So, presumably a Swedish journalist travelling around British coal fields in the 1920s and wondering about global warming will have been influenced by Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish scientist who’d done the calculations about what carbon dioxide build-up would mean in 1895 as a way of distracting himself from a messy divorce.
But maybe not. Maybe Lotka (see footnote)? In any case, all will be revealed by Andreas Malm (for it is he), this coming Thursday, in Bloomsbury, London.
Text and image below copied and pasted from the website of the Social History Society.
6.00pm, Followed by a wine reception
Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up A Pipeline: learning to fight in a world on fire, discusses British histories of coal intertwined with Swedish working-class literature in the 2024 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture.
In 1928, a young Ivar Lo Johansson, soon to become the leading Swedish working-class novelist, published what might have been the first consistently dire warning about the climatic effects of large-scale coal combustion. It was included in a book of reportage about life in the British coal districts. What led Lo Johansson to his precocious prediction? This lecture will trace the intersecting paths of subaltern wilderness politics and early climate science in the Swedish movement of working-class literature in general and the works of Lo Johansson in particular.
Andreas Malm is associate senior professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His latest books, both out from Verso in October, are The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth and, written with Wim Carton, Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.
For information contact Katy Pettit k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk
Book via Eventbrite
And back to All Our Yesterdays text.
- Hat-tip to the Morning Star‘s excellent “what’s on” listing, inevitably called “The Red List.”)
2. That Lotka thing? See this from 1983.
