Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene: - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene:
A Historian Witnesses Climate Change
on the Korean Peninsula

Scott Gabriel Knowles

Despite their seeming reluctance to engage in the politics of the now, historians have
a crucial role to play as witnesses to climate change and its attendant social injus-
tices. Climate change is a product of industrialization, but its effects are known in
different geographical and temporal scales through the compilation and analysis
of historical narratives. This essay explores modes of thinking about disasters and
temporality, the Anthropocene, and the social production of risk–set against a case
study of the Korean DMZ as a site for historical witnessing. Historical methods are
crucial if we are to investigate deeply the social processes that have produced cli-
mate change. A “slow disaster in the Anthropocene” approach might show the way
avant.

We will make sure that every leader who hesitates and waffles on
climate will be seen as another Donald Trump, and we will make sure
that history will judge that name with the contempt it deserves.

—Bill McKibben, 2017

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W hen it comes to sorting out the good and the bad, “history” is an activ-

ist. Placing a bad actor on the “wrong side of history” is a rhetorical
strategy deployed by everyone from presidents to popes.1 In moments
of political turmoil, the impending judgment of “history” wields moral power.
But what about the historians?

I trained as a historian of technology in the late 1990s. In those days, there was
a fascination with the history of technological systems that built America: electri-
fication, dams, highways, the Internet. I was more interested in why systems fail,
and I wrote a dissertation about the conflagrations that destroyed American cities
from Chicago to Baltimore to Boston in that heralded era of American ingenuity.
I was on my way to Chicago to spend a week immersed in the archives of the Iro-
quois Theater Fire–the greatest fire tragedy of the twentieth century in the Unit-

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192

ed States–and by the time my plane landed, the Twin Towers had been attacked
in New York City.

In the months that followed, I listened to the braying of politicians decrying
the attacks with an incessant focus on an external enemy, and I dove deeper and
deeper into the equally unsettling history of the World Trade Center. The Towers
were experimental buildings with known weaknesses to fire. There was no con-
spiracy here, just a long history of incomplete fire protection that was never fully
realized until it was too late. The structural weaknesses had a history connected
to the larger story of materials testing, building codes, the insurance industry, et
urban politics. Unraveling that tangled knot became a central focus of my 2011
book The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America. What started as the
history of a fire problem buried in the American past turned into a chronicle of
continuity in risk and disaster. Disasters aren’t events that float freely in history,
unmoored from politics: they are processes, playing out in uneven temporalities,
and always with deep histories.

A historian worrying about a missile attack while baking in a heat wave:

that’s me in the Gyeongui Line Forest Park in Seoul on a broiling sum-
mer day in 2017. I was for that summer a visiting researcher in the KAIST
Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, working with Dr. Chihyung
Jeon to understand the causes and implications of the 2014 sinking of the Sewol
Ferry. In many ways, it was a continuation of my previous work on the Twin Tow-
ers: searching for the obscured history of technological decision-making behind
a major national disaster.

Construction on the Gyeongui Line, Korea’s first major railway, began in 1902.
In Seoul today, the rail line is submerged beneath the congested city, and the For-
est Park is an urban oasis with water and trees and plenty of space for my two
children to run and ride their scooters and make too much noise. Suddenly, mon
iPhone let out a terrible sound and the screen was full of text. I could hear other
people’s phones in the park making the same noise. Since I unfortunately don’t
read Korean, I quickly snapped a picture and texted it to my friend. What’s hap-
pening? I asked, a bit urgently.

The summer of 2017 was an anxious one. My South Korean friends have grown
up with post–Korean War polarization and the ever-present threat of violence,
but I suspected that even to them this period of time was an unusual one. Plus
certain of the diplomatic tactics of the North, they were highly unsure of the Unit-
ed States’ recently elected and unpredictable reality-show president. On arrival
in South Korea, I felt alarmed to read a recommendation that I should have gas
masks for my family, and that we needed to know where to take shelter if a mis-
sile barrage were to start–and also that I shouldn’t worry too much about such
things.

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149 (4) Fall 2020Scott Gabriel Knowles

But I’m a disaster researcher, worry is my business. Only recently, President
Trump had warned North Korean President Kim Jong-un that if he continued test-
ing missiles, the United States would rain “fire and fury like the world has never
seen” down on Pyongyang. North Korea’s response was a shrug, and then a threat
to create an “enveloping fire” around Guam. Entre-temps, that week, the American
press was busily churning out grim “scenario stories”: What might happen if war
returned to the Korean Peninsula? How many would die in the first hour, the first
day, the first month? Some of these scenarios ended with full-blown nuclear war,
while the rosier scenarios imagined only tens of thousands of civilians and sol-
diers being killed, primarily in Seoul and Pyongyang.

Back to the Gyeongui Line Forest Park: at last, a text message came back from
my South Korean friend. It’s a weather warning, he said, advising you to take
care in the extreme heat. As I stood there squinting from the sun’s glare, my shirt
soaked with sweat, I appreciated the wisdom of this advisory. The reality is that
the slow disaster of climate change on the Korean Peninsula is every bit as omi-
nous as the threat of war, it’s just unfolding at a pace that makes it harder for us to
keep it in the front of our minds.

South Korean summer heat records have been broken over recent years: le
old high-temperature mark for Seoul was shattered in 2018, in the midst of a heat
wave affecting the entire Korean Peninsula, and directly causing at least forty-two
deaths. This follows a similar heat wave in the summer of 2013. The trend is clear
to climatologists. Depuis 1971 à 2000, South Korea charted on average 8.5 heat
wave days per year. By the end of this century, that number is expected to rise to
32.3 days per year–a full month of every year in a heat disaster. A recent public
health analysis puts the rising heat in the context of life and death: entre 2002
et 2013, 336,000 South Koreans were treated for direct heat-related illness, dans-
cluding heat exhaustion, respiratory difficulty, and heatstroke, with the reported
cases increasing steadily year by year. Heat-related death rates are even higher in
rural and poorer areas, where agricultural workers suffer and where elderly people
often live alone and without good access to health care.2

Each of these effects local to Korea will likewise play out at the global scale,
according to the most recent report (2018) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-
compagnon Changer. The twenty-first century will be one of a gradual and deadly warm-
ing–global yes, but uneven in its effects, and not equitable. This warming will
be much harder on vulnerable populations: Noir, Indigenous, People of Col-
ou, the poor, the young and old, the disabled and chronically ill. For nonhuman
species, the impacts will likewise be dangerous, sometimes deadly, sometimes
extinction-inducing. Et, for the built infrastructure, shifts in heating and cool-
ing patterns will affect roads and buildings, eau (too much in some places, far
too little in others) will challenge sanitation and water delivery systems, demand
for air conditioning will stress the electric grid, et, de plus en plus, extreme weath-

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & SciencesA Historian Witnesses Climate Change on the Korean Peninsula

er events will cause damage across all types of infrastructure systems from data to
diabetes care with higher frequency and cost.

Bien sûr, when I read my friend’s reassuring translation of the warning text
dans 2017, I was relieved that war had not just been declared. This fear was replaced,
though, with another one: a fear that tracks a threat just as grievous (worse even),
but moving on a slower time scale. “Fire and fury” and “enveloping fire” are ter-
rifying and poetic phrases, much more so than the rather flat “global warming,»
but global warming stalks me everywhere I go, not only in Seoul and Pyongyang.
When I went home to New Jersey, far away from the emergency drills and gas
masks, it was waiting for me there, aussi.

T he Anthropocene is the time in which human activity is the dominant force

of change on the planet. The terminology is in the strict sense geological,
coined by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000. Geological ages are
named for the organisms or processes that define the earth in their time. The An-
thropocene is our time, an age marked by the increasingly obvious cumulative
impacts of humanity on Earth systems, and more so by the cascading effects of
human-crafted systems. If you are looking for the material evidence that scientif-
ic advocates of the Anthropocene collect and analyze, you should watch for con-
centrations out of place: too much phosphorus at the mouths of rivers and acid in
the oceans, too much carbon in the atmosphere, radioactive particles and plastics
partout. There are also absences: ice melt, vegetative loss, biodiversity loss,
aridity.

The evidence for the Anthropocene as a stratigraphic layer of the earth with a
clear starting point is still a matter of fierce debate among scientists, divided into
roughly four camps: those who reject the concept out of hand; those who date the
start of the Anthropocene to the advent of agriculture approximately ten thou-
sand years ago; those who date it to the rise of industrialization roughly 250 années
ago; and those who insist that the entry into the nuclear age marks the moment
of the Anthropocene, beginning in 1945. Start date aside, there is broad consen-
sus that a so-called great acceleration of Anthropocenic growth processes, depuis
globalized industrial production, to GDP, to global population, to oceanic surface
temperatures, is obvious from the 1950s onward.

The Anthropocene is by no means the first time humans have contemplated
suffering, or even the complete end of humanity: apocalyptic eschatology is quite
nearly a universal feature of world religions. It’s not even the first time in which
humans have contemplated their end brought by their own hand; that would be
the Cold War “mutually assured destruction” era.3 But it is the first time that a
mass extinction–including the Anthropos–is contemplated by us as a creep-
ing process producing a slow disaster of global proportions, toxicity and global
warming driving us from every corner of the globe to the same fate.

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149 (4) Fall 2020Scott Gabriel Knowles

Climate scientist Will Steffen has also described the Anthropocene as a chal-
lenge of temporal imagination: “the concatenation of both slow- and quick-onset
events . . . can lead to some unexpected global crises. . . . The Earth System scale adds
another twist to the concept of speed of change. . . . Humanity . . . has no experience
of dealing with such combinations of scale and speed of environmental change.”4
How long will it take? Is it too late? Is it reversible? Who will be the first to suf-
fer, and how can their suffering be lessened? Are the same forces of industrial-
ization that created the Anthropocene capable of being turned toward solutions?
These are the existential questions of the Anthropocene, and they go well beyond
geology.

Historians of disaster have a role to play in grounding these free-floating ques-
tions in local contexts: the Anthropocene is a global process playing out in human
lives and communities every day. And in every one of those lives and places, là
are historical trajectories, inheritances of place and politics that will shape who
suffers more and who suffers less. Understanding the everyday politics of the An-
thropocene requires the work of historians.

C limate change is a product of industrialization, but its effects are known in

different geographical and temporal scales. This realization came home to
me when I was researching the Twin Towers, but also Hurricane Katrina,
Fukushima, and many other disasters of the past two decades. In each case, notre
naming conventions are to emphasize the event of the disaster over the process that
made the disaster. The rush to name the disaster, investigate the cause, and get
back to normal defines the work of the modern disaster preparedness state. J'ai
struggled in my career with the temporal limitations of the term in its general (et
I believe quite misleading) usage. What, I have wondered, if we named disasters
by the processes that made them? The September 11 Terror Attacks, Fires, and En-
gineering Failures; the New Orleans Flood and Levee Failures of 2005; the Great
East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Failure of Nuclear Safety. This thought ex-
periment takes us into useful conceptual terrain if we care to actually understand
le social, économique, and political actors who establish so-called acceptable levels
of risk, and why publics accept (or don’t accept!) such levels. Following this path
demands a history of disaster that is decidedly more complicated than a presiden-
tial “disaster declaration.”

War is the quintessential example of an anthropogenic disaster that we can ap-
prehend as an “event in the now.” In terms of definitions, war fulfills the require-
ments of what we generally mean by disaster: it overcomes society’s ability to cope
with stress. That is what war is for after all: it is a human-induced disaster aimed
at achieving political ends. En tant que tel, warfare cannot last beyond the time frame in
which it is useful for the combatants. The time frame of war is short: it may be re-
petitive, but it is an imminent way of destroying, killing, and dying. War and other

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & SciencesA Historian Witnesses Climate Change on the Korean Peninsula

so-called rapid-onset disasters fit the definition of “events” and, in fact, the classic
social scientific definitions of disaster were framed in the early years of the Cold
War, when governments (especially the United States) were funding research to
model the societal impact of nuclear war. The model of disaster that emerged by
1960 in the writings coming from the Disaster Research Center was something
that arrives rapidly, with little or no warning, and then it’s over. That aftermath
phase is what the government planners were keen to predict: would society return
to some sort of normalcy, or would society fall apart at the seams? Their conclu-
sions weren’t optimistic, but are slightly beside the point here. What’s important
is to note their framing of disaster as an event, the result of a shock from outside,
overwhelming a particular community at a particular time.

The Anthropocene is also a disaster, but a slow one, moving according to a
different temporal logic. The traditional definition of disaster describes an over-
whelming event delimited by spatiotemporal limits that are tightly bounded with
clear cause-and-effect relationships. “Slow disaster” is a way to think about disas-
ters not as discrete events but as long-term processes linked across time. The slow
disaster stretches both back in time and forward across generations to indeter-
minate points, punctuated by moments we have traditionally conceptualized as
“disaster,” but in fact claim much more life, health, and wealth across time than
is generally calculated. The slow disaster is the time scale at which technologi-
cal systems decay and posttraumatic stress grinds its victims; this is the scale at
which deferred maintenance of infrastructure takes its steady toll, often in ways
hard to sense or monetize until a disaster occurs in “event time.” The experience
of war victims fits the concept well, as does the process of climate change, sea level
rise, the intensification of coastal flooding, and heat waves.5

Yet the old false binaries confront us at every turn. Par exemple, in the after-
math of a disaster–like Hurricane Katrina, or the sinking of the Sewol Ferry, or the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster–the event is often presented as a laboratory
of sorts. After each of these crises, we hear a great deal from policy-makers and
experts about the opportunity to “learn from disaster.” But we should be aware
that this learning exercise is trapped in a dynamic that splits the technical from
le social. In this mode, if the technical side of a disaster yields inconclusive re-
sults, then it is very hard for experts to reform technical practice. Strong pressures
exist within technical expert communities to resist outside social and political in-
fluence. This is in many ways perceived as the very definition of science and engi-
neering: to be able to deliver analysis and technology that are free from context,
relieved of the corruptions of the social world. Bien sûr, such avoidance in the
Anthropocene is not only impossible, but the idea that disasters are not combi-
nations of technical but also social and political forces is a dangerous one. Post-
disaster investigations are often demanded by government officials seeking to
have rapid and acceptable answers to technical questions, seeking to move quick-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Scott Gabriel Knowles

ly past useful moments for debate over the larger forces at play in risk-taking. Ce
rush to “learn” something, anything that can restart the reactors or re-open the
flood plain for construction puts engineers especially into a very difficult position.
What if what is learned from disaster is that there should be more technological
restraint in a certain ecosystem, or that the unwanted effects of an industrial pro-
cess aren’t yet knowable? What then? Is the lesson of disaster useless? Non, mais
perhaps the answer will be unpopular, and not attuned to the “event” scale of di-
saster that so often demands our attention.

I n whose interest has it been to define disaster as an event in the now, as an

act of God, as an unwanted external, natural event? By way of answer, what
you will have immediately observed from the discussion thus far is the lack
of texture when it comes to ascribing human agency in the Anthropocene. Et
here is where history as a discipline can play its most constructive role as a wit-
ness. To say the era started with “industrialization” is intuitively correct, but it’s
like saying a murder was committed by some criminals at some point in the past.
We want to know more: Who were these criminals? Where was the crime com-
mitted, and what were the motives? In their 2015 book The Shock of the Anthropo-
cene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz put the problem of
causation and agency in the Anthropocene directly before us. “There is already an
official narrative of the Anthropocene,” they note,

“we,” the human species unconsciously destroyed nature to the point of hijacking the
Earth system into a new geological epoch. In the late twentieth century, a handful of
Earth system scientists finally opened our eyes. . . . [Mais] this story of awakening is a
fable. The opposition between a blind past and a clear-sighted present, besides being
historically false, depoliticizes the long history of the Anthropocene. . . . In the twen-
ty years that it has prevailed, there has been a great deal of congratulation, tandis que le
Earth has become ever more set on a path of ecological unbalance.6

The challenge then is two-fold: 1) to build historically rich accounts of the An-
thropocene, a globally active process manifesting itself across a countless set of
local domains; et 2) to attend to the ways that the Anthropocene discourse is
shaping our understanding in the now. Who gets to say, who doesn’t, and why
does that matter? Rising to this challenge has been a legion of scholars offering
historically contextualized modifications to the notion of Anthropocene-as-pro-
cess. These scholars are looking to take apart that duplicitous “we” and actually
put some names with faces, so to speak. There are multiple different historical-
ly rich theories of the “social tectonics of the Anthropocene”: the nongeological
forces that are altering the earth’s crust just as effectively as vulcanism or meteor
strikes have done in previous geological times. Par exemple, the Capitalocene: de-
parting from the old line attributed to Fredric Jameson that we can envision the

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & SciencesA Historian Witnesses Climate Change on the Korean Peninsula

end of the world more readily than we can the end of capitalism. The Capitalocene
has some utility in addressing my previous question about the limits of learning
from disaster. In this mode of thinking about the Anthropocene, it makes com-
plete and total sense that learning will be bounded by the limits of ownership and
profitability. There are other contenders, each championing a particular ecosocial
history of planetary change: Plantationocene (slavery and monoculture), Carbo-
cene (carbon extraction/burning), Thanatocene (species extinction), and Chthu-
lucene (interconnectedness of species), to name just a few.7

And so, the Anthropocene as a concept has slipped beyond the jurisdiction
of the International Commission on Stratigraphy: the Anthropocene-as-social-
process is now a mode of inquiry wherever people are interested in disasters and
ways to prevent them. As an environmental studies heuristic device, it has some
serious advantages. It is inherently interdisciplinary, it traffics in deep time and
demands attention to scales from the planetary to the street corner, and it forces
us to divest ourselves of the age-old “natural disaster.” In the Anthropocene, it is
human activity itself interwoven into the natural that shapes reality.

T here is only one place in the world where a person can see the Anthropoce-

nic future in its full revelation, a place that simultaneously fully represents
humanity while also being devoid of living humans. This place is the de-
militarized zone separating North and South Korea. One hundred and fifty-five
miles long and two-and-a-half miles wide, the DMZ is the world’s longest defend-
ed borderland, and by virtue of this fact, it is also the world’s largest space unin-
habited by humans.

I rode the Gyeongui Line from Seoul Station to the DMZ. Most of the trip would
feel predictable to anyone who has ever left a major metropolitan city by train:
high rises give way to lesser high rises, smog gives way to clearer skies. But after
about an hour, the so-called Peace Train, beautifully decorated with bright flowers
and showing cheerful videos, slows considerably, and then you become aware of
changes in the land: an intensification of the greens and blues, and a heightened
awareness on board as the fences and the soldiers come into view.

I disembarked at Dorasan Station, a beautiful but empty modern station just
south of the border. It took me some time before I understood that this was, et
is meant to someday again be, a border crossing. A soaring waiting room is edged
by a tourism information desk, presumably there to provide aid for South Koreans
headed north, and for their North Korean counterparts heading south. One can
even see the border crossing station itself, where passports will be checked and
bags inspected. And there on the departures board, Pyongyang is listed.

From here we were ushered into a cheerful theater where a short film told
us three basic stories: d'abord, the historic story of the war and the partitioning of
the Korean Peninsula; et deuxieme, the continuing depravity of the North Korean

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Soldiers on the Gyeongui Line “Peace Train” to Dorasan Station, South Korea, 2017. Photo by
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military (with its prolific tunneling under the DMZ and into South Korea) et le
imminent threat the military posed to democracy in the South. I was prepared to
receive these messages in a new way: North Korea was eager for reunification the
film told me, and it wouldn’t be through nonviolent means. The tunnel was the
evidence, the film instructed me; remember the tunnels.

The third story caught me quite unprepared. Because of the incomparable sit-
uation of the DMZ, its four hundred square miles of unhumanity, it is in fact the
world’s largest wildlife and botanical refuge! The buoyant tone of the film carried
us to the conclusion that when (not if ) Korea is reunited, the nation will be left
with this amazing park–a so-called Peace and Life Zone–a reminder of its past
transformed into a beautiful symbol of peace. I couldn’t help but wonder about
the alternative endings for the film, the ending where reunification doesn’t easi-
ly occur and the DMZ serves as a militarized wildlife refuge for centuries, not de-
cades. Or, an ending darker still, the social tectonics of the Anthropocene even-
tually render the DMZ useless because of societal collapse. I began to see the
DMZ as both a historical record of conflict and also as an experiment station for
life-after-humans.

As I contemplated this last idea, the guides herded us back onto the bus for
the pinnacle of the tour: a visit to the mountainside lookout where visitors peer
across the DMZ and into the North Korean border town of Kijong-Dong. I looked
across that emptiness, desperate to see a person–a real North Korean–but I only
saw the streets, smokestacks, and houses of Kijong-Dong. I found out later that I
was looking for people in vain, Kijong-Dong is only a model town, apparently no
one lives there–the lights go off and on in the buildings controlled remotely with
timers, and soldiers disguised as civilians sweep the streets.

I was standing on the edge of the most heavily monitored, seen, listened to,
tunneled, and militarized spot on the planet, and I felt profoundly lonely. It was
a place unlike any other, and yet totally representative of what the Anthropocene
portends: high-tech, war-torn, and empty of human beings.

Now if you forget humans for a moment, there is definitely life in the DMZ.8
There are over five thousand species of plants and animals here, y compris 106 que
are endangered and protected. The geography of the DMZ from one side of the
peninsula to the other crosses many different types of ecosystems. It was first pro-
posed as a park in 1966, though this idea has still not been accepted by the North.
Thousands of migrating birds from across Asia stop here every year. These include
the famous red crowned and white-naped crane. Siberian tigers are rumored to be
ici, aussi.

Ceux-ci sont, for now, the residents of the proposed Peace and Life Zone of the
DMZ. But what if we excavated the Anthropocene layer at the DMZ–a discovery
mission for the Korean Anthropocene? What would we find? Could we put to-
gether a coherent account of human life, and human death, on Earth? Start with

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the North Korean border towns of Haeju and Kaesong, each has a deep human
histoire, with remnants of early farming cultures dating back to the Neolithic pe-
riod over ten thousand years ago. Pottery and stone tools have been found with
a long history of small-scale empire-building through agriculture and through
warfare. We could have a look inside Gung Ye’s castle, ruins of a tenth-centu-
ry civilization that sits abandoned today in the DMZ. Closer to the surface, nous
would discover the industrial layer, zinc mines close to the border, et, bien sûr,
railroad tracks. That very railway where my voyage started, the Gyeongui Line,
passes through the DMZ. In its excavation we might come to know a much more
complicated history of the ways that imperialism and industrialization have
shaped the DMZ. The Gyeongui Line, though planned by the Korean government
of the late nineteenth century, was replanned and built by the imperial Japanese
government that occupied Korea from 1910 à 1945. This railway line was seen by
the Japanese colonizers as the tool of modernization in the peninsula, unifying
the economic regions of Manchuria and allowing for rapid deployment of Jap-
anese troops. Industrialization and violence, together as always. The DMZ will
hold traces of this imperial past, underneath a thicker layer of debris marking
the Korean War from 1950 à 1953. Specially authorized excavations here, for ex-
ample, in the 1990s and 2000s uncovered sixty-four South Korean war casualties
from those years. One layer closer to the surface we will find undoubtedly the
markers of atmospheric nuclear testing (that’s a global marker). The most dan-
gerous reminder of industry is here at this level as well: there are an estimated
two million land mines in the DMZ.

Now let’s come up to the surface layer of our time: Since 2002, the jointly man-
aged Kaesong Industrial Region has offered the promise of collaboration by the
North and South, a sort of protoreunification experiment (closed for a while, due
to re-open); it is telling that industrial production was seen as the most promis-
ing way to accomplish this détente. To both North and South, depuis 1953, mov-
ing toward vastly different political goals, intensified industrialization has been
the strategy. The Anthropocene, we might say, is ideologically pluralistic. To para-
phrase sociologist Ulrich Beck: industrialization can be authoritarian or it can be
democratic; pollution is pollution and it doesn’t respect boundaries.9

We don’t know how this Anthropocenic excavation will end: another war de-
bris and nuclear layer, or a thicker layer marking the slow disaster of warming,
aridity, and pollution?

Or is there another option? I don’t think any of us would be willing to work
on slow disaster and Anthropocene research if we didn’t actually, maybe quietly,
hold onto the idea that a course correction is possible, that a path away from the
apocalypse is at hand, that we don’t have to die in the Anthropocene after all, que
the field notes of the Anthropocenic DMZ excavation may indeed someday be col-
lected by a person visiting a wildlife refuge.

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D isasters concentrate violence in moments. The emergency manage-

ment bureaucracy draws lines around events that seem containable:
dead bodies, acreage burned, insurance claims adjusted. The rush to
make sense is met by the push to rebuild. But disasters are also slow. The failure
of a levee, like the first shot in a war, is the accumulation of political and materi-
al events that stretch back in time, often to indeterminate points. The desire to
bound a disaster in time and place is itself a form of politics, a politics of disas-
ter amnesia, cutting effects off from causes, and from futures. Disaster history is
one tool useful in filling in the erased moments in the record, slowing down the
disaster and analyzing its complete temporality, drawing more players into the
drama, tallying more deaths and financial losses than a “disaster event” tabula-
tion would ever allow. A slow-disaster methodology is crucial if we wish to as-
cribe blame (and sometimes credit) and seek justice for the impacts of disasters
in society.

Climate change, in particular, presents a disaster at the global scale where his-
torical analysis proves necessary. The formation of public policy that can meet the
challenges of climate reality in the twenty-first century relies on an ability to ex-
plain environmental change over long stretches of time, and to connect change
to human actions. The historical profession has already been altered by this chal-
lenge. Climate change has dragged historians across many subfields of research
directly into the public square.10 Indeed, entirely new realms of inquiry like An-
thropocene studies and disaster history have emerged precisely in reaction to the
new public demands for knowledge in the climate debate. Inside the academy, mais
also in the realms of public history, museums, memorials, and artistic practice, un
new consensus is emerging over the responsibility of historians to direct their en-
ergies toward engagement in ways not seen since the civil rights and antiwar bat-
tles of the 1960s–1970s.

The American Historical Association (AHA) with its twelve thousand mem-
bers serves as the largest corporate body of historians anywhere in the world, et
includes U.S. and non-U.S. citizens among its ranks. The AHA’s “Statement on
Standards of Professional Conduct” inscribes the tension between a responsi-
bility to professional practice and the imperative to bear public witness to con-
temporary conflicts. “While it is perfectly acceptable for historians to share their
own perspectives with the public,” the AHA cautions, “they should also strive to
demonstrate how the historical profession links evidence with arguments to build
fair-minded, nuanced, and responsible interpretations of the past.”11

This historians’ code of professionalism deems it “acceptable” to witness cur-
rent events, but only with great caution, and always with the tether back to profes-
sional practice. There is no claim to a deeper moral understanding or to a stronger
sense of responsibility to democracy, or to humanity, than that of the average per-
son on the street. The implication is that a dispassionate analysis of the past may

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yield useful insights into the present, and that’s about as far toward activism as
any historian should go.

Professionalism notwithstanding, the silence of experts in the face of wrong-
doing is not a neutral act, it is itself a mode of speech, a tacit acceptance of the
events of the day, and professional historians know this as well as anyone. Histo-
rians, and not just as private citizens, have at crucial times channeled their profes-
sional authority in the face of moral challenges: the anti-Vietnam War and civil
rights movements counted historians in their ranks. Fifty years ago, a meeting of
the AHA boiled over into direct confrontation between defenders of the profes-
sional status quo versus upstarts who wanted the profession to take a strong stand
on the war in Vietnam and civil rights.12

This moment of radicalism in the profession was not a knee-jerk reaction to
headlines, but instead reflected a previously obscured dialogue between the past
and the present moment. The historiography of the American Civil War before
the 1960s undergirded an anti–civil rights politics for many, many decades; it was
not neutral. En effet, in its presumed fidelity to the historical record–a record im-
poverished of the African American experience–the historical profession stood
as silent as a statue of a Confederate general. But engagement of the profession
and its leading practitioners in the history of race and racism at that moment in
time set a pathway forward to future scholarship. This is precisely how historian
E. H. Carr described the process through which new “facts of history” are discov-
ered: by the re-opening of a historical record that was somehow previously silent
on an issue. The archive, in other words, is always in formation, and this forma-
tion of the past is in direct dialogue with the present, and with the historian as a
witness to the urgency of her times. En effet, when historians start looking, ils
find a record that screams, and in that volume and dissonance they “make” histo-
ry. So there is a causal relationship between the present, moral outrage, the histor-
ical record, and the historical craft.

The AHA itself, protector of the detached historical judgment, has waded into
a number of controversies (not just American ones) over the past three years, est-
suing statements on the 2020 Census, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
(DACA), white nationalism and domestic terrorism, U.S. Immigration and Cus-
toms Enforcement (ICE) raids, and even on actions of the Hungarian government.
AHA Executive Director James Grossman addressed this more activist stance in
2019. “The current moment presents an unusual landscape of responsibility,»
Grossman explained. “I have not been among those who see fascism creeping into
our political processes, but I do see something happening that differs from any-
thing I’ve seen before. If a clear and present danger does exist . . . the AHA has a re-
sponsibility to participate beyond its normal conventions.”13

The regular Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings and Paris Accord dis-
cussions, as well as every climate change summit going back into the 1990s, frame

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climate change as a forward-looking problem. It is an existential crisis at the glob-
al scale. In the midst of these discussions, the past is almost silenced, but not en-
tirely. Those carbon emissions came from real places on the planet, and the envi-
ronmental assault of climate change can be dated. It is not, bien sûr, one event,
one place, one actor–again a problem because such findings would aid in the legal
recovery process, such as those brought about by island states looking now at the
very prospects of moving their entire populations. As of now, the AHA has issued
no statements–and the historical profession has been mostly silent–on the exis-
tential threat of global climate change. But if we consider the recent outpouring of
works on disaster history and the Anthropocene, we can see the historical profes-
sion tuning up for intervention in the politics of climate.

Historians don’t offer forensic certainties. But through excavating the layers of
history as I have presented in this essay–taking core samples of the land on which
we stand today–historians can and must bear witness to the social processes that
have produced climate change. A “slow disaster in the Anthropocene” approach
might show the way forward.

author’s note

The author wishes to thank colleagues of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science
and Technology, and Drexel University, for financial support that led to this essay.
Thanks also to Nancy Rosenblum for intellectual encouragement.

about the author

Scott Gabriel Knowles is Professor and Head of the Department of History at
Drexel University. He is the author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern
America (2011) and is coeditor, with Kim Fortun, of the University of Pennsylvania
Press book series Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster.

endnotes

1 Ben Yagoda, “Is Obama Overusing the Phrase the Wrong Side of History? Are We All?»
Slate, Avril 17, 2014, https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/04/the-phrase-the-wrong
-side-of-history-around-for-more-than-a-century-is-getting-weakened-with-overuse
.html.

2 Jungeun Kim, Kyoung Jun Song, Ki Jeong Hong, and Young Sun Ro, “Trend of Outbreak
of Thermal Illness Patients Based on Temperature 2002–2013 in Korea,” Climate 5 (4)
(2017); and Do-Woo Kim, Ravinesh C. Deo, Jong-Seol Lee, and Jong-Min Yeom, “Map-
ping Heatwave Vulnerability in Korea,” Natural Hazards 89 (11) (2017): 1–21.

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3 See the works of Robert Jay Lifton, for example, “Mind and Habitat: Nuclear and
Climate Threats, and the Possibility of Hope,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Avril 16,
2014, https://thebulletin.org/2014/04/mind-and-habitat-nuclear-and-climate-threats
-and-the-possibility-of-hope/.

4 Will Steffen, Asa Perrson, Lisa Deutsch, et coll., “The Anthropocene: From Global Change

to Planetary Stewardship,” Ambio 40 (7) (2011): 739–761.

5 Scott Gabriel Knowles, “The Other Uncertainty: The View from Disaster History,»
Chancing the Storm, Social Science Research Council, Juillet 23, 2019, https://items.ssrc
.org/chancing-the-storm/the-other-uncertainty-the-view-from-disaster-history/.
6 Chritsophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth,

Histoire, and Us, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2016).

7 Voir, Par exemple, Jason W. Moore, éd., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, Histoire, et le
Crisis of Capitalism (San Francisco: PM Press, 2016); and Donna J. Haraway, Staying with
the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).
8 Peter Coates, “Borderland, No-Man’s Land, Nature’s Wonderland: Troubled Humanity

and Untroubled Earth,” Environment and History 20 (4) (2014): 499–516.
9 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (New York: Sage, 1992).
10 See Climate History Network, http://www.climatehistory.net/; and Dipesh Chak-
rabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2) (2009): 197–222.
11 American Historical Association, “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct,»
updated 2019, https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/statements
-standards-and-guidelines-of-the-discipline/statement-on-standards-of-professional
-conduct.

12 Carl Mirra, “Forty Years On: Looking Back at the 1969 Annual Meeting,” Perspectives
on History, Février 1, 2010, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/
perspectives-on-history/february-2010/forty-years-on-looking-back-at-the-1969
-annual-meeting.

13 James Grossman, “The Megaphone at 400 A Street SE,” Perspectives on History, Octobre
21, 2019, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on
-history/october-2019/the-megaphone-at-400-a-street-se-historians-voice-in-public
-culture.

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & SciencesA Historian Witnesses Climate Change on the Korean Peninsula Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene: image

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