Contested climate: the debate on the climatic influence of forests - episode 2

How does one go about researching over a century of newspapers on
the topic of the climatic influence of forests resulting in a few
million hits? This was the daunting task facing Stephen Legg,
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in History in the School of
Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash
University. His research into the 19th century debate of climatic
influence of forests in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the
United States led him to trawl through tens of thousands of
articles online collections such as Trove. This second of two
podcast episodes with Stephen Legg, explores the practical and
methodological issues surrounding the use of online collections
of historical newspapers.


The second half of the podcast focuses on the relevance of the
19th and early 20th century debates on forestry and climate in
the light of modern climate change. Can such parallels be drawn
or does such “presentism” distort the history of what people
thought at the time? These are not just important questions for
historians of climate change but for environmental historical
research in general.


 


Music
credit: “Silica” by
fluffy, available from ccMixter