Roundtable: What can environmental history and the history of technology contribute to today’s challenges – and how?

Zeit: 18-20 Uhr | Online

Roundtable mit
Christoph Bernhardt (Erkner), Julia Obertreis (Erlangen), Heike Weber (Berlin) und Timothy Moss (Berlin) 
im Berlin-Brandenburger Colloquium (BBC) für Umweltgeschichte im Sommersemester 2021

Veranstalter des BBC für Umweltgeschichte:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin) in Kooperation mit dem Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF Potsdam)
Organisation: Dr. Jan-Henrik Meyer (ZZF Potsdam), Dr. Astrid M. Kirchhof (HU Berlin)

Abstract:
This roundtable event provides an opportunity for all participants to give their own responses and ideas to the following questions that frame the mini-series on usable pasts of environmental history and the history of technology:

1. What selective or simplistic histories of the environment permeate the thinking of policy-makers, business leaders and opinion-setters and how can they be challenged by historians?
2. What helpful analogies to past crises exist and what false analogies should be subjected to criticism?
3. In what ways do ‘presentist’ framings of the climate/environment crisis limit our ability to understand its characteristics and potential responses?
4. What legacies from the past – institutional, cultural, political, socio-economic, material – constrain action or restrict options for addressing the climate/environment crises?
5. What lost or discarded alternatives from the past could enrich our response to climate and environmental change?
6. What risks do historians need to be aware of when engaging with contemporary debates on environmental or climate policy and practice?

Rather than responding to prepared inputs, participants are encouraged to consider answers to the above and additional questions of their own in advance of the event, so that – in true roundtable style – everyone is given the space to reflect upon these issues and engage with the comments of others.