CATS Annual Lecture History, Climate Change and the Anthropocene: Finding Hope in Japan

Climate change and the Anthropocene not only foreshadow a terrible future, but alter our sense of the past. Our growing productivity, energy use, and numbers once seemed like triumphs of ingenuity, but now pose enormous problems. Indeed, for some, history has become a purely declensionist story. But this talk offers a way forward, first by exploring the differences between “climate change” and the “Anthropocene” as frameworks for history, and second by examining the ways early modern Japan managed to thrive within ecological constraints - and the ways it didn't. Any history of hope in the Anthropocene pivots on lowering our expectations as we move from modernity’s promise of infinite abundance and liberty to the more modest goal of resilience with decency.