Rescue!History workshop, Friday 24 November

Half-baked multi-authored Book proposal (very) provisional title:

‘From the Far Shore: History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure’

Some half-baked directions/possible chapters (???)

The reality and urgency of human-created climate change

Conceptual conundrums

Are we living at the end of the anthropocene?
A chronicle of a death foretold, premonitions of disaster in human history
Is the historical discipline equipped for an end of its subject’s potential supply?
A slow burning fuse or sudden surge? Can we chart the present crisis in historicist terms?
A victim of our own success? Modernism, the Enlightenment and the drive for globalised cornucopia

Harbingers of the end

Embracing the apocalyse?: Millenarians and armageddonists across time and space
1816, the year without a summer

Being in denial, some examples in history (Holocaust?)

Prophets of the end? Arnold Toynbee and E.P. Thompson.
- ‘imagining’ the end’, warnings from science fiction writing
Spenglerism, time for a reconsideration?
Being bereft of the others, historical species extinctions and its impact on the human psyche

Case Studies

Harbingers of unsustainable life-styles : from ancient Mesopotamia to North American ‘dust bowl’) (or comparative model)
The End of empire and climate change (Rome, steppe peoples, China?)
The Connect between climate shift, population and disease: The Black death and its impact
Near disasters and total disasters within pre-modern societies, Easter island and New Zealand

Surviving Catastrophe, Creating Conditions for Renewal

- Learning from adversity, the case of the Inuit/bushmen/Icelanders (etc)
- Civilisations geared to sustainability, Inca empire and the overcoming of ‘hunger’

Agriculture practice for the long-term; the cases of terra preta/Melanesian practice
Creating conditions for sustainability : the case of the Amish
Prescience, clairvoyance and prophecy: notions of end-history as routes to survival and renewal (ii)
Thought-systems without teleology, answers in the east?

Afterword: If the end is nigh, what should we be celebrating in the human experience?

ML Nov 2006