Response to Threats to Science and Heritage in Greenland
The National Science Foundation funded RESPONSE project is part of a larger umbrella program North Atlantic Encounters (NAE) sponsored by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization and the Humanities for Environment Circumpolar Observatory.This program promotes effective trans-disciplinary cooperation across disciplines including environmental humanities, history, social sciences, natural sciences, place-based education for sustainability and arts and media for sustainability.
It promotes co-production of knowledge with local institutions, indigenous communities and scholars and more effective use of digital media for public engagement and education for sustainability.
It makes use of over two decades of collaborative experience by the international NABO cooperative, including productive collaborations both with Nordic researcher networks, such as the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and productive collaborations with local communities in Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland to promote an inter-connected set of projects investigating the experience of human societies in the North Atlantic islands over the past millennium.
That rich archive of human experience encompasses the creation of cultural landscapes and seascapes, significant climate impacts, anthropogenic stresses to ecological systems, medieval and early modern world impacts, participation in different colonial systems, and the onset of modernity.
The NAE program will connect participating local resident communities in Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland while also linking academics and practitioners. It will pool resources, equipment, and staff to carry out vigorous and sustained cross-case, inter-regional comparative work on all periods taking on the “longitudinal” cross temporal perspective of Historical Ecology emphasizing change in places through time.
Prior interdisciplinary collaborative publications by this team have won the American Anthropological Association Gordon Willey Prize for interdisciplinary publication 2007-2010 (McGovern et al 2007) and the biennial European Society for Environmental History St Andrews Prize in 2019 for best article in European environmental history (Hartman et al. 2017).
Thus the current RESPONSE project focuses upon Greenland, but is a part of the larger North Atlantic Encounters program.
Greenland RESPONSE: A short film exploring the archaeologies of climate change in UNESCO Kujataa
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Video credits: Greeland National Museum & Archives 2024
Archaeological sites across the circumpolar north are rapidly degrading as a consequence of rising global temperatures. This short film shares the story of the Greenland RESPONSE project and the archaeologists racing to record and rescue what is left. Focussing on the sub-arctic farming landscape of Kujataa, south Greenland, the film documents the excavations of Norse (Viking) farming settlements dating between the 10th-14th centuries, while exploring the very tangible connections to present-day Inuit farming communities working the same soil. The film is a mixture of English and Kalaallisut. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation with support from the Greenland National Museum, UNESCO Bridges, NABO and the University of Iceland.
RESPONSE Project Photo Gallery:
RESPONSE Project: Latest Posts
UNESCO BRIDGES Program
NABO is now affiliated with the UNESCO BRIDGES Program and the RESPONSE project is part of this, together with the Gateway to the Atlantic: Climate change threats to heritage and island sustainability in the Northern Isles of Scotland project.
BRIDGES is a new UNESCO initiative now moving forwards as a sustainability science coalition proposed for integration in their MOST (Management of Social Transformations) intergovernmental science program.
The intention of the coalition is to better integrate humanities, social science, and local and traditional knowledge perspectives into research, education and action for global sustainability through development and coordination of resilient responses to environmental and social changes at local and territorial scales.
The BRIDGES logo expresses the aim of connection between knowledge holders, disciplines, and practitioners needed to better coordinate effective responses to rapid large-scale change. Further details on NABO’s involvement in BRIDGES can be found here:
| Two Policy Papers about NABO and CUNY in the UNESCO Bridges Program | |
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NABO Project Links:
References
| Two Downloadable Research Papers | |
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Hartman, S., Ogilvie, A.E.J., Hauker Ingimdunarson, J., Dugmore, A., Hambrecht, G. & McGovern, T.H. (2017) Medieval Iceland, Greenland, and the New Human Condition: A case study in integrated environmental humanities. Global and Planetary Change 156, 123-139. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.04.007
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McGovern, T. H., Vésteinsson, O., Friðriksson, A., Church, M., Lawson, I., Simpson, I. A., Einarsson, A., Dugmore, A., Cook, G., Perdikaris, S., Edwards, K. J., Thomson, A. M., Adderley, W. P., Newton, A., Lucas, G., Edvardsson, R., Aldred, O. & Dunbar, E. (9 Jan 2008) Landscapes of Settlement in Northern Iceland: Historical Ecology of Human Impact and Climate Fluctuation on the Millennial Scale. American Anthropologist: 109(1), 27-51. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2007.109.1.27.
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