The oral history and folklore of Climate Change and an extension of what we mean by PLACE.
In working with a few different oral history programs, I have always been intrigued by how much information these interviews about rural life in North Carolina, Arkansas, or central Kentucky contain about climate change. When men and women in their 80s and 90s discuss their childhoods, they often recall extended winters, greater amounts of snow, creeks running so deep they would flood their banks, and trees so filled with robins that robin soup was a popular dish.
Oral history is often seen as a way to gather human history. Folklore interviews tell us about the community’s lifeways. These oral history interviews were conducted to learn more about the history of communities not the depletion of water in central Kentucky. Yet, why do we see these as two different topics? More and more we realize (or re-realize) the interconnectivity of our lifeways with that of our larger environment. But this knowledge has to spawn action and be a part of the way we conceptualize cultural studies and human-centered, one on one research.
This morning I just read the following article, linked from the MADRE webpage. Containing comments from the leader Wangari Maathai who worked to begin the Green Belt Movement,
this article connects climate change to women’s issues and women’s daily lives, to foodways, to the folklore of daily life. Please read it.
My point here, which may seem both obvious and even pointless is that we can’t separate oral history from daily life; we can’t separate cultural studies from climate studies; we can’t separate people from place. Our knowledge of this interconnectivity has to lead to action–both large and small. I think we can begin by seeing the ways in which our work as students of culture is inseparable from our lives on this planet. We talk a lot about the concept of place, but I think we must enlarge this concept to think about place in a way that acknowledges environmental degradation.