History

Lecture 24

Ok, so for the last 3 weeks of our course we are going to be studying the 20th century Through this book by by the the great environmentalist. Dorian Jr Called the great acceleration. Actually, he wrote this with a co-author. Peter angle cave Came out just a few years ago and it deals with something called the great acceleration. Just an idea that has been Posited by environmental historians and an environmental scientist. Basically saying bad Human activity over the last several centuries has altered the Earth's environment And dramatic ways That have excelled or rated in their scope and in their quality and in their effect on the environment, especially since World War 2. This is an era of an acceleration, basically of human driven changes to the environment, including climate change, pollution, and deforestation land degradation. Number of other interrelated things. As this book is going to deal with basically the relationship between basically energy Economics and the environment in the 20th century, with a real emphasis on the post World, War 2 period is quite an interesting book is wide ranging and deals with a lot of big fundamental ideas in the study of environmental history which makes it perfect for a class like ours. So the chapters in this book are a little bit longer than some of the things we've read in the past. And so we're going to space it out a little bit. We're going to have one chapter of this do every other class period. So you had up until Wednesday of this week to read the 1st chapter and I'm going to give you until Monday of next week to read the 2nd chapter. So we're going to keep going in that sort of routine in order to give you a little bit of time to prepare each chapter and also to build in a little bit of time on the syllabus for you to work through the 3 articles that you're going to compare for your final essay, if you still have any questions about your essay Or your perspectives or feedback you received on there. Please let me know. So we can get moving on that project as well as the 2 basic things we're going to be doing kind of interspersed throughout the last 3 weeks of this class, reading the great acceleration and working towards our final essays. And so this book begins with a general overview of the importance of energy to human history. If you think about it, this planet runs entirely on the energy provided by the sun. Most of that is of course Wasted or not put towards human uses. Exactly something like a 3rd of it immediately disperses back out into space. That amount of energy from the sun that goes to a variety of sources. Some just radiates back into space over time anyway. But about 10 percent of that energy gets used for things like Consumption by plants by animal Warming of the oceans and land and so forth. And it is all that energy that essentially Kind of feeds the engine of human life on Earth. So we're really dependent upon the energy of the sun. It's that there's something like $110000000000.00 tons of biomass that is produced in the sea each year from energy from the sun, $120000000000.00 tons of biomass on land And up until very recently. Until say, the 17th 18th centuries, this was Basically what human life depended on were, you're taking part in this web. He says of energy and life without being able to really alter in much The ways that human beings, The kind of energy we're Domesticating animals and plants, especially after the discovery of fire and the use of fire by humans. And then the agricultural revolution in antiquity, where people began, you know, harvesting plants growing them for human purposes rather than just hunting and gathering big touched And human development in part because they interrupted that energy cycle and allowed human beings to harness more of the earth Through the particular practices There was Dramatic transformation in human history Of fossil fuel, Oil to power machines that made Impossible Possible and allowed for really an intensification of human energy Of ends that ended up having a pretty significant impact on how human beings interact with the rest of nature So we can Produce the sun Periods of time Of crude Underground Something like 500000000 years And we are now tapping into Energy from the sun. They were able to use to kind of power our societies, But of course this is come with some pretty significant downsides, pretty significant Impacts on the environment that we have to consider alongside. Of course, the obvious economic benefits of all of this. And that's really where this book goes is kind of balancing out The way we should understand energy use through its potential for positive human use. And you know, obviously the economic development boom in human societies over the last several centuries has been driven almost entirely by the expansion of energy, But it also has come at a cost of environmental degradation in really strange and sometimes an even ways. And that's why it's important to look at this as a historian, not just an even smooth. You know of energy use bad in energy use, destroy the earth. It's actually very on even an interesting in the way that that actually functions. And so this book is going to go through a very new set of case studies to give us a sense of how human societies and nature interact through energy. It's quite an interesting story there. So one very obvious effect of The earliest stages of industrialization was the amount of environmental pollution that it created. So pollution, of course, became a major Cause of death. In fact, in industrial England, The the air was so polluted. And so You know, just overrun with the exhaust from fossil fuel plants and small factories without any sort of regulation that it just was a just a fatal environment. And in fact, the kind of benefits of a lot of the economic development were being offset by the huge environmental consequences of kind of unregulated fossil fuel use in urban centers. It produced acid rain which affected crops back to, you know, The ability for human beings to use land for other sorts of purposes, degraded buildings really quite destructive. And even today it's projected that about $100000.00 deaths per year around the world can be attributed directly to to air pollution In. This is especially true in societies today that are less regulated. Then say Western European societies, there have been of course attempts to Tap into other potential energy sources to There's a little quick overview of the history of hydro electricity in nuclear power. But there were of course, some obvious limits to the usefulness of those things for the scope of human energy use in this time. So the closely interrelated thing here that McNeil focuses in on in this chapter is how energy use has fueled Quite literally. A massive boom in the global population is really staggering when you take a look at say the entirety of human history. Look at a chart like this really paints a picture of what it would. An unusual moment in world history that we live in right now is really an aberration from the norm that has existed for thousands of years in human societies. He notes that it took many thousands of years for human society to achieve its 1st. You know, milestone of 1000000000 people. This happened sometime between about 181820. The global population then doubled between about 1900 in 1930 to 2000000000 It then tripled in the period that we're studying in this book from roughly 2300000000 people in 1905. Right to 7200000000 people at the time. This book was written, it's a little bit higher than that now, but over the course of 70 years, the human population tripled As more human beings alive today than probably throughout the entirety of human history combined, Which is a pretty staggering figure. If you think about it, and you know, really interesting thing about this is that in fact, the birth rate over this period has actually decreased from about $37.00 births per 1000 to 20 births per 1000, which is really driven. This has been quality of life issues, things like vaccines and clean water, better food supply medicines, and so forth that are made possible in part by industrialization. So it's mainly that our death rate has declined relative to the birth rate at such a level that it's Created a massive boom in the overall population. Right? This is one of those instances where a more kind of focus chart kind of tells the the story. A little bit better over the last couple 100 years. It's quite an interesting thing to see how this exponential growth in the population driven by declining death rates with industrialization has Created this situation. And so of course we have to consider that this all is filtered through human history and human processes. There is that balance between structure and agency that we have to deal with. There's significant environmental effects from population growth, but they're actually kind of unpredictable and they vary significantly from society to society and from situation to situation Some universal thing like population growth has pushed the demand for resources and for food. And so that has driven things like deforestation, the use of freshwater really to a breaking point in a lot of cases, Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have increased, which is driving really a ticking time bomb with with climate change. But we're also seeing some strange kind of unpredictable type things like the effects of migration and urbanization. It's significant in the United States, for instance, to see the growth of a city like Phoenix on your screen here. This is now the 5th largest city in the United States, and in many ways it's sort of an environmental disaster. I there's not access to significant fresh water. It has to be piped in from from large distances away, relies upon the heavy use of fossil fuels for things like air conditioning and just making it habitable. So even strange situations like this where people's preferences and the kind of economic boom of certain regions as lead to some Strange on even affects population growth. For instance, right now is booming in Southeast Asia as well as in India, where as population growth is actually declining, some in Western Europe and in the United States Being filtered through human agency, which is, again, one of those Ideas that we've been covering throughout this class we can Understand environmental process Affecting human history in this kind of one way. One way road, right. There's always have to consider the human element in all of this. And so in order to do this, this book is actually going to deal with things like energy use and population growth and their effects through a variety of interrelated case studies. And so in the next chapter of that, we're going to read for next week. Chapter 2 deals with the relationship between climate and biological diversity. So please keep up on the book, make progress on your final essay and e-mail me if you have any questions.

Lecture 25

Good morning everyone, we are on the last week of our semester. Now We have periods to go until the end and we're going to be spending this time as you know, finishing up our reading of j.r. McNeil and Peter angle Keyes. The great acceleration in environmental history of the Anthropocene since 1045 And environmental history, basically of the 20th century Focused on a variety of interrelated issues That are connected to human intervention into the environment that is, in our course. As we've been studying for the last 13 weeks or so, We've been looking at this reciprocal relationship between human history and natural environments that is Environment and geography shape human history in subtle ways. But human beings also reshape environments for their own needs. And we always need to think of these as a back and forth reciprocal relationship. And certainly when it comes to the issue of human impacts on climate, this is a really important topic for historians to dive into because it is impart. You know, informed by our past, that is how we're going to respond to this should be informed by by our past. But also because of just the pressing nature of this problem, it really requires a disciplinary approach as we're seeing right now in the midst of a pandemic. How important it is to have people who are trained in the social sciences and in the humanities because of course, there is a large, You know, human societal impact that requires some thoughtful, measured response. So there is an important role for the Humanities in discussions of things like climate change. And we're going to look at this really from Perspective, kind of studying this as a Kind of convergence of science and the humanities to look at how the discussion over climate change and biological diversity has developed over the last half century or so. And where that path seems to be headed right now. So There has been a growing scientific consensus over the last half century that human activities since the industrial revolution have driven global warming and climate change. And among the many factors that are involved, the massive concentration of atmospheric gases are really the major driving factor in. This comes from of course, the burning of fossil fuels, as well as the modification of environments for human uses, which have Of unpredictable effects that have added up to a massive concentration of carbon in the Earth's environment, which has driven A gradual warming in Global climate patterns. But also has produced sort of erratic weather patterns. This is something that goes back also to our discussion of the Little Ice Age. It wasn't simply that we saw across the board colder temperatures. What we saw were Radek weather patterns that were caused by a sort of interruption of the Of the climate cycle. So in the 1st chapter, the discussion really centered on human beings And of altering the Earth's environment for human needs and how the effects of things like the burning of fossil fuels and the creation of a really like energy, rich society, Energy, and energy use. Intensive Society led also to a massive population growth, which in turn led to greater demands for resources, which drove things like, You know, the clearing away of prairie lands for farming massive deforestation. The burning of massive amounts of fossil fuel to keep up with demand and a variety of other interrelated effects in this chapter. Now he's looking at specifically the issue of how climate change has affected the Earth's ecosystems and specifically looked at biological diversity and its decline as a proxy for a broader ecological decline taking place in the world, driven again by The activities of industrial societies. So this is just a really cool overview of the Data sets out there, tracing global temperature patterns relative to pre-industrial levels and the Chart where we have a fairly steady pattern within a variation of about a, you know, A quarter to half, a degree that suddenly spikes during about the 1970 s., Well, we've now seen a really unprecedented spike in the average temperature Throughout the world. And again, this is averaged out over a large number of data sets. But what it speaks to is a More erratic set of responses in the very kind of complex Li intertwined ecosystem that we live in are a part of a minor variation here. And there can sometimes have very dramatic consequences in other areas. So throughout this chapter, he goes into the effects of things like The rising temperature in the oceans, which again seems very minor. The way that is described initially is just a fraction of a degree. But if you think about the enormity of the world's oceans, A rise in the temperature, even of a fraction of a degree, amounts to an enormous amount of heat that is being captured in retained by the oceans. This is also of course Connected to things like rising sea levels with Ice melting at On the, As well as altering the chemistry of the oceans. Even inland. The melting of glaciers on and mountainous areas has disrupted regular water cycles. Where the again you could think of glaciers in a way as sort of retaining a certain amount of precipitation throughout the year and releasing it seasonally in the spring. And so these Changing weather patterns, just changing climate patterns, have sometimes unpredictable consequences. And so we see both things like, you know, your Radek Periods of both drought and heavy rain, the loss of go glaciers. Meaning also that we sometimes have periods of drought where you have river levels lower than usual because there's not that you know Built up reservoir of extra water in the in the glaciers, as well as warmer oceans, producing Increasingly severe psych loans and hurricanes. So again, it's not simply a matter of warmer temperatures in a warmer climate, but even more erratic climate, very much like what we saw with The Little Ice Age. So just a quick summary of some of the things that this is from National Geographic. Some of the things that We have seen in can expect in the future as climate change continues. Things like, again, extreme temperatures, both high and low, as well as that with that drought and forest fires and so forth. Also hydrological events like like again, flooding and Mass movement of water, as well as of people we could add to this. And again, these meterological events I was just describing. So again, it's more erratic weather patterns and just simply warmer weather. So Sense End of the 2nd World War, there's been a growing consensus among scientists that human activity In the climate. And this might have dire consequences for the ecosystem that human beings are part of. But it's only really been sense about the 1000. And this especially came from things like Pollution and litter, which again, it disproportionately affected people in urban centers. But again became a much more apparent by the to me to the seventy's and eighty's Acid rain, which was actually damaging. A lot of A lot of buildings and historical structures, and again trying to get to the heart of why suddenly we're seeing a disintegration of you know, public works Discover that this was part of a much broader problem, much broader issue of of pollution than there was of course, also, the discovery of a mass of the ozone layer in the southern hemisphere, Things that were being more widely publicly felt that brought this to public attention. And as scientists became increasingly urgent in their calls for the need for a concerted response and The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced a report for the 1st time in 1900 that really spelled out in great detail, human impact on climate change, as well as Some suggested steps for creating a coordinated global response, because again, this is an issue that doesn't obey national borders. And there's there's something that no single government alone could address. And this has been repeated in 1005200120072014. And finally, last year in 2019 and early on policymakers were quite responsive to this and worked through a framework non-binding framework, but one that seemed to address some of the major issues. But again, there's been major political resistance to this, especially domestic political resistance within the United States, which is something of an aberration among industrial powers as a lot of skeptics, especially on the far right of the political spectrum. You know, Conservatives are encouraged especially by their political allies within industry kind of lobby congress, successfully Arguing that the economic costs of this have, you know, would be Damaging to the economy. Even you know, the world's Largest most productive economy And on a more extreme And more extreme approach to this as Moon. Unfortunately, the current administration has pushed a little bit of this A little bit, but quite a lot of this is the outright denial that climate change is either Real or that it is a serious problems other than this Has actually slowed efforts considerably because the United States does play such a major role in the global economy as well as playing a major role in the production of greenhouse gases and so other, you know, growing kind. A condom is like notably China and India have been somewhat reluctant to adopt stringent environmental measures. Pointing out the injustice of developing countries going through this process of industrialization, this very dirty and polluting and then suddenly changing the rules of the game. Right. So this has been one of the challenging political issues. During the Obama administration. There were actually some major changes that were made committing the United States to an international framework for addressing this, but that has been reversed again due to domestic political resistance. So one quick measure for this that is often referred to within the scientific community is the decline in biodiversity. And it's estimated that The The current rate of The rise in the global temperature, Up to about 2 degrees Celsius would result in something like a 20 to 3020 percent to 33 percent decline In global biodiversity. That is the extinction of something like one in 5 to one in 3 species worldwide. This is of course important because the health of an ecology depends upon in large part of its diversity, because this is very closely interconnected. And even just, you know, something like the dying off of some or the dying off of of small insects can actually be very devastating all the way up the food chain all the way through the ecology ecological system. So without a major intervention, we're really looking at a 6th major extinction event on Earth. And again, we're always fighting this tide of balancing short term and short term economic goals against you know, as well as the interests of the most influence elements of the global society. Against what is really necessary when we consider human beings as part of a broader ecology. So in part, it's a way of how we think about human history and its relationship to the rest of nature. Again, we don't float up on top of our apart from the rest of the ecological system on earth. We're deeply involved in it. And this is one of the great lessons of environmental history that we have to consider ourselves as part of A broader spectrum of life. spectrum of life. On Earth and that comes with great responsibility. So sorry if this was a little bit of a bummer. But it's important to address this straight on as environmentalist story. And so I have a great day and keep working through your final project. If you have any questions, please do reach out.

Lecture 26

Ok, I, everybody today's lecture is going to cover chapter 3 in An angle keys book, the great acceleration and this chapter deals with environment and economy and more specifically about massive urbanization and the pressures that that is placed on The natural environment that supports an urban metropolis but also some of the challenges faced by city planners and of course the residents of these new metropolises that we could address through an environmental perspective. So this chapter builds on some of what we have read already in this book on things like, you know, energy use and population growth and so forth. And now is diving into the more specific issue of the demographic trends. Right? So we've seen population growth over the course of the last 100 years or so on a really unprecedented level. I love these little hockey stick charts of like population growth over 10000 years and you can see very quickly like what it, what a strange aberration this is. But another part of the story that you don't see on a simple chart like this is that it is very uneven That a lot of this population growth Has been driven by development in the 3rd world or in the developing world. There's been a massive boom in population, in places like Southeast Asia and South Asia, as well as sub-Saharan, Africa. Whereas in Europe and North America, the population growth rate is actually starting to contract a little bit to come back down. So we need to kind of unpack this a little bit and look at how population growth varies and what sort of new challenges this is presenting. That might not be immediately obvious, just from a kind of overall Overall view of just the pure numbers. Right. And one of the Really odd trends in this is the sudden growth of cities. So throughout medieval history and even ancient history, it's basically taken as a rule of thumb that no more than about 10 percent of the population ever lived in cities. And in most cases, it was probably significantly less than that and we're living in a moment now where over 50 percent of the world's population lives in urban areas, There are over 500 cities. Now with a population of 1000000 or more and of those about 24 cities that have at least 5000000 people, and there are 12 bonafide metropolises with 20000000 people or more. And we have to remember that cities are not outside of nature. They're, they are, in fact, dependent upon And shaping the natural environments around them. And that was really what we were exploring through this book on Chicago that we read a couple weeks ago was how we can't really divorce cities from the environment. It's not just man and nature bad, really those things depend upon each other very closely and shape each other in some really important ways. So we can see this in, you know, in the United States Of mass urbanisation, right? My hometown has Just grown enormously over the last few decades and a lot of this was driven not, but just by by Birth rates and so forth. When I walk around the streets of Portland, Oregon. Now I've mostly meet people from California and Omaha and Kansas City and people coming from other places. Now that we have this very closely interconnected world, an interconnected economy and people move and travel much more than ever. So part of the, the the really the biggest driver of urbanization is actually migration right from people seeking jobs and seeking opportunities. So it's an economic process more than anything else. Right. And even in like my own small little small suburb on the edge of town where I grew up, this was basically the forest. I used to walk through school or what we used to walk through to get to school is now, you know, basically indistinguishable from the strip malls that are on the outskirts of Chicago and Indianapolis and so forth. So we're also seeing a little bit of more homogenous City Planning and growth that's coming along with this. So Chapter goes a little bit into the just, the anomaly of the World War, the post World War 2 boom in urban populations where we saw sustained growth of 9 percent growth annually in the world. like 3. Cities on average, which is an enormous figure And slowed a little bit, 6 percent annually since 1905. but still the enormous rate of 3. And along with this, we can also going to map this onto very closely. The growth in the world economy. This is a charge. This is from the World Bank's website giving you a quick overview of really the economic expansion, the economic growth Of our world Over the past half century or a little more than half a century. Now, since since World War 2, see where my mind is. I'm still back in the ninety's, But you can see that 1st couple of trillion was pretty tough to get to. And now we're at a point where the world's gross domestic product that is A figure that reflects the overall value of goods and services produced in economies. If you take that all together around the world, we've seen this just enormous exponential growth over Over this last, what 75 years or so since the end of the 2nd World War And with that too, it's, you know, kept pace Very well with population growth. So it's not just Population growth, kind of holding steady with, You know, economic growth in population growth going side by side, but actually the g.d.p. Per capita. So if we broke that down like the value of all the goods and services produced and brought that down and divide it by the number of people in the world, p. Even that per capita g.d. Has risen more than 10 fold. Right? So it's a pretty significant economic expansion that we're seeing in in this moment. But again, we have to remember that this is not taking place in a Vacuum, but we always have to consider historical circumstances. And a big part of this too, is that you know through that post-war period, The 1st half or so of that was consumed by the Cold War where formal imperialism and colonialism had had ended formally. Right. Where we're no longer seeing, you know the British empire with its See. No Small colony throughout the world, extracting resources and funneling them back into the Metropole. But it's actually not that far off of that either. It's just 2 different means, right? So during the Cold War, the United States and its Western democratic, liberal capitalist allies, We're trying to outmaneuver and outcompete the communist regimes of authoritarian regimes of the Soviet Union China and their various allies. Right. And so this green area you see marked around there are the kind of nonaligned areas, although you could really kind of group most of Latin America into the Western bloc and So forth. But these became sort of competitive grounds for American and Soviet intervention to try to bring them into their to their block, basically to outcompete a rival economic system. And so that operated in many cases a little bit like old school imperialism, sort of, you know, playing an influence game extracting resources, tying economies together in ways that were often, really good for big developed countries and pretty bad for small developing countries. So just really briefly, I wanted to talk specifically about the growth of of Bangladesh, a little bit of humor looking at Southeast Asia here on our map to zoom in a little bit after World War 2 British India was partitioned. Right? So we have India proper and then up to the northwest d.c. Pocket. Ok. Pakistan was originally part of that British colony. And then over here Bangladesh, which was originally at Independence called East Pakistan. So Pakistan and East Pakistan were basically areas where there was a Muslim majority and then India was an area where there was a Hindu majority. And so the British drew these boundaries and created Muslim states and a Hindu state. So this became sort of difficult in East Pakistan to sort of maintain a common government with this place all the way over here in West Virginia and West Pakistan. And so in instead, Bangladesh actually are East Pakistan became independent as being led dash sometime after that. And capital city Dhaka then benefited beef from becoming a Basically capital city and A center of administrative functions, as well as the sort of showpiece for the dock Integration into the world economy. And so there were a number of developing countries that benefited from foreign investment from some of their relationships with say, the Soviet Union in the United States. And you know, the kind of investments that were used as a foothold for for kind of political influence. And so forth, but Dhaka became a booming city after independence and is now it went from being a Relatively small city early in the 20th century to now being The 9th largest city in the world and the 6th most densely populated. And they've had just an enormous problem trying to keep up with this massive immediate growth of the city. Suddenly so many people called Trade in one place has basically overwhelmed the local government. Right? So, whereas no governmental brochures and travel brochures will show you this side of Dhaka, this is where most people on the specially, the outskirts of Dhaka people who are not among the super wealthy. This is their experience of Dhaka. Right? It is one of the most polluted cities in the world, a lot of this driven by Rapid industrialization without any sort of regulation or oversight. As one of the things we benefit from in the United States and Western countries is the kind of strong governmental oversight over industry because people will tend to, you know, simply dump their problems on to others. When allowed to The sewage system in Dhaka is completely overwhelmed by population growth. More than half of sewage doesn't even make it into the sewage system. And what does make it into the formal sewage system often gets dumped directly into river systems. And so the water around is basically unusable. It is Has to go through pretty heavy filtration process in order to even be basically usable. And even then you wouldn't drink it. There is Massive problem with litter and dumping of waste because there's not an official waste collection system. And because of the massive industrialization without any sort of oversight, there's also massive pollution going to dumping of toxic wastes. There's a specific problem with arsenic appearing in a lot of the food and groundwater and so forth in and around Dhaka. So just the enormity of those economic problems are Important to deal with. And we also have to recognise that this isn't just some compartmentalize off in some corner of the world in Bangladesh that we don't care about or something. Right. That we're all living in the same plan. And things happening in Bangladesh are actually very impactful on the United States and and really the rest of the world. These are all despite these little political boundaries and the seeming great distance between here and there. It's really not that great of a distance and not that remote from our from our experience here. So even in a more kind of Monday level, You know, this is not a unique problem to Bangladesh. This is basically the set of problems that every Western early Western cities experience to 1903, London would have been a nightmare for a lot of the same reasons that there was just no effective public works to deal with this massive population, growth, and unregulated industry. It's the smog of London and so forth were famous for this So these are not new problems. . They're just amplified now as new growing cities are grappling with them on a much larger scale than the kind of relatively slower growth of industrial, European cities experience. And even beyond just those immediate urban problems, There's also this concept introduced in the chapter of page 123 or so of the ecological footprint of cities that we can't just consider the impact of cities. Just, you know, on the immediate location, like Hong Kong, for instance, is a relatively compact city, one of the world's largest metropolises, but has been really grown up more than out because of its because of the geographical constraints. You know, a port city right on the oceans is kind of a limit to how far they can go. But you know, you know, Hong Kong has been very serious about considering their environmental impact on the world around them. Right? So it's not just the city itself. It's built up land, but we also have to consider that cities draw on the resources of natural areas around them or Crops and agricultural land that supplies food Grazing lands for livestock and farms And ranches and so forth. Fishing industries that supply food to cities beyond that, of course is also forests providing lumber and timber and so forth as well as the much larger area around it that actually is That is Absorbing. C o 2 is filtering out some of the pollutants and so forth that are brought in by cities and their transportation systems and so forth. Right. So this is just really the tip of the iceberg of a much larger ecological footprint as they call it. And so you can imagine with now 500 cities of a 1000000 people or more 12 mega metropolises if 20000000 people or more and more than half of the world's population living in cities, we're starting to really get to a point where we're, We're questioning the viability of this over the long term, whether or not he says there is enough nature to go around, We'll stop it there for today. So I hope that you think about this a little bit and write some thoughtful responses in your summary of the chapter. Often we kind of try to balance these 2 things of environment and economy, but there's some kind of hopeful words in there too, about some ways forward. Although this was written some years ago and it may be a little bit too late for some of those to have a great impact.

Lecture 27

Ok, today we are going to have our final huge a lecture of the semester Worth that in the final week here in just wrapping up our final exams in our for our final essays. And we finally made it to the end of the last book of the of the 5 that we have covered. We are today going to look at chapter 4, which deals with 2 interrelated issues. One, the Cold War And secondly environmentalism and the rise of environmentalism to confront some of the challenges posed by The kind of Cold War excesses we could call it. Ok. So in this lecture, we're briefly going to look at how international politics shaped environmental policy and how that also sparked Social movements that Sought to change the really the activities of both governments and industry as environmental challenges began to mount. So we are in Chapter 4. Now of the great acceleration And again, the theme of this chapter Is Basically how the Cold War shaped environmental policy for states and also the environmental movements that came to challenge those activities. So the Cold War 1st of all, We didn't have a strong grasp on this concept Of a confrontation between 2 sets of powers that shaped most of kind of late 20th century political history. So after World War 2, when you know the Soviet Union and United States had combined their efforts to defeat Nazi Germany and their fascist allies. At the end of that war, the Red Army did not And Basically moved out of those Eastern and Central European territories that they had Conquered during the war in the fight against Naziism. And so we have kind of a contest that ensues. We could call it between the United States and their allies in Western Europe And the Soviet Union and they're kind of occupied powers. They called this the Warsaw Pact. Basically a set of powers under Soviet military occupation that obeyed orders from Moscow and the United States countered with NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is still in place today, Came an increasingly global conflict. Each set of powers tried to outmaneuver the other. So this brought the United States deep into Latin American politics to try to prevent the Soviet Union from getting involved In the Soviet Union also found itself involved in Southeast Asia in China. And so the Cold War term 1st to the absence of great power conflict. Right? Because there's no direct war between the United States and Soviet Union. However, it was not obviously a period without warfare. It's just Pushed to the periphery in places like say Korea, or here we see on our screen Vietnam And it is very particular type of warfare that we end up seeing in a lot of these arenas that is, these proxy wars were often asymmetrical wars, right? So like the United States is fighting against basically peasants who are fighting a guerrilla war against tanks and bombers. Right? And so that type of warfare became a particularly environmentally, damaging, right. Not just in Vietnam, but throughout much of the 3rd World where you have basically 1st world powers and 1st world machinery. You know, confronting people using the forest using the trees using rural areas as their as their cover. Right. So here we see, for example, 2 u.s. Planes, spring aged Orage, which is a hazardous chemical used to clear Clear forest lands and expose Guerrilla fighters on the ground in order to prevent them to using the environment for cover. And this have long term environmental consequences both for the land and for people in those zones, right in areas in sub-Saharan, Africa, where the Soviet Union and United States also got involved. And we saw, You know, Crops of the crops being burned in order to starve outwards guerilla fighters and their supporters in rural areas. Laying of massive areas of land mines burning out environmental. You know zones, jungles, and so forth. This is also done a lot in America. It's a very highly destructive brand of warfare marked a lot of these asymmetrical conflicts. Ok. And even in times of peace, there was an enormous investment in industry in order to support the massive military machine that was required for, say the United States to confront the Soviet Union or the Soviet Union converse lead to confront what they saw as the great threat of the United States, and so we see, For instance, sufficiency campaigns in the Soviet Union, trying to make sure that they could secure all the resources they need within Within their boundaries. It's led to some, a kind of odd things like trying to farm cotton in Central Asia, which produced one of the worst environmental disasters of the 20th century with basically diverting so much water from the air. All sea in Central Asia that it's basically dried up. Now where we have, you know, one of the one of the Great inland bodies of water in the world is basically gone. At this point, your fishing villages now 200 miles from from the from shore and so forth. Right? So really reshaping environments in order to industrialize quickly had consequences and China. We could add to this under Mao, Basically a campaign to rapidly industrializing modernize China known as the Great Leap Forward. This is one of the great components of what's known as Maoism. Right? Or you know the policies of of Mao In order to industrialize rapidly, they cut a lot of corners, Things like trained Quickly, steel production in grain harvests and building military industrial parks and so forth. Had you know, Unforseen environmental consequences? Not only does China become one of the world's principal polluters and very rapid fashion. A lot of The productive campaigns that they carry out, things like trying to improve grain harvest and increase the area that was actually under cultivation. It's up really being very environmentally, damaging, right? As you see on your screen here, this is a method of terrorist farming that was spread deep into the countryside into deeply forested areas in China in order to expand food production. Right. And this sort of method, although it's quite pleasing to the eye, is also Not very sustainable. And it requires 1st of all massive labor to set up and to maintain, but also promotes erosion. It, of course, is cutting into environmentally necessary forest lands. Rapid salinisation from overusing land becomes a problem with this to be seen, not only in China, but also in the Soviet Union. And the United States is an increasingly instrumentalist view of nature that is viewing nature only through what it can provide for short term. Human uses, Which of course We must, You know, consider that human beings are not just sitting above or apart from nature, but are deeply reliant on environmental processes and ecological concerns. And those things often stand it off with short term economic goals. And so that's really where we see the beginnings of a lot of Tensions leading to the environmental movement by the 196970 s.. Right. And of course, we also have the problem of the more high profile And kind of dramatic issues of the nuclear weapons, industry and A series of basically Either instance disasters or or long drawn out. Slow disasters that are caused by it. Right on the left. You see the Hanford nuclear site, this is actually very close to where I grew up only about 100 miles or so from my hometown up the Columbia River. And this is one of the most polluted sites in the world. This is where the United States produced most of its plutonium during the Cold War in order to Provide fuel for nuclear weapons. So this was again prone to disasters and sometimes poor human judgment things like, for instance, the green run that was mentioned in the book here in 1949 when they thought they would see what happened when they exposed a certain amount of fresh plutonium Openly and kind of tried to measure it in a kind of got out of control and ended up creating a, You know, enormous disaster that they didn't even acknowledge for something like 35 or 40 years. The Soviet Union was even more a new kind of nonchalance with their handling of nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel. On the right here, you see Lake to try Near the town of my Iraq, which is considered to be the most polluted site in the world. This is basically a shallow pond where lots of nuclear waste is was just sort of haphazardly dumped orders of magnitude, more polluted than places like Cher noble or 3 Mile Island where there were more kind of high profile Disasters of nuclear meltdowns and so forth. But I mean in the book you describe, for instance, like standing at the edge of Lake Eyre, a child for one hour would give you a lethal dose of radiation. So There are these kind of immediate dramatic factors too, to match with kind of long term impact of overtaxing the environment for Industrial and military ends that became part of just the normal functioning of the world. During the Cold War, It was only in the 1960 s. Or so that environmentalism Arose as a response to this and many point to the early 1960 s.. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring as the sort of launching point for this Silent Spring Is kind of an exposé dealing with the plight of songbirds and making the argument that basically modern attempts to introduce massive chemicals into the environment to control it for agriculture and for pesticide purposes has created a kind of, you know, massive environmental problem that we were not grappling with, but this actually brought together a number of existing concerns over pollution. Right? That goes back all the way back to like the, you know, 1000 century with coal plants in urban areas and so forth created massive public health problems. Of course, the concerns over over exploitation of natural resources, The transformation of landscapes that we see that in Indiana, right, like that draining of swamps in order to create farmland and so forth. All of the Long term problems along with now the threat of Exposure to radiation from nuclear fuels and so forth. This came together in the 1960 s. And the kind of environment of social movements at that time To Bring about really a more conservative concerted effort to confront the shortsighted policies of governments and industrial leaders. And there's this sort of challenge of, you know, what's good for a few at the top who make most of the decisions and what's probably, you know, wise and best for that for the largest number. This confrontation is a pretty much a constant one, But environmentalism is persisted well beyond many of the social movements of the sixty's because of the enormity of the problems that it is confronting and the persistence of those problems. Right. And we can think of this also environmentalism as An issue of justice as well, because as we've have seen, not only in like Cold War politics, but even in the United States, We see that Environmental concerns disproportionately affect poor as well as typically ethnic minorities. So if you know, for instance, the decision in North Carolina right to to park a toxic waste dump in the middle of an African-American community that had very little voice or political in state politics, really kind of galvanized the movement against this. But it's very typical for Poorer areas, areas with ethnic minorities, large African-American communities, and so forth, a much more vulnerable to the actions of government and industry that will tend to, you know, park things like nuclear waste dumps or environmentally hazardous activities into those areas. And so it's in a way Just amplifies other existing problems in society. So you think of environmental racism as another component of this. So in a kind of a final note, I know we're just about over time already, but Environmental concerns, like many of the other challenges we face today will require international cooperation to meet. And we're in a unique position in the United States of having the world's largest economy and having a kind of outsized role both in the production of Save Pollution and carbon being pumped into the atmosphere.