Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource exhaustion, deforestation, plastic pollution – as the environmental crisis widens, time for historical reflection seems to have become short. Historians are challenged to enlarge the scope and scale of their activities beyond understanding past and present phenomena towards more future-oriented approaches; action, it seems, has taken the place of analysis. Is this observation at all appropriate? Are historians possibly even complicit in creating a new environmental urgency that defers historical examination to an afterthought?

Our Roundtable starts from this provocation to reflect the difficult position of our discipline(s) amidst a global environmental crisis. In this situation, can we as environmental historians refrain from taking ecological problems and their envisioned solutions for given? Can we formulate theoretical and methodical positions that mediate between critique and action? Is there a way for us as environmental historians to historicize the ecological crisis while simultaneously fostering green transitions? And is such a dual task desirable at all?

Such questions on the scope and function of history in the Anthropocene are currently widely and controversially discussed. By working for a radically historical concept of the environment that can be understood both as a critical and a future-oriented contribution to the environmental issues of our time, our Roundtable conversation aims to contribute to the debate with a focus on the theory and subject(s) of history as well as the meaning and role of history.

Applications are due by 18 September. We look forward to receiving your proposals!

Sabine Höhler (KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm) sabine.hoehler@abe.kth.se
Christina Wessely (Leuphana University Lüneburg) christina.wessely@leuphana.de