Our Deepening Planetary Crisis: The Reflections of an Environmental Historian
By Dr. Peter Coates, Emeritus Professor of American and Environmental History at the University of Bristol
Preface
At the end of November 2019 - a few months before the COVID pandemic turned the world upside down – then first year History student, Fliss MacKenzie, introduced herself at the end of a ‘Modern World’ seminar I was sitting in on (the tutor was a PhD student I was mentoring). COP25 (the 25th UN Climate Change Conference) was about to meet in Madrid for two weeks of deliberations (2-13 December). So Fliss asked if I’d like to put down some thoughts on matters environmental for the readers of the ‘History Department Newspaper’, I duly committed some thoughts to paper on COP25’s opening day, but the piece never saw the light of day. (Initially subject to a postponement, it then seems to have become another, if trivial, casualty of the first lockdown.)
I’d completely forgotten about the responses I’d compiled to Fliss’ questions – until, that is, the History Society emailed the Department’s environmental historians early last month to discuss plans for the Climate Emergency Day of Action on the 29th of April. I suddenly remembered that I had something off-the-peg that might be of interest to History students. And so, The Bristorian agreed to publish my reflections on Fliss’ questions as something of a period piece - a 28-month-old artefact from the pre-Covid world.
Two years and four months is a long time in the life of an undergraduate. Fliss was in her first term when she formulated these questions but is now approaching the end of her degree. The ‘Modern World’ unit no longer runs (despite its popularity with many students). And when those 28 months encompass a stretch of time before and after a global pandemic, they can seem like decades. Also, a couple of months ago, I retired after nearly 32 years at UoB. (Thank goodness my final teaching block saw a return to face-to-face teaching, after the challenges of online teaching with Microsoft Teams.)
Reproduced below, verbatim from late 2019, are Fliss’ questions and my answers.
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Environmental issues seem to hold an increasingly prominent place in our cultural discourse. Do you see this as having a significant historical precedent, or as a newer phenomenon specifically rooted in the 2010s+? If the latter, why do you think that this is happening now?
Today’s broad spectrum of environmental concerns, environmentalist discourses and environmentalisms is firmly rooted in the radical impulses and counter-cultures of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Friends of the Earth was founded in 1970, Greenpeace in 1971 and the forerunner of Britain’s Green Party, the Ecology Party, was set up in 1975. The Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental Rights was issued in 1970 in the aftermath of a devastating oil spill that soiled the beaches of affluent Santa Barbara, in southern California. Its author was the pioneering US environmental historian, Roderick Nash, who taught what was probably the world’s first environmental history course at the nearby University of California at Santa Barbara in the spring of 1970. Rock music already reflected these feelings of eco-apocalyptic anxiety and anger. As Jim Morrison of The Doors had sung in ‘When the Music’s Over’ (1967):
What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her.
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn.
And tied her with fences and dragged her down.
One of the core readings for a ‘Modern World’ seminar the other day, on the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ and the Indian Ocean tsunami of Boxing Day (26 December) 2004 (thanks, fellow UoB environmental historian Dan Haines, for assigning this topic), was a chapter from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism(2007). I explained that the author, Naomi Klein, illustrates how the fervent environmentalism of the late 1960s/early 1970s connects with today’s climate crisis activism. A prominent Canadian anti-globalization thinker and social activist, Klein, is the daughter of a American ‘draft dodger’ father who fled with his family to Montreal in 1967 to avoid military service in Vietnam. If Klein’s anti-war, civil rights and peace activist parents had moved instead to Vancouver, British Columbia, they might well have become early members of Greenpeace, established there in the Canadian version of San Francisco, capital of West Coast counterculturalism.
What attitudes do you think are at the core of the twenty-first century West’s relationship with the environment? What aspects of this do you think need to change so that we can move forward towards a more healthy relationship?
In 1967, the historian of technology and medievalist, Lynn White, published a short essay in Science that enjoyed enormous impact within and beyond academia. ‘The historical roots of our ecologic crisis’ zeroed in on the Judaeo-Christian God’s injunction to Man (Genesis) to ‘fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’. White did not actually argue for an abandonment of this tradition that set humankind apart from and also above the non-human/more-than-human world of nature: he recommended a return to the Franciscan notion of stewardship. But the attention White drew to less anthropocentric religions such as the pantheistic, animistic creeds of Native Americans and Buddhists was very much in tune with the Sixties’ Zeitgeist. But I don’t think we all need to become Zen Buddhists or adopt the spirituality of pre-contact indigenous peoples to repair our relationships with the nonhuman world. Our mainstream Western narrative of prioritizing human interests goes beyond religion. It also goes beyond economic systems. The values and behaviour of unrestrained global capitalism shoulder a heavy burden of responsibility, of course. But the former Soviet Union and pre-capitalist China trashed the natural world as effectively as any Western regime. Others say the fundamental cause of our dire ecological straits is the ideology of expansion, or growthism, in terms of an unrestrained belief in growth as an unquestioned good – whether in terms of GNP or human population. There are far too many of us, obviously, but it’s not just a question of numbers. Not everyone’s ecological footprint is the same size. Attitudinally, what we need to confront, perhaps, is the arrogance of humanism. A heavy dose of humility as a species is what the doctor recommends.
Are there any environmental issues that you think are overlooked in the popular perception of the climate crisis, and that you wish that people would consider more carefully?
As two weeks of UN-sponsored climate change talks begin in Madrid, it’s hard to think of burning issues (no pun intended) that aren’t somehow linked to a world that’s literally burning up in places like California and Australia. But within that huge, swirling area of concern over global warming, there are some things we could sink our teeth into more deeply: the ever-expanding empire of the land and water hungry avocado; the SUV (aka Chelsea tractor); energy-squandering air conditioning; and massively destructive industrialized fishing methods that devastate species and wreck the seabed, compromising the oceans’ capacity to store carbon. Unrelated to the climate crisis, there’s my long-term obsession: salmon farming. Don’t get me started on the penning in of a fish programmed to swim thousands of miles; medication and pesticides dispensed to combat disease and parasites; pollution from faecal waste that creates dead zones in the lochs and fjords around salmon farms; the transfer of sea lice to wild salmon; and the genetic mixing of fish farm escapees with wild stock. OK, I got myself started! As for all that fish meal ground up from fish that are perfectly palatable for humans, that deprives the inhabitants of fishing communities in the Global South of essential nutrients…..The bottom line is that salmon farming is basically an offshore version of battery farming and aggravates social injustice.
What is your opinion on the work of groups such as Extinction Rebellion? Do you think that their methods help or hinder change?
I’m a big fan of XR. One of my most vivid memories this year [2019] was going down to Marble Arch on Easter Monday to absorb the atmosphere. The road that sweeps around the northeast corner of Hyde Park and the western end of Oxford Street had been blocked to traffic and people were sitting, talking, gathering and eating in the roadways. This gave me a glimpse of a new kind of human-friendly city, of an urban future in which people reclaim the streets, the air is cleaner, it’s less noisy, and all that land appropriated to accommodate the parking of private vehicles has been converted into playgrounds, playing fields, parks and vegetable allotments. [April 2022 insert: during the various lockdowns, we got more than a glimpse of what carless cities could be like.]
On the Global Climate Strike march in Bristol on 20 September [2019], I experienced some pissed off commuters whose homeward bus journeys were disrupted by the blockage of Park Street down at College Green. But if that’s our idea of inconvenience, the inconvenient truth is that we ain’t seen nothing yet.
What do you think is the best way for members of the Bristol History Department to engage with environmental issues, and to help precipitate change?
Academics of all stripes spend a lot of time on planes, going to conferences and on research trips. I’m as guilty as anyone else. Flight shame (a movement that began in Sweden [Flygskam]) has cropped up as a topic in conversation and during panel sessions at every conference or workshop I’ve attended this year, from Florianopolis to Tallinn. We could all restrain our conference related air travel. [April 2022 insert: how fast things change, especially during a global pandemic, which effectively grounded those planes (at least for a while) in a way nobody experiencing 'flight shame' a couple of months pre-pandemic could ever have imagined.]
But my message from the bully pulpit (a phrase coined by that great early 20th-century conservationist, President, Theodore Roosevelt) to History colleagues and our students is different. You probably already buy free range eggs. So why are you still eating farmed salmon? (And insist that your scallops are ‘hand-dived’).