Blog

Dan Procter - 25.03 

Why weaving environmental history in works

I was lucky enough to speak at Teachers Talk in Manchester on 1st March 2025. For the talk I ruminated on what the purpose of teaching environmental history in our classrooms was. I had just watched the series on BBC Nature and Us Nature and Us: A History through Art - BBC iPlayer. This is a fantastic watch which underscores humans evolving relationship with the natural world, and is something we, as teachers of history, are best placed to highlight within our curriculums. 

Therefore, with a clearer purpose I put together the summary document (attached) to run through in the talk. An interesting point which is raised in this documentary is human belief systems, which originally often deified animals as Gods, moving towards more recent religions deifying Gods with human characteristics. This shift highlights how we are moving away from seeing ourselves as part of the natural world, and becoming apart from it. The quote at the top of the summary document actually shows how subduing nature is ordained in the Bible. 

To link this to our KS3 curriculums, it is possible to show over the course of time how humans have subdued the environment and moulded it to our needs, with far reaching consequences. Human impact on the environment can be spotlighted in almost every lesson, whether we are discussing the Spanish Armada (deforestation - 4,000 oak trees to build one large warship - 40 hectares of forest!) or Slavery (environmental impact of the plantation system - soil erosion, deforestation, habitat loss...and if put next to each other, the plantations in the Deep South covered an are around the size of the state of Georgia!). 

So this is something we can easily weave and spotlight within our curriculums. It doesn't necessarily need whole new schemes of learning creating - we already teach it. I do not need to say, it is of increasing importance now, we always live with the consequences of the past. As history teachers we could do well to move beyond our political/social/economic analysis of events and include an environmental lens within it.