Climate, Environment, and Society in Medieval Central Eurasia - Amanda Wooden and Henry Misa

CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

7.21.22 Henry Misa provides an almost two-thousand-year-long context for the modern climate crisis in Central Eurasia. He gives an overview of climatic and environmental change in Central Eurasia stretching from around 400 to the 1960s, and discusses the ongoing debates within the historiography of climate and society in Central Eurasia with a focus on the medieval period. Amanda Wooden brings together mining histories, political ecology, and modern environmental perceptions in Kyrgyzstan. The history of mining in Kyrgyzstan connects extractivist colonization, post-Soviet neoliberalism, and contemporary national climate change politics. During the aftermath of the Soviet Union disbanding, the Canadian mining company Cameco developed the largest productive gold field in Kyrgyzstan, Kumtor, the only open pit mine in the world removing glacial ice to access ore. Wooden outlines conceptualizations of these mountains and glaciers over time, including today’s renewed socio-nature ideas competing with modernistic views of these lively geological bodies. Amanda E. Wooden is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Henry Misa is a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University, Department of History, specializing in premodern Central Asian history.