ICDP PROJECT DEEPCHALLA: RECONSTRUCTING ~250,000 YEARS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY ON THE EAST AFRICAN EQUATOR

The Historiography of Environmental History

10.1093/oso/9780199225996.003.0009 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

J. R. McNeill

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Environmental History ◽

Industrial Pollution ◽

Full Scale ◽

Environmental Concerns ◽

The Us ◽

The World ◽

History Of ◽

The 1960S ◽

The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

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On storiation and what is washed ashore: The Anthropocene as big kahuna

Dialogues in Human Geography ◽

10.1177/20438206211017456 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 204382062110174

Author(s):

Elena Burgos Martinez

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Environmental History ◽

Environmental Degradation ◽

Social Research ◽

Critical Perspective

This commentary begins by outlining current debates on the notion of the Anthropocene from a critical perspective. Subsequently, it will discuss how Pugh and Chandler (2021) directly address such a problematic and how their work contributes to pluralising contemporary academic debates on the Anthropocene. Their previous academic engagements are no stranger to questions of epistemic discrimination in the broad fields of geography, geopolitics, island studies, and social research, and, more concretely, mainstreamed anthropological thinking. This commentary will therefore focus on their call for storiation and its relevance for contemporary debates seeking more ethical, localised, fluid, and coherent approaches to environmental degradation, environmental history, island identity, geopolitics of climate change, and indigeneity. From all the shapes storiation can take, this commentary focuses on indigenous storiation as embodiment.

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Effect of environmental history on the habitat-forming kelp Macrocystis pyrifera responses to ocean acidification and warming: a physiological and molecular approach

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-82094-7 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Pamela A. Fernández ◽

Jorge M. Navarro ◽

Carolina Camus ◽

Rodrigo Torres ◽

Alejandro H. Buschmann

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Ocean Acidification ◽

Environmental History ◽

Coastal Upwelling ◽

Macrocystis Pyrifera ◽

Natural Variability ◽

Kelp Forests ◽

Species Response ◽

Enhanced Expression ◽

Mesocosm Experiments

AbstractThe capacity of marine organisms to adapt and/or acclimate to climate change might differ among distinct populations, depending on their local environmental history and phenotypic plasticity. Kelp forests create some of the most productive habitats in the world, but globally, many populations have been negatively impacted by multiple anthropogenic stressors. Here, we compare the physiological and molecular responses to ocean acidification (OA) and warming (OW) of two populations of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera from distinct upwelling conditions (weak vs strong). Using laboratory mesocosm experiments, we found that juvenile Macrocystis sporophyte responses to OW and OA did not differ among populations: elevated temperature reduced growth while OA had no effect on growth and photosynthesis. However, we observed higher growth rates and NO3− assimilation, and enhanced expression of metabolic-genes involved in the NO3− and CO2 assimilation in individuals from the strong upwelling site. Our results suggest that despite no inter-population differences in response to OA and OW, intrinsic differences among populations might be related to their natural variability in CO2, NO3− and seawater temperatures driven by coastal upwelling. Further work including additional populations and fluctuating climate change conditions rather than static values are needed to precisely determine how natural variability in environmental conditions might influence a species’ response to climate change.

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Epidemic malaria and warmer temperatures in recent decades in an East African highland

Proceedings of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rspb.2010.2020 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 278 (1712) ◽

pp. 1661-1669 ◽

Cited By ~ 89

Author(s):

David Alonso ◽

Menno J. Bouma ◽

Mercedes Pascual

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

East Africa ◽

Nonlinear Response ◽

Climate Change Impacts ◽

Human Model ◽

Recent Past ◽

East African ◽

Highly Nonlinear ◽

The Impact

Climate change impacts on malaria are typically assessed with scenarios for the long-term future. Here we focus instead on the recent past (1970–2003) to address whether warmer temperatures have already increased the incidence of malaria in a highland region of East Africa. Our analyses rely on a new coupled mosquito–human model of malaria, which we use to compare projected disease levels with and without the observed temperature trend. Predicted malaria cases exhibit a highly nonlinear response to warming, with a significant increase from the 1970s to the 1990s, although typical epidemic sizes are below those observed. These findings suggest that climate change has already played an important role in the exacerbation of malaria in this region. As the observed changes in malaria are even larger than those predicted by our model, other factors previously suggested to explain all of the increase in malaria may be enhancing the impact of climate change.

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