Only Connect: Why History Really Matters

In the latest of our articles on climate change and the study of history, Mark Levene makes an impassioned plea for historians to leave the comfort zone and spell out where globalism is taking the planet – before it is too late.

But what has this got to do with the vast majority of us who do not live in the countryside, or work the land, or who were not born in England? In situating the History Matters campaign outside the experience of an urban, increasingly diverse and multicultural Britain, what it actually suggests is an underlying anxiety about the nature of contemporary national cohesion. More crucially, by setting humanity’s relationship to nature almost in aspic, the campaign failed to confront what should matter to all lovers of history, whatever their background: the possibility of its continuing supply coming to an untimely and catastrophic end.
 

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