Linking Climate Pasts and Futures

What can we learn from the climate futures that people expected, hoped, or feared in the past? As Historian Ruth Morgan reminds us, “the future, after all, is always as much about the past as it is the present.” In these two talks, Professor Morgan reflects on the place of history, archives, and past knowledge in directing our climate futures. Learning from the uncertainties, disasters, and possibilities of our past can help us imagine new futures.   

Ruth Morgan is an Associate Professor at the Australian National University, Director of the Centre for Environmental History, and Member of the ICEHO Board of Directors. 

Futures Past and Possible: Histories of and for Tomorrow

History Council of Victoria Annual Lecture - October 8, 2020

From bushfires to COVID-19, the trials of 2020 have left many wary of what tomorrow may bring. Yet ours is not the first generation to be preoccupied with tomorrow. Through historical narratives, we can reflect on futures of the past, that is, on the kinds of futures that peoples in the past expected, hoped, or feared. Although some futures past did unfold, it is not necessarily the realisation of these futures that makes them worthy of historical study. Rather, it is the particular conditions that produced those forecasts, predictions, or possibilities – as well as what they set in train and how – that is the historian’s concern. The future, after all, is always as much about the past as it is the present.

Focusing on Australian climate futures, past and possible, this lecture considers the ideas and ideals that have animated settler understandings of the continent’s climes and how their legacies may shape tomorrow.

Archives for a Dry and Drying Land

Annual Lecture for the ANU Archives and the Friends of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre - October 20, 2020

By all accounts, 2020 has been a remarkable year. Bushfires of unprecedented duration and spread, then a pandemic, have led us all to wonder, when will this be over? When will we return to normal? But what is normal in a dry and drying land is especially elusive.

The archives can offer insights into how peoples past grappled with similar uncertainties, as non-Indigenous peoples reckoned with the continent's unfamiliar climes. Through their stories, this lecture explores what the disasters of 2020 have revealed about our relationships with the environment, and how we live on the driest inhabited continent on Earth.