About

The 1800 Histories project was started at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University in 2022. It is coordinated by Emma Rothschild, Diana Kim, Connor Chung and Oliver Riskin-Kutz. The website is designed by Amy Price. The project welcomes proposals for new micro-histories of the sites depicted on the map. For further information, please contact us at amp32@cam.ac.uk

Editorial Board

Tariq Omar Ali, Connor Chung, Diana Kim, Ian Kumekawa, Thomas Lauvaux, Oliver Riskin-Kutz, Emma Rothschild, Victor Seow

Background on the motivation for the project; Emma Rothschild, Sensing Project presentation, September 29. 2023

The first motive was clearly historical -- an effort to understand the causes of climate change. As a historian I tend to think in micro-terms, about particular places or companies or technologies. Macro or global explanations -- that climate change was caused by the industrial revolution, or capitalism, or materialism -- have serious limits, and the methane histories project was a way to go beyond these very general stories.

The second motive was more melancholy. I have been writing about energy and the environment since the 1970s, and I have found the turn towards the global surprisingly dispiriting. Of course climate change is a global problem. Of course global negotiations are important. But the exhortation to think globally can also lead to despondency. What can one do, as an individual, to change global consciousness, if that is the objective? And if "one" is a government, then what are the possibilities for changing collective consciousness that are not uncomfortably evocative of indoctrination?

The third motive has developed over the course of the project itself. It is that methane emissions, in so many of the cases we have looked at, are co-located with other, far more proximate forms of pollution, including the pollution of land, water and neighborhoods. The economic activities that led to the methane emissions, sometimes over more than a century, have also led to other costs, of which many will endure over many decades to come. Methane, which is colorless and odorless, has been an almost ethereal presence in discussions of the "low-hanging fruit" of global climate policy. Some methane emissions are associated with pipeline leaks in, for example, the Arizona desert. But others are the outcome of a highly polluting and often toxic local environment, and this has become the focus of several of our micro-histories.

In new work overuring the summer of 2023, we began exploring three such sites, chosen in collaboration with the Wofsy group. Intrepid economists and historians have  made site visits to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to Birmingham, Alabama, and to Commerce City, Colorado; we hope these will be the first of many.

The final motive is about what can be done. I do believe that it is important to understand the causes of climate change, in order to prevent it -- or to prevent other, different environmental disasters in the future. But I have come increasingly to believe that local as well as global action is essential; action to change a landfill site, for example, partly because of its global effects and partly because of what it does to children living around it. The micro-histories are a way to make change imaginable.

In an immediate sense, to give a classroom example, in a course taught last year with Victor Seow, Writing Histories of Climate Change, we used the methane map as an assignment -- choose a site and see what you can discover about its history.But in a larger sense, the focus on local histories has led, already, to exchanges with municipal officials, regulators and especially with community groups. The 1800 Histories project's contribution to the new sensing work in summer 2023 was to explore the histories of  sites that the Wofsy group have been observing with MethaneAIR, and to go there, as well; to walk around the fence-lines of the plants in Alabama and Colorado. Itwas also, for the authors, to engage with river protection organizations in Birmingham, and community organizations in Commerce City. Reducing methane emissions is a local and micro- as well as a global and macro-opportunity.

 

The program on Economic History, Climate and the Environment at the Joint Center for History and Economics, of which the 1800 Histories project is a part, is supported by generous funding from Carol Richards, the late David K Richards and the Richards family.