Last year, I joined Katie Holmes and Andrea Gaynor in conversation with Prof. Scott Gabriel Knowles on his daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-Calls. We discussed our History Australia article (Doing Environmental History in urgent times) and the role for environmental history and activism in our communities.
Visions of the Future
Albert Robida, Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique (1890)
Long delayed by bushfires and COVID, Visions of the Future is finally launched!
Funded the British Academy, this project aimed to to place visions of the future from Britain, North America, and Australia since 1800 alongside each other, comparing the anxieties and preoccupations that have produced them. 1800 marks a key shift. New ideas about time emerged, in which past, present, and future constituted separate entities. This same period, the dawn of western industrialization, is also a candidate for the beginning of the Anthropocene, around which contemporary anxieties about the future have clustered. It was a privilege to work with superstars Assoc. Prof. Will Tullett, Dr Hannah Murray, and a team of creative students from Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Liverpool, on this project.
Check out the Visions of the Future website for an A-Z of visions of the future, creative responses to those visions, and a fun randomiser!
Indigenous Water Knowledge
Meta River, USGS, Unsplash
In 2021 I worked with geographer Dr. Martina Angela Caretta (Lund University) and a team of fantastic Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors to put together a Special Issue on Indigenous Knowledge (IK) for water-related climate adaptation, which featured in the journal, Climate and Development.
Our aim was to gather evidence either by Indigenous scholars or scholars collaborating with Indigenous Peoples on climate change adaptation in relation to water-related hazards from across the globe. This Special Issue developed in the context of the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, in which the editors were a Coordinating Lead Author (Caretta) and a Lead Author (Morgan) of the Water chapter. Recognizing the urgent need to include IK in this chapter’s assessment, and well-aware that ‘IK/LK is not ready-made for the IPCC’ (Castán Broto et al., 2019, p. 6), we invited Indigenous contributing authors to participate directly in the IPCC process. We then developed this Special Issue in order to foster further scholarship by IK holders and in collaboration with IK holders and Indigenous Peoples, which could be included in our chapter’s assessment. In this Special Issue, we argue that explicit attention must be paid to water-related adaptation strategies informed by IK and practiced by Indigenous Peoples, as well as to the political and cultural sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples over water rights and use (see also Cameron, 2012; Ford et al., 2016).