Public History Education and Environmental Sustainability - Best Practices and Resources (draft)

Public historians have long engaged with environmental topics and environmental historians to explore the long-term material effects of the decisions, actions, and conceptions of people and nature in the past. As we move toward the 2018 NCPH conference, conversations about the intersections between public history and topics such as climate change and environmental sustainability are obvious to many in the field, but lack a common point of entry to learn and begin for others. The NCPH Committee on Environmental Sustainability hopes to provide some guidance for how we can train our future professionals in this field to innately understand and incorporate environmentally sustainable practices in our work.

For almost two decades, many groups involved in preserving and interpreting the past have addressed issues of environmental sustainability through historic preservation (“the greenest building is the one already built”) and resource management (cultural landscape preservation). Since the 1990s, public historians have encouraged collaboration between cultural preservationists and environmentalists in developing projects and in educating the public about the relationship of humans to the natural world. Since 2010, public historians have organized annual working groups and sessions to keep the conversation going at almost every conference, culminating in the 2014 NCPH conference theme “Sustainable Public History,” followed by an increasing number of published articles and continued conversations at annual meetings.

This activity led several participants to collaborate with the NCPH Board to create a task force and now a standing committee on the issue. We developed and released white papers that articulated the committee’s goals in 2014. One such goal includes taking a broader approach to undergraduate and graduate training to provide the language and skills for influencing policy-makers. Our practices of narrative, shared authority, and collaborative partnerships position public historians to enter the national conversation on sustainability. To address this, we sponsored a working group in Indianapolis to begin to develop a best practices document to provide guidance for educators to support and promote environmental sustainable practices, not by adding to the curriculum, but with the goal of integrating them into the values and skills we already teach, such as shared authority. We are still developing ways to do this effectively. In advance of a structured discussion taking place next month at the annual meeting in Las Vegas, we invite our colleagues to use the comments feature below to share thoughts and feedback on the strength, feasibility, and usability of these initial guidelines.

View and download the best practices and resources document in PDF form

The NCPH Committee on Environmental Sustainability uses the broadly accepted Brundtland Commission (1987) definition of sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” as its working principle. As public historians, we accept the pursuit of social justice as part of our profession and issues of environmental justice are integral to these questions. In an era defined by climate change, a growing world population, and the need to live with finite natural and financial resources, the committee seeks to advance environmental sustainability as not only an essential value for preserving historic resources for future generations, but as a core principle of public history practice on par with shared authority and community empowerment.

Key areas for best practices in public history education and environmental sustainability include:

Public historians bring a set of skills, approaches, and training to issues of environmental sustainability:

Research, analysis, and interpretative skills.
Experience with communicating the complexities of everyday life and society through narratives.
Experience with collaboration and shared authority.
Training in creating outcomes aimed at general audience and communities.
Knowledge of primary and secondary sources.

Knowledge, Skills, and Training in Environmental Sustainability include:

Knowledge of environmental history.
Interdisciplinary training: scientific literacy, remote sensing, hydrology, biology, architecture, engineering, and geographic information systems.
Cultivation of a mindset of openness to multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary practice and knowledge of other disciplines related to environmental sustainability.
Cultivation of a sustainability mindset that students will bring not only to their coursework, but also to their future positions as leaders in the field.
Conversations with other public-facing academic fields such as public archaeology and public science.
Continuing education.
Field projects conceived in a way that address: environmental justice, landscape, environment, local history, interdisciplinary teamwork, and interdisciplinary conversations.
Public historians are uniquely trained to communicate the historical dimensions of sustainability to public audiences.

Advocating and Exploring Sustainable Practices and Environmental Justice

Living communities
Indigenous communities
Urgency
Global warming
Citizen science
Consciousness, best options
Precautionary principle
Sarah Sutton – sustainability as an institutional undertaking

Environmental Ethics

Encourage the creation of an ethics statement for your public program and classes.
The statement should then be translated into action, including action by the administration.

Engagement, Activity, Activism

Encourage colleagues who teach public history to incorporate environmental sustainability into their curriculum.
Communication and collaboration with the public science community.

Regionally and Locally-Focused Projects

Emphasize grassroots and local history as particularly public history
Partnerships
Site-based projects and research
Alternatives to burning fossils fuels in visits to local sites
Urban versus rural

Environmental Sustainability and Public History Education – Selected Resources
NCPH Committee on Environmental Sustainability
Draft – Spring 2018

Books – Environmental Sustainability and Public History

Barthel-Bouchier, Diane. Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013.

Brophy, Sarah S. ad Elizabeth Wylie. The Green Museum: A Primer on Environmental Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2008.

Caradonna, Jeremy. Sustainability: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Chamberlain, Gregory, ed. Greener Museums: Sustainability, Society, and Public Engagement. United Kingdom: Museum Identity, 2011.

Daniels, Tom and Katherine Daniels. The Environmental Planning Handbook for Sustainable Communities and Regions. Chicago: American Planning Association, 2003.

Edwards, Andres R. The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift. Garbiola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2005.

Fretz, Eric. Climate Change Across the Curriculum. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016.

Grossman, Zoltán and Alan Parker, eds. Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2012.

Hart, Ted, Adrienne D. Capps, and Matthew Bauer. The Nonprofit Guide to Going Green. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010.

Hill, Jennifer and Tim Gale, eds. Ecotourism and Environmental Sustainability: Principles and Practices. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

Holo, Selma and Mari-Tere Álvarez. Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2009.

Hurley, Andrew. Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010.

Melosi, Martin V. and Philip V. Scarpino, ed. Public History and the Environment. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company, 2004.

Moon, Michelle. Interpreting Food at Museums and Historic Sites. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Moon, Michelle and Cathy Stanton. Public History and The Food Movement: Adding the Missing Ingredients. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Sutton, Sarah. Environmental Sustainability at Historic Sites and Museums. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Books – Environmental History and Climate Change

Behringer, Wolfgang. A Cultural History of Climate. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010.

Hawken, Paul. Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. New York: Penguin, 2017.

Howe, Joshua P., ed. Making Climate Change History: Documents from Global Warming’s Past. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.

Heasley, Daniel Macfarlane, and Noah D. Hill. Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press.

Langston, Nancy. Sustaining Lakes Superior: An Extraordinary Lake in a Changing World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Lieberman, Benjamin and Nancy Gordon. Climate Change in Human History: Prehistory to the Present. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Magnuson, Joel. The Approaching Great Transformation: Toward a Livable Post Carbon Economy. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2013.

McKibben, Bill. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. New York: Times Books, 2007.

McKibben, Bill. Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community. New York: Henry Holt, 2007.

McKibben, Bill. The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing about Climate Change. New York: Penguin, 2012.

Moore, Kathleen Dean. Great Rising Tide: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2017.

Outwater, Alice. Water: A Natural History. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Ruddiman, William F. Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Human Took Control of Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Seidl, Amy. Finding Higher Ground: Adaptation in the Age of Warming. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2012.

Weart, Spencer. The Discovery of Global Warming. rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Books – Urban Environmental History

Dyl, Joanna L. Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.

Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995.

Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary Indiana, 1945-1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Isenberg, Andrew, ed. The Nature of Cities: New Directions in Urban Environmental History. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006.

Jonnes, Jill. Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape. New York: Viking, 2016.

Klingle, Matthew. Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Kowsky, Francis. R. The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

Lawson, Laura. City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Lewis, Peirce F. New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed. Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places; Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Melosi, Martin V. Effluent America: Cities, Industry, Energy, and the Environment. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2001

Melosi, Martin V. Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2005.

Melosi, Martin V. Pollution and Reform in America’s Cities. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980.

Melosi, Martin V. Precious Commodity: Providing Water for America’s Cities. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2011.

Melosi, Martin V. The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Melosi, Martin V. Urban Policy: Historical Modes and Methods. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Melosi, Martin V. and Joseph A. Pratt. Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.

Mitchell, John Hanson. The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008.

Orsi, Jared. Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Sanders, Jeffrey Craig. Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.

Thomas, Lynn L. Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Books – Eco-Feminism/Women and Gender in Environmental History

Diamond, Irene and Gloria Feman Orenstein, eds. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1900.

Gaard, Greta. Critical Ecofeminism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.

Kheel, Marti. Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Lytle, Mark Hamilton. The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson and the Rise of the Environmental Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Merchant, Carolyn. Earthcare: Women and the Environmental. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Moore, Niamh. The Changing Nature of Eco/Feminism: Telling Stories from Clayoquot Sound. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014.

Musil, Robert K. Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America’s Environment. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2014.

Riler, Glenda. Women and Nature: Saving the Wild West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Scharff, Virginia, ed. Seeing Nature through Gender. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

Scott, Dayna N. Our Chemical Slaves: Gender, Toxics, and Environmental Health. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014.

Unger, Nancy C. Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Warren, Karen J. Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, and Nature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Books – Environmental Health, Environmental Justice, and Environmental Racism

Blum, Elizabeth D. Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.

Davies, Katherine. The Rise of the U.S. Environmental Health Movement. Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.

Fletcher, Thomas H. From Love Canal to Environmental Justice: The Politics of Hazardous Waste on the Canada-U.S. Border. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003.

Finger, Simon. The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indian, 1945-1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

McKiernan-González, John. Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Rosen, George. A History of Public Health. Rev. ed. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Scott, Dayna N. Our Chemical Slaves: Gender, Toxics, and Environmental Health. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014.

Smith-Howard, Kendra. Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Zimring, Carl A. Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

Books- National Parks, Public Lands, and Natural Resource Management

Bartlett, Richard A. Yellowstone: Wilderness Besieged. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985.

Catton, Theodore. American Indians and National Forests. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.

Everhart, William C. The National Park Service, 2^nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983.

Frank, Jerry J. Making Rocky Mountain National Park: The Environmental History of an American Treasure. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013.

Harmon, David. Francis P. McManmon, and Dwight T. Pitcaithley. The Antiquities Act: A Century of American Archeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006.

Howkins, Adrian, Jared Orsi, and Mark Fiege, eds. National Parks Beyond the Nation: Global Perspectives on “America’s Best Idea.” Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016.

Janetski, Joel. Indians in Yellowstone National Park. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002.

Lien, Carsten. Olympic Battleground: The Power of Politics in Timber Preservation. 2^nd ed. Seattle: The Mountaineers Books, 2000.

Mengak, Kathy. Reshaping Our National Parks and Their Guardians: The Legacy of George B. Hartzog. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012.

Pickering, James H. The Rocky Mountain National Park Reader. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2015.

Rothman, Hal. Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Rothman, Hal K. and Char Miller. Death Valley National Park: A History. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013.

Runte, Alfred. National Parks: The American Experience. 4^th ed. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2010.

Sax, Joseph L. Mountains without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980.

Sellars, Richard West. Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Wilson, Randall K. America’s Public Lands: From Yellowstone to Smokey Bear and Beyond. Lanham, MD: Rowland & Littlefield, 2014.

Yochim, Michael J. Protecting Yellowstone: Science and the Politics of National Park Management. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013.

Essays

Archibald, Robert R. “Sustaining the Future.” In The New Town Square: Museums and Communities in Transition. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004.

Cafaro, Philip. “What Should NPS Tell Visitors (and Congress) about Climate Change?” The George Wright Forum 29:3 (2012): 287-298.

Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Edited by William Cronon New York: W.W. Norton, 1995, 69-90

Evenden, Matthew. “Reflections: Environmental History Pedagogy Beyond History and on the Web.” Environmental History 14:4 (October 2009): 737-743.

Glaser, Leah, guest editor. Public History and Environmental Sustainability special issue of The Public Historian 36:3 (August 2014).

Lewis, Michael. “‘This Class Will Write a Book’: An Experiment in Environmental History Pedagogy.” Environmental History 9:4 (October 2004): 604-619.

Moon, Michelle and Cathy Stanton. “The First Course: Locating Public History within the “Food Movement’” The Public Historian 36:3 (August 2014): 109-129.

Schiavo, Laura Burd. “‘White People Like Hiking’: Some Implications of the NPHS Narratives of Relevance and Diversity,” The Public Historian 38:4 (November 2016): 206-235.

Stanton, Cathy. “Farming in the Sweet Spot: Integrating Interpretation, Preservation, and Food Production at National Parks.” Wright Forum 34:3 (2017): 275-284.

Government and Organization Reports

Executive Order 13693. “Planning for Federal Sustainability in the Next Decade.” Federal Register 80: 57 (March 25, 2015): 15871-15884.

National Park Service. Climate Change Response Strategy. Washington DC: Department of the Interior/NPS, 2010.

National Park Service. National Climate Change Interpretation and Education Strategy. Washington D.C.: Department of the Interior/NPS, 2016.

National Park Service. “Urban Agenda: Call to Action Initiative.” Washington DC: Department of the Interior/NPS, 2016.

National Park Service Technical Preservation Services. Illustrated Guidelines on Sustainability for Rehabilitating Historic Buildings. Washington DC: Department of the Interior/NPS, 2013.

Rockman, Marcy et al., Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy. Washington DC: Cultural Resource, Partnerships, and Science and Climate Change Response Program, National Park Service, 2016.

United Nations Environment Programme, UNESCO, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate. Cambridge, MA: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2016.

World Heritage Convention and UNESCO. Climate Change and World Heritage. Paris: World Heritage Centre, UNESCO, 2007.

Government and Organization Websites

Active History

Climate History Network

Environmental Protection Agency

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

National Council on Public History’s History@Work blog

National Park Service

National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Preserve Nevada

Public Lands History Center