“Historicizing Adaptation” is a blog series launching today that will publish on Thursdays for the next few months. This series will feature environmental historians and scholars in allied fields reflecting on adaptation in historical perspective. Some participants will do so by considering particular historical episodes, with case studies ranging from enchanted landscapes in medieval Wales through resilience among Wyandot women to the politics of the built environment in contemporary Winnipeg. Other scholars will take a more conceptual approach, considering, for instance, how notions of adaptation figure in pedagogical practices and strategies of resources management. Together, the short pieces in this blog series offer many useful prompts to thinking about what we mean when we talk about adaptation and about what adaptation has meant in the past.
The fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established the context for many contemporary discussions of the notion of adaptation. Released in 2007, the report included attention to adaptation alongside the focus on science and mitigation that had shaped earlier IPCC Assessment Reports. Increasing society-wide acceptance that climate change is not just real but also already underway has helped prompt many parties to consider adaptation, even while contention persists around how best to pursue adaptation. Subsequent Assessment Reports by the IPCC have continued to address questions of adaptation. The fifth Assessment Report, released in 2014, exhibited new concern with questions of global equity, including attention to differential opportunities for and barriers to adaptation. More recently, the sixth Assessment Report (2023) established gaps and challenges in current adaptation efforts.
My own interest in conceptualizations of adaptation took root in the context of a recently-completed project on Canada’s Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, a Canadian federal government agency created to target the agricultural and economic crises of the 1930s on the northern Great Plains/Canadian Prairies. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, as concern over anthropogenic climate change continued to increase, some scholars examined the by-then defunct agency for insight into potential adaptive strategies.1 My own work on the agency highlighted drawbacks to adaptation as driven by the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration and addressed how other-than-human actors like the wheat stem sawfly (image below and further discussed here) took advantage of changed agricultural practices. My current research on water management on the Canadian prairies deals extensively with irrigation, which IPCC reports cite as a critical adaptive strategy in agricultural regions.
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As I have continued to research prairie environmental history, and as I have followed evolving public discourse around climate change, the notion of adaptation has come to seem less and less obvious. How have different groups and communities defined adaptation? In what ways have these understandings persisted or changed over time? According to historical actors, what are the boundaries between adaptation and maladaptation or failure to adapt? How have adaptive strategies figured in relations between and within communities? In what ways might historicizing adaptation help us to better understand questions of inequity and injustice, in the past and also in the present day? For all the importance of public and scientific discussions that couple adaptation to the science and mitigation of climate change, these discussions typically don’t fully accommodate the potential complexity of the notion of adaptation.
Indigenous scholars and thinkers have had important things to say about adapting to catastrophic change. As numerous commentators have asserted, and as contributors to this series will further explore, many Indigenous communities are themselves survivors of colonial apocalypse, with the resilience and richness of contemporary Indigenous nations reflecting their success in adapting and resisting. About a third of the blog posts included in the “Historicizing Adaptation” series will profile Indigenous peoples’ strategies of adaptation. Together, these posts showcase some of the ways Indigenous communities from across North America and elsewhere have worked to safeguard what they can and to perpetuate what matters most to them. These posts invite us to appreciate anew the diversity of Indigenous cultures as manifest through adaptation. We might also consider the prospect of understanding colonialism as a structure that increases the difficulty or raises the stakes for processes of adaptation, even while colonialism creates conditions in which colonized peoples are forced to adapt to often devastating changes.
Environmental historians and scholars in allied fields have come at questions of adaptation to climate change from various angles. Some have made the case for the importance of historical approaches in large-scale efforts to understand societal responses to climate change.2 Others have proposed that particular historical moments like disasters might offer especially fruitful opportunities to think hard about questions of adaptation and related concepts like resilience.3 The blog posts in this series consider a wide range of places, periods, and perspectives, making clear that environmental historians and allied scholars find it productive to ask questions about adaptation at various analytical scales and in response to an array of historical circumstances. Many of these posts help illuminate the specific understandings of adaptation that historical actors developed and deployed, marking the need for caution in applying modern-day notions of adaptation to the past. Insofar as some posts also accommodate the prospect that adaptation might be the subject of contestation, this blog series suggests the importance of considering the plurality of approaches and perspectives that might underlie the ideal of adaptation. Adaptation, it seems clear, has had complex and multiple meanings in the past, underlining the need to consider the concept with care and nuance in the present.
Inspired by the contributions to this series, and recognizing that my thinking continues to evolve, I’ve come to think of adaptations as carefully calibrated and conscientiously maintained relations between continuity and change, relations that are defined by the perspectives and worldviews of those who participate in calibrating and maintaining them. From this perspective, and insofar as the evidence-based study of continuity and change is fundamental to the work of many historians, it seems likely that historians and allied scholars are positioned to make valuable contributions to our understandings of adaptation. The idea of adaptation – so important in the contemporary moment, so varied in its historical incarnations – might particularly benefit from the sort of culturally-specific, context-rich examinations that are regularly undertaken by environmental historians and allied scholars. Contributors to this blog series do admirable work in moving us further forward in our thinking about adaptation in historical perspective, and also in establishing there is much further reflection to be done on this matter.
The first post in the “Historicizing Adaptation” blog series will appear on Thursday 6 March 2025, with subsequent posts following weekly. “Historicizing Adaptation” is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Feature Image: Image is part of the University of Lethbridge Library Digitized Collections, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Lethbridge Research Center Photo Collection, P24-21.1. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
Notes
1. Marchildon, Gregory P, “Drought and Public Policy in the Palliser Triangle,” in Vulnerability and Adaptation to Drought: The Canadian Prairies and South America, eds. H. Diaz, M. Hurlbert, and J. Warren (University of Calgary Press, 2016), 181-197; Gregory P. Marchildon, Suren Kulshreshtha, Elaine Wheaton, and Dave Sauchyn, “Drought and Institutional Adaptation in the Great Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1914-1939,” Natural Hazards 45 (2008): 391-411; Robert McLeman, Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Present Challenges (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 168-177; R. A. McLeman, J. Dupre, L. Berrang Ford, J. Ford, K. Gajewski, and G. Marchildon, “What We Learned from the Dust Bowl: Lessons in Science, Policy, and Adaptation,” Population and Environment 35 (2013): 417–40; Jim W. Warren and Harry Diaz, Defying Palliser: Stories of Resilience from the Driest Region of the Canadian Prairies (Regina: University of Regina and Canadian Plains Research Centre Press, 2012).
2. George C. D. Adamson, Matthew J. Hannaford, and Eleonora J. Rohland, “Re-thinking the present: the role of a historical focus in climate change adaptation research,” Global environmental change 48 (2018): 195-205; Dagomar Degroot, Kevin Anchukaitis, Martin Bauch, Jakob Burnham, Fred Carnegy, Jianxin Cui, Kathryn de Luna et al., “Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change,” Nature 591, no. 7851 (2021): 539-550; Rowan C. Jackson, Andrew J. Dugmore, and Felix Riede. “Rediscovering lessons of adaptation from the past,” Global Environmental Change 52 (2018): 58-65.
3. Bas van Bavel, Daniel Curtis, Jessica Dijkman, Matthew Hannaford, Maïka De Keyzer, Eline Van Onacker, and Tim Soens, Disasters and history: The vulnerability and resilience of past societies (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
