Tag Archive

advocacy

What is "sustainable public history"?

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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.” Read More

Get your wind farm off my historic site: When visions of sustainability collide (Part 2)

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Continued from Part 1.

The case of Southern Öland provides a rather dramatic case where visions of heritage preservation and renewable energy development collided, but it is certainly not unique.  Other communities have faced similar challenges, including the World Heritage sites of Mont-Saint-Michel in France (where an off-shore wind project was blocked by the French courts), and Britain’s Jurassic CoastRead More

Get your wind farm off my historic site: When visions of sustainability collide (Part 1)

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Off the east coast of Southern Sweden, a battle is raging between competing visions of sustainability.  On the most unlikely of battlegrounds, bucolic Öland island, a desire to promote renewable energy has brought local officials committed to promoting a sustainable society into conflict with island residents, preservationists, farmers, environmentalists, and local business owners who believe that protecting the island’s character and cultural resources is incompatible with a proposal to expand industrially generated wind power on the island. Read More

Sound-bite history reconsidered

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I am generally not a fan of sound-bite history.  In this age of information overload and attention deficits, however, I suppose we must consider ways of packaging history in short, audio-visual formats in order to reach a larger public audience.  Richard Heinberg’s Post Carbon Institute video, “The Ultimate Roller Coast Ride,” is a worthy effort in this regard.  Read More

Project Showcase: Ironbound Environmental Justice History and Resource Center

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Ironbound Community Corporation,  a non-profit community organization in Newark, New Jersey, which celebrates its 45th anniversary in 2014, began working on an archive in 2011, partnering with  the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. ICC’s unique environmental justice history, which gained it an early national reputation, is important to its city, state, and the country at large. Read More

Help us build a bibliography on public history and climate change

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Google “public history” and “climate change” and you’ll quickly realize that public historians are only just beginning to talk about how their work relates to the increasingly urgent questions posed by the earth’s rapidly changing climate.  You could make a case that environmental public history is itself still in its infancy, even though it’s been more than two decades since Martin Melosi, in his President’s Annual Address to the National Council on Public History, issued a call for “environmental history [to] be a means to make the value of history better understood to the public.”[1]  Read More