So, following on from review of Rebecca John talking about Charles Keeling and the Air Pollution Foundation on the History of California podcast, here’s some brief thoughts on Alice Bell on the Curated Object.
If you know of podcasts that deal – even tangentially – with the history of man-made climate change (research, politics, etc), then let me know.
Alice Bell, author of Our Biggest Experiment, was recently a guest on the Cursed Object podcast.
The objects she brought were
a) a jar of London air (Euston Road)
b) a 1989 edition of the Radio Times which was all about Being Green (I’ve seen that issue, it’s extraordinary).
Bell was a confident and engaging guest, and the whole episode is worth your time.
Three things stood out for me, but your mileage will vary.
- Bell’s point about the intertwining of energy and democracy – e.g Plug plot Riots (there’s also all that Carbon Democracy stuff by Timothy Mitchell, I don’t remember is she mentioned it. She probably did.
- The point that people who went climbing mountains and glaciers in the 19th century left, ah, “spoor” which is now back with us, thanks to all the melting.
- A nice anecdote about how, when she was doing walking tours of London’s climate history (Shell, DECC etc) then different people would turn up to take part with their own stories – one couple whose first date, in 1947, had had to be moved because the smog was so bad the busses weren’t running (before the 1956 Clean Air Act, the response to the deadly December 1952 smog, air quality was astonishingly bad. It still is, just less visible now).