FACULTY – Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Program in the Environment
Please note that this interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
To start, could you tell us a little bit about your current research?
Dr. Perrin Selcer: “I’m researching a project that I’m calling “The Holocene Is History: Human Nature at the End of the Last Ice Age” and I’m looking at two things. One is the history of the science of understanding what we call the deep past. Not quite the history of hundreds of millions of years, not human history, but the in-between. The time scale that we’re thinking about is at the end of the last Ice Age, which happened officially 11,700 years ago, the start of the Holocene, the geologic epoch in which we live. The ice sheet started shrinking about 22,000 years ago and kept shrinking up to several thousand years ago but about 12,000 years ago was a dramatic moment of catastrophic climate change, which marks the end of the last Ice Age. So looking at that period of change is also the moment when we have the stories of our origins of civilization that developed over the last 150 years. Where we have stories about mass extinctions of megafauna and the origins of agriculture, which leads to the development of complex states, happening during this period of rapid climate change. So how do we get these stories about that, where’s the science coming from? How’s the science developed? Second, is trying to understand what were the real environmental changes that happened then. I’m telling both the environmental history of the changing landscapes, human responses to those changes, and human impacts on changing those environments. But also the history of how we know what we know, how sure we are about what we know, and how that knowledge is implicated in our current environmental politics today.”
What do you wish people had a better understanding of from your research?
Dr. Selcer: “I would say the goal of my research is to help us think about these larger time scales that we’re not comfortable in, that we have to be able to understand if we’re going to be responding to the climate crisis now. One of the things about my research is that when we think about these deep time scales, it’s important to know that change was also happening at a daily and a seasonal level, and that things were happening even before we had a historical record. So a lot of our sense of events unfolding over millions of years is about the resolution that we have looking back through the fossil record. But in fact, daily life decisions were being made, species were changing, and big events like some of these mass extinctions unfolded in a day or centuries. Climate change at the end of the last Ice Age, we have a 10-degree Celsius drop and rise in the temperature over Greenland in a decade. So the Earth system itself, in planetary time, moves at multiple tempos and temporalities. An extension of that is that the earth is quite sensitive to change. So it is prone to make drastic, quick changes. We have to be aware that at the same time, there’s a lot of continuity through these changes and individual species, animals, and organisms were able to survive changing climates. Some of the species that went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age had survived multiple periods of equivalent climate change in the past. So something happened differently at that moment that prevented them from changing their ranges and adapting. We can see similar things happening today in terms of range changes due to climate change or habitat loss. Species are resilient, strong, and can change more quickly than we sometimes give them credit for. Looking at individual species seriously and thinking about how we can support them through the rapid changes that are happening is important. One of my favorite examples is the loons who have tens of millions of years of evolutionary history. Their range is changing drastically, but the areas that they’re nesting in today were covered in ice 15,000 years ago so they’re able to adapt to these kinds of changes. We have to have an active hand in supporting strong, resilient environments as well as mitigating our effects on these places.”
As a historian, how do you look at time scales differently? Or how do you make sense of the difference in scales, from human history to geologic time?
Dr. Selcer: “It’s a fun challenge and kind of the center of my research. I think that in some ways, different time scales make different things visible and they can provide powerful insights into how change has happened over the history of our planet, but they also can obscure things. Through a geologic time scale of millions of years, you’re not even looking at species in the fossil record, you’re generally looking at genera or families and you’re seeing these sorts of dynamics change. And that kind of perspective does provide important insights, but they’re different and make more specific kinds of history invisible. So in one sense, choosing the right scale for the kinds of questions, analysis, and interventions you want to make is critically important in understanding what you’re not seeing. At the same time, there’s this issue about the need to understand how these different scales are interacting at different periods of time, that they’re all kind of functioning simultaneously. We have trouble, maybe it’s even impossible to have a synoptic view that integrates them all simultaneously. One of the things I’ve learned from this research is that this unfathomable sense of geologic time is not very helpful. One of the messages is that well, humans aren’t that important, and that can have a spiritual, powerful sense of the majesty of the universe that we’re in, which I do appreciate. I don’t want to discount that, but it can also have the effect of making you feel insignificant in terms of the kind of issues that we’re facing, which I don’t think is true and is not always helpful. In the same sense, hanging out with geologists and paleobiologists, they can fathom these times. Once you get practiced at it you can go out in the environment and see hundreds of millions of years of time passing, see where epochs are missing, and be awed by your appreciation for it, rather than by the kind of overwhelming sense of, wow, I can’t possibly understand that.”
Where do you see the humanities in the climate change conversation?
Dr. Selcer: “It’s critical that when we’re thinking about sustainability, environmental justice, and climate change, that we include the humanities and social sciences in those conversations. Because in some ways, the technical issues and the scientific issues are the easiest to solve, but we feel hopeless, yet we have solutions, we have those technologies available now. The relationships that are getting in the way, in some ways, these human relationships are really harder to work through. And I do think that history and anthropology and literature and philosophy and all sorts of other disciplines and specialties and other voices outside of the academy play a critical role.”
What advice do you have for other educators?
Dr. Selcer: “Well, for me and many of my colleagues, I think that we tend to, or I tend to look at these issues in terms of environmental justice more than sustainability. Sustainability doesn’t imply or include for whom, it kind of assumes that this planet is going to be working for everybody equally. From history, I take that these kinds of massive changes have happened, and learning to live with change is really key, and to be able to do that ethically it helps to adopt a justice platform. Which is to ask, who’s going to win and who’s going to lose from the kinds of changes, that makes you pay attention to the vulnerable peoples and the accountability for who’s actually causing these kinds of changes. But also environmental justice includes nonhumans: plants, animals, and organisms. Trying to think about our relationships with them as a part of our community is a more useful and exciting frame, that invites in humanities, social sciences, Indigenous knowledge, and other ways of knowing in addition to the natural sciences.”
