Finding Federal Climate Heritage
President Jimmy Carter at a dedication ceremony for the White House solar array on June 20, 1979 (photo source: Bill Fitz-Patrick/Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum/NARA, published as part of the featured link below).
By Marcy Rockman, Lifting Rocks Climate and Heritage Consulting, for the SHA Climate Heritage Initiative
In 2012, as the Obama administration was stepping up its attention to climate change, I was advised to come up with an idea to have in my “back pocket” if the Secretary of the Interior wanted to do something splashy, something high profile but also, hopefully, meaningful. At the time, I was serving with the National Park Service as Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources. The idea I came up with was to designate the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) as a National Historic Landmark. MLO is where in 1958 Charles Keeling began collecting direct measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. His graph of these measurements, the Keeling curve, has become one of the most widely recognized and referenced sources of information about how humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere. NOAA, which manages MLO, was interested, on the provision that such designation would not interfere with ongoing monitoring at MLO and updates to the facility as needed. In the end, no request came and work on the designation didn’t go forward.
What heritage does is ground us in how the present came to be and remind us of other ways of being. As current challenges mount against NOAA and other US federal agencies, climate heritage- places, artifacts, and knowledge that track the history of the identification of modern anthropogenic climate change and efforts to address it- may be more important than ever. MLO is vital for its data now and its decades-long vision. So too are the solar panels President Carter installed on the roof of the White House in 1979 (featured link). Removed in 1986, the panels have continued on and dispersed widely, physical traces of different ideas. As with all heritage, what happens next with these legacies is up to us.
Featured Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/climate/jimmy-carter-solar-panels.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rE4.uyy3.TI9lLdGnIIGn&smid=url-share (gift link)
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or opinions of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
For a listing of all blog posts in this series, visit our Climate Heritage Initiative page.
