Climate Histories: Communicating Cultural Knowledge of Environmental Change

人们如何感知和沟通他们所处环境和气候的变化？科学账户通常涉及复杂的温度变化测量和复杂的气象建模。然而，还有其他关于变化的描述，例如，这些可能是通过特定动植物物种行为的变化或通过新类型天气的到来而推断出来的。此外，传达这些变化的形式不一定是技术气象账户的形式。关于气候变化的信息--无论是现在的还是过去的--可能嵌入到民俗、故事、歌曲、诗歌、生活史甚至修道院记录等流派中。可以借鉴科学解释的元素，也可以完全回避科学解释。这些非常不同的“气候历史”在海外和英国都能找到。我们的网络寻求解决如何最大限度地利用气候变化的问题。气候历史是重要的信息来源。它们可以告诉我们很多关于过去发生的环境变化，这对生活在其中的人类(和其他物种)的影响，以及为应对这种变化而采取的策略。但要以面值来看待这些账户也存在困难。它们可能很难获得，而且对分析提出了复杂的挑战。这些问题包括可靠性、流派、受众和表演。可以从它们包含的信息以及听到它们的人的智力和情感反应两个方面对它们进行分析。为了更好地了解这些气候历史，我们需要汇集各种学科的专业知识，包括社会人类学、历史学和人文科学。这些学科各自开发了不同的方法来记录和解释特定类型的交流在其产生的背景下的重要性。我们的网络将把来自这些领域的专家聚集在一起，一方面让他们与自然科学中的气候专家对话，另一方面让对制作和使用气候历史感兴趣的公众进行对话。网络将召开虚拟的方法学研讨会，世界各地的同事将在会上就收集和解释气候历史的最佳方法交换意见。然后，我们将举办一个研讨会，探索研究人员如何为他们在研究期间收集的气候历史开发新的方法。这一活动将在一次公开会议上达到高潮，会上将展示和讨论精心策划的研究。该项目将通过建立自己的网站和相关的论坛功能，在网上保持强大的影响力。这将允许网络成员在活动之间进行持续合作，并代表与普通公众的主要联系点。长远来说，我们的目标是为普通中等教育证书和高级程度会考的地理学生，开发特别适用于学校教学的资源。这些材料将介绍各种气候历史，并说明在不同的社会和文化背景下如何感知和应对气候变化。该网络的成员还将向地方/自然历史学会和学校团体讲解主要的研究活动和研究成果。

How do people perceive and communicate changes in their environment and climate? Scientific accounts typically involve intricate measurements of changes in temperatures, and complex meteorological modeling. However there are other accounts of change, these might be inferred for example through the changing behaviour of particular species of animals and plants or through the arrival of new types of weather. Moreover, the forms in which these changes are communicated are not necessarily those of technical meteorological accounts. Information about climatic change - both current and in the past - may be embedded in genres such as folklore, stories, song, poetry, life histories and even monastic records. Elements of scientific accounts may be drawn upon, or it may be eschewed altogether. These very diverse 'climate histories' can be found both overseas and in the UK. Our network seeks to address how we can make the most of them.Climate histories are a vital source of information. They can tell us a great deal about the environmental change that has happened in the past, the effects this had had upon the humans (and other species) living through it, and the strategies that have been adopted in order to deal with such changes. But there are also difficulties in taking these accounts at face value. They may be difficult to obtain, and they present complex challenges for analysis. These include questions of reliability, genre, audience, and performance. They can be analysed both in terms of the information they contain, and the intellectual and emotional responses of those who hear them. To understand these climate histories better, we need to pool expertise from a variety of disciplines, including social anthropology, history, and the humanities. These disciplines have each developed differing methodologies for documenting and interpreting the significance of particular genres of communication within the contexts in which they are produced. Our network will bring together experts from these areas, putting them in dialogue with climate specialists in the natural sciences on the one hand, and publics interested in producing and consuming climate histories on the other.The network will convene virtual methodology seminars, in which colleagues around the world will share ideas on the methods that can best be used to gather and interpret climate histories. We will then hold a workshop to explore ways in which researchers can develop new approaches to the climate histories they collected during their research. The event will culminate in a public conference, in which the workshopped research will be presented and discussed. This will lay the groundwork for an edited publication and future research proposal, to be developed during the final months of the grant.The project will maintain a strong presence online through the creation of its own website and associated forum features. This will allow the ongoing collaboration of network members between events, and represent the main point of contact with the general public. In the longer term we aim to explore the development of resources of particular use for teaching in schools, aiming at an audience of GCSE and A-Level Geography students. The materials will introduce various climate histories and illustrate the ways in which climate change is perceived and responded to in different social and cultural settings. Members of the network will also give talks to local/natural history societies and school groups, explaining the main research activities and research findings.