Everywhere we look, from the photographs featuring the yellow tinge of the Animas River to the vacant flagpole on the South Carolina Capitol grounds, conflicts are putting a spotlight on society’s need for historians.
And yet the number of history majors is dropping. Young people entranced by history are often advised to choose a different major that will give them the skills that society will actually value.
Something is seriously out of whack here.
When the Environmental Protection Agency learned that the crew working at the Gold King Mine had inadvertently released 3 million gallons of wastewater, the need to understand history was as compelling as the need to test water and to appraise risks to health.
Decades before today’s EPA decision-makers and workers entered the picture, the mining rushes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had transformed the interior West. While the plans, actions and choices of the EPA must face scrutiny, that scrutiny will be superficial unless it begins with the deeper history of mining and its complicated legacy in this region.
Focusing our attention only on the present, we court the terrible risk of turning on each other. Without historical perspective, we align ourselves not as members of coalitions devising the best ways to live with our inheritance from the past, but as opponents wielding blame and condemnation.
Teams of historians should serve as first responders when problems created by our predecessors disturb the present. There is nothing mysterious in the job description of these time-traveling ambassadors:
1) Just say “no” to academic jargon and professional self-preoccupation; 2) lay out the origins of the dilemmas that, without historical guidance, will befuddle, vex and, often enough, paralyze even the best-intentioned citizens; and 3) call attention to alternatives, options and paths that, even if they were not taken in the past, remain open and possible.
Journalists often ask historians for background, and many respond energetically and effectively. Nonetheless, the world presents opportunities beyond counting for social entrepreneurs willing to create a new organization to dispatch historians when troubled citizens need their help.
Even with historians operating at full force, a twist of fate like the mishap that took place near Silverton on Aug. 5 will evoke inescapable misery. Trying to clean up a mess, the EPA produced a bigger mess, a sequence of cause and effect that defies a simple analysis. In the presence of unintended consequences and unforeseen outcomes, an entirely unrealistic — and entirely irresistible — desire to reverse time takes over.
Mocking the intense yearning to return to a time that has moved out of our reach, the past remains “another country.” But for all the distance and difference between the past and the present, the border between the two zones is porous and shifting. And in any number of unhappy episodes in 2015, the past is making sudden intrusions — very nearly invasions — into our world.
These conditions call for the launching of a new slogan, celebrating the practical value of an under-utilized profession. “Historians: Don’t Leave Home without One” has a lot to recommend it, but it might present trademark problems.
So how about “Historians: Don’t Confront a Crisis Without One”? That might actually work, inviting us into a more honest and forthright relationship with each other and with those who have preceded us on the planet.
Patty Limerick is faculty director and chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado. She is co-author of the report “Cleaning Up Abandoned Hardrock Mines in the West: Prospect- ing for a Better Future” (2005).
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