A Conversation with Dr. Dagomar Degroot: Societal Resilience and Adaptation in the Little Ice Age

In the eighth episode of the Climate History Podcast, PhD candidate Robynne Mellor (Georgetown University) interviews Dr. Dagomar Degroot, director of HistoricalClimatology.com, about his new book: The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720. Dr. Degroot is an assistant professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, where his research focuses on societal resilience and adaptation to abrupt climate change; conflict and climatic trends, particularly in the pre-industrial Arctic; and the environmental history of outer space. His next book, Civilization and the Cosmos, under contract with Harvard University Press and Viking UK (a division of Penguin Random House), will trace how dramatic environmental changes across the solar system influenced human history. At Georgetown, he teaches courses on a range of interdisciplinary topics, from the history of Mars in science and culture to the present-day Anthropocene. He is also the co-director of the Climate History Network, the director of the Climate Tipping Points Project, and the usual host of the Climate History Podcast. 

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In this episode, Mellor and Degroot discuss how the Dutch thrived in the Little Ice Age; the limitations of histories that focus exclusively on disaster stories; the challenges of interdisciplinary work; the keys to getting a job in environmental history; and the culture shock of moving from Canadian to American academia. 

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