Behind the Headlines
Climate Change: Can Stories Save the World?
A panel discussion with Francis Ludlow, Assistant Professor of Medieval Environmental History, TCD; Ailise Bulfin, Research Fellow, TCD; Christopher Pastore, Associate Professor of History, University at Albany, State University of New York and Trinity Long Room Hub Fellow; and Jumana Manna, filmmaker and artist.
...we must recognize that climate change has long been and still is deeply connected to political unrest, human migration, and war.
I had the privilege of presenting on this multidisciplinary panel that asked simply: how does narrative shape our understanding of climate change? Frank Ludlow showed how mining Egyptian water records, particularly those pertaining to the rise and fall of the Nile, can help us rethink some of the dominant narratives of Egyptian history. Jumana Manna led us through a scene in her documentary film that examines the connections between the Green Revolution in agriculture and the Syrian Revolution. In my own talk, I examined early modern climate knowledge, arguing that the ways we describe climate have always been shaped by moral concerns, political anxieties, and economic desires. And in her examination of several popular apocalyptic films and novels, Ailise Bulfin showed how “we use stories to make sense of the world,” arguing that dire narratives and visceral images of environmental catastrophe can play powerful roles in effecting social, political, and ecological change. The take-away: As we construct our present-day narratives of environmental transformation, we must recognize that climate change has long been and still is deeply connected to political unrest, human migration, and war. And if at times we have addressed climatic challenges with cool reason, in others we have remain firmly committed to misconceptions.
The Trinity Long Room Hub's Behind the Headlines series is supported by the John Pollard Foundation. Find out more about this discussion here.
TLRHub · Behind the Headlines on Climate Change: Can Stories Save the World?
Trinity and the Changing City
Dublin: Natural and Cultural Heritage
A panel discussion with Marcus Collier, Assistant Professor of Botany, TCD; Maryann Harris, Dublin City Council; and Michael Cronin, Department of French, School of Language, Literatures and Cultural Studies, TCD.
...Michael Cronin argued that we must focus on the ways language and literature mediates our engagement with nature
Convening an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this panel examined the science, policy, and culture of urban environments with a specific focus on Dublin. Trinity College botanist Marcus Collier made the case that as cities respond to competing demands, we must embrace “nature as a technology” for improving urban conditions. Efforts to rewild cities by adding garden roofs, living walls, and green spaces, he showed, can provide quantifiable improvements to all aspects of urban life, including health, education, and even commerce. Maryann Harris of the Dublin City Council championed the UNESCO biosphere concept, which imagines cities as ecological systems built upon complex entanglements between humans and the natural world. Harris argued that we need to balance urban development with environmental protection, contending that if more people have access to nature, more people will work to protect it. Literary scholar Michael Cronin argued that we must focus on the ways language and literature mediates our engagement with nature. Taking seriously the power of children’s books and the intensely placed-based literature of Dublin could, he argued, cultivate a wider ecological sensibility, and even a commitment to environmental stewardship.
Trinity and the Changing City is organised by the Identities in Transformation research theme, led by Daniel Faas, Department of Sociology, and is supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.
TLRHub · Dublin: Natural and Cultural Heritage
Seatangled
Ireland, Literature, and the Coast
A talk by Nicholas Allen, Professor of English and Director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia.
...a fascinating meditation on the place of coasts in modern Irish literature.
Nicholas Allen gave one of my favorite environmental lectures, a fascinating meditation on the place of coasts in modern Irish literature. Taking its title from his new book Seatangled, Allen’s talk asked simply, what does Ireland look like from the shore? He showed that Irish literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often embraced an aesthetic colored by coastal variation. Examining the works of Yeats, Joyce, and Erskine Childers, among others, Allen showed how the sea flowed through the Irish imagination. Coasts, he explained, formed a “borderland between the inner life of Ireland” and an “external world related to the history of empire.” But following independence, years of civil war, the establishment of land-based partition, and a collective embrace of territorial nationalism, Ireland looked inland. Writers like Elizabeth Bowen of Cork, he showed, captured this oceanic withdrawal. Evoking landed imagery, Irish prose and poetry increasingly looked to farms and pastures. But as Ireland experienced dramatic economic growth and cultural transformation by century’s end, coasts, as areas of dynamism and new possibility, assumed, once again, more prominent roles in shaping the nation’s literary identity. Ultimately, Allen showed that coastal imaginaries can ebb and flood like the sea itself, thereby shaping national narratives in powerful ways.
This lecture was organised by the Oscar Wilde Centre in partnership with Trinity's School of English.
TLRHub · SEATANGLEDIreland, Literature And The Coast Mixdown
Christopher Pastore is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York and was Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND fellow at the Long Room Hub during the 2018-2019 academic year. An environmental historian of early America and the Atlantic world, he is author of Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) and is currently writing a history of slimy things in the sea from prehistory to the age of plastic pollution.
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Digging into the Archives:
Digging into the Archives with Bill Emmott
Digging into the Archives with Eve Patten
Digging into the Archives with Meltem Gürle