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This article originally appeared as part of my Climate Control column for the Fall 2023 issue of Ohio Archivist, the official publication of the Society of Ohio Archivists. Climate Control is dedicated to exploring the role of archives and archivists in addressing climate change and environmental issues.  

Climate change is impacting every aspect of our lives. In Ohio, the main impacts of the climate crisis will be increased heat and humidity, an increase in extreme rain events, and the possibility of more severe drought. Such events will impact our professional work as well as our personal lives. For example, more humidity could lead to more mold outbreaks in our collections, extreme rain events could lead to combined sewer overflows and building flooding, and severe heat events could exacerbate chronic health conditions.

Given that the climate crisis is impacting virtually every aspect of modern life, how should archivists go about ensuring that these transformational changes are reflected in our holdings? Where would we even start with such an enormous challenge? One possibility could be exploring a new kind of documentation project that builds off the existing strengths of Ohio’s archives.

American archivists have a rich tradition of documentation projects. Documentation projects have typically been efforts that attempt to identify as many archival records about a particular subject area as possible. Documentation projects were especially popular between the 1970s and 1990s. Although they are not as prevalent today, documentation projects still exist and have significant importance for increasing access and awareness of specific topics. A notable example is Project STAND (Student Activism Now Documented), with its efforts to identify student activist archives at US colleges and universities. 

One of the most comprehensive documentation projects focused specifically on Ohio was the Ohio Labor History Project. The Ohio Labor History Project started in 1975 with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities as a collaborative effort between the Ohio Historical Society, the Ohio AFL-CIO, the Ohio Network of American History Research Centers and the Labor Education and Research Service of The Ohio State University. The project sought to identify as many labor union records and labor activist papers as possible within the state, as well as recording oral histories. Many of these collections were eventually transferred to the Ohio Network repositories. Since collections were typically accessioned into the nearest Ohio Network center, this means that those institutions have labor union records that often reflect some of the major local industries. For example, Ohio University has extensive holdings related to the United Mine Workers, and the University of Cincinnati has related to printing, typography, and paper. The Project published an extensive guide in 1980 with details about all of the known collections, and a bibliography of printed resources on Ohio’s labor history.  

What if we tried to replicate the Ohio Labor History Project as say, the Ohio Climate Change Archives Project? What could this look like? First, we should consider one of the major challenges with environmental policy, which affects not just climate change but also issues like habitat destruction, air pollution, land use, and access to clean water.

One of the greatest challenges in addressing environmental issues is that environmental problems routinely cross political boundaries like cities, counties, states, and even countries. Political jurisdictions rarely map onto the boundaries created by nature, and even when they do (such as borders made up by rivers), nature’s boundaries have a tendency to shift. For example, the Mississippi River has famously changed courses over eons, until the Army Corps of Engineers engaged in a series of river control projects meant to keep the river from migrating. Nature shows us over and over how arbitrary and artificial our political boundaries are. To address climate change and environmental injustice, we need to think more holistically and expansively. One of the ways we can expand our imagination is to shift our thinking towards watershed-oriented solutions and problem solving. 

Watersheds are defined as areas in which all water eventually drains into a specific hydrological feature. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) divides the country into 21 major watersheds, and within each major watershed are many smaller watersheds. To find your local watershed and learn more about local water issues, you can visit the USGS website Science in Your Watershed or the Environmental Protection Agency’s website How’s My Waterway.

Ohio’s history, economy, and culture is shaped by its two major watersheds: the Great Lakes watershed and the Ohio River watershed. What if a climate change documentation project went beyond our state’s political jurisdiction, and was instead organized around our two major watersheds? Of course, we share both of these watersheds with other states and in the case of the Great Lakes, another country. Fortunately, archivists have a long-track record of cooperation across institutions and political jurisdictions. We do not have to be limited by thinking only about our state, and in fact, working across state lines might even make the work of a major documentation project easier.   

What would this look like in practice? Let’s sketch out what it might look like for the Ohio River watershed. We may think of the Ohio River watershed as including only the states that are bordered by the river – Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois. In reality the watershed includes portions of several other states (Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and New York).  

The first step might be for the State Historical Records Advisory Board (SHRAB) in each state to develop a partnership agreement for an Ohio River watershed documentation project (such a step might be the good basis for a major planning grant to facilitate this work). The SHRABs might create a coordinating committee with representatives from each of the watershed states. The representatives would include archivists, but also scientists, environmental policy experts, and community activists. The coordinating committee could come up with a standardized survey instrument for each of the Ohio River watershed’s 14 smaller subregions.

This survey might try to examine the existing scientific records for each subregion, as well as what collections exist related to human-environment interaction, such as agricultural use, land use, transportation, and urban planning. Given that each subregion is likely to have varying concerns related to environmental justice issues, each subregion could identify specific issues that warrant a closer look. For example, which activist groups may be working on the buildout of petrochemical facilities upriver in southeast Ohio and West Virginia, or the issue of combined sewer overflows in the greater Cincinnati region? Do they have archival records they wish to have preserved?

The survey should look both at records already safely preserved in each watershed’s existing repositories, as well as records that are currently held outside of archival institutions. For the latter, additional grant funding for implementation may be needed to designate certain archives within each watershed as a potential “receiving institution” for the transfer of collections, if groups or individuals with important documentation are interested in transferring their records. Given that there may be important archival records held within communities that may understandably wish to keep their records under their own stewardship, this phase could also include post-custodial supporting activities such as training workshops and the hiring of traveling archivists to assist communities as needed.Such a project would be ambitious and require major resources, but the lasting contribution to the historical record cannot be overstated. Archival records have played an important role in helping us understand the trajectory of climate change – from agricultural harvest records, to scientific measurements of pollution levels, to repeat photography projects of glaciers. Investing in documenting climate change as it unfolds across our watersheds would be a profound contribution that archivists can make towards tackling the climate crisis.