Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
TEMPERED DREAMS
RICHARD WHITE
I come from a discipline, history, whose whole orientation is retrospective.
Except on the grandest of scales, neither I nor most of my colleagues can
offer much in the way of predictions that anyone who cares to examine our
track record will care to trust.
History's strengths are more humble; they are context and contingency,
and they are an odd pair. For historians context equals historicizing. It is
their basic enterprise. It is about what particular pieces are, and are not, on
the table at any given time, how they got there, and, just as critically, the
relationships between them. It is hard to play the game if you don't know
the rules and you don't know the score. Context is about the rules and the
score. But context is also about where we, as both pieces and players, fit in.
To fail to see yourself in historical context is to badly mistake where you
are and how you got there. Knowing where you are and how you got there
is, at the very least, helpful in figuring out how to get where you are going
and, perhaps, even in deciding where you want to go.
Unfortunately, all the context in the world doesn't explain tomorrow,
which is where you always end up. Tomorrow is as much about contin-
gency as context. Rules change. New pieces appear. The world is not, of
course, totally remade, but sometimes events do take off in a dramatic new
direction. Ecologists and historians are the academics whose disciplines
most appreciate contingency. Things are connected; thus, after something
happens, most things that follow are different. The film
It's a Wonderful Life
is about contingency. It became Stephen Gould's metaphor for evolution.
Contingency is the stock of the historical trade.
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Contingency depends on scale. Historically, the smaller the scale, the
greater the amount of contingency. Our individual lives are more contin-
gent than the national life, but even the national life can shift because of
