Disjunctures of Practice and the Problems of Collapse

This chapter asks what insights long-term historical information from before the Great Acceleration and Anthropocene might offer to policy and practice in the twenty-first century. Conventional sustainability research usually focuses on shallower time horizons that could miss insightful environmental and social processes evolving over centuries to millennia. Although we push for increased engagement with historical researchers, parallels between pre-modern and contemporary environmental and societal challenges need to be treated with caution. So-called cases of societal collapse—often associated with environmental calamities—provide limited or at best flawed parallels with challenges faced today. The pitfalls of reductionism and determinism that often attend collapse discourse account for social agency and complexity in incomplete and unconvincing ways. Instead, we argue that historical evidence should serve as context to environmental problems faced today, as antecedents of the accelerated environmental change of later modernity rather than as direct analogies. Historical antecedents can be understood, to an extent, as previous experiments against which to test and improve theory or to structure possibilistic scenarios that help anticipate unexpected social and environmental challenges. In concluding, we suggest that researcher in historical sciences and the humanities require resources, space and incentives to explore sticky questions of uncertainty, risk, and vulnerability to environmental change together with global change researchers, policymakers, and environmental practitioners.