Alastair McIntosh, the Scottish writer and activist, kindly did an interview last month, the first for my “Groundhog Day or End of Days” project (see here).
You can (and in my opinion should!) read the transcript here, but here’s a few clips to whet your appetite.
And then I started to notice, you know, when I got involved with some CND type stuff, and so on, I noticed that every one of these campaigns would have a kind of half-life and it would rise very sharply and everybody would be saying, “Oh, this time we’re gonna do it. This time. We’re going to force the government’s hand, or whatever.. This is the big one. This is the breakthrough.”
And you know what? Kingdom never come. Not in that worldly sense of “thy kingdom come by” thy community come, thy opening up the way be done on earth as it is in heaven. Because it reaches a point of an apparent breakthrough and then it collapses.
So I learned that if I wasn’t going to become disillusioned whenever this happened, I had to anticipate it. And I frequently, my writing uses the metaphor of a surfer – that a surfer swims out and doesn’t waste time and energy grabbing every little wave that comes their way. The Surfer swims out. And I’ve never done it but I’ve watched my son doing it. And will maybe hang around for up to an hour, hoping for the perfect wave to come. And then surf in on the chosen wave.
and
marc hudson 45:27
You’ve kind of answered the question just there but I’ll ask it anyway. Besides burning out and selling out, then what other problems does this boom and bust cycle create?
Alastair McIntosh 45:43
It also creates false premises. So XR, have a big thing “Tell the truth.” But you’re not actually telling the truth when you’re misleading people as to how activism works. And I take XR as a presenting case, but it’s the case much more widely. It’s the case in politics. It’s all over this…
and
It leads to false hope. Which leads to the wrong kind of disillusionment. I say this because in my first book on climate change, Hell and High Water, that came out in 2008. I recommend what the Victorian Scottish preacher Oswald Chambers calls “The discipline of disillusionment.” Where he says we must become disillusioned. We must strip away our illusions of false hope in order to touch a deeper truth from which we can work realistically. So this is, what we’re talking about the activist world is not a disciplined disillusionment, it’s an indisciplined disillusionment that leaves people cast out as flotsam and jetsam on the beach. Sometimes quite psychologically damaged as you’re probably aware.
The latest All Our Yesterdays interview, with Leon/@AkanKwaku, who definitely deserves a follow from you. Here’s his profile pick and his Twitter banner is to die for (see foot of this post!)
1) Who are you (where born, where grew up) and when did you start thinking “hmm environmental problems are here and getting worse”
My name is Leon, born and raised in Birmingham minus the accent, in a place called Handsworth. I first started thinking about environmental problems when I was quite young, probable aged 8-9. I think for me it started when I moved to Sweden back in 2007, children are taught from an early age about the importance of the environment, recycling is seen as a resource not rubbish.
2) Obviously environmental problems do not exist in isolation – how do you think they tie with other questions – inequality and, especially, racial injustice and oppression? What are some of your favourite thinkers and doers on these questions?
Everything is linked if you look at the parts of the earth which are left in a deliberate underdeveloped state. These are often countries which has majority black and brown populations, they are resource rich, western companies and governments have not interest in helping these countries to become modern, this will then increase the costs they now access the resources they want.
3) If you could have the undivided attention of everyone who says they are concerned about climate change, for just a couple of minutes, what would you say?
Discussions around regulating the media, make them accountable.
Make politicians accountable
Reform police and discuss ending the friendly relationship between them and politicians.
I would discuss the dismantling and reforming the political, economic and legislative landscape
4) What are, in your opinion, the biggest barriers to closer and better collaboration between people of good will who are coming from different places (race, class, gender, able-bodied status, age – you choose which)? Can you point to good work being done to bridge these barriers that deserves a shout-out and could be replicated/enlarged?
Education alone isn’t enough, we need to rid ourselves and private schools, fund all schools adequately, training and skill based jobs and ensure people from disadvantaged backgrounds get an opportunity to access some of the best positions in society
5) What next for you?
I have built a 15k following on Twitter by calling out this government’s hypocrisy, maybe a video blog, podcast?
6) Anything else you’d like to say.
We need serious change, we need people who not scared to speak the truth.
Cracking interview with Dr Jenna Ashton (aka @heritagemcr) about feminism, archives, etc.
1. Who are you, and how did you come to be an historian?
I am a Lecturer in Heritage Studies and arts-led researcher, in the Dept. of Art History & Cultural Practices, University of Manchester. I’m also Research Lead for Creative and Civic Futures with our “Creative Manchester” platform, and an Associate Member of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. My work largely focuses on place-based community cultural practices and expression, along with evolving (I hope!) feminist theory and methods. As an artist, curator, and producer, I consider artmaking as a process for thinking and analysis (to misquote Mieke Bal, 2022).
It’s funny you describe me as an historian. I never think of myself as an “historian”, but a strange scholarly combination, working across the sociological, historical, visual, material, spatial, ecological. I’ve always wanted to connect the contemporary with the historical and understand things politically. I finally discovered this was called “cultural studies”, so I guess that’s where I have landed now, with a critical angle on all-things “heritage” practice and discourse.
My background education is mostly in the arts; at A Level I took all arts subjects across literature, language, performance, and film (much to the dismay of my science and sociology teachers). At Uni (I took all three degrees, BA (Hons), MA, PhD at Uni of Manchester, not being able to afford to travel elsewhere, and with other family and work commitments), I first took a combined degree across Drama, Literary Studies, Art History, and Classical Civilisation. It was a running joke that I had the longest degree title of any student graduating in my year. But I didn’t want to drop any subjects after A Levels, and I also didn’t know what I wanted to “specialize” in. So, a combined degree fulfilled that. It was horribly organised and combined students were badly supported; we didn’t belong to any one department, so we were pushed around and ignored quite a bit. It’s funny that interdisciplinarity is such a “thing” now. We were doing it via the combined programme, but we didn’t have the lingo or the zeitgeist. I loved it. I could pick and choose the modules I wanted to take and mix it up into a wonderful artsy-soup. I discovered a love of (and knack for) art history and visual studies [AHVS] (which wasn’t available during school), with a focus on feminist and social practices. I took my MA (FT) and PhD (PT) in AHVS. My PhD analysed childhoods through the lens of contemporary sculpture. It was described by the examiners as not a very “traditional” art history PhD, as it brought together visual arts, sociology, spatial theories, and psychoanalysis. To me, it seemed the most obvious thing in the world to use the visual and plastic arts to make sense of socio-psychological experiences given they emerged within a cultural context. Within a cultural studies dept. or school of art this wouldn’t have been at all odd.
Anyway, since 2018 I have been back at that same department as an employee, working mostly with colleagues in the “cultural practices” side of things or with academics in other arts and science disciplines.
So am I an historian? Kind of. “Historian” always seems such a grand title and as if you should have a very precise and defined period of expertise. I don’t have that. But historical methods are important to all scholarship and practice. I always thought it odd the separation between what I would call “straight” history (with a capital H) and “queer” history (aka art history). It still exists; the two disciplines don’t seem to talk to each other. At some point during my education (and also lived experience) feminist activists, histories, and practices helped me fuse all these disparate academic parts together with my concern for social justice issues. Feminism exists on the edges, in the gaps, defies the binaries. Feminism is also hopeful. It can see a way through the quagmire.
I have a parallel story of work and everyday life that intersects with my uni education and academic development that was/is as equally important as the learning undertaken in the Ivory Towers, but that’s for another interview.
2. Why do we need a feminist analysis and practice around archives and archiving? (Imagine I am asking that in my best Daily Mail voice, muttering about woke Corbynista stalinist social justice warriors)
Archives are part of structures of power and oppression. This is not a “woke-snowflake” interpretation, but a fact acknowledged by archivists and archival science. Archives are not neutral or objective containers of artefacts and documents but, like museums, have evolved through a process of careful (or not so careful) construction – led by the “victors” and those with power. Feminist practices seek to redress or expose structures of power relating to sex and gender (and its intersectional issues), and to evidence and promote differently gendered or sexed experiences and materialisations that have been oppressed or eradicated via oppressive patriarchal systems. Importantly, feminist practices are not just concerned with the historical record, but feed back into our contemporary cultural and social systems, reimagining, shaping, and enacting societies that are fair, equitable, and just. Feminism in the archives makes space for evidencing the marginalised and oppressed; it also enables the documenting and evidencing of its own heritage (feminism as heritage). Where women’s rights are still under threat (along with wider LGBTQ+ peoples), and our bodies are at risk from violence, poverty, and ill-health, feminist analysis and practices are required across all areas of cultural production and its materialisation and systems.
Since 2016 I have been focusing on feminist archival and curatorial practices as methodologies, working with numerous archives and collections, archivists, artists, and women’s organisations to explore these issues through practice and publishing.
In 2017 I published “The Feminists are Cackling in the Archive: A Manifesto for Feminist Archiving (or disruption)” with Feminist Review (download here). It was an invited submission, following an event on archiving women’s performance practice. The Manifesto brings together all the things I still try to do: working collaboratively with people, develop new forms via creative practice, publish varied and interesting pieces that embody the practice (not merely representative or dissemination), and work through serious issues playfully.
3. Are women still being written out of the history? If so, how, and what should people (including ‘male allies’ – because, you know, ultimately everything has to be about them) be doing about that?
First, start by reading (and citing) all the great feminist work that is being done to diversify histories and contemporary accounts of women’s experiences and practices. Second, support women-led initiatives and research aiming to “cackle” and disrupt the record (including providing the funding and infrastructure.) Third, get on and disseminate that work. Fourth, pay women decent wages across all sectors so they are not struggling to survive. Fifth , stop killing women (ideally, this should be first). Sixth, just because she’s a woman with power doesn’t mean she’s a feminist and cares about other marginalised or at-risk women (see various examples in current Conservative Government). But, stories of those women are as equally important to evidence, to remind us that social justice is the work of feminist practice, not simply putting women into powerful positions.
4. What are you working on at present/near future?
Publishing wise, I’m working on an edited collection for Routledge on “Heritage and Gender”, and an experimental authored book for Intellect on “Feminist Co-Production: as a Crochet Textile Playground” (using the work of Japanese artist Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam as a textile metaphor). Practice-wise, I am working in North Manchester (in neighbourhoods with high indices of multiple deprivation) leading an interdisciplinary research project making sense of community resilience under climate change stresses, and exploring the potential of arts practice for supporting social justice. Plus, I’m working on another research project supporting work around riparian treescapes for climate adaptation, land stewardship, and species reintroduction. Now (and in the near future) my work is mostly ecological, a natural progression from feminist cultural work. I also have an adopted archive of an ageing female photographer I want to work on at some point …
5. Anything else you’d like to say.
Amongst the raging at inequalities and injustice, I witness, daily, very ordinary people doing extraordinary things for humanity and other living beings. I hold onto bell hooks’ call for people to practice love and to love each other well. Feminism is hope.
Who are you/what do you do and (how) has climate change impinged on that?
I am Peter Watts, a freelance journalist, editor and author. I mainly write about arts and culture as well as architecture, but I also do a lot of copywriting for brands and companies. It’s the latter area that has mostly been affected by climate change, in the sense that almost every company I deal with now wants to foreground sustainability and highlight their environmental credentials. A couple of years ago, the emphasis was diversity and sustainability but now it is almost entirely about sustainability.
This includes a lot of self-styled “luxury” companies or organisations from across the world that trade solely on providing sustainable products such as very expensive recycled clothing or water bottles made from ocean plastic or a finance company that had developed a tool that measures how banks, insurance brokers and lenders are exposed to climate risk. Then there are all the companies that wish to celebrate carbon-saving efficiencies in traditionally dirty industries, particularly textiles and construction.
I am not always sure how much this focus on sustainability is driven by consumer trends rather than genuine fear for the planet or desire for improvement, but it’s clear that most companies now recognise the need to at least acknowledge some responsibility for the climate and want to be seen to be doing something to reduce their carbon footprint. That is something that wasn’t the case a decade ago.
There is clearly an element of greenwashing in this, but some individuals are extremely passionate, knowledgeable and committed. They recognise the urgency of the situation and believe that business is the best way to create wide-spread change.
2 Famously journalism goes through waves of interest in a topic – often quite short, and without connection to the relative importance of an issue. Where are things, in the UK, with the climate issue, compared to – say – 2018/19.
That’s tricky for me to say as when it comes to news journalism I am very much a consumer like anybody else, so can only really state what anybody might observe. So I think a lot depends on which media you consume – somebody who reads the Guardian will clearly have a different experience to the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail.
But what seems to have changed is that even the latter newspapers, while still having climate change-denying columnists largely employed to generate rage clicks, now carry almost daily reports that demonstrate to the readers the obvious impact of climate change. So even on the right, there seems to be an acceptance that things are changing, even if there is disagreement on the causes of that change, what the eventual results of it might look like and what needs to be done to stop it.
I think this is relevant when seeing government ministers raging against net zero – even within their own constituencies, these people now represent a minority view, albeit one that unfortunately still has an outsized impact and gets way too much attention. Rather than angrily amplify their views, it might be better to simply ignore them.
I remember the first serious bump in mainstream “green” stories when David Cameron became Conservative leader as that was seen as an issue that might get him elected, so was covered sympathetically by the press. Things then went quiet again as there was no electoral value in sustainability but it started to slowly change with the annual news of unprecedented droughts, floods and fires around the world. Last year’s heatwave in the UK might have been a turning point in this country as it was something everybody could understand lay outside accepted norms and even the most sceptical seemed to accept it wasn’t an isolated event. The weight of evidence was now too large.
I believe that the media’s incredible capacity for collective amnesia will soon completely bury all memories of climate change denial.
I guess the biggest issue is that a lot of this journalism is quite passive – reports on the weather, reports on extreme conditions, reports on climate change reports – rather than stating what needs to be done or clearly outlining the consequences of inaction. You get that in the Guardian obviously but not anywhere else.
3. More broadly, does climate change “come up” in conversations at the school gate/dinner parties “etc”? In what ways?
Yes certainly. It seems to be a background concern for most people I speak to at school gates and in the pub (I don’t think I have ever had a dinner party I am afraid). There’s a lot of hopelessness – “what’s the point?” – and a certain amount of cognitive dissonance – “climate change is terrible and I will talk about that when I fly back from Los Angeles for this one meeting”. The problem is that the issue is so vast, the solutions are so complex or life-limiting, and the implications so terrible, that nobody really wants to delve into it too deeply beyond acknowledging it’s very frightening. I would include myself in this.
4. What are some of your favourite books/films/radio programmes that help you think through the climate issue?
As per the above, I tend to avoid any books, films or radio programmes that are explicitly about climate change. I find factual material to be too depressing and fictitious material too frivolous. I have over the years read books, watched films and played lots and lots of video games about the apocalypse, so I guess that counts. Most of these are about zombies, but I can handle a metaphor.
One of the reasons I have continued with All Our Yesterdays is because there are definitely lots of smart activists and academics out there doing great work who deserve a signal boost and the chance to cross-fertilise. One such person is Prof. Cyrus Mody… who kindly agreed to this interview. (If you read Dutch, check out this interview too).
1) Who are you and how did you come to be working on the 1970s Oil Industry from a perch in Netherlands?
I’m an historian of science and technology at Maastricht University. A lot of my research wanders into business history, environmental history, energy history – but my PhD is in Science and Technology Studies, and I approach all my research from the direction of science and technology. That’s perhaps my main contribution as a scholar – to get historians of science to think more about business, and to get business, environmental, and energy historians to think more about science (and to get all of them to think more about technology). Until recently, I was making those points mostly with respect to fields related to the microelectronics industry – fields like semiconductor physics, electrical engineering, nanotechnology, materials science. But in the course of that research (and in reading the secondary literature on similar science-oriented industries such as biotechnology) I noticed that the oil industry was absolutely everywhere in high-tech (and yet hardly anyone had pointed out that ubiquity). So around 2012 I started preliminary work on the project that became Managing Scarcity and Sustainability by trying to map all the “spillovers” from the oil industry into other high-tech domains that I could find.
At the time I was at Rice University in Houston – a great place to do oil history and energy humanities, and a wonderful place to be an untenured assistant professor because I had a lot of freedom to teach what I wanted and enough resources for the kind of research I was doing at the time. But I could see that I couldn’t study all the oil spillovers I was uncovering on my own – that would require becoming an expert in the history of too many fields, each of which deserved its own study. For reasons I won’t go into, at Rice I was never going to be able to put together the kind of team needed to tackle this topic. But in the Netherlands, team projects are common. It wasn’t an easy decision to move, but in doing so I’m now surrounded by a much more vibrant local/regional history of science and technology and STS community than I was in Houston, and I’ve been able to hire an incredible team (Odinn Melsted, Jelena Stankovic, and Michiel Bron) to work on Managing Scarcity.
2) Tell us about , “Managing Scarcity and Sustainability: The Oil Industry, Environmentalism, and Alternative Energy in the Age of Scarcity.” – what is the project, and how might it help us understand what is going on now?
Managing Scarcity and Sustainability (https://managingscarcity.com/) is a five-year project funded by the NWO (usually translated as Dutch Research Council; award VI.C.191.067). Our main focus is oil actors’ involvement in the global debate about resource scarcity, environmentalism, and sustainable growth/development in the “long 1970s” (which we usually define as the years 1968 to 1986). By “oil actors” we mean, firstly, oil firms as well as allied firms and trade associations; but we also mean individual oil executives and scientists and engineers with oil industry experience, as well as the firms (e.g., solar energy start-ups) and organizations (e.g., philanthropic foundations) that those individuals led.
The project is sort of two-pronged: on the one hand, we look at the technologies that oil firms (and the start-ups they invested in) developed in response to growing awareness of resource scarcity and environmental problems. Here, we’re mainly interested in solar, geothermal, and nuclear (both fission and fusion) energy as well as auxiliary technologies such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology; but we’re also trying to draw in researchers who are studying other oil spillovers, e.g., wind energy or fuel cells and advanced batteries. The oil industry was deeply involved in lots of alternative energy in this period, but pulled back (in many cases, abandoned) those investments in the 1980s.
The other prong looks at a network of current and former oil executives who stoked the global debate on resource scarcity, environmental problems (including climate change), and sustainable development. At the center of that network were: Robert O. Anderson (chair of both Atlantic Richfield – a mid-size oil company – and the Aspen Institute, as well as donor to many other environmental organizations and think tanks); Maurice Strong (a Canadian diplomat, chair of the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development, but also an executive or board member with various oil companies including Ajax, Dome, Petro-Canada, and Tosco); and George Mitchell (often known as the “father of fracking” but also the sponsor of a series of Limits to Growth conferences and other environmental/sustainable development activities). Through collaboration with the Club of Rome, the United Nations, the Nobel Foundation, and an array of think tanks, this network was incredibly influential in the emergence of institutions of global environmental governance from the 1970s until the early 1990s.
What can we learn from this? Well, first, that climate denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable. All across the oil industry in the 1970s executives were publicly saying that we would need to rely more on non-fossil fuels: nuclear fission in the short term, geothermal in the medium term, and nuclear fusion and solar in the long term (by which they meant after the year 2000). And their companies invested accordingly. We’ve also known for a while that oil firms were aware of climate change in this period; but members of the Anderson-Strong-Mitchell network weren’t just aware of it, they were some of the loudest voices in the world drawing attention to it and calling for global governance structures to address it. Which means, second, that we have to look for a more complex explanation for why denialism became a more common strategy from the late 1980s onward. Our working hypothesis is that the declining price of oil meant these firms had less cash to invest for the long term. But, perhaps more importantly, the election of neoliberal regimes in the US, UK, Netherlands, Canada, and elsewhere meant those firms could no longer rely on the state as a partner in development of both alternative energy and climate regulation. Neoliberalism also encouraged hostile takeover bids by people like T. Boone Pickens, which forced oil firms both to liquidate assets in order to fend off those bids, and also to refocus on their “core competency” of getting oil out of the ground in order to assure investors that their main priority would be short-term returns rather than responsible long-term development of alternatives.
3) What is the “nanobubbles” project? What inspired it, what has it achieved, what next?
NanoBubbles is a large project funded by the European Research Council’s Synergy program (award 951393). We are a couple dozen researchers across more than a half-dozen universities in the Netherlands and France, drawn from history, sociology, philosophy, library science, computer science, nanoscience, STS, and other fields. The aim is to better understand the difficulties that scientists face in attempting to correct the scientific record, and also to study the systemic inducements to exaggeration, defense of erroneous claims, and even outright fraud in science. Some members of the group have personally experienced damaging repercussions from their attempts to correct errors in the scientific record; others have developed tools and approaches for studying some of the channels through which errors propagate (e.g., journal articles). My own interest stems in part from my earlier work on nanotechnology and in part from my current work (within Managing Scarcity) on climate denialism and on the oil industry’s inflation of “bubbles” in high-tech fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence. We’re about 18 months into the project, a lot of which was spent on hiring people and getting our infrastructure in place (e.g., ethics protocols), so our achievements thus far are mostly preparatory to what comes next; but I’d point you to work by some members of the project (Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and colleagues) on “tortured phrases” as an example of what we’re working on (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02134-0). Ultimately, at least in the Maastricht corner of the project (i.e., myself, Candida Sanchez Burmester, and Max Rossman), we’d like to do both traditional, labor-intensive qualitative research (participant observation at labs and conferences, historical research at archives) and also develop automated tools for scaling up qualitative research to much larger Ns in order to better understand how claims and counter-claims do or don’t circulate through (and gain traction within) scientific communities.
4) What do you think the main thing academics/politicians/activists/citizens need to understand/do differently around energy to help us miss our climate targets by a smaller margin than we otherwise would?
Well, energy and climate are too complex to point to a single “main thing.” But the lessons I’d draw from Managing Scarcity and NanoBubbles are these: denialism and obstruction weren’t inevitable, and at one point a significant portion of the oil industry was working toward some kind of transition in both technology and governance; oil firms bear plenty of blame for their later support of denialism, but there are other actors (particularly neoliberal politicians and economists as well as the financial industry) who bear lots of blame too (and if we only address the oil industry but not those other actors we’ll never actually resolve the core issues); but even if some oil actors of the 1970s (people like Strong and Anderson) were moving in a more positive direction than that of their successors, their program was still too oriented to technological solutionism and economic growth; instead, we need an approach that prioritizes cultural change over (though not necessarily exclusive of) technological innovation, and that is willing to entertain alternatives to economic growth.
Sabine Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Modern History. She works on the history of science, technology and medicine in Britain and its colonial empire between WWI and 1965, with a particular focus on the Caribbean and East Africa. She kindly agreed to be the latest person interviewed as part of the All Our Yesterdays project.
Who are you and how did you come to be studying insecticides?
I am Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York. I have been at York since 2010 and before that I was a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. I did my PhD at Imperial College in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
From University of York website
My work focusses on two things – the history of science in Britain from WWI to the 1970s and the history of British imperialism in the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in relationship between science, scientists and the state, including big issues such as the increasing attention paid to experts by government in the early 20th century and the ‘rise of research’, in which an activity labelled as ‘research’ became as the key activity that needed to be funded by business and government.
I first became interested in insecticides when I discovered that the British government had set up a major centre for insecticides research in the colony of Tanganyika after WWII. A group of scientists based there carried out extensive trials of DDT and other chemicals in East Africa during the 1950s. I tracked down the scientist who had been the head of the centre before independence, Dr Kay Hocking, and interviewed him about his work.
It struck me that the history of DDT use in the tropics had come to be completely dominated by the story of the World Health Organisation’s Global Eradication of Malaria project and that other bodies who sponsored extensive research into insecticides, and promoted their use, such as the Colonial Office in Britain, had been completely ignored. This prompted me to put together a funding application to the Wellcome Trust for a project to recover the history of insecticides in Britain and places that were part of the colonial empire. This project, called The Chemical Empire, is now in its fourth year and I am writing two books at present – one on DDT in Britain and the other mapping insecticide use across the British Empire.
2. What has surprised you in the course of researching insecticides?
I think one of the really surprising things about researching the history of insecticides in Britain and the British empire is that previous historians have not asked some fairly fundamental questions. There has been no attempt to really investigate where and when the deployment of different insecticides was greatest, in public health, homes, or farming. A lot of unexamined assumptions have become embedded in our existing histories. For example, a tendency to assume that malaria control was the most significant area of insecticide use in the tropics after 1945 has meant that other areas of insecticide deployment have been overlooked. In many places in the British empire, far greater volumes of chemicals were disseminated fighting agricultural pests, such as locusts in East Africa, than eliminating mosquitoes. What this means is that we have often been looking in the wrong places to understand insecticides and their impact on the environment and people in the mid-twentieth century. The insecticide experiences of whole communities have been ignored.
3. What lessons are there in how campaigners worked on this issue for climate campaigners?
The history of insecticides shows us the power of public outrage. The British case illustrates that concerns amongst scientists and some campaigning groups could only go so far in persuading policy makers to take action. Civil servants and politicians were forced to do something when a growing number of everyday people expressed their concern to newspapers, their MPs and directly to Ministers (there is a large file containing letters from the public in the National Archives) The turning point appears to have been the publication of Silent Spring in Britain in 1963. I would agree with the point that many people have made beforehand – that Rachel Carson’s intervention was incredibly important. Specifically, it is really striking in the British case that Carson’s book did not necessarily provide revelations of harm that nobody had previously known about (the harms had already gained a certain amount of publicity), but rather she provided a powerful set of metaphors and imagery that changed the way that people spoke about insecticides. The idea of a sea of poison washing over the countryside, the idea of invisible toxins seeping into our land and water, the invocation of similarities with atomic radiation and thalidomide and so on. I think what Carson did was capture the imagination of people in a way that scientific reports had failed to do, and perhaps most importantly of all, provide some incredibly affecting metaphors and images that provided a common language for the way that people expressed their concerns.
4. How and where can people find your work?
Two articles have been published recently on our work on The Chemical Empire project – both are Open Access.
Sabine Clarke and Thomas Lean, “Turning DDT into ‘Didimac’: making insecticide products and consumers in British farming after 1945”, History and Technology, 2022, Vol. 38, 1, 31–61
Sabine Clarke and Richard J.E. Brown, “Pyrethrum and the Second World War: Recontextualising DDT in the Narrative of Wartime Insect Control”, Journal of History of Science and Technology, Vol. 16, no. 2, December 2022, pp. 89-112.
And this video shows me talking about the history of insecticides and locust control in East Africa.
5. What next?
Tom Lean and I hope to finish our book on the history of insecticides in Britain by the end of the year. I plan to travel to Ghana to find out more about the history of insecticides and stored products in the summer.
6. Anything else you’d like to say
I am organising a workshop next year to discuss the global history of pesticides so please get in touch if this is something that you work on!
This year All Our Yesterdays is going to have at least 52 interviews/guest posts, with at least half being of women, and at least one quarter being people of colour. The first guest post of the year was Jonathan Moylan, an Australian climate activist. Today, it’s a Canadian doctor, Peter Carter, of the Climate Emergency Institute.
1. When did you first become aware of climate change, as distinct from more general environmental issues, and how did you become aware?
It was 1980. Many of us in the peace/nuke disarmament movement were spending time on the global environmental threat to life. In the 80s there was a real general fear of stratospheric ozone pollution holes ending life. Then many of us realized greenhouse gas pollution could end life. Jimmy Carter’s 1988 Global 2000 report [https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/pdf-archive/global2000reporttothepresident–enteringthe21stcentury-01011991.pdf] was great for building awareness and motivation; media covered it well in those early days….
Then in 1988, James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the Earth was warmer than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements, and that the warming was already large enough to see the cause and effect relationship with the greenhouse effect. Talk about a wake-up call!
In the global warming early time, people were scared and people got engaged. But in 1997, corporations attacked with their Global Climate Coalition, making it even more important and challenging to get the truth out actively and clearly.
2. What specific “gap” was the Climate Emergency Institute (CEI) created to fill, and what actions has it taken that you are proudest of?
Scientists’ communication of the climate change science for the public has been poor to misleading. The Climate Emergency Institute analyzes and synthesizes climate change research for “lay” (nonscientific) audiences: the public, ENGO memberships, government bodies, etc.
CEI also helps the public understand the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) workings and their reports. For example: The IPCC disallows language such as dangerous, disastrous, etc. as well as specific best recommendations. Their economics has been badly biased, projecting “least cost.” The IPCC was projecting the very latest time for mitigation, with only a 50/50 chance of success. They’ve changed their goalposts and used their scenarios to mislead — they did not apply a worst case nor current emissions projections. They’ve described the future in terms of the huge range between best-case and worst-case scenarios. Their reliance on (computer) model projections excluded theoretical science predictions. The IPCC only projects to 2100 (despite the fact that things could still get much worse after 2100.) Their projections do not include any large feedback sources, nor any carbon sink decline. They only apply a single fixed sensitivity metric of 3ºC — so their entire assessment rules out risk. Between unanimity “consensus” of the scientists and then of the national policymakers, risk is ruled out and everything in the reports underestimated. For example, it was assumed that the Global North could ride out — even benefit from — climate change (by 2100) while Africa and low latitudes would suffer.
Then, on top of all that, the UN climate change conferences (COPs, or Conferences of the Parties) are set up for failure due to their de facto and ad hoc decision-making procedure, which is a unanimous vote — but which they call “consensus” (until that is inconvenient because one nation objects, at which time they switch to “consensus minus one”). This system effectively gives every powerful country in the world a veto over the other nations doing the right thing on climate change.
So there is a lot we’re trying to help the world to grasp.
3. Your book “_Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival_” came out in 2018. What are the game changers for survival, and if you were writing the book now, what would you add?
The “game changers” section of our book (I co-authored it with Elizabeth Woodworth) included tax reform and an end to perverse subsidies; human rights-based legal challenges; market leadership; civil resistance strategies; and, of course, technological innovations in near-zero-carbon energy and transportation.
The agenda of SRM (solar radiation management) cannot prevent planetary catastrophe. The agenda of biomass burning (which is horrid) for carbon dioxide removal is certain catastrophe. Massive resources for Direct Air Capture are a must.
There’s nothing I would add, because we haven’t even taken the simplest step yet: ending the $5.9 trillion in direct and indirect subsidies that governments give (with our tax money) to fossil fuel corporations every year (according to the IMF).
4. Complete this sentence – “The main thing that those striving to help our species cope with climate change can learn from the last 30-plus years is … “
… that we have done practically everything wrong, based on our Euro-American Nature-conquering worldview and our perverse “money power” economics of oppression, exploitation, pollution, degradation and destruction — with future generations written off.
5. Anything else you’d like to say [upcoming events, campaigns, etc.]?
We’re gearing up for our latest mass mailout update on the most dire emergency. The way things are going, globally disastrous 1.5ºC will be reached by around 2030 (being denied by all but James Hansen) and planetarily catastrophic 2ºC by 2050.
We have just started prep for Phase 1: Civil Society ENGOs and Faith Groups. This will be an educational updating with the hope of getting endorsement for our lobbying for a powerful intervention by National Academies and Royal Societies of Science. A call for aggressive United campaign to stop all fossil fuel subsidies would be in the call The IPCC Sixth Assessment stated that global emissions must be put into immediate, rapid decline, but this is not out there. Science Academies and Royal Societies around the world must intervene by advising their governments of this most dire emergency and the urgent need for immediate emergency responses. They have not.
The 2022 InterAcademy Partnership’s Health in the Climate Emergency: A global perspective is by far the best assessment to date on climate change. Sadly, it’s coming too late.
Here’s an interview with Matthew Todd, who is tireless on Twitter about the size, scale, and imminence of the climate crisis. Many thanks to him for taking the time to answer AOY’s questions. If YOU want to answer the same questions, please do so and DM them across… (One point of this project is to help expand the discussion…)
1) Who are you? When did you first hear about climate change (or “global warming”, or if you are really decrepit, “the greenhouse effect”)? What do you “do”?
My name is Matthew Todd. I am a journalist and author. I worked for Attitude, the U.K.’s best selling gay magazine, for 20 years from 1996, and was editor from 2008 to 2016. I’m the author of two books; Straight Jacket, about LGBTQ mental health, and Pride, about the LGBTQ equality movement.
I first heard about climate change when I was at school. I remember a geography teacher telling us about it; that the planet was heating up, that the ice caps would melt, that the whole of humanity could be in really big trouble. But he said of course we’ve got some decades to fix it and governments will fix it. Everyone that really scared but we all kind of believed and hoped that governments would do something about it. Obviously they haven’t. They are in total denial.
2) Has any particular post on “All Our Yesterdays” resonated with you? If so, which one(s) and why? [also, if there’s stuff you DON’T like about AOY, please do say]
No, I’ve not see anything that’s annoyed me. I think anyone trying to draw attention to the ecological and planetary crisis that we are in is a positive and I applaud everyone who does it.
3) What topics would you like to see AOY covering that it hasn’t yet?
I’d like to see more about the funded denial campaigns from the oil and energy companies to cast doubt on climate change. It’s been the number one reason why people haven’t woken up to the severity of the threat. I don’t think most people realise that oil companies have funding the handful of scientists who don’t agree with Climate Change Science and are funding the massive amount of online disinformation about the issue.
4) What have “we” – people in the “climate movement,” broadly defined – done “wrong” over the last 30 plus years? What have we not done well enough, what have we not done at all, what should we not do/not have done?
I think we should’ve just been far more radical and been out on the streets from the very beginning. I think scientists should have called out the oil company campaign of disinformation more and I think they should’ve been locking themselves to the doors of media organisations who are failing to tell the public the full truth about the reality of the crisis we face. They should do that now. I don’t mean to be critical scientists because they shouldn’t have to do that, but unfortunately the media is completely broken and I think the only way people will ever wake up is when the science is on the front pages of newspapers and people are showing emotion about it.
Celebrities have completely failed us by not raising the alarm. The whole of our societal structures, from politics to media, has completely failed. The focus on individual action has been an absolute disaster as well. Of course the concept of carbon footprint was created by BP to shift blame away from companies like themselves onto the individual. Unfortunately, people think that all they need to do is turn their mobile phone charger off and everything is going to be okay, when in fact we’re not going to survive without massive systemic global change.
5) Pivotting from that cheerfulness, tell us about any projects you are working on and how people can get involved (chance to plug your books, podcasts, campaigns).
I’m working on various things about like a one-man show and new book and a couple of plays but I have to be honest; I find it really hard to work during this time knowing calamity is heading straight towards us. The only thing that can stop it is if hundreds of millions of people rise up and demand change.
