Climate, environment and history
The climate emergency has come to the fore particularly in recent years. Teaching about the environment and climate is a feature of subjects like science and geography, but it is, and should be, the responsibility of every curriculum subject. History has a particular role to play in helping us understand how we got here, alternative futures and how we can benefit from an understanding of and respect for the natural world. While there is a growing body of literature to support the teaching of these issues in schools, the curriculum is still playing catch up.
The HA has supported the teaching of environmental and climate history for a number of years; history and history teaching has long involved a study of place and the historic environment in one way or another; you only have to look at past issues of Teaching History, Primary History and The Historian to see this. Indeed, a sense of place is often crucial to students’ historical understanding.
Within and beyond this sense of place sits the continued inter-relationship that humanity has had with our environment. In fact, one of the enduring threads of history is how humankind has manipulated, shaped and used our environment for our own needs and how human history has in turn been shaped by the environment.
The dedication of an entire issue of all of our journals to climate change and environmental history forms part of our commitment to ensuring that history as a discipline can play a key role in helping our members and young people to understand and respond to the climate emergency.
22 April is Earth Day, and so to mark this, we are making the recent editions of Primary History and Teaching History open access between 15-29 April.
Primary
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Primary History 96: Climate and environment edition
Articles include:
- The potential of primary history [to respond to the current ecological and climate crisis]
- How much has the weather mattered in British history? A possible development study
- A Significant Local Event: Carlisle floods
- Earth heroes: Etta Lemon, ‘The Mother of Birds’
- The year without a summer and other cautionary tales
- Dig for sustainability!
- Linking history and science: how climate affected settlement
- Exploring sustainability in the Early Years
- Using indigenous and traditional stories to teach for climate and ecological action
- Trees
- Why we need to teach about the history of trees and woodland (and how we might do it)
Related member resources:
- Recorded webinar: Helping primary students understand climate change
- Wangari Maathai as a significant individual
- Ideas for Assemblies: Linking historical events with geography
Secondary
Teaching History 194: Climate and environment
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This resource is free for everyone |
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This resource is free to everyone. For access to our library of high-quality secondary history materials along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of history teachers and subject leaders, join the Historical Association today  |
Articles include:
- The potential of secondary history to respond to the current ecological and climate crisis
- History and the climate crisis: Bristol history teachers explore environmental history in the classroom
- When did humans take over the world? A big history approach to teaching climate change
- Learning history outside the classroom in an age of climate crisis
- Industrialisation, energy and the climate crisis
- What Have Historians Been Arguing About… climate history
- Equestrian comrades and an octopus of mud: bringing environmental history into the classroom
- Cunning Plan... for teaching about climate change through the history curriculum
- The place of the ‘standing people’ in the curriculum: how including histories of trees can connect the past with the present and the future
Related member resources:
- Recorded webinar: Secondary history and the climate crisis
- Climate change: greening the curriculum?
- Investigating ‘sense of place’ with Year 9 pupils
- Teaching History 169: A Time and a Place
UCL's Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Education was set up in 2022. The Historical Association has been proud to act as a dissemination partner to highlight the Centre, its work and resources for history teachers.
General interest
Look out for the upcoming summer edition of The Historian this July which joins the theme of the environment, with articles on medieval climate history, art and ecology, Glacier tourism and more. You can access past editions on this theme including:
Related resources:
- Recorded Webinar: Our Human Planet
- Lina Weber, ‘Doom and Gloom: the Future of the World at the end of the Eighteenth Century’, History Vol. 106, Issue 371 (2021)
- C Scott Dixon, ‘Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda in Reformation Germany’ History Vol. 84, Issue 225 (1999)