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The creation of a new geological era, the Anthropocene, the "age of human impact on earth", offers historians a new prism from which to study history. Questions about "why" - why an event occurred, for example - require new answers in the light of man's influence on planet earth or vice versa, and new methods. A unique challenge for historians, on which the IRD/IMéRA fellow Samuel White is working, with the Past Global Changes (PAGES) Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of Societies (CRIAS) working group.Samuel White is associate Professor in the Ohio State University, Department of History. He is in residence at IMéRA from the February 17 to the July 10, 2020, co-holder of IMéRA/IRD chair on Sustainable Developpement, onto the research project : Climate Reconstruction and Impacts from the Archives of Societies.History’s Anthropocene Questions Ourenquiries into the past change with the present.&#160; New knowledge, new problems, and new politicsraise different questions about the events of history and suggest differentanswers.&#160; A satisfying explanation of theFirst World War, for instance, must be very different today than in 1920 or1950.&#160; Nowwe are entering a new age not only in human history but also earthhistory.&#160; An Anthropocene Working Groupcomposed of experts from more than a dozen specialties has proposed that themid-20th century marks the start of a new geological epoch definedby human influence on the earth system from climate change to massextinction.&#160; An official decision on theAnthropocene is still awaited from the International Commission onStratigraphy, but scholars from the humanities and sciences have already begunto rethink their disciplines in light of the proposed new epoch.TheAnthropocene raises at least three kinds of questions for history.&#160; First, there are questions about theAnthropocene epoch itself, when it began, and what defines it.&#160; Second, there are questions, especially in environmentalhistory, that have become more urgent or interesting in light of Anthropocenechallenges and the growing science of environmental change.&#160; Finally, there are questions—especially ‘why’questions—that historians have already discussed but whose meaning, ormeanings, change as we enter the new epoch.&#160;Most attention has focused on the first two types, where historians andother humanists have found promising opportunities for new projects.&#160; Here, I want to focus on the third type:existing questions that don’t mean what they used to.&#160; This is where history has run into troublingissues.Image by Stux on PixabayIn what ways do the meaning of historical questions change?&#160;  In what ways do the meaning of historical questions change?&#160; In fact, these changes are not very different from the ways that everyday questions demand different kinds of answers in different conversations, depending on context.&#160; Questions—especially ‘why’ questions—request information to provide understanding, whether that information comes in the form of a conversational answer or the more sophisticated formal explanations of history or another discipline.&#160; Nevertheless, the ways that historical questions are changing in the Anthropocene, and therefore the kind of explanations that history needs to provide, are more complicated and less intuitive than what we usually experience.&#160; The pace and variety of changes generate misunderstandings even among scholars.Analyzingthe problem more closely, we can see that there are at least five ways that ‘why’questions alter their meanings: the ‘fragility’ of the outcome in question, thetype of causation sought, structure and contingency in the cause, the contrastset, and the criteria of causal selection.&#160;Complicated or abstract as these may sound, we deal often with each ofthese concepts, often without realizing:The‘fragility’ of an outcome (a philosophical term of art) means what would stillcount as a particular outcome if things had been different.&#160; To take a historical example, would the FirstWorld War still count as ‘the First World War’ if it had started over adifferent issue or in a different year or if Britain or the US hadn’tparticipated?&#160; Does a historicalexplanation of it need to account for exactly the events that happened, or onlyfor the fact that the Great Powers went back to war in the early 20thcentury?&#160; The answer depends on what wefind important about the outcome and its consequences.Thetype of causation refers to the search for ‘effects of causes’ or ‘causes ofeffects’.&#160; Are we asking does aspirin cure headaches, or did aspirin cure my headacheyesterday?&#160; Are we asking does capitalism cause inequalitythroughout history or did neoliberalpolicies cause the rising inequality of the late 20th century?&#160; In other words, are we looking for ananalysis of how one variable tends to control another, or are we looking forwhether a particular outcome depended on certain conditions?&#160; The answer will depend on the issue, ourcontrol over it, and the information we have about it.Structureand contingency refer to whether we see an outcome as the foreseeable product ofa system itself or some unpredictable accident or interference in the system.&#160; For instance, was the 2008 financial panic anunpredictable shock to the globaleconomy or an inherent failing in theeconomy?&#160; The answer depends on how wedefine the systems and how we understand predictability.Thecontrast set refers to the alternatives that our questions imply.&#160; Contrasts are typically between units,conditions, or times. For example, an explanation for the French Revolution of1789 may take the form of causes for a French(not German) Revolution in 1789, a French Revolution(not peaceful transition) in 1789, or a French Revolution in 1789 (not sooner or later).&#160;The right explanation depends on which distinctions matter to us now andwhat alternative outcomes make sense.Finally,most historical outcomes required several necessary elements all comingtogether at the same time.&#160; Thus, thecriteria of causal selection asks which of these equally necessary elements wetalk about as ‘the cause’ or ‘the important cause’ of the outcome.&#160; Returning to the First World War, perhaps theoutcome depended on militarism, nationalism, imperialism, and diplomaticmissteps all at the same time: so where to start when discussingcausation?&#160; The answer might depend onmany criteria, including the closest fit between the condition and outcome or itscurrent ethical or policy relevance.Asthese examples make clear, historians have always had to adjust explanationsfor past events in complicated ways as these five elements of historicalquestions changed.&#160; Why, then, does theAnthropocene present such a unique challenge for historians?Why does the Anthropocene present such a unique challenge for historians? Boththe Anthropocene itself and the growing science of Anthropocene problemsscramble our conventional assumptions about concepts, actors, and evidence inhistory.&#160; Certainties and stabilitiesoften taken for granted in history are no longer certain or stable, formerlyhistorical problems become interdisciplinary, and those other disciplines offernew information and ways of analyzing the past.&#160;Some key problems include:Variability:Features of nature assumed to be fixed now change, inviting a reconsiderationon the fragility and contingency of historical outcomes as described above.Manipulability:Historians’ causal selection has focused on individual decisions or social andpolitical factors thought to be under our control rather than elements (such asnatural disasters) assumed to be uncontrollable.&#160; How do we adjust our analysis of causationfor an epoch when humans influence the whole earth system?&#160; Newpolitical challenges: Just as historians used to assume that only human factorswere under our control, we also assumed that only analysis of human factors hadreal relevance for politics and ethics today.&#160;Urgent Anthropocene problems—and possible solutions—may foreground theanalysis of environmental factors and their analysis as equally or morerelevant than the social and cultural factors in conventional histories.&#160; They also tend to emphasize global challengesand responses, such as greenhouse gas emissions, more than those at a locallevel.Plausibilityof other outcomes: Political and diplomatic failures on major environmentalissues and now the COVID response, combined with technological breakthroughs infields such as renewable energy, may make it easier to imagine avoidance ofcertain environmental problems than positive steps toward adaptation andresilience in the face of change.&#160; Thispresent perspective could reshape our views about what was possible forsocieties facing environmental challenges in the past.Quantification:Facts about the environment and environmental change now come at us in the formof numbers, trends, and visualizations.&#160;The nature of the data itself invites discussion of patterns andcorrelations associated with effect-of-cause analysis rather than the cause-of-effectanalysis typical of (qualitative) historical research.&#160; It focuses our attention on changingfrequencies and magnitudes over time, rather than individual historical outcomes.Integrationof human and natural systems: Anthropocene research increasingly deals withissues that couple natural and human systems into a single whole.&#160; This perspective fundamentally challengeshistorical approaches that have analyzed social, political, or culturalprocesses apart from nature, with environmental factors entering the pictureonly as contingencies.&#160; Modelsand projections: Anthropocene challenges have also advanced the use of vastmodels of these human and natural systems, such as the climate system, to explainpast change and generate future projections and scenarios.&#160; This perspective also changes our notions ofwhat is—and was—foreseeable and therefore what was structural or contingent.We can see the challenging nature of these changes, for example, in scholarship over the societal impacts of past climate change.&#160; Did phases of cooling such as the early modern ‘Little Ice Age’ change history, or did societies adapt and make their own histories?&#160; Did extreme events such as the Tambora eruption and 1816 ‘year without a summer’ generate catastrophes and crises, or were these minor accidents of history?&#160; Did climatic trends drive conflicts, migrations, and other major impacts throughout the past?Image from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Photo Library on PixabayThe complementarity of quantitative and qualitative approachThesequestions have attracted a growing body of research, originally from historiansbut now from geographers and other social and natural scientists.&#160; The research has been divided betweendistinct qualitative and quantitative approaches.&#160; The former, mostly from historians, hasproduced detailed stories about how particular societies have handled climatechanges or extremes; the latter, mostly from social and natural scientists,examines statistical associations between climate data and measurable impacts,usually at a large scale.&#160; These twodifferent approaches have generated much mutual criticism of methods andconclusions, usually on the assumption that the two kinds of scholarship aregiving competing answers to the same questions.&#160;In fact, using our analysis here, we can understand how they’re reallyanswering different questions—or rather different meanings of the same questions—andhow it is Anthropocene perspectives have created this divide:‘Fragility’of the outcome:&#160; Historians’ qualitativeresearch takes each society’s eventual path to climate crisis or resilience asa different outcome, but in quantitative research it is the timing andfrequency of climate impacts across many societies that really counts.Typeof causation: Historical research uses cause-of-effect analysis: i.e., but forthe climate change or extreme event, would the outcome have been the same?&#160; Yet quantitative approaches useeffect-of-cause analysis, using models and correlations to indicate whether aclimate variable tended to control an impact variable.Structureand contingency: Historical research has usually started from the analysis ofsocial systems and studied natural events as a contingent impact, whereas workfrom the sciences might start from a combined socio-natural system and treat factorssuch as different political systems as just incidental variables, likely toaverage out over a large number of cases.Contrastset: Here we probably see the most critical distinctions.&#160; For historians the key question has usuallybeen why one society rather than anotherfaced crisis in the face of climate change or extremes.&#160; The concern has been about the politics,culture, or economics of vulnerability and adaptation.&#160; For quantitative studies, the question hasusually been about variations in the frequency or magnitude of impacts and howthose might correlate with climate variables: that is, a contrast over time rather than between societies.&#160; The central concern is the long-term globalimpact of change in the climate.&#160; Causalselection:&#160; Finally, historians’ causalanalysis—even when it comes to events that combined social and climatefactors—has usually started with human decisions and institutions.&#160; Not only are these the conventional subjectsof history, but they are also assumed to have more immediate political andethical relevance than environmental factors such as climate.&#160; However, quantitative approaches start withclimate as the independent variable, not only for methodological reasons butalso because the research wants to be relevant to contemporary climatechange.&#160; The projected impacts of globalwarming form the subtext of these projects. Eachapproach has its limits.&#160; However, withthis analysis, we can see how the two are mostly complementary rather thancompeting.&#160; To find common ground,scholars should recognize the questions of historical climate impacts as ‘Anthropocenequestions’ in the sense explained above.&#160;Historians need to appreciate the ways that Anthropocene perspectiveschange the nature of their questions, inviting new kinds of answers as well as thecontributions of other disciplines.&#160;Social and natural scientists need to recognize the (pre-Anthropocene)perspectives and questions already addressed by historians, to build on andcomplement their work rather than assuming that new data means addressing aproblem from scratch.Anotherkey takeaway here is that in the Anthropocene, the division of labor betweenacademic disciplines may be less between topics than within topics, and less betweenquestions than within questions.&#160; As‘society’ and ‘nature’ become less distinct, so will the concerns of ‘humanist’and ‘scientific’ approaches. &#160;Yet thiskind of interdisciplinary collaboration will often take more than goodwill, patience,or even theoretical and methodological sophistication.&#160;&#160; It will take some careful reflection on themeaning and changes in the very questions we are trying to answer.