On the weekend of September 26-28, 2008 a Collaborative Workshop on Deliberative Democracy and Climate Change was held in Edmonton at the University of Alberta. This event looked at ways to mobilize citizens around the issue of climate change and its future impacts. If you are interested in climate change or citizen engagement as current issues, I would encourage you to visit the Public deliberation on climate change website, and even to think about joining in the conversation there.
I authored a briefing document on climate change for the workshop. It gives an overview of climate change science, focuses in specifically on likely impacts in Alberta, and also situates Alberta's contribution to the problem within a Canadian and global context. The final two pages of the document list a variety of sources for further reading. You can download the document here, or over at the workshop website.
I found this an interesting opportunity to contribute, as a historian, to a current debate. Authoring the briefing document gave me the opportunity to inject some historical perspective into a debate which like so many these days is historically shallow.
I think that as historians we need to draw attention to the fact that communities and societies have faced ecological crises in the past. Acknowledging this history offers optimism, after all, although the Norse in Greenland didn't survive their climate crisis, the Thule in Greenland did. It's not the climate itself, but social resilience and adaptability that is key.
