Tag Archive

sustainability

"Sustainable public history" means action in Monterey

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After an incredibly engaging and well-attended American Society for Environmental History conference in San Francisco last week, I arrived in Monterey excited to extend the conversation about the connections among environmental history, sustainability, and public history. I did not expect, however, that the term “sustainability” could rouse the activist roots of our profession.   Read More

Energy Efficiency + Climate Change: A Conversation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation

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Public historians are communicators. We tweet, blog, analyze, interpret, and document events for a variety of different publics. We make connections, linking widespread evidence into a single narrative.

It is that skill set that we are looking for at “Energy Efficiency + Climate Change: A Conversation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation” on Thursday from 8:30-10 a.m. Read More

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

"Seeds of Change": A pop-up museum for Monterey

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plantsHeading to Monterey for the National Council on Public History’s annual meeting next week?  Don’t forget to pack your contribution to NCPH’s first pop-up exhibit, “Seeds of Change:  Public History and Sustainability”!

Generated entirely from participant contributions and built onsite at NCPH, “Seeds of Change:  Public History and Sustainability” will examine how issues of sustainability converge with the work we are doing in public history.  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