Case Statement: Public History in Antarctica: Communicating Sustainability through an Online Digital Photo Archive
Adrian Howkins, Colorado State University
Abstract
The Antarctic continent poses unique challenges for public historians. It is remote, hostile to the presence of people, and relatively little known. Academic work in Antarctica is dominated by natural scientists, rather than humanists and social scientists. Most people will never visit Antarctica, meaning that it lacks the direct connection to place that public historians often take for granted. But despite these difficulties, the Antarctic continent has much of value to public historians, especially those interested in the theme of sustainability. The issues facing Antarctica bring into stark relief many of the broader environmental challenges facing the global community in the twenty first century, including climate change and natural resource extraction. A better understanding of the environmental threats facing Antarctica can help to make some of some of the more abstract ideas relating to sustainability more tangible. Climate change, for example, becomes more real when you can look at repeat photography of retreating glaciers; the environmental devastation wreaked by the whaling industry becomes quickly apparent from a picture of rotting carcasses. With a particular focus on a National Science Foundation funded project to develop a historical photo archive of the Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys region, I would like to contribute to this working group session by considering how the challenges faced by public history in Antarctica can help us to address the some of the issues involved in promoting the values of sustainability through public history more widely.
Case Statement
I am an environmental historian at Colorado State University, and I have become interested in public history through my involvement with our Public Lands History Center (http://publiclands.colostate.edu/). For the past six years, I have been working with a team of ecologists on the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research Site (MCM LTER). The McMurdo Dry Valleys are the largest predominantly ice-free region of Antarctica, and for the past sixty years have been one of the most intensive sites of scientific research anywhere on the continent. The lack of snow and ice has made the Dry Valleys attractive to a wide range of scientific fields including geology, geomorphology, paleoclimatology, and ecology. My work with the MCM LTER site has two major goals. Firstly, I am attempting to use historical research to contribute to our understanding of the ecology of the region. One way of doing this has been to use archival research to extend our “long term” understanding further back in time beyond the 26-years that LTER scientists have been monitoring ecological change. Secondly, I am interested in writing a history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys as a place that offers fascinating insights into the overlaps of environmental history, political history, and the history of science. Much recent ecological work in the region, for example, has been focused on understanding ecosystem response to climate change, and this has been at least partly driven by observations of actual environmental changes such as rapidly rising lake levels. In some ways my two goals of participating in this project are connected, in other ways they remain quite distinct. But over the past two or three years, I have come to see this work as fitting into the field of public history broadly defined.
In January 2017, I spent several weeks in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica conducting fieldwork for a National Science Foundation funded project connected to my LTER work to develop a digital photo archive of sites of human occupation in the region (http://mcmurdohistory.lternet.edu/). This project offers an interesting case study of many of the main themes of this panel. In addition to making a contribution to the scientific work of the LTER site, one of the major aims of the historical photo archive project is to make the history of the McMurdo Dry Valleys accessible to a wide-ranging public beyond Antarctica. Some of the people interested in the site will be scientists and support staff that have spent time in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, and are interested in looking for historical photos of the region. But we’re hoping that much of the audience will be members of the public who are interested in Antarctica, but who haven’t had an opportunity to go there. As noted in the abstract, developing a public history project for a place that most people will never physically visit presents a unique set of challenges. But this somewhat extreme example perhaps offers important insights into some of the issues facing public historians as we engage with questions of environmental sustainability more widely. Two graduate students accompanied me to Antarctica for the recent field season, and this project also offers an example of public history education and training.
I am still relatively new to the field of public history, and I’m very excited about participating in a discussion on public history and sustainability. Based on my experiences with the MCM LTER and with developing a historical photo archive of the region, I have a number of questions that might be interesting to discuss:
1) What is the relationship between public history that takes a serious interest in sustainability, and the field of environmental history? How can we think critically about the concept of “sustainability” (in a similar way, for example, that William Cronon wrote about the “Problem of Wilderness”), while using this idea to guide our work?
2) Can virtual projects such as the McMurdo Dry Valleys historical photo archive ever replace the experience of visiting places ourselves? By developing virtual projects, are we paradoxically creating additional incentives to travel and burn carbon? This is even more paradoxical when the projects are attempting to show some of the physical impacts of a changing climate.
3) Should we even be doing public history projects in places such as Antarctica, which are so resource intensive to get to? What “environmental debts” do we accrue by working in such places, and how can we start repaying these debts? Similar questions could be asked about research in any places that are beyond our local region.
4) What is the appropriate “carbon footprint” of public history education? Should we be taking students to places such as Antarctica as part of their training? Should we be encouraging them to study abroad? What are some of the things that they could be reading beforehand to make the most of their experience?
5) Climate Change and the concept of the Anthropocene have come to dominate discussions about sustainability over the past decade or so. How can we take these issues seriously without ignoring other dimensions of environmental sustainability?