Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises

What the Future Needs from History

John Haldon editor Adam Izdebski editor Piotr Filipkowski editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Published:15th Jul '22

Should be back in stock very soon

This paperback is available in another edition too:

Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises cover

This is an open access book. 

Histories we tell never emerge in a vacuum, and history as an academic discipline that studies the past is highly sensitive to the concerns of the present and the heated debates that can divide entire societies. But does the study of the past also have something to teach us about the future? Can history help us in coping with the planetary crisis we are now facing? 

By analyzing historical societies as complex adaptive systems, we contribute to contemporary thinking about societal-environmental interactions in policy and planning and consider how environmental and climatic changes, whether sudden high impact events or more subtle gradual changes, impacted human responses in the past. We ask how societal perceptions of such changes affect behavioral patterns and explanatory rationalities in premodernity, and whether a better historical understanding of these relationships can inform our response to contemporary problems of similar nature and magnitude, such as adapting to climate change.

ISBN: 9783030941390

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

347 pages

1st ed. 2022