History at the End of the World? Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure

A collection of essays from Rescue!History, a group of historians concerned with the challenge of climate change - how we got here and where we go next. Edited by Mark Levene, Penny Roberts and Rob Johnson. 

This collection of essays proposes that climate change means serious peril. Our argument, however, is not about the science per se. It is about us, our deep and more recent history, and how we arrived at this calamitous impasse. With contributions from academic activists and independent researchers, History at the End of the World challenges advocates of “˜business as usual” to think again. But in its wide-ranging assessment of how we transcend the current crisis, it also proposes that the human past could be our most powerful resource in the struggle for survival. Our approaches begin from archaeology, literature, religion, psychology, sociology, philosophy of science, engineering and sustainable development, as well as “straight” history.

About the author

Mark Levene is Reader in Comparative History at the University of Southampton, Rob Johnson is a historian at All Souls College, Oxford, and Penny Roberts is Associate Professor in History at the University of Warwick. There are thirteen other contributors