A one-day workshop that seeks to generate critical transdisciplinary engagement around climate research and discourse in the 1970s

Friday, 30 August 2024, 9-5pm
CHSTM Seminar Room: Simon 2.57 [maps and travel]

Organisers: Robert Naylor, Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda, Ruth Morgan

Please register here to attend in person
Please register here to attend online

Open to a range of disciplinary backgrounds, this workshop concerns the resonances of climate-based narratives and the growth of climate research during the long decade of the 1970s. The 1970s have been acknowledged as a period of political, economic, scientific, and cultural transition. Daniel T. Rogers has described the 1970s as the beginning of an age of fracture, when the discursive, economic, and political landscape was torn apart and reformed. Eric Hobsbawm has written that the decade heralded “a world that lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis.” It is during this time of crisis that climate change narratives began to emerge into the political spotlight. As shown by scholars such as Spencer Weart and Joshua Howe, reasons for this increase in status include, as a few examples, the rising influence of the environmentalist movement, neo-Malthusian fears of population explosion supposedly accentuated by adverse climatic effects on crop yields, and (controversially) the usefulness of climate change arguments for the nuclear power lobby during a time of energy and oil crisis.

However, despite this important work, many climate histories overlook the 1970s and diminish its importance, instead choosing to focus on the foundation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 and discounting events that could not be construed as a direct precedent to this process. This workshop aims to help rectify this by highlighting climate change ideas when they were at an amorphous, protean stage, when the issue was made to resonate with diverse economic and political interests before it became one of the defining features of turn-of-century discourse. By doing this, we hope to better understand the diverse ways in which we have come to know, perceive, and politicise the climate and its changes in order to better navigate the present.

Download the programme here (pdf)

On the front cover of Rockefeller Foundation publication RF Illustrated August 1974

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