Presentations and Papers

This area of the site provides downloadable material for use by educators and those interested in issues around History and Sustainability. All material should only be used with the permission of the author.

 

Presentations

The Big Here and the Long Now
Presentation by Libby Robin of the Australian National University, providing a global perspective on sustainability, history, and new work in the history of science and understanding long-term environmental change.
          Part One
          Part Two

 

Papers

The Big Here and the Long Now
Paper (linked to presentation above) by Libby Robin of the Australian National University, providing a global perspective on sustainability, history, and new work in the history of science and understanding long-term environmental change 

 

Podcasts

Nature as historical protagonist

2008 Tawney Lecture to the Economic History Society by Bruce M.S. Campbell of Queen’s University, Belfast.

What role did natural environmental processes, both physical and biological, play in shaping the course of economic development over the last millennium and longer? Neo-classical economics, Marxist theory, and the New Institutional Economics all espouse the post-Enlightenment view that what mattered most historically was neither the weather nor diseases but markets, technology, power and property relationships, institutions, and the balance thereby struck between population and available resources. This, however, overlooks the independent influence that natural agencies could exercise upon the supply of and demand for resources, via their effects upon the reproduction, health, and life expectancy of humans and the domesticated plants and animals required for subsistence. That there was indeed a significant environmental component to the course of pre-industrial economic development is demonstrated via a comparison between the chronologies of prices, wages, grain harvests, and population reconstructed from historical records, and corresponding chronologies of growing conditions and climatic variations derived by natural scientists from dendrochronology and Greenland ice cores. One intriguing but hitherto little appreciated ingredient of this co-evolution of human and environmental processes was a close but probably indirect relationship between climatic perturbations and biological hazards, as exemplified by the episode of the Black Death.