Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

Climate change is an issue that's animating politicians, scientists and activists across the world.

But could looking to history help shape our approach to the climate crisis today? In this conversation, the best-selling author and

historian Peter Frankapan and broadcaster and conservationist Chris Packham shared their thoughts

on these topics and more, considering whether

the past offers any optimism for the future. Asking the questions was Matt Elton.

Thank you both so much for being with us today. I'm sure you'll have questions for each other as we go

along, but I wanted to kick off with a question for each of you. Peter, your book charts the dramatic way in which the climate has shaped human civilization across centuries. How do you think that look into the past can help inform our own view of climate and climate change? Well, that's a great question. Thank you, Matt, and Chris, thank you for taking part this conversation. I've got so many questions I have for you, so I'd like to do as little talking as possible and as much listening.

I mean, I guess, look, from my perspective as a historian, I guess there are two sort of obvious things to say. One is when we think about history and how it's taught in classes, it's only about human beings, right? History starts for most people in their classroom at primary school with the Egyptians.

And it comes through to all those sort of great events, the Battle of Hastings and Napoleon,

the First and Second World's War, the horrors and the joys of human civilization.

And I think that that means that when we frame how we think about the world,

we're only thinking about human activities.

And I think it's very important for historians and for us all to

remember that this planet has been a long time before humans arrived. That's the first thing

that we tend not to think about the natural world, but also some of those kind of crises that

we're having at the moment are things like sustainability, biodiversity, a warming world,

changing weather patterns. You know, this is not the first time that

those things have happened. The challenge for us, I think, today is that some of these

accelerations are happening in incredibly quick time, much faster than they ever have done at any

point in history. So I guess from the historian's point of view, that there's only so much you can

learn, if I'm really honest, about looking at the Roman Empire and rainfall patterns or so on.

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