As the planet enters the ‘era of global boiling’, as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it in mid-2023, the urgency of arresting the climate crisis has never been greater. Bringing together expertise from geography, history, international relations, law, political science, and science, this workshop will excavate the deeper roots of this contemporary moment as it has unfolded in Asia and the Pacific. By problematising the notion and uses of ‘crisis’, this interdisciplinary gathering of researchers seeks to reveal the politics that the crisis decades have summoned, whom these politics have served and to what effect, and what alternative futures have been foreclosed since the 1970s. This workshop, the first to focus on contextualising the climate crisis in Australia and the Indian Ocean region, facilitates the development of fresh perspectives on the history, politics and implications of climate change, and establish the foundations for further collaboration.
 

Papers are grouped into the themes of “Framing Crisis,” “Responding to Stockholm,” and “Fuelling the World.” Titles and presenters are as follows:

Dr Aditya Balasubramanian (Australian National University)on Beyond the Oil Shocks: The fuelwood crisis of the 1970s and India

Prof. Nicholas Brown (ANU) on Combatting Nonsense: J.G. Crawford, food, agricultural science, international development, and the environment

Dr. Alexander E. Davis (University of Western Australia) on The Political Ecology of Climate ‘Crisis’ in the Indo-Pacific

Prof. Robyn Eckersley (University of Melbourne) on The Rise of the Climate Emergency

Prof. Mark Howden (ANU) on Reflections on the International Scene

Dr Ben Huf (University of Sydney) on Australia’s First Department of the Environment, 1972-1975

Prof. Melanie Oppenheimer (ANU) on Turning the Red Cross Green? How the Red Cross movement responded to the ‘human environment’ in the early 1970s

Dr Robert Naylor (University of Manchester) on An Adequate Institution for Planetary Concerns: Rockefeller Foundation funding for climate change research projects in the 1970s

Dr Jessica Urwin (University of Tasmania) on Going Nuclear on the Climate Crisis