t is to point out that history is living and relevant to current concerns, not the “dead hand of the past,” as some might see it

From that initial realization that humans are forcing global climate change, we have now come to understand that humans are changing, overwhelming, or displacing other global processes of nature as well, on scales never before seen in human history

McNeill observed that he thought that a hundred years hence, at the end of the twenty-first century, historians and others looking back at the twentieth century would be struck by the significance, not of the two massive world wars, the rise and fall of fascism and communism, the explosive growth of the human population, or the women’s movement, but of the changed relationship of humans to Earth’s natural environment.

The past may not change, but our history of it does. History—the narratives that historians write—is relevant to us because historians are influenced in their selection of what and how to write about the past by their engagement with issues and problems that confront us today.