PART II:
CHAPTER 4
Yves Rees
We had 12 years left. Twelve years remaining to avert catastrophic climate change. That was the headline message of the special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in October 2018. Time was ticking down and there wasn’t a minute to waste. Only a dozen short years to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. If we failed, the consequences would be horrific: drought, flood, deadly heat, food shortages, poverty – all experienced by hundreds of millions. There’d be resource wars and countless refugees. Earth might become uninhabitable altogether.1
By this point, we’d been hearing warnings about climate collapse for decades. Anyone who’d been paying attention knew things were dire. But this report felt different. For the first time, the notoriously circumspect IPCC had given us a hard deadline in the imminent future. Twelve years wasn’t our grandchildren’s lifetimes; it was us, not too far down the track. And if the IPCC, with its culture of consensus and compromise, was willing to make this alarming call, who knew how bad things really were?
At the time, I was 30 and newly minted as a historian. I’d set my sights on a career in history while still a teenager and had spent my entire twenties learning the tools of the trade. Now I was finally here, researching the past for a living, only to look up and discover that the world was hurtling towards calamity while I toiled in the archives, breathing in centuries-old dust. In 2030, the deadline given by the IPCC, I’d be only 42 – still in the prime of life. I’d be there to see the climate unravel and had a personal interest in helping stave off nightmare scenarios. But what did my profession have to offer? What use was history to a warming earth?
On a sunny Friday that November, I discussed the 1920s with fellow historians in a cloistered office while school students marched for climate on the streets outside. At that moment, I felt sure I’d chosen the wrong path. When the future was so urgent, surely it was a waste to keep my head stuck in the past. Perhaps history was a trivial indulgence in these times, a form of fiddling while Rome burns. For months, I pondered a career change, trying to imagine myself as a climate scientist or full-time activist.
On closer inspection, however, I realised my mistake. History was far from irrelevant to the climate crisis. In fact, history was everywhere in how we thought and spoke about this existential threat. In the United States, climate activists were calling for a Green New Deal and a Climate Mobilisation – concepts that evoked Roosevelt’s New Deal and the mobilisation of the Second World War.2 The Anthropocene, the name given to our era of human-induced climate change, is itself a historical concept.3 Then, in early 2019, Extinction Rebellion (XR) burst onto the scene with the message that getting 3.5 percent of the population onside was the magic number for forcing climate action – a figure derived from historical analyses of activist efforts like the suffragettes and the civil rights movement.4 Later that year, in a speech to US Congress, Greta Thunberg cited the example of Martin Luther King, Jr and the civil rights movement as a model to emulate.5 The most radical climate activists in the world were placing history at the heart of their message.
History did have relevance, it turned out. But what was its precise function? What exactly did it have to offer in helping us respond to the climate crisis? Most often, it appeared that history was being used as a playbook to provide lessons for how we should act or rules to predict the future. Faced with a crisis? Try a New Deal – it worked in the 1930s, so is sure to work again. Unsure if activism can impel climate action? Look to the suffrage movement and follow its proven recipe for success. In other words, this was history as analogy. The unstated assumption was that we can draw meaningful parallels between past and present, because the two are sufficiently alike that the latter can inform the former.
This thinking is seductive but does not hold up to scrutiny, for the simple reason that history teaches us that no two events are ever equivalent. Unlike the social sciences, where generalised models abound, doing history is about drilling into the messy particulars of each time and place. When you go into that detail, you appreciate the specificity of every happening. While the past provides important context, there are no analogies to be drawn or neat lessons to be extracted because nothing is ever replicated. There are always different factors at play – and those factors make all the difference.
To take one example, the suffrage movement cannot provide a playbook for the climate crisis because the two are very different beasts. The former was a campaign for a specific piece of legislative reform – female suffrage – within individual nation-states. The latter, by contrast, requires all-encompassing systemic change at a global level. They emerged in vastly different worlds, a century apart. Both involve activism, to be sure, but that is where the similarities end. As a result, it’s doubtful that suffrage campaigns can teach or predict anything about climate activism. Suffrage history may be a source of inspiration, but little else.
But if history doesn’t have lessons for the climate crisis, how is it relevant? As the months ticked by, and the Savage Summer swallowed vast swathes of Australia, then a zoonotic virus linked to deforestation shut down the world, I read and thought and read some more. What did the study of the past have to do with an alarming present and future? The more I read, the more I began to suspect that the answer to my question lay not in the substance of history – the who, what, when and why – but in the way history makes us think. The answer was about historical consciousness: how we imagine past, present and future to be connected. In short, the answer to my question was about time.
Historians, time and the climate crisis
Historians are time workers. Although we understand history as the study of the past, it’s more accurately described as a craft that turns data into story. In essence, historians are storytellers who make narratives about the passage of time. Things happen, and historians posit the relationship between them. These narratives do more than tell us about the past; they also ‘build temporal architecture’ that structures our thinking and shapes our imagined futures.6 As historian Samia Khatun puts it, the job of the historian is to ‘time travel’ along a particular ‘temporal index’. Most often, historians travel along that index into the past, but we can also project the same index into the future. Our means of travelling into the past determines ‘the particular line of travel [we] can see going forward’.7 Hence, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, our pasts are ‘future in orientation. They help us make the unavoidable journey into the future.’8 As a result, historians play a crucial role in articulating ‘what the lines are along which we imaginatively travel’.9 The practice of history engineers our understandings of time.
This is relevant to the climate crisis because anthropogenic climate change has been fuelled by a particular understanding of time. During the Anthropocene, ‘progress’ has been the temporal logic that underpins Western political and economic life. Progress narratives imagine time as a linear pathway, moving from a backward past towards an enlightened future. In a nutshell, progress is the idea of history as a story of perpetual change and improvement. It is time as a straight line, a highway from darkness to light. This meant that the future would always eclipse what had gone before. ‘The future would be different from the past, and better, to boot,’ historian Reinhart Koselleck explains.10
This conception of time influenced how humans acted in the world. From the nineteenth century, a historical imagination structured around progress fuelled both economic growthmanship and imperial expansion: the twin engines of anthropogenic climate change. The logic here was simple. If history was a story of progress, humans must always be doing and making more. More production, more knowledge, accelerating extraction. Growth became imperative. As Koselleck puts it, progress required ‘an active transformation of this world, not the Hereafter’.11 Hence the industrial revolution, profiteering, imperial expansion and ceaseless economic development (pursued by communist and capitalist economies alike) appeared the natural way of things. Each was a vehicle that would transport society along the highway towards a glistening future. Any harm caused along the way could be excused as collateral in the service of the ultimate progress of humankind.12
Crucially, progress ideology also implied that some people were further advanced than others. Time was a highway but not everyone was at the same point. Some societies were further advanced; others lagged behind – stuck in the ‘waiting room of history’.13 Hence imperialism could be justified as the act of ‘advanced’ countries like Britain helping more ‘backward’ societies to catch up by bringing civilisation to their doorstep. In this way, empire became ‘ethically thinkable’.14
The progress narratives that motored economic growth and imperial expansion were, in large part, invented and popularised by historians. As Priya Satia puts it, the first modern historians ‘were not hobbyists on the sidelines, but the very makers of history’.15 They didn’t just document the past; they conceived ideas that changed the future. Progress narratives emerged from Enlightenment thinking that replaced older notions of cyclical history with the idea that history was linear and progressive. Two historians were key here. The first is James Mill, the Scottish historian (and father of philosopher John Stuart Mill) whose 1818 History of British India would become the single most influential book among British officials in India. Mill’s central thesis was that Britain was tasked with liberating India from barbarity. He posited that ‘there was a single route of progress that all societies must travel, leading to the highest pinnacle of human achievement: Western civilisation’.16 The book was required reading for colonial officials for decades, ensuring that generations of leaders soaked up and enacted these ideas.
One of those officials was Thomas Macaulay, an associate of Mill and a leading figure behind the push to enforce English as the language of education for the Indian elite. After returning from India in 1838, Macaulay reinvented himself as a historian. He embarked on a five-volume History of England, published to huge acclaim between 1848 and 1859. In Macaulay’s telling, England’s past was a story of progress, a tale of a great nation coming into being through ever greater peace, prosperity and liberty. Like Mill, he positioned England as the apex of civilisation, the most advanced nation leading more backward peoples into modernity. Macaulay’s History was a worldwide bestseller, with the first volume sold out within ten days. His story – and his vision of history as progress – would come to have a profound influence on British thinking.17 As the historian Catherine Hall puts it, Macaulay’s progress narrative ‘inspired generations of public schoolboys, historians, politicians, law-makers and colonial administrators – the governing classes – as well as autodidacts’.18
Having begun in history books, the idea of history as progress took on a life of its own. Progress narratives circulated widely in Western culture until they were plain common sense. They operated in simpatico with social Darwinism and provided justification for imperial expansion. Over the nineteenth century and beyond, progress became the taken-for-granted understanding of how time worked. For over two hundred years, it has impacted how we understand the past but has also shaped how we act in the present. It gave a green light to – even demanded – the pursuit of productivity and growth.
Since the 1960s, academic historians, under the influence of postcolonial and poststructural thinking, have largely disavowed progress narratives. Yet this understanding of time continues to be dominant in popular historical consciousness – not to mention political and economic discourse. Take ‘development’, for instance. The global focus on developing ‘underdeveloped’ nations is directly indebted to progress narratives that imagined time as a march towards the future, with some societies ahead and others behind.19 As the anthropologist Anna Tsing puts it, ‘we were raised on dreams of modernization and progress’ and still today ‘their categories and assumptions are with us everywhere’.20
These dreams of progress have had nightmarish effects on our Earth. Thanks to the ‘celebration of environmental-wreckage-as-progress’, we’ve seen over two hundred years of rampant extraction, exploitation, development and rising carbon emissions – a way of life that has left us, in the 2020s, with what poet Tony Birch calls a ‘storm of our own making’.21 Due to our insistence on being forever bigger and better, our once-bounteous home is now irreparably damaged and fast threatening to become uninhabitable.22 Australian climate scientist Joëlle Gergis put it bluntly when she wrote in 2020 that ‘humanity is facing an existential threat of planetary proportions’.23 The great irony of an historical imagination structured around progress is that the relentless pursuit of advancement has left us facing the very real threat of our own extinction. ‘No jobs on a dead planet’ is one slogan of the environmental movement. ‘No progress in death’ might be another.
This is not to suggest that the history profession caused the climate crisis or is to blame for its human and environmental toll. Such an idea is absurdly reductive and would distract from the very real culpability of political leaders and fossil fuel executives who have allowed the crisis to unfold despite decades of warnings. The point is not that historians are the villains of the piece, but rather that a particular theory of history invented by humans in the recent past helped drive anthropogenic climate change. In other words, the climate crisis is in part a problem of historical consciousness. It’s a political problem, an economic problem and an environmental problem, but it’s also a problem of time. Progress ideology propelled carbon emissions and its continued influence inhibits meaningful climate action. So long as we continue to believe the story that we’re marching through time towards a bigger and better future, we’ll struggle to abandon our fantasies of endless growth and undertake the structural transformations necessary to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees.
Lessons from history: Detoxing from progress
If we recognise the climate crisis as a problem of historical consciousness, what does this mean for our efforts to mitigate climate breakdown? First and foremost, this recognition enables us to disrupt the inevitability of progress narratives.24 At present, with the logic of time-as-progress so entrenched, it’s easy to assume this is the natural and inevitable way of things. It’s easy to mistake this invented idea for a fact of nature, taken-for-granted and intractable. Like fish oblivious to the water they swim in, we become oblivious to the temporal script that saturates our culture. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, we too readily ‘mistake today’s peculiarities for eternal verities’.25 And when that happens, it becomes near impossible to think outside or beyond the progress script. We accept its growth imperatives without question, and so maintain our carbon-intensive existence.
Once we name progress as nothing more than a particular theory of history, it begins to lose its iron grip on our imaginations. It becomes possible to see that progress narratives were made by humans, and so can be unmade by them. Only a few hundred years ago, humans imagined time in other ways, and may well do so again. This is akin to the point made by the late novelist Ursula K. Le Guin when she declared: ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.’26 Like capitalism, like the divine right of kings, progress narratives are not immutable fact but rather an idea that has arguably reached its use-by date. By recognising this situation, we begin to see that other worlds are possible. Nothing about our theory of history is fixed or inevitable, and it is possible to radically reinvent the temporal scripts we live by.
From here, we might begin to replace progress stories with alternate understandings of time. No longer fooled into thinking that history is inherently linear and progressive, we create space to recover different temporal scripts that will make possible different – more sustainable, more collectivist – futures. As Satia writes, ‘what is required is not so much progress as recovery from the imaginary of progress’.27 We need to detox from progress, you might say.
In practice, this means telling different stories about life on earth. The idea of stories as a weapon against climate breakdown might seem fanciful. However, among leading analysts of the climate crisis, there is widespread agreement that the problems of this moment are bound up in questions of narrative, with new stories regarded as a vital precondition of meaningful change. From cultural critic George Monbiot and ecophilosopher Joanna Macy, to feminist Donna Haraway and philosopher Bruno Latour, to geographer Mike Hulme and economist Kate Raworth, there is consensus that humans apprehend the world through story. For change to happen, the story must first change.28 ‘Stories trap us, stories free us, we live and die by stories,’ writes Solnit. In her view, ‘the change that counts in revolution takes place first in the imagination’.29 Even scientists like veteran US environmentalist Gus Speth have acknowledged that meaningful climate action requires a new cultural paradigm. Speth reflected back in 2013 that our environmental crisis can only be addressed via ‘a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.’30
In the effort to displace progress stories with other ideas of time travel, the history profession has a crucial role to play. As society’s designated time workers, historians are uniquely equipped to recover, invent and popularise alternative temporal scripts. Samia Khatun, an Australian historian based at the University of London, is one of several voices urging the history profession to rise to this challenge. As she argued in a 2021 interview, ‘if the historian invents progress, or institutionalizes progress as the main way of thinking about time, then the historian also has in their hands the power to think of other ways of travelling through time, other ways of imagining hope, and what a better imagined future might look like’. Given we’re not used to regarding historians as culture-shapers, this may seem grandiose. Yet, as Khatun explains, as historians, ‘we’ve seen that this is the role that historians played in the past. And so, it’s our role to undo it and come up with new pathways forward’.31
If historians are to help us detox from progress, what alternative temporal scripts might they deploy in pursuit of a liveable future? The answer is unlikely to be found in the cultures that gave us progress ideology in the first place. As the Black American poet Audre Lorde put it, ‘The master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house’.32 To find more sustainable and humane ways to exist in time, we might look to the colonised peoples whose knowledges were trampled in pursuit of progress. In Australia, this could mean learning from the First Nations cultures that sustained life for tens of thousands of years. These cultures understand time in ways radically different from the settler story of progress. Aboriginal time is generally understood as cyclical and non-linear; it spirals in regenerative loops instead of shooting towards the horizon. This means that multiple times co-exist. According to Tyson Yunkaporta, senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University, First Nations peoples ‘see past, present and future as one time’.33 The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner coined the term ‘everywhen’ to explain this way of thinking.34
By learning from the idea of everywhen, alongside other non-linear temporalities, historians might tell new stories that facilitate a paradigm shift in how we imagine ourselves in time. If we jump off what Yunkaporta calls ‘the arrow of time’, and instead come to understand time as cyclical, we might lose the pathological compulsion to forever be bigger and better.35 The idea of throwing out directional history can seem impossible, given its constitutive role in the dominant vision of the world. But at this historical juncture, we arguably have no choice. Progress is a death sentence, and human futures will only be possible if we adopt other ways of being and knowing.36
As I wrote this chapter, the IPCC released a new report. Described by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as a ‘code red for humanity’, the report published in August 2021 warned that the world was likely to heat by more than 1.5 degrees within the next two decades, breaching the ambition of 2015’s Paris Climate Accords. Even if we went carbon zero tomorrow, anthropogenic climate change has already caused irreversible damage to the Earth’s climate.37 The question now is not will things get bad? but rather will humanity survive?
If we are to avoid human extinction, we need to reimagine the way we exist in time. We need to abandon the progress stories that prompt us to burn coal, raze forests, exploit labour and grow GDP, and we need to confront the harm such narratives have caused. We need to refute Macaulay’s idea that history is progress, and instead recognise that the passage of time can be understood in many ways. The arrow of time is just a story we’ve told ourselves, and there are different stories to be told. In short, we need new temporal scripts that will shift the popular imagination so that we might veer off our collision course with calamity. We need climate scientists, we need activists, we need carers and medics and teachers and leaders, but we also need time workers. We need historians.