GISS Lunch Seminar

Speaker: Joseph Manning (Yale Univ.)
Topic: An Historian Among the Scientists. Understanding historical climate change

A "Eureka" moment in a small New Haven restaurant led Frank and I to form a small, remarkable group of scientists, historians and some excited students to try and understand the connections between large volcanic eruptions and the social history of ancient Egypt. We got to work on writing up a paper that would become a kind of proof of concept for a large US National Science Foundation Project. As far as I know it was their first historian-led project to successfully win funding in the program called "Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems." This was no small feat since we had to satisfy three different divisions of the NSF-Geosciences, Biological Sciences, and Social and Economic sciences. This was all about teamwork, not the normal way of working in History, which is much more geared to the lone scholar in his or her study synthesizing facts and creating narratives. This was something different, but also very promising, and we were convinced when we started that the idea of understanding human societies as "coupled" to their natural environments, acting on, and influencing each other, was very much the way forward in understanding the human past. The work will allow us at once to more richly understand the human past and to come up with better solutions to our current climate predicament, and how best we as a species can and should respond and prepare. I will discuss the results of the project so far and why it matters for History.