Studying the past equips Wake Forest students to tackle today’s environmental crises
If you ask someone, ‘Why should we study history?’ they’ll probably give you an answer about how, by learning from the past, we can avoid making the same mistakes today. And this is true: there is a lot we can glean from past civilizations and societies, including lessons about living sustainably and protecting the environment. But, as sustainability-minded Wake Forest undergraduates are learning, the reasons for studying history go far beyond this simple principle.
“It is only in the last 10-15 years that environmental history has become something of broad interest to many historians and students of history. It is an area of real emerging interest,” explains Wake Forest History Department Chair, and CEES affiliate faculty member, Monique O’Connell. The interests of Wake Forest undergraduates reflect this trend — over the past few years, the history department has seen an uptick of students interested in majoring or minoring in history who were also interested in the environmental studies program. In response, they have expanded their repertoire of courses to attract these students. “We started thinking, this is something we need to address,” says O’Connell.
CEES affiliate Monique O’Connell (middle) is the Chair of the WFU History Department
And they have, with gusto. Many WFU students interested in environmental history are interested in public policy, so to address that need, history department associate professor Lisa Blee has developed a course on US Environmental History. Blee’s specialties are the American West, Native American history, and environmental thought, making her course a must-take for undergraduate students looking to go into environmental policy or law. The course was first offered in Spring 2021, and is already on the docket for Spring 2022.
Another course that will be offered in Spring 2022 is Visiting Assistant Professor Daniel Burton-Rose’s deep dive into East Asian Environmental History. That course, the first of its kind to be offered at Wake, is “a really special and unique course offering for us,” raves O’Connell.. Both Burton-Rose and Blee’s courses are also cross-listed in Wake’s Environmental Program.
O’Connell herself is also interested in environmental history — but with a 1000-year-old twist. Spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, she developed a course called “Environment and Disease in the Medieval Mediterranean,” which she taught for the first time last semester. The course was built on new historical research into the climate of the Medieval World, and how environmental change contributed to the spread of bubonic plague. Although the course was a little intense, given that students were living through a pandemic, they were really positive about it. “We ended up doing a lot of reflective projects, asking questions like, ‘What resonances do you see in the contemporary pandemic and in the past?’” O’Connell explains.
The skills that history students gain from these courses go far beyond reflection. O’Connell pushes her students to interrogate different types of sources and synthesize the information they provide. Understanding climate change and human health in the Middle Ages requires “looking at textual evidence from literary writers in the past, combined with evidence from isotope dating and ice cores.” Because not all of her students had experience with college-level science courses, O’Connell collaborated with Paul Jones from the chemistry department to teach them the basics of isotope dating. With support from the ENV program and the Humanities Institute, she also brought in biological anthropologist Sharon DeWitte to guest lecture on the biology of bones, and how we can extract historically relevant information from them.
“One of the things I hope for by infusing sustainability into the curriculum is that, whatever career a student chooses, they are going to bring a sustainability mindset to their work”
Beyond just keeping class interesting, O’Connell’s approach demonstrates for students history’s interdisciplinary nature. “I think it produces in students a much greater desire and ability to back up their claims with different types of evidence,” she muses. In doing so, she and her colleagues are developing the kinds of thinkers we need to address current environmental issues, including climate change. Not only are they more confident in their abilities, they also gain the crucial skills of understanding the limits of their knowledge and recognizing when (and how) to reach out to people with complementary expertise.
For students interested in sustainability and environmental issues, the history department’s interdisciplinary approach to their courses is a boon. They have the freedom to explore outside of their preconceived interests, and the department is actively investing in their environmental history offerings, with plans to hire a permanent position to teach European and global environmental history in the modern world at the next possible opportunity. “One of the things I hope for by infusing sustainability into the curriculum is that, whatever career a student chooses, they are going to bring a sustainability mindset to their work,” says O’Connell. “Sustainability isn’t siloed.”
Perhaps most importantly for us today, students are walking away from their environmental history courses with the knowledge that past societies have successfully navigated their own environmental crises, motivating them to make a difference in the world: “I’m seeing a sense of optimism in students, that people in the past have taken action and that it is possible to do something to address current crises.” That sense of agency, combined with their interdisciplinary training, will go a long way toward making our modern world a better place.
The cover photo for this article is a close-up of The Allegory of Good and Bad, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena in 1339, right before the onset of the second pandemic.