Can Historical Newspapers Be an Antidote to the Environmental Crisis?
Our environmental crisis is tethered to an aesthetic and rhetorical crisis. So many institutions grant the public “free” access to archives, but what if—as an ordinary citizen—you can’t even find the door? This talk will consider barriers to information, how such obstacles may exacerbate the environmental crisis, and what newspapers can do that many resources cannot to help unlock knowledge for those who need it most. Kerri Arsenault is a literary critic, co-director of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University, contributing editor at Orion magazine, and author of "Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains (2020)." Recently, she was a Democracy Fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and a fellow at the Science History Institute. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.