Review: Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research By Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford, and L. Anders Sandberg, eds. Routledge, 2016.

Abstract

In Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (2014) historian Joshua Howe analyses the twentieth-century American scientific discourse about global warming. Howe concludes that the eventual entanglement of climatological science and politics in the late twentieth century undermined the possibility for effective change, which makes the history of this discourse one with very real, and sometimes devastating consequences. ‘Ask an Inuit who has watched her traditional way of life disappear with the Arctic sea ice about climate change,’ he writes, ‘or a Pacific Islander who has watched his island sink into the ocean. They will tell you about this aspect of the tragedy’ (Howe 2014, 203). However, in order to tell those stories and connect them to larger themes, such as global warming or the relation between humans and their environment in general, serious methodological considerations need to be made. They do, after all, not rest on clear-cut evidence that is readily presented in the archives. An excellent starting point for writing those stories is provided by Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford, and L. Anders Sandberg’s edited volume Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research (2016).