What is "sustainable public history"?

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cannery row buildings

Monterey’s Cannery Row, shown here in 1973 before it was redeveloped as a retail district, will be the focus of one of the NCPH conference tours. Photo credit: Herbert Maruska

Sustainability is an increasingly attractive concept that resonates across disciplines and many facets of public life. A quick Google search turns up over 69 million results, including “sustainable development,” “sustainable seafood,” “sustainable performance,” “sustainable capitalism,” “sustainable travel,” and my favorite, “sustainable dance club.” Yet as William Cronon reminded us in his keynote address at the 2011 American Society for Environmental History conference titled “The riddle of sustainability: a surprisingly short history of the future,” the term “sustainability” is a relatively new invention, and its definition is evolving and contested. It simultaneously holds the potential to address the world’s most pressing issues while at the same time being so widely-applied and vaguely-defined as to be meaningless. Public historians, in a unique position to create and communicate knowledge about the past to the broader public, have now embraced the term, as evidenced by the theme for this year’s NCPH annual meeting, Sustainable Public History. But what does “sustainable public history” really mean?

Is it simply about a profession—about sustaining our place in society over the long term? Is it about cultivating and creating public history practices and institutions that are resilient and adaptive to changes in public values and behavior, museums, the academy, the funding landscape, or technology? Or does it imagine something larger? Does it assert a role for public historians in informing and even taking an active part in conversations surrounding what it means to live in times marked by great uncertainty including climate change, a growing human population, loss of biodiversity, and resource scarcity? What about when elements of environmental sustainability conflict with historic preservation as demonstrated in Steven Burg’s recent two-part blog post “Get your wind farm off my historic site: When visions of sustainability collide”?

Members of the NCPH Public History and Environmental Sustainability Task Force have been actively engaging these questions. In a newly-released White Paper, the Task Force writes that “Sustainability’s broadly accepted definition of ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs‘ dovetails with public historians’ efforts to preserve and interpret history and historical resources for present publics and future generations.” Historians in San Francisco at the American Society for Environmental History conference (March 12-16, 2014) and in Monterey at the NCPH annual meeting (March 19-22, 2014) are similarly exploring the relationship between public history and environmental sustainability.

In my last post here, I made the case for what I see as an inherent relationship between environmental and public history. Adding the concept of sustainability to the discussion broadens, deepens, and complicates this connection. I look forward to seeing what interesting insights and questions come out of both meetings. In addition to the many panels that deal explicitly with the intersection of public history, sustainability, and environmental history at both conferences, I am especially excited about the field trips offered at both conferences that promise to prompt and extend our dialogue on these subjects.

Walking tours of San Francisco and Muir Woods, a boat tour of San Francisco Bay, and a “Toxics” tour of the Bay Area, plus other tours dedicated to wildlife conservation, renewable energy, and fire history during the ASEH will further connect attendees to place as they consider environmental history in relation to the landscape and past of the San Francisco area. At the NCPH, with field trips focused on historic preservation and adaptive re-use around Monterey and Carmel, explorations of Cannery Row and the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, and a view of the Biological Center on Cannery Row, the influence of the environment will never be far below the surface. Touring these unique and storied parts of California will no doubt bring the relationships between public and environmental history and sustainability into sharper focus.

~ Cody Ferguson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental/Public Humanities at Arizona State University.  He is serving as this year’s liaison between the NCPH and ASEH annual meetings.

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