Towards a Librarianship of the Future: Fostering Cultural Adaptation to Climate Change

Towards a Librarianship of the Future: Fostering Cultural Adaptation to Climate Change

In Brief
The field of library science is paying increasing attention to anthropogenic climate change by exploring best practices for mitigating damage from environmental disasters and participating in climate action. This work is valuable, but it does not necessarily take on the cultural dimensions of climate adaptation. How are unquestioned ideas about time and decay supporting the carbon-heavy preservation of archival materials? How can libraries promote interspecies kinship, consider the legacy of industrial colonialism, and acknowledge the emotional impact of environmental destruction? To approach these questions, this article introduces thinkers from the environmental humanities and Anthropocene scholarship and applies their work to the field of library science. It explores alternatives to linear concepts of time, affective materiality of archival objects, palliative death ethics, and Indigenous perspectives of climate change as the legacy of industrial colonialism. The article concludes by suggesting ways that institutions can promote cultural adaptation to climate change.
By
Nora Zahn
Introduction
Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin begins her 1985 epic,
Always Coming Home,
with a brief chapter titled “Towards an Archaeology of the Future.”
1
The most likely intention is not to promote new standards to modernize the field of archaeology (“towards an archaeology
for
the future”), nor is it to envision or influence what archaeological practice may look like decades or centuries from now (“towards a
future archaeology”
). Rather, the book is a fictional ethnography of a people living in what we know as California’s Napa Valley thousands of years from the present day. What Le Guin likely means by the phrase is the most grammatically simple yet conceptually brain-melting interpretation: to replace the past with the future as the object of archaeological study. She is telling us to turn our heads and look in the opposite direction.
The dissonance of studying the ruins of a society that doesn’t yet exist is apt for approaching the Anthropocene, the Earth’s current, unofficial geological epoch characterized by the ecosystem-altering impact of
Homo sapiens
and resulting planetary disruptions.
2
Since the term was coined in the early 2000s, scholars from various academic disciplines have considered its implications as a framework that elevates human behavior to the level of worldshifting ecological events.
3
One such discipline is the environmental humanities, a field that emphasizes narrative and culture in approaching environmental challenges. Through an interdisciplinary lens combining the political, anthropological, literary, and/or philosophical, the field is united by the belief that humans and nature are intertwined. The environmental humanities welcomes traditionally excluded or undervalued perspectives into the discourse, with a particular openness to…