Climate Pathfinder: History is the Guide

Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., Justin Shapiro was fascinated by key questions that connect the past to the present and future. “I started to consider questions like, how does a city like Buffalo – with a diminished tax base – reconcile its environmental past with its economic present?” Shapiro said, a Duke postdoctoral associate at Nicholas School of the Environment. These are the types of questions – about pollution, responsibility, political and personal impact – that have shaped Shapiro’s scholarly life. Shapiro, a historian who is in his third year of a postdoctoral fellowship at…