes have too often been part and parcel of those problems, because we’ve tended to impose them in a way that ignores the limitations and needs of the environments we inhabit.  Real change, he said, means learning to listen in new ways to the non-human world and refusing to be rushed or impatient even while acknowledging the urgent need for action.  “I think of them,” Berry said of younger people entering this arena, “and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience.  And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.”

The idea of being patient in an emergency strikes me as useful for public historians to think about but from the opposite direction.  Rather than being impatient activists who need to be convinced of the value of patience, we tend to be inherently deliberate practitioners who haven’t collectively acknowledged that we are in fact in the midst of an emergency. Public historians understand that intimate knowledge of place and attachment to place—Berry’s key preconditions for acting ethically and in relationship with the ecosystems that sustain us—require time, meticulous attention, and the careful building of relationships with other people in particular settings. We bring a number of crucial skills to climate discourse—an openness to interdisciplinarity and teamwork, an attention to the role of the social within “natural” processes, an ability to weigh and communicate various kinds of evidence about the past, and an understanding of how to create accessible narratives that bring macro and micro levels together. But we are only just beginning to put those skills to work in a concerted way within broader efforts to understand the causes and address the effects of our rapidly changing climate.

This post was written as the introduction to a born-digital collection that is part of an emerging conversation within public history about how we might do that.  The collection, “Public History in a Changing Climate,” will be available to National Council of Public History conference registrants this week (and to the world at large shortly after the conference).  It emerges from several years of discussions at NCPH annual meetings and elsewhere, along with a growing strand of material within the Public History Commons focusing on environmental sustainability. Most of the pieces in these pages originated as conference Working Group case statements or posts from the History@Work blog, with a handful of additional contributions.  This collection also connects with the 2014 NCPH Annual Meeting theme of “Sustainable Public History” as well as with a Summer 2014 special issue of The Public Historian journal on the same theme, edited by Leah Glaser.  The combined print and digital pieces make up the first in a planned series of hybrid publication projects by the journal and the Commons, under the series heading of “Explorations.”  Future “Explorations” will take up other topics, while we hope that public historians’ discussions about environmental sustainability will be able to build on these 2014 attempts to capture where we are at present.

If I had to express my own sense of where that is, I would say we’re in a good-enough space for change.  The “good-enough” concept comes from the work of psychoanalytical theorist D.W. Winnicott, who believed that children develop best when their parents and environments do not fulfill every possible need but rather leave room to reach outward, to experiment, and to learn from encounter and experience. Good-enough spaces are profoundly transitional. Media scholar Elizabeth Ellsworth, applying Winnicott’s ideas to thinking about the physical spaces of learning, notes that the transitional environment holds us “not as a container would, not as a passive receptacle of what we already are;  rather, it holds us in passage and accompanies us from one emergent space to another.”[1] Good-enough spaces are not perfect;  not everything is in place yet.  And that is Winnicott’s point:  what we need are not perfect starting-places, but places where we can simply start, often in provisional and partial ways.

I see the public history field at the moment as very much a good-enough space in this sense.  I see a growing number of people like myself and many of the contributors to this collection who are feeling their way into new territory, by no means confident about where they’re headed but impelled by both a sense of urgency and a conviction—paradoxical, unsettling, but in line with Wendell Berry’s notion of the importance of patience in an emergency—that our particular skills of inquiring carefully and deeply into the past can serve a vital purpose in our troubled present.

In one sense, of course, this has always been the central purpose of public history.  But the level of urgency is qualitatively different.  Making the changing climate more central in our work requires a shifting of priorities that is often at odds with institutional and organizational practices and inertias.  Many of us who are attempting this recentering find that it requires continual pushing against those forces, making time for emergent projects and conversations, challenging deep patterns in small and large ways.  Our work environments are not always completely hospitable places for these efforts.  But they are good enough.  Their imperfections as sites of vision and action—the daily demands that can seem so disproportionate to the looming awareness of environmental catastrophe—also create stabilities and platforms from which we can begin to make individual and collective change.  We need many more of these beginnings, and more ways to hear the voices of those, like the many practitioners and scholars included in this collection, who have already started.

~ Cathy Stanton is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University and Digital Media Editor for the National Council on Public History.

[1] Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning:  Media, Architecture, Pedagogy (Routledge Falmer, 2005), 72.

2 comments
  1. Beautifully-written, Cathy. We just need to each start where we are, where we can. History organizations have the most human of platforms to work from, sharing stories and histories and attitudes to help all our visitors and colleagues see what a climate difference each can make.

  2. Paula Hatfield says:

    Very thoughtful and comprehensive article. I live in a W Tx town experiencing growth challenges on many levels. As a volunteer historical advocate your thoughts are meaningful on many levels. Thank you!

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