Centre for Environmental Humanities

Research and Teaching in the Midst of Climate Crisis, by Ashley Dodsworth

Posted on September 27, 2019October 19, 2023 by ceh-admin

I became a co-convenor of the PSA Environmental Politics sub-group earlier this year, against the backdrop of the rise of Extinction Rebellion and the increasing impact of the environmental movement. The convening team decided to reflect this in our latest event, a workshop on ‘Activism and Academia in an Age of Environmental Breakdown’ at Nottingham Trent which aimed to not only bring together activists and academics, but to critically reflect on the intersection between the two and try to explore how to hold academic events in this time of climate crisis.

As anyone who’s organised an event knows, finding a convenient data is half the battle. Balancing the start of term dates for myself and the other co-convenors was difficult and the date of 20^th September was one of the few that worked for us all. But surely holding an event on environmental activism on the date of the global climate strike was contradictory? After much discussion we decided that the fit between the theme of the conference and the strike could provide a rich source of discussion and that we should try and explore this. So we arranged for the lunchbreak to include time for anyone who wanted to, to attend the demonstration being held in the nearby city centre with directions provided. Some participants also mentioned that they would be attending the workshop as part of their strike action, with one participant wearing a strike arm-band. Registration was free and we were clear that people could attend for whatever time they could, to further support people coming along as part of their strike activities. Participating in a climate protest, whether by labelling attendance at the workshop as such or briefly joining the main demonstration, while at the same time critically analysing both the protest and the intersection of activism and academia blurred the objectivity of the workshop, to say the very least. But bringing our practice into the workshop and openly discussing how they intersected, in addition to ensuring that no activism was compulsory, grounded our discussions and prompted each participant to reflect on how they experienced the intersection of both their research and their action.

The current wave of climate action and the groups that are spearheading it, such as the school strike movement and Extinction Rebellion, are distinct in the way that they are driven by young activists. Initially we recognised this through a panel on youth engagement, with excellent speakers such as Dr Sarah Pickard presenting their work on young people’s political activism. However this felt disingenuous and was not representative of the movement nor the agency of the young activists driving it. So we reached out to young climate activists around the globe and asked if they would like to record a video to be shown at the conference which explained why they got involved with the climate strike movement and how the networks they were part of were organised. (We took advice regarding data protection and gained the consent of their parents when necessary.) Hearing directly from these activists from across Europe and America brought balance to the panel, ensuring that we weren’t just discussing youth activism, but listening and responding to them and their work directly. This activist engagement was also reflected in the speakers we invited to the conference and the call for papers. We wanted to ensure that activists and practioners were included and highlighted this in both the name of the workshop and throughout. For example the ‘Critical Reflections on Extinction Rebellion’ panel featured activists from the group as well as academics who study it, and representatives from a local wildlife NGO took part in another panel. The NGOs represented were from Nottingham and the Midlands in part due to proximity to the conference venue but also because we wanted to reflect the context of the area we held the event in, to ‘think global, act local’. We endeavoured to match this with an engagement with the wider context of climate activism, with a discussion of activism and academic globally and in the Global South in particular. Deciding against a specific panel on this topic, we tried to reflect the global context throughout the day, such as including videos from young activists around the world and a specific reflection on this topic at the start of the roundtable led by a scholar of and from the Global South. However keeping the balance between the local and the global was difficult, raising questions of whose voices are included and whose are heard. Within the workshop we wanted to reflect the growing trend of more inclusive academic conferences, a trend that is particularly prevalent within environmental scholarship. The roundtable at the end of the workshop was designed to facilitate this, with activities that paired up activists and academics for discussion and time for the group as a whole to talk together. This turned out to be one of the strongest aspects of the workshop – certainly it was one of the most commented upon and more space for this discussion, even at the expense of time for the earlier papers, would I think have been welcomed.

Reflecting on the workshop now, while there are changes I would make, the attempt to not only bring together academics and activists but to embed that approach within the format of the day and its priorities was I felt worthwhile. To research and teach on environmental issues in the face of climate denialism and apathy as well as the increasing environmental collapse is a political act and we should recognise that in our forums.

Ashley Dodsworth is a lecturer in politics in SPAIS at the University of Bristol and co-convenor of the PSA Environment sub-group. Her research explores the intersection of the history of political thought and environmental politics, and environmental rights. She is co-editor of Environmental Human Rights: A Political Theory Perspective (Routledge, 2018).

Reflections on European Society for Environmental History Bi-ennial Conference, Tallinn, 21-24 August, 2019

Posted on August 29, 2019October 19, 2023 by ceh-admin

Back home after the conference, my mind flitting around memories including the stupendously impressive opening ceremony, the highlight of which was an Estonian choir serenading conference attendees from atop a submarine in Tallinn’s Seaplane Harbour Museum – no really – and conversations with such a wide variety of attendees that it only serves to remind me what a broad church environmental history is – and ending up committing to do another book review as a result of a chance encounter with an envhist colleague/book review editor for a journal.

But uppermost in my thoughts is one of the keynote speeches, which I think was a masterclass in how to deliver a compelling narrative whilst relating it to relevant historiography and conceptual themes, using different sources of material to inform and balance judgements about conflicting information, and paying due attention to agreed conference themes. To name just a few of its qualities. The keynote was by Professor Kate Brown of MIT in the States, presenting on aspects of her most recent book, ‘Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future’. Quite apart from the important factual content of direct relevance to us (blueberries and other fruit and vegetables from Ukraine and Poland are now off my shopping list probably permanently), Professor Brown critiqued the existing Chernobyl historiography and present mainstream mind-set as being limited both geographically and temporally, focused on the immediate geographical site around the nuclear plant, and also on an “accident” narrative which regards the disaster as a one-off event suspended in time, rather than an ongoing disaster with accelerating consequences.

Commenting also on the perspectives created by popular media/culture, Brown critiqued the (much-praised from a dramatic perspective) HBO ‘Chernobyl’ TV series as perpetuating a prejudice that a “Chernobyl” could only happen in an authoritarian regime such as the Soviet Union – whilst, as Brown asserts, the liberal democratic authorities in Japan took three months to acknowledge that there had been a nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

Of greatest interest from a budding historian’s perspective however, was her analysis of the primary research material available, recognising that official documents from the period were more useful in illustrating the deleterious impact of Soviet bureaucracy and power structures on the capacity to provide accurate information about the health consequences of Chernobyl – than they were useful in terms of understanding the actual health consequences. For the latter Brown undertook oral history research with workers who had been present in dealing with aspects of the aftermath, identifying what they had done, why, and what the consequences for their own health and that of their now deceased colleagues had been. Professor Brown’s presentation was filmed by ESEH and is now available on: vimeo.com/354501590

Her presentation reminded me of some of the things I learned in my MRes in Historical Research at the Institute of Historical Research, that not all sources of material are accurate, that they may exist for a particular reason, and reflect the views/bias of the person and/or organisation responsible for their creation – not something I had exactly forgotten, but which had been pushed to the back of my mind in my rush to “do” the research for my ongoing PhD.

Elsewhere in my ESEH conference experience, I’m left reflecting on the value of making presentations, as opposed to just attending conferences to hear other people and “network”. Although there were in total 500 ESEH conference attendees (although not all at the conference at the same time) there were in most segments of the timetable around ten parallel sessions, and for my ‘Landscapes of War’ session in which I presented there were just nine attendees, plus the three speakers, the chair, and a technician – spread out in an unfortunately quite large lecture room. I had a similar experience at ASEH back in April – hundreds of conference attendees in all, lots of competing parallel sessions, and our five-strong panel nearly outnumbered the audience. I know, I know, the contacts you make, the practice you get in public speaking, the opportunity to reshape your PhD material according to the themes of the conference, thereby broadening your perspective on your own material…but nevertheless I found all the empty seats quite dispiriting, and in stark contrast to the buzz I got from speaking at the Rural Modernism and British Agricultural History Society conferences earlier this year where, whilst there were only 30 or 40 attendees in total, there were no parallel sessions, so I had an audience of all the conference participants, and it really made me feel like it was worthwhile.

I’m sure the issue of how many parallel sessions to have is a perennial tension for conference organisers, and I’m certainly not going to attempt to give advice – but only to say that I think, in deciding to participate in future conferences, I will just have to accept that as a landscape militarisation envhist, I will likely have to resign myself to speaking to small audiences for the larger international conferences, in order to benefit from the events’ scale and breadth in other ways – and wait for the smaller single-session conferences to give me the exciting and stimulating experience of presenting to a good-sized audience.

Gary Willis

Year Two PhD Student

Department of Historical Studies / Member of Centre for Environmental Humanities

When Canton Met London: A Botanical Bridge in the Work of John Bradby Blake, 1766-1773

Posted on July 23, 2019October 19, 2023 by ceh-admin

Josepha Richards’ postdoctoral research explores the archives of an 18^thcentury British botanist – John Bradby Blake – whose personal project was to make Chinese plants better known in Britain and its colonies. She explains this early attempt to compile a Chinese “flora”, how he relied on the help of Chinese to gather information and what were the wider consequences of his work (notably on the environment of British American colonies).

In the 1770s, the English trader John Bradby Blake made one of the earliest systematic attempts to document the diversity of Chinese plants, based on careful observations of the material he was able to access while based in China. His time there coincided with the operation of the Canton System (1757-1842), when Guangzhou (Canton), along with nearby Macao, was the only harbour open to Westernerswanting to trade with China.

John Bradby Blake appears to have been a self-taught botanist prior to becoming a trader with the British East India Company in 1766. He put this expertise to work shortly after he began his duties in Guangzhou as ‘supercargo’. From the start, Blake’s goal was to use his spare time in the off-trade season to collect the plants that he encountered, many of which were little known in Europe at that time. Before embarking for China, Blake had met with eminent naturalists such as Daniel Solander and John Ellis in London, who advised on using the recently created Linnaean system to classify previously unknown Chinese plants.

Painting of the Tallow tree in the Blake collection, Oak Spring Garden Foundation

Around 1771, Blake started to produce drawings and notes for his Chinese “flora”. He chose the plants he wished to include based on the material to which he had access in Guangzhou, and by comparing those plants with others described in several Western botanical books that he had brought with him. Much information also came from the translation of Chinese botanical books such as the classic Chinese book of medicinal plants, the Bencao Gangmu(Compendium of Materia Medica). Whenever he could, he also obtained seeds of certain plants of particular interest and planted them, following advice from local Chinese garden owners and gardeners. Blake also commissioned and worked closely with a Chinese artist named Mak Sau to produce realistic, scientifically accurate, drawings of the plants, often including different stages of their growth, for example both flowers and fruits.

Blake regularly sent seeds to England to his father, a retired East India Company ship’s captain. Blake senior then distributed the seeds to recipients across Britain: not only to major institutions, such as the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew, but also to commercial plant nurseries in London. Among those who received seeds were also several correspondents in the developing British American colonies.^[i]The plants that Blake was interested in were diverse, and included several ornamentals such as the sought-after Camellia, but Blake seems to have been especially focused on plants with practical uses such as Chinese medicinal plants, or plants with economic uses (dye, food crops, wax).

The British American and Caribbean colonies were particularly eager for any new economic crops. It is no surprise then that the plant which among all of Blake’s findings had the widest environmental impact, was one sent to the American South and Caribbean: the Chinese tallow tree (Triadica sebifera sebiferaL.), used by the Chinese to produce a form of vegetable wax. Not only did Blake take lengthy notes on how the Chinese grew the plant and processed it in order to produce wax; but he also commissioned a series of detailed paintings and sent them with seeds, via London, all the way to South Carolina, Georgia, and the St. Johns River in Florida in the American colonies, as well as St. Vincent in the Caribbean. The tallow tree did very well in the American colonies, and Blake is therefore indirectly responsible for encouraging further exploration of its use in the 19^thcentury. Unfortunately, the species turned out to be pernicious invasive with negative environmental impacts.

Blake’s contributions – had they come to full fruition – would have been a major contribution to Western knowledge of Chinese plants. Also, by taking Chinese books as references he clearly took Chinese botanical knowledge seriously. His papers allow for a rare insight into the dynamic between Chinese go-betweens and Western botanists in the 18^thand even 19^thcentury. Indeed, without the help of Chinese translators, gardeners, gatherers and wealthy garden owners, no Western botanist could have undertaken the kind of project that Blake was attempting.

Blake’s project was cut short by his early death in 1773. Around 1775, Whang Ah Tong, a trade intermediary who knew English and who appears to have helped Blake with translations while he was in Canton, returned Blake’s papers and paintings back to his father in England. Some of the drawings were also either acquired by, or given to, Sir Joseph Banks (now in the Natural History Museum, London) and these were used by Banks used to assist the plant collectors he sent to China in the latter part of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Unfortunately, the 19^thcentury saw intensified xenophobia and prejudice in Western relations with China, which led them to discount local Chinese knowledge and proved an impediment to more open Sino-Western botanical exchange. Although forgotten after his death, the reappearance of John Bradby Blake’s work in the twenty first century offers a rare glimpse of an earlier more positive dynamic in early Sino-Western cultural and scientific exchanges.

Forest 404: A chilling vision of a future without nature

Posted on June 6, 2019October 19, 2023 by ceh-admin

Binge-watching of boxsets on BBC iPlayer or Netflix is a growing habit. And binge-listening isn’t far behind. Podcast series downloadable through BBC Sounds are all the rage (with a little help from footballer Peter Crouch). Enter Radio 4’s ‘Forest 404’ – hot off the press as a 27-piece boxset on the fourth day of the fourth month (4 April 2019). This is something I’ve been involved in recently: an experimental BBC sci-fi podcast that’s a brand-new listening experience because of its three-tiered structure of drama, factual talk and accompanying soundscape (9 x 3 = 27).

Try to imagine a world in which not only forests but every last trace of the natural world as we know it has been erased (almost……). This eco-thriller by Timothy X. Atack (credits include ‘Dr Who’) is set in the 24^th century following a data crash in the early 21^st century called The Cataclysm (404 is also the error message you get when a website is unavailable). The action follows lead protagonist Pan (University of Bristol Drama alumna and ‘Doctor Who’ star Pearl Mackie), a sound archivist who archives recordings surviving from the early 21^st century. These include items such as a speech by President Obama’s on climate change, Neil Armstrong’s remarks after landing on the moon and Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in love’. Pan is merrily deleting them all (useless and senseless). Until, one day, she stumbles upon a recording of birdsong in the Sumatran rainforest that inexplicably grabs her. In fact, she’s left intoxicated, almost falling in love with it. So begins Pan’s quest to understand its origin and purpose – not to mention her mission to reconstruct the meaning of an almost completely eradicated world of nature.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a project with the world-famous, Bristol-based BBC Natural History Unit (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council), exploring wildlife filmmaking over the past quarter-century. We wanted to include and support a creative dimension going far beyond the project’s more strictly academic and historical elements. Something poetic and performative that could take the study of nature at the BBC into new territory, and away from the visual. But the core theme remains the same: the value of the natural world and its representation in cultural form. This haunting drama focuses on that cultural value very closely by exploring an alien and alienating future world without nature – a world where the only memory of its former existence is preserved in Pan’s sound archive.

This is a deeply historical approach that re-unites me with a piece of research I published some time in the journal Environmental History (2005) what I called the strange stillness of the past – how sounds, both human and non-human generated, were overlooked by most historians. ‘Forest 404’ also ties in with another recent AHRC activity led by my colleague, Dr Victoria Bates. The project was called ‘A Sense of Place: Exploring Nature and Wellbeing through the Non-Visual Senses,’ and I participated as a volunteer. It was about immersing people in natural sensescapes using 360-degree sound and smell technologies. The idea is that we can potentially ‘take nature’ to people who can’t go to it for a first-hand experience.

With my partners at the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council, I see ‘Forest 404’ as part of an emerging research area known as the environmental humanities. The starting point of ‘enviro-hums’ is the conviction that a scientific perspective, no matter how important, cannot do full justice to the complexity of our many layered relationships with nature.

The humanities and arts have a big contribution to make in helping us to appreciate the value of what ecosystem services researchers call cultural services. This denotes the so-called non-material benefits we derive from the natural world – its aesthetic value (beauty), how it inspires imaginative literature, painting and music, its spiritual significance, and its role in forming cultural identities and giving us a sense of place. Last spring, Radio 3 broadcast a week-long celebration of all things forest and trees, following it up with another week in the autumn. ‘Into the Forest’ was all about how forests have supplied an almost unlimited source of inspiration for creative activity. ‘Forest 404’ confronts us with the brutal possibility of a world not just without forests and trees but even lacking a conception of nature. And it makes us think about how that absence impoverishes us culturally and spiritually as well as the more obvious ecological dangers we face.

Accompanying the podcast is an ambitious online survey devised by environmental psychologists at the University of Exeter and operated by The Open University. Data on how we respond to nature has previously concentrated on the visual. This focus on natural soundscapes will add a fresh dimension to what we already know about how contact with nature benefits our physical and mental wellbeing. Give the podcast a listen. Then please do the survey – over 7,000 people have already done so. It takes less than 10 minutes.

Full details can be found on the BBC website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06tqsg3

Peter Coates, Professor of American and Environmental History

Unless we regain our historic awe of the deep ocean, it will be plundered

Posted on May 20, 2019October 19, 2023 by ceh-admin

In the memorable second instalment of Blue Planet II, we are offered glimpses of an unfamiliar world – the deep ocean. The episode places an unusual emphasis on its own construction: glimpses of the deep sea and its inhabitants are interspersed with shots of the technology – a manned submersible – that brought us these astonishing images. It is very unusual and extremely challenging, we are given to understand, for a human to enter and interact with this unfamiliar world.The most watched programme of 2017 in the UK, Blue Planet II provides the opportunity to revisit questions that have long occupied us. To whom does the sea belong? Should humans enter its depths? These questions are perhaps especially urgent today, when Nautilus Minerals, a mining company registered in Vancouver, has been granted a license to extract gold and copper from the seafloor off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Though the company has suffered some setbacks, mining is still scheduled to begin in 2019.

This marks a new era in our interaction with the oceans. For a long time in Western culture, to go to sea at all was to transgress. In Seneca’s Medea, the chorus blames advances in navigation for having brought the Golden Age to an end, while for more than one Mediterranean culture to travel through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the wide Atlantic was considered unwisely to tempt divine forces. The vast seas were associated with knowledge that humankind was better off without – another version, if you will, of the apple in the garden.

If to travel horizontally across the sea was to trespass, then to travel vertically into its depths was to redouble the indiscretion. In his 17th-century poem Vanitie (I), George Herbert writes of a diver seeking out a “pearl” which “God did hide | On purpose from the ventrous wretch”. In Herbert’s imagination, the deep sea is off limits, containing tempting objects whose attainment will damage us. Something like this vision of the deep resurfaces more than 300 years later in one of the most startling passages of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), as a trip underwater in a diving bell figures forth the protagonist’s desire for occult, ungodly knowledge.

Mann’s deep sea is a symbolic space, but his reference to a diving bell gestures towards the technological advances that have taken humans and their tools into the material deep. Our whale-lines and fathom-lines have long groped into the oceans’ dark reaches, while more recently deep-sea cables, submarines and offshore rigs have penetrated their secrets. Somewhat paradoxically, it may be that our day-to-day involvement in the oceans means that they no longer sit so prominently on our cultural radar: we have demystified the deep, and stripped it of its imaginative power.

But at the same time, technological advances in shipping and travel mean that our culture is one of “sea-blindness”: even while writing by the light provided by oil extracted from the ocean floor, using communications provided by deep-sea cables, or arguing over the renewal of Trident, we perhaps struggle to believe that we, as humans, are linked to the oceans and their black depths. This wine bottle, found lying on the sea bed in the remote Atlantic, is to most of us an uncanny object: a familiar entity in an alien world, it combines the homely with the unhomely.

For this reason, the activities planned by Nautilus Minerals have the whiff of science fiction. The company’s very name recalls that of the underwater craft of Jules Verne’s adventure novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870), perhaps the most famous literary text set in the deep oceans. But mining the deep is no longer a fantasy, and its practice is potentially devastating. As the Deep Sea Mining Campaign points out, the mineral deposits targeted by Nautilus gather around hydrothermal vents, the astonishing structures which featured heavily in the second episode of Blue Planet II. These vents support unique ecosystems which, if the mining goes ahead, are likely to be destroyed before we even begin to understand them. (Notice the total lack of aquatic life in Nautilus’s corporate video: they might as well be drilling on the moon.) The campaigners against deep sea mining also insist – sounding not unlike George Herbert – that we don’t need the minerals located at the bottom of the sea: that the reasons for wrenching them from the deep are at best suspect.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OElwEL-pnDI?wmode=transparent&start=0]

So should we be leaving the deep sea well alone? Sadly, it is rather too late for that. Our underwater cameras transmit images of tangled fishing gear, cables and bottles strewn on the seafloor, and we find specimens of deep sea animals thousands of metres deep and hundreds of kilometres away from land with plastic fibres in their guts and skeletons. It seems almost inevitable that deep sea mining will open a new and substantial chapter on humanity’s relationship with the oceans. Mining new resources is still perceived to be more economically viable than recycling; as natural resources become scarcer, the ocean bed will almost certainly become of interest to global corporations with the capacity to explore and mine it – and to governments that stand to benefit from these activities. These governments are also likely to compete with one another for ownership of parts of the global ocean currently in dispute, such as the South China Sea and the Arctic. The question is perhaps not if the deep sea will be exploited, but how and by whom. So what is to be done?

A feather star in the deep waters of the Antarctic. BBC NHU

Rather than declaring the deep sea off-limits, we think our best course of action is to regain our fascination with it. We may have a toe-hold within the oceans; but, as any marine scientist will tell you, the deep still harbours unimaginable secrets. The onus is on both scientists and those working in what has been dubbed the “blue humanities” to translate, to a wider public, the sense of excitement to be found in exploring this element. Then, perhaps, we can prevent the deep ocean from becoming yet another commodity to be mined – or, at least, we can ensure that such mining is responsible and that it takes place under proper scrutiny.

The sea, and especially the deep sea, will never be “ours” in the way that tracts of land become cities, or even in the way rivers become avenues of commerce. This is one of its great attractions, and is why it is so easy to sit back and view the deep sea with awed detachment when watching Blue Planet II. But we cannot afford to pretend that it lies entirely beyond our sphere of activity. Only by expressing our humility before it, perhaps, can we save it from ruthless exploitation; only by acknowledging and celebrating our ignorance of it can we protect it from the devastation that our technological advances have made possible.

This blog is written by Laurence Publicover, Lecturer in English, University of Bristol and Katharine Hendry, Reader in Geochemistry, University of Bristol and both members of the University’s Cabot Institute. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.