Dagomar Degroot
Dagomar Degroot is an environmental historian, author, and professor at Georgetown University. He was the 2024–25 Baruch S. Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation at the Library of Congress. His interdisciplinary scholarship bridges the humanities and natural sciences to examine how past societies - on Earth and beyond - responded to environmental change. He is particularly known for his work on climate history, resilience, and adaptation, and for exploring the environmental history of outer space as a dimension of human–environment interaction. He is a proponent of historical scholarship that engages explicitly with present-day concerns, including global catastrophic risks such as climate change, pandemics, and the continued development of artificial intelligence.
Life and education
Degroot was born in Raamsdonksveer, the Netherlands, in 1985. He emigrated to Canada in 1988, and in 2007 completed a B.A in History and English at McMaster University. After earning an M.A. in history from McMaster in 2008, he received his PhD from York University in 2014. He completed one year of a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario before joining Georgetown University in Washington, DC as an assistant professor in 2015.Research
Degroot argues that environmental changes - on Earth and across the Solar System - have had a greater influence on human history than commonly assumed. However, his publications on social responses to climate change in the Arctic, or on relationships between climate change and human conflict, emphasize that the impacts of these changes on people and on local environments have been complex and occasionally counter-intuitive. He has therefore worked to establish methods to identify subtle connections between human and natural histories.Degroot is among the first historians to write about the success of societies and communities in coping with past climate change. In 2018, he published a book, The Frigid Golden Age, that argues that the Dutch Republic - precursor state to the present-day Netherlands - was resilient and even adaptive in the face of a period of cold climate known as the Little Ice Age. The book was named by the Financial Times as one of the top ten history books of 2018.
He has since worked with other scholars to establish how other societies survived and even thrived during periods of preindustrial climate change. He has sought to identify strategies used by these societies that can inform today's efforts to adapt to human-caused global warming. He has emphasized that resilience is not always virtuous, since many populations have historically prospered during climate changes by exploiting or plundering other populations.
In recent publications, Degroot has reimagined the Solar System as a mosaic of dynamic environments that influenced, and were influenced by, human history. In 2025, he published a book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, that argues that changes in cosmic environments revealed the existence of global risks, prompted debates about alien life, and shaped the histories of mass media, technology, and culture in previously unknown ways. He has argued that early efforts to prevent microbial contamination of the Earth and other worlds through space travel can be seen as a failure that shows how competitive and poorly regulated government or corporate programs create world-threatening risks.
Degroot has also developed several online initiatives. He co-founded the Climate History Network, an organization of scholars who study past climate change, and created The Climate Chronicles, a popular podcast and multimedia project on the history of climate change.