What does history say about the climate crisis?

Indeed, although some of the crises we’re facing at the moment – a warming world, changing weather patterns, and issues of sustainability and biodiversity – aren’t happening for the first time, the challenge is that history shows us that they are taking effect much faster than in any earlier era.

Chris, how important do you think history is in our relationship with the natural world? Do history, heritage and conservation go hand in hand?

Chris Packham: I think they do. History has always provided contemporary context, telling us who we are and how we got here. I’ve always looked to history to understand our position today. I think where Peter’s book excels is in its exploration of the impact of climate and biodiversity loss, that cycle of ills which has impacted on the planet for such a long time. It looks at how these complex factors have influenced the development of civilisations, not just in terms of day-to-day lives but also wider forces such as economics and agriculture.

It’s also quite terrifying, because over the course of even our recent history, planetary forces have played significant roles in shaping where we find ourselves today. To neglect that is, I think, foolhardy, because it underlines our absolute fragility. We are so overconfident that this world has been built for us, that we can abuse it however we like, and that it will be robust enough to soak up our mistreatment. That simply isn’t true. We can see that we are in deep trouble – because we’ve been there many times before.

PF: Climates have changed so often, and there have been catastrophes in the past. People sometimes say, well, maybe that tells us that everything will be fine. But it’s almost the opposite: all those great cities of the past that exceeded their boundaries disappeared, after all. Civilisations come and go – and there are reasons for that.

A warming world is really bad if you’re a human being, but great if you’re an emerging infectious disease that thrives on individuals living closer together than ever. Then there are the pressures we’re putting on resources. I don’t think we realise the escalating cascade of effects of these things – just how close we are to the precipice. My job is to explain how we got there, while people such as Chris are trying to work out how we pull back from the edge. And we have to do so in a way that’s hopeful – because if you tell everyone we’re all going to burn to a crisp, you scare people and shut down dialogue. The conversation around climate and environmental change seems to antagonise some people, rather than helping them accept it. Chris, why do you think people get
so worked up about data, statistics and the challenges of environmental change?

CP: I think you used the key word there: change. Our species is remarkable, and our intelligence, adaptability and creativity are profound. But while we are very good at cure, we’re not so good at prevention. We usually need to get kicked in the teeth, either by the planet or by ourselves, before we start to put things back together.

A classic example is the Second World War, which caused huge global stress – but look at the inventiveness used to overcome its problems. A more recent example is the coronavirus outbreak: we knew we were vulnerable to a pandemic, but did absolutely nothing to guard against it. Tragically, millions died – but within eight months we developed a vaccine that saved millions more.

For all those great aspects of humanity, we’re not very good at change. We like the status quo. We like what we’ve grown into. We will tolerate inefficiency, threat and fear – though we’ll try to suppress the latter. I don’t mind fear, actually, because it’s a very good motivator. In the natural world, it means one of only two things: fight or flight. But for all Elon Musk’s endeavours, we’re not leaving this planet any time soon. So we’ve got to fight to maintain it as a viable place to live – which is vital, because I don’t think it will look anything like it does now, or has done for the past few hundred years.

Going back to another point you introduced, Peter, only 1 per cent of the species that have ever lived on Earth survive today. Extinction is an essential part of evolution, and the arrogant idea that we can shape all of this to our advantage just isn’t correct.

PF: When I was writing the book, one of the issues I considered was how people thought about biodiversity loss and sustainability in the past. Some of the first texts ever written were worried about resources and change. The Genesis story of Adam and Eve is an environmental parable, for instance. All is perfect in the garden of Eden. The good lord provides everything you need, with one simple instruction: don’t be selfish. God’s punishment for us not respecting the world is that we have to grow crops among the weeds and face floods, droughts and famines.

So much of the earliest writing is about our relationship with the natural world. It was a real revelation to think that the same questions we ask today were faced by our common ancestors for thousands of years.

Do you think there are ways in which history can help get these messages across?

CP: We draw upon history in a simplistic way. We frequently contrast environmental activism with that of the civil rights movement, the suffragettes, or the anti-apartheid movement, but highlight non-violent direct action and tend to forget there was quite a lot of violence in those movements as well.

We also need to think further back and look at how planetary forces and climate, as well as humans and other species, have had an impact on the development of civilisations. A great revelation, reading Peter’s book, was watching those twists and turns, and the way humans responded. The Little Ice Age [from the 14th to mid-19th century] in Europe set us back, for instance, but we overcame it. It wasn’t just a matter of waiting for the climate to improve – it required a resourcefulness that we need to draw upon and find strength in again today.

PF: Historians all cut our cloth in slightly different ways, and it’s hard to be prescriptive. But questions we sometimes struggle with in universities are: what is our purpose? Is our priority writing for specialist academic researchers, teaching, to bring up the next generation of scholars, or engaging with the public? We are sometimes slightly uncomfortable about the best ways to get our ideas into the public domain.

There’s also anxiety about the degree to which we should be involved in policy. Many of my colleagues don’t think they should be, and would push back at the idea that you can learn lessons from historical episodes or devise policies around them as a result. But one of the key things I’ve discovered is that people have a real appetite for history – and that’s as true for environmental history as it is for the Tudors or the Silk Roads. People are hungry for ideas and to learn, so if you can engage with that, these kinds of conversations can flow from there.

Do you have heroes from history whose stories might help shape today’s debates?

PF: One of the things I tried to do in my book is to use as many people’s voices as possible, because one of the wonders of history is reading people’s thoughts and views in their own words to get a sense of how people reacted to the problems of their day. Sometimes, the things they wrote or thought were wrong, and that’s important too. There are lots of historical figures to whom I’m hugely sympathetic, rather than a single figure I look up to or who I think got everything right. So I’d dodge the question slightly by nominating a whole symphony orchestra of guest-star appearances rather than specific individuals.

CP: I’m one of those kids who grew up reading [HG Wells’s 1895 novel] The Time Machine, and have always fantasised about rubbing a lamp and a genie popping out to offer me three time trips. Obviously, I’d love to see a Tyrannosaurus Rex – the greatest animal that’s ever lived. I’d also love to know precisely what happened at the end of the [19th-century] battle of the Little Bighorn. But my third wish would be to go into the future to see which players in contemporary humanity will be regarded as heroes. And, of course, I’m going to say that they will be the individuals such
as [Swedish environmental activist] Greta Thunberg: the young woman who spoke so forthrightly to people across the world back in 2019 and 2020 when we really needed a wake-up call. I fantasise about going into Parliament Square and seeing who has replaced the statue of Churchill.

Peter, you write that “there are vast regions, periods and peoples that receive little attention” in the history of the environment. Which aspects are overlooked?

PF: Indigenous peoples are largely written out of history – yet, all around the world, such peoples tend to have been incredibly careful conservators of their ecosystems. And that’s not just because I feel that’s a nice thing to say – it’s measurable.

These groups have had to respond to change very quickly, and have tended to do so in very practical ways. They have a good understanding of how sustainability works – but that rarely gets highlighted except by groups such as [human-rights charity] Survival International.

One of my current bugbears is the fact that nature conservation often involves setting up game reserves, which can involve booting people out. In Tanzania and Kenya, for example, Maasai have been pushed out of lands they’ve inhabited for millennia, as have Baka people in central Africa. Part of the conservation movement says that the only natural world that’s perfect is one that humans don’t get to touch, but humans and the natural world can live side by side.

Working on Silk Roads, central Asia and nomadism, I’ve explored the ways in which non-city-based peoples and their lifestyles have been important in history. Nomadic or non-sedentary peoples have been written about in denigrating ways, as savage or brutal. But many of the products we need in cities come from places far away from urban centres, and we tend not to think about the people who are making and growing them.

The word ‘civilisation’ comes from the Latin civilis, referring to people who live in cities, and we concentrate too much on those in ivory towers or centres of power – usually men, and usually wealthy. It can be a challenge to write about different regions and people in an engaging way, but it’s vital to be reminded that there are lots of different ways we live on this beautiful planet, and that we should explore all of them.

CP: One of the most interesting things in Peter’s book is that when the supercontinent Pangaea broke up, mammal fauna that arose in the Americas were different from those in Asia, Africa and Europe. There was greater diversity to draw upon when domesticating mammals in those latter regions, and that enabled greater access to food. That in turn gave rise to the classical civilisations, which had written cultures long before those in the Americas. So the story of which aspects of the past we focus on comes down to biology.

PF: That’s exactly right. The fact that we had horses, camels or other animals that could enable us to connect quicker to each other, carry goods, help sow and mill crops and so on, meant that how societies developed in the Americas – where there weren’t horses – was different from in Europe and Asia.

Around 94 per cent of history faculties in the UK focus on the history of the west. This partly reflects the attitude espoused by one of Britain’s most famous historians, [19th-century writer and politician] Thomas Babington Macaulay, who wrote that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.

Those legacies have contributed to aspects of environmental history and climate negotiations we struggle with today. How should the west deal with the fact that we burned all of our coal in pursuit of industrial and political economic development – and parts of the world that haven’t had that boost say: now you’re telling us we need to be green and clean? The only way we can have those conversations is to respect other cultures, learn about them, and understand our role in their successes and weaknesses.

PF: How optimistic are you that human ingenuity, technology and lessons from the past can provide hope for the future, Chris?

CP: I’m a pragmatist, and I know we can’t continue to live on the planet in the way we do now. But I believe that the resourcefulness we can muster – our inventiveness and creativity – means humanity will survive. Peter, were you tempted – given all the data you assembled – to look to the future?

PF: Funnily enough, historians can be quite bad predictors of the future. It could be that, because we tend to deal in war and pestilence, we tend to be quite gloomy! I’ll let other people have a go at predicting the future. It just felt right to me, as a historian, to explain how we’ve got to where we are in 2024, and let people work out what they think comes next –and what they, their family, friends and communities, should be doing. As you know much better than I, Chris, we can all make our small changes. But if we can act in concert, then things start to look slightly more promising.