Thursday, September 9, 2021, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT
Patrick Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History
“How Should We Think About Environmental Crises?”
The idea of the end of the world has been central to American history since the Puritans. After the atomic bombs of 1945 it became possible to imagine that the world would be destroyed not by an angry God but by human folly. Fears over nuclear weapons and then over environmental issues like pollution, over-population, and resource exhaustion led to a succession of alarms in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and finally to expressions of dread that global warming will be apocalyptic. In today’s Colloquium, the first of the Fall 2021 series with which we are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Emeritus College, Dr. Allitt will review the history of environmental alarms to show their continuity with the jeremiad tradition and older forms of American catastrophism. And he’ll discuss whether he still holds with the un-catastrophic views he expressed in his 2014 book, A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism.