Mark Carey

Publications
Research Website
Glaciers and Society Website

Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples Initiative

Mark Carey specializes in environmental history and the history of science.He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Davis, and held a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Geography department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Carey's research has focused on several topics: climate change, natural disasters, glacier-society interactions, mountaineering, water, and health/medicine. His goal is to understand dynamic interactions among people, knowledge systems, environmental perceptions, and natural processes.  Carey's interdisciplinary research links many fields - from history to geography to glaciology and climatology. Though he has written most extensively on the Peruvian Andes, he also does international comparative history and has published on Central America, the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean.

Carey's book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society, was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. It won the Elinor Melville Prize for the Best Book in Latin American Environmental History, awarded by the American Historical Association's Conference on Latin American History. One of his articles, "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species," won the Leopold-Hidy Prize for the best article in the journal Environmental History during 2007. For a full list of publications see below or visit his research website with more on his publications.

Carey currently has several ongoing research projects, including:

• Encounters with Ice: How Glaciers Changed the World and Captured Our Imagination. This book project analyzes the history of human-glacier interactions over the last two centuries, showing how and why glaciers captured people's imagination, shaped societies, and affected the evolution of various earth sciences, such as climatology and geology.
• Hydrologic Transformation and Human Resilience to Climate Change in the Peruvian Andes. This is a three-year, million-dollar National Science Foundation grant on climate change and water management in Peru. It is a collaborative project with glaciologist Bryan Mark at Ohio State University, geographer Jeffrey Bury at the University of California, Santa Cruz, bio-geographer Kenneth Young at the University of Texas, Austin, and geo-hydrologist Jeff McKenzie at McGill University. Read more about this project in a recent issue of the journal Nature or in the February 2013 issue of EcoAmericas.
• Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Carey is currently a contributing author to Working Group II for the fifth IPCC assessment report due out in 2014. He is working in particular on detection and attribution of climate change impacts (Chapter 18).
• Mountaineering in South America. Carey has a book-length project on the history of mountaineering in the South American Andes. It builds on his previous work on the mountaineering-scientific activities of the German and Austrian Alpine Club in the Peruvian Andes since the 1930s, published in the Hispanic American Historical Review.
• Climate Therapy and Tuberculosis Health Resorts in South America. This book project examines sanatoria established to cure tuberculosis in alpine Andean areas from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. It explores the evolution of climate therapy to heal patients, and it takes a comparative approach across national contexts in Chile, Peru, and Argentina.
  

An important part of Carey's research is the involvement of undergraduate students. Thanks to grants from the National Science Foundation, Carey has been able to give students valuable research opportunities on a variety of topics over the years -- from field work in Peru, to library and web research, to website design for disseminating research results. 

Carey's courses in the Clark Honors College also provide unique opportunities for undergraduates, such as his Spring 2012 course on "Climate and Culture in the Americas" in which all students presented their research projects at a public national student conference Carey co-organized on "Indigenous Peples and Climate Change." Carey and co-organizer Kathy Lynn, director of the Tribal Climate Change Project and Environmental Studies research, have since established the UO Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples Initiative, with annual events for students, the university, and Eugene - Springfield communities including next April 2013 to correspond with the Climate Change Research Symposium.

Publications

Book:

In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Selected Articles (sole authored unless otherwise noted): 

Jeffrey Bury, Bryan Mark, Mark Carey, Kenneth Young, Jeffrey McKenzie, Michel Baraer, Adam French, Molly Polk, and Kyung Huh, "New Geographies of Water and Climate Change in Peru: Coupled Natural and Social Transformations in the Santa River Watershed," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103, no. 2 (2013): 363-374.

"Beyond Weather: The Culture and Politics of Climate History," in Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, ed., Andrew Isenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, in press).

"Climate and History: A Critical Review of Historical Climatology and Climate Change Historiography," Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews – Climate Change 3 (2012): 233-249.

Mark Carey, Adam French, and Elliott O'Brien, "Unintended Effects of Technology on Climate Change Adaptation: An Historical Analysis of Water Conflicts below Andean Glaciers," Journal of Historical Geography 38, no. 2 (2012): 181-191.

"Mountaineers and Engineers: The Politics of International Science, Recreation, and Environmental Change in Twentieth-Century Peru," Hispanic American Historical Review 92, no. 1 (2012): 107-141.

"From National Parks to National Archives: The Diplomacy of Research in Latin America," in Research Beyond Borders: Multidisciplinary Reflections, eds. Lise-Hélène Smith and Anjana Narayan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books of Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 23-35.

Mark Carey, Christian Huggel, Jeffrey Bury, César Portocarrero, and Wilfried Haeberli, "An Integrated Socio-Environmental Framework for Glacier Hazard Management and Climate Change Adaptation: Lessons from Lake 513, Cordillera Blanca, Peru," Climatic Change 112, nos. 3-4 (2011): 733-767.

"Inventing Caribbean Climates: How Science, Medicine, and Tourism Changed Tropical Weather from Deadly to Healthy," Osiris 26, no. 1 (2011): 129-141.

"Commodities, Colonial Science, and Environmental Change in Latin American History," Radical History Review 107 (Spring 2010): 185-194.

"Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future Directions," Environmental History 14, no. 2 (April 2009): 221-252.

"Disasters, Development, and Glacial Lake Control in Twentieth-Century Peru," in Mountains: Sources of Water, Sources of Knowledge, ed. Ellen Wiegandt (The Netherlands: Springer, 2008), 181-196.

"The Politics of Place: Inhabiting and Defending Glacier Hazard Zones in Peru's Cordillera Blanca," in Darkening Peaks: Glacial Retreat in Scientific and Social Context, eds. Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian Luckman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 229-240.

"The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species," Environmental History 12, no. 3 (July 2007): 497-527.

"TheNature of Place: Recent Research on Environment and Society in Latin America," Latin American Research Review 42, no. 3 (2007): 251-264.

"Living and Dying With Glaciers: People's Historical Vulnerability to Avalanches and Outburst Floods in Peru," Global and Planetary Change 47, no. 2-4 (July 2005): 122-134.

"La influencia Mayangna en la historia de la Costa Atlántica nicaragüense," Revista de Historia 14 (2002): 73-88.

Mark Carey conducting research at Lake Palcacocha, Cordillera Blanca, Peru.