Climate Pathfinder: History is the Guide

Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., Justin Shapiro was fascinated by key questions that connect the past to the present and future.

“I started to consider questions like, how does a city like Buffalo – with a diminished tax base – reconcile its environmental past with its economic present?” Shapiro said, a Duke postdoctoral associate at Nicholas School of the Environment.

These are the types of questions – about pollution, responsibility, political and personal impact – that have shaped Shapiro’s scholarly life. Shapiro, a historian who is in his third year of a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke, is studying and teaching why and how certain places carry heavier environmental burdens than others.

As an undergraduate at State University of New York at Geneseo, he explored Buffalo’s environmental legacy: the dividing lines between wealthy and poor communities, white and Black neighborhoods, and more. Then he looked at how that understanding could be applied to experiences in other cities.

Early Inspirations

He moved on to doctoral work at the University of Maryland, working with environmental historian and mentor Thomas Zeller. Shapiro learned how “more productive questions can be asked if we dissolve the boundary between environment and technology, between nature and culture, and between humans and their surroundings,” he said.

Shapiro’s dissertation, now a manuscript in review in advance of publication, applies that framework to public housing in Washington, D.C. It is, as he describes it, an environmental history of public housing that pays close attention to siting, the literal place and ground on which the buildings and people live.

“I hadn’t seen any real deep engagement with the physical features of the land on which public housing was built and its surroundings,” he explained. “My hunch was that these houses were built in places that were usually not the most healthy environments, like some that are wedged between highways and next to incinerators. And my hunch was right.”

His larger claim is unsettling: that the failure of large-scale public housing in the United States cannot be understood without examining the material environments into which it was placed. His specific work is on housing in Washington, D.C. Building codes were ignored. Federal oversight displaced local accountability. Environmental burdens accumulated. Historians, he argues, must pay closer attention these sites.

A Multi-Pronged Look at Climate Issues

Shapiro brings this close attention, care and intellectual specificity into his service and classroom teaching, too. He serves on Duke’s Climate Change Advisory Committee in the education subcommittee and leads Trinity’s first-year “Climate Constellation” built around the course “Let’s Talk About Climate Change.”

All first-year students at Duke take either a Constellation or a Focus course. Students in the Climate Constellation — framed by the question “How Does Climate Affect Our World?” — begin with a sweeping interdisciplinary introduction organized in three arcs: natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities. In the spring, they choose a seminar for further exploration — history, religion, mathematical modeling, science or linguistics.

“It’s like a graduate curriculum in miniature, where students explore broadly across a field and then dig deeply into some specific aspect of the topic,” Shapiro said.

For part of the students’ experiential component this year, Shapiro and Cody Stevens from Duke Facilities organized a tour of Duke’s West Campus steam plant for the 60 students enrolled in the Climate Constellation. Shapiro took the students to the plant to demonstrate how complexes are often screened from view by highways or landscaping. Just as public housing, campus infrastructure is hidden behind hedges and brick facades. “Facilities are this really often overlooked aspect of what happens at Duke,” he said.

”The course has brought students to the Duke Campus Farm, Duke Forest, Duke Gardens, among other places. It really is about bringing all of the pieces of the Duke Climate Commitment together in a yearlong course of study,” Shapiro said.

The Constellation curriculum also brings climate study into the community. Students have learned from documentary photographer Justin Cook and Ann Adams, a resident of Princeville, N.C., whose historically Black community has endured repeated flooding. The aim is to help students see that climate change is not a distant abstraction.

“It’s not just a problem out there,” Shapiro said. “It’s not just a problem in coastal communities or in the Arctic. It’s a problem that’s happening every day in places very close to home.”

Research Informed by History

Not many doctoral candidates write an academic monograph on a subject unrelated to their dissertation while preparing to defend, but Shapiro has. His first book, “The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative: A Vision for 21st Century Science,” examines the scientific response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the creation of a $500 million independent research effort funded by BP.

His next major research project, tentatively titled “Engineering the Anthropocene,” will connect climate science to engineering practice. Shapiro seeks to trace how changing understandings of climate move from federal research programs into engineering curricula and, ultimately, into the built environment. New York City’s evolving seawalls and infrastructure are one case study he is exploring.

“I would hope that from my work, folks begin to realize that climate change is not just a problem on the margins,” Shapiro said. “I can at least tell you the story of how we got here and leave it to you to think about where we might go.”