HCE is an interdisciplinary research group at NTNU employing historical and cultural perspectives to address current environmental challenges.

With the acknowledgment that we have entered the Anthropocene, the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has become problematic. We are now painstakingly aware of the human fingerprints on every part of our planet’s environments – from large oceanic and climatic systems to small insects and tiny microorganisms. Rather than lamenting this development as the end of nature, we should grasp the opportunities that lie in the realization that nature and human culture are tightly interwoven. If nature is not timeless, it has a history. If humans have thoroughly affected all planetary environments, this is also a human history – and a cultural history. A history that we should study and learn from.

The environmental challenges we currently face are very real, grave, and not rarely induced by modern humans. Finding sustainable solutions to them feature high on the international agenda. But where do the problems come from? In order to tackle current challenges of biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution and degrading natural resources, we should address the recent and distant past to understand their roots. We should learn from the failures and successes of past initiatives to tackle environmental problems. We should delve deeply into the cultural conditions and conceptualizations of nature and humans that enabled, and made reasonable, environmental degradation. We should also examine human-nature interactions that proved sustainable, and that might show us a way to live with and off nature past our own lifetimes. We should investigate the entangled dynamics of cultural and environmental processes over time. And we should address the temporality of our current society and environment, to comprehend properly that we have a past that we need to relate to – and a future that we need to attend to.