Climate Witness: Oral Environmental History and Community-Based Research—A Case Study from Trans-Himalayan India

Abstract

ABSTRACT On August 5, 2010, a violent cloudburst dumped fourteen inches of rain on Ladakh, a mountain desert region in the far north of India accustomed to getting just three inches of rain in a year. Five years later, flooding recurred on a wider scale, destroying buildings, roads, fields, and orchards all over Ladakh and provoking a wide-ranging discussion among locals about the causes of climate catastrophe. In this essay, we attend to those local voices and allow the people of Ladakh to speak for themselves about the causes and consequences of climate change as well as the best forms of climate change adaptation in the trans-Himalayan region. We offer a two-year progress report on our ongoing oral history fieldwork in this unique and ecologically sensitive high desert region. At the same time, we offer some reflections on the discipline of oral history itself and the promise it offers in conjunction with community engagement to the study of climate change. The surprising fact remains that despite much recent and inspiring work at the compelling intersection of oral and environmental history, few oral historians have taken on directly the subject of climate change, and those who have tend to dwell on the specific experience of the American West. Here we join those few oral and environmental historians who are approaching climate change by way of global community engagement. Only by way of such engagement, we argue—only by following the best practices of what has come to be known as community-based participatory research, can oral history fulfill its public mission as we understand it and contribute decisively to the humanistic study of the Anthropocene.