The past five years have seen multiple breakthroughs in establishing the past as a key dimension for global change researchers and highlighting the need to bring environmental history, archaeology, environmental humanities, and environmental science disciplines together with nonacademic holders of local and traditional knowledge, and practitioners attempting to manage resources for sustainability. In multiple fields we are seeing acceptance of the importance of our stories of “long term human ecodynamics” for current and future sustainability efforts, not the least in UNESCO MOST’s launch of the BRIDGES initiative. Heritage and community engagement are now recognized as key elements in shaping more successful responses to global change impacts and in rallying support for action on climate change. We are now being listened to, and places are opening at multiple levels for our contribution to addressing current, often “wicked”, problems of growing urgency.
SPONSORS
- Center for Collaborative History
- Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity
- High Meadows Environmental Institute
- Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies
- Program in Medieval Studies
- Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies