climate-bluesThis is a space for discussion of Mark Levene’s “Climate Blues: or How Awareness of the Human End might re-instil Ethical Purpose to the Writing of History” (Environmental Humanities 2, 2013, pp. 147-167)

Discussion will take place via the comments below.

Discussion

26 comments
  1. Rebecca Conard says:

    My approach to teaching environmental history always seems to lead to a point, usually near the end of the semester, when the declensionist metanarrative of environmental history takes hold, students sink into a depressive state, and then begin to question what, if anything, they can do. Initially, my response was an optimistic “if we humans were smart enough to get ourselves in this predicament, we are smart enough to think our way out,” but that gradually shifted to a more realistic observation that the only way forward is to wean ourselves of consumerism. They are okay with the upbeat response; they don’t want to hear the second message.

  2. Rebecca Conard says:

    My point is that I don’t underestimate the enormity of what Levene is proposing.

  3. Cathy Stanton says:

    I’ve managed to find a bit of time to sit with Mark’s article and found it really inspiring and intriguing (and a bit frustrating just in one or two places). I loved the way he kept pushing the discussion toward the notion of the sacred, although he wasn’t always using that particular language. His ideas about working for the common weal and breaking open linear “empty” time in search of a transformative vision of humanity made a lot of sense to me – we can point to fossil fuels as the foundation of the problem of anthropogenic climate change, but really, our hubris and our sense of separation from “Nature” are more foundational yet. So I appreciated his keeping the focus there, as both a part of his analysis of the problem and his vision of a possible and possibly productive response.

    I wished he’d been a bit more explicit about the contributions that historians per se could make here. That’s his starting-point, and he comes back to it at the end, but I felt as though there were some gaps in between, and I was left thinking that he’s calling on historians to do the work of theologians or spiritual guides rather than setting out a potential utility for the skills that historians actually have. That may be part of his point – i.e. our “business as usual,” with its linear temporality and its many problematic links with disciplinary structures embedded in the Western academy, may not actually have tremendous utility in this situation. I’ll be interested to hear what others think about that.

    I also had some quibbles with the way he’s looking to non-Western cultures and peoples as the likely survivors of Anthropocene crises – I’m still thinking through his ideas there, so I’ll stop at this point.

  4. Cathy Stanton says:

    Hah – we were posting simultaneously! Great minds…

    My sense is that he’s saying we need a deep spiritual shock to jolt us out of our consumerist/individualist ways. Or rather, that we’re not going to think or invent our way out of this problem, but need to approach it through that aspect of spirit (even in a somewhat secularized way – i.e. as a common human situation that requires deep human fellow-feeling).

    1. Cathy Stanton says:

      And I don’t underestimate it, either – and am always wondering “what would it take to jolt enough people into that state?”.

    2. Leah Glaser says:

      I agree– this is my main takeaway form what he is saying– and that Historians can link the cultural to the natural– and ground that sense of spirituality that comes within “end of days” crisis. Can’t help thinking that popular culture is ahead of us with all the zombie and apocalyptic films and shows.

      1. Cathy Stanton says:

        My guess is that Levene, as a scholar who focuses mostly on genocide, is used to dwelling in that realm of real-life horrors and end-of-the-world scenarios. I appreciate that perspective here, which is getting clearer to me as we discuss this – i.e. worlds do end within genocides, and people face unimaginable horrors. I like your perception that historians can “ground” this, Leah.

  5. Rebecca Conard says:

    You are, as usual, more more eloquent and possibly more receptive to Levene’s argument. I am awed by the sweep of his knowledge and the clarity of his writing, but I, too, had trouble getting a clear sense of what historians can do. Compared to Brian Fagan or Jarad Diamond, both of whom come to the conclusion that adaptability will determine the winners and losers as climate change advances, Levene seems more fatalist in outlook. I was left wondering whether the role of historians might be to explain the processes of collapse as they unfold, perhaps leaving a record behind for those who survive?

    1. Leah Glaser says:

      This is something to ask Richard Heinberg as well.

      1. Cathy Stanton says:

        Yes – good point! And maybe a broader question for Heinburg is whether he sees any role at all for historians in the “powering down” phase he thinks we need to be aiming toward.

        1. Leah Glaser says:

          Levene’s apocalypse is more literal, Heinberg’s is economic– but I think, for both of them, they are pushing for a change in attitude and values.

  6. Rebecca Conard says:

    Well, while we waiting for others to arrive, a few more thoughts. This being Sunday morning, I thought I would reread the tricky passages where he navigates between theology and history to see what else might spring to mind. The quality of this essay that continues to stand out for me is that he starts from an utterly honest assessment of the catastrophe that is just around the bend. At the same time, I think he is far too optimistic about human behavior in times of extreme crisis. Where in the annals of history has a fight for survival triggered much compassion? There certainly isn’t much in the current state of global affairs to suggest that human civilization is even moving in that direction, but I don’t want to go there. The other aspect of Levene’s article that stands out for me is the ending, where he more or less suggests orchestrating a mass plea for grace. Assuming that it is possible to inspire a critical mass of humans to take action for transformative change (does he make this assumption?) (does he really think it is not too late?), then is he summoning historians to produce interpretations of the past that lead the way to this transformation? In other words, if we (who is we?) are going to throw a Hail Mary pass, seeking grace, do we need historians to help aim in the right direction?

    1. Cathy Stanton says:

      We are clearly on the same posting schedule, Rebecca! I posted my thoughts below just as you were adding this.

      My sense is that he’s not looking for “grace” as in “a solution” or a last-minute redemption, but more as “this is where we are, and all we can do is live lives that are as compassionate and principled as possible.” In other words, it’s not a way out of the problem, but a way to live within the problem. And then his role for historians, articulated at the end, seems to be to show that this is a stance that principled humans have reached before in other extreme crises.

      1. Leah Glaser says:

        I agree with this analysis Cathy.

  7. Cathy Stanton says:

    I wondered if it was not even that instrumental, but more about how to live a principled life “in the moment” during the end-times. You’re right, he does seem very fatalistic about the long-term prospects, and pretty convinced that modernity is well on the way to collapsing under its own weight.

    I think I basically agree with him, but find that it’s too depressing to dwell there too much of the time! So my own approach on this has been much more pragmatic than theological/philosophical – I’ve been trying to think about how historians’ actual existing skills (a careful, complex reading of evidence from the past) could help us in the task of adaptation, if we were motivated by a strong enough sense of urgency. In working on energy-related issues in my own part of the world, I’ve actually often wished that there were more discussion of the moral/spiritual dimensions of all this, because changing our whole set of expectations about our relationship to the earth seems fundamental to making any deep change. So Levene’s more purely theological argument here does have some appeal for me, and I like that he’s managed to do that outside of any specific religious context. It’s a very New Age argument in a lot of ways, framed within the Western academic tradition.

    1. Leah Glaser says:

      It provides ethical, scholarly foundation for historians to move into this “political” realm all-too-long-presumed to be of climate change.

  8. Leah Glaser says:

    How are you 2 writing in the future? Its Sunday morning at 10am and your posts both say 1pm. ; ) I’m reading now from the library of the synagogue while my kids are in Sunday school and I am working nest to a Yale climate change professor– so it seems like I should be inspired.

    At first glance, this seems to converge with the book I’m reading now in preparation of our Keynote– The End of Growth– which plays off the book cited here — the Limits of Growth… both explicitly link the economy to the availability of natural resources. So this conversation will be VERY useful in how to push Richard Heinberg to help public historians think about our role. And I can’t help but see all this as consistent with interpretations of historians in my own historiographical world of the good ol’ Turner thesis. He came up with his thesis in a time of “progress” and economic prosperity– but it was still inherently gloomy with implications that this was all ending with the frontier. But no one paid attention to that question of “what do we do now?”– they merely answered it with manufacturing and urban growth.

    I love the main point of this article in that it challenges us, as an ethical obligation, to apply our profession in a productive way– which is sort of how I think about Public History. I do read that Levene is saying that the reality of climate change is challenging us to re-write history in a way that does change how we think about behavior and attitudes in the past and thus change those for the future.

    Right now, my students are reading environmental histories and, for better, coming away with a better understanding of the complex human-environmental relationship and for worse, the inevitability that nature is not destroyed– it just changes– but what concerns me is getting them to understand that we need to adapt to those changes by also changing.

    I think he does have some instructions for us. This guy offers the idea that historians integrate human and natural history and not separate the cultural. He talks about the resistance historians will have to the theories of other disciplines– but this is what we in this reading group, task force, etc have been pushing too. Of course he implies that doing all this within the current structures of cheerleading and policy advising is seeming pointless and challenges us to open an alternative, more spiritual, space where we can help prepare people for cultural adaptation. Obviously a huge and arrogant task for us and one that would require us slipping off our style of progressive narrative. The thinking of people like Benjamin against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and the discussion of Judaic messianic philosophy and “Tikkun olam” (the Jewish obligation to make the world better) as a catalyst for new thinking is pretty fascinating to me right now, considering where I am writing from right now! Quite the synergy.

  9. Cathy Stanton says:

    I love that you’re in the synagogue library and Rebecca and I are in the future already! (WordPress keys off some time zone that I’ve never fully figured out – I think it starts from Greenwich time, which probably also relates to this discussion about linear time and Western/modern hegemony.)

    I’m struck by your phrase “we need to adapt to those changes by also changing.” I think people relatively quickly embrace the idea that we need to change, but the default assumption is that we’ll do it primarily by developing new technologies and figuring out how to get energy from new sources, not that we may need to live in an entirely different way. That’s one of the historian’s tasks that I see: conveying a clearer sense of what some other ways of living were actually like, without romanticizing them or downplaying the many reasons why people made choices that have led to the ways of living that we have now.

    This relates to my quibble about how Levene is seeing non-Western/indigenous peoples as a model for other modes of living. This is something that anthropologists have struggled with – i.e. that we might want to make common cause with the radically “Other” ways of life and exchange that many of us study (David Graeber’s “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” is built on that idea) but also that it’s very hard to get beyond just appropriating someone else’s culture in a way that’s always more or less facile. There was a whiff of that kind of appropriation in Levene’s argument that bothered me a bit, and I don’t think he’s really grappled with the implications of what he’s proposing in that section (p. 160).

    1. Leah Glaser says:

      Yes, the false time dimension feeds right into Levene’s “alternative space” proposal!

      When I said changing, I did mean his sense of internal/ cultural/ spiritual change. Because you are right that it has always been about adopting new technology and not adapting ourselves.

      I do agree about the problematic appropriation of indigenous and marginalized peoples- and I was put off by the assumption that even scholars today study “other” groups with a kind of “gaze” or quaint utopia– but what I’m taking from what he says is the idea inherent in Native American history today– that of resilience, survival, and adaptation (spiritual, cultural, economic, political) over emphasizing tragedy and genocide as the whole story. Maybe not adapting those beliefs, but more the spirit of what it really means to change.

  10. Cathy Stanton says:

    I do think he’s advocating more of an adoption of “Others”‘ actual practices and worldviews, which is what I find problematic. He’s asking “are we willing to take on board both the practical life-skills and cosmologies of human communities living before or apart from dominant Anthropocene modes,” and that jars me. For one thing, those skills and cosmologies were and are shaped by particular cultural and historical conditions that aren’t really transferable. And for another, we’ve really come to question the whole idea of cultures “apart from” the dominant (the whole “Europe and the People without History” idea). I think his heart is definitely in the right place here, but he could have framed the discussion differently, and I like the way you frame it better – i.e. that there’s something valuable to be learned from cultures that have struggled and adapted on the margins under difficult circumstances.

    1. Rebecca Conard says:

      I agree with both of you that, if there is a practical message, it is that historians must also change, particularly in the ways we perceive time and think about humans in relation to nature–and as you put it, Cathy, “convey a clearer sense of what some other ways of living were actually like, without romanticizing them or downplaying the many reasons why people made choices that have led to the ways of living that we have now.” Since post-modernism and environmental history writ large have pretty much demolished the Turnerian notion of progress, and the positivist foundation on which it was built, where do we turn for new models? One might be Carl Becker’s concept of the specious present and with it the idea that historians are uniquely trained to operate in a kind of liminal space between past and future, able to pull useful stuff from the past in order to produce history that helps ordinary people make sense of the present and, by extension, perhaps make informed choices concerning the future.

      Speaking of the specious present, I think I may have thrown things out of whack when I posted my message this morning as a new post rather than a response to Cathy’s. I think I now have the hang of this linear process.

      1. Rebecca Conard says:

        BUT, the clock here says 3:12, not 9:11.

        1. Cathy Stanton says:

          But you’re poised somewhere between the past and the future, so that’s all good!

          I hadn’t encountered Becker’s notion of the specious present before – did he mean specious in terms of it falsely seeming to be purely a matter of the present moment, when in fact it’s expandable in terms of its relations to past and future? If so, that makes a lot of sense to me and really seems to resonate with Levene’s ideas (and also with Mircea Eliade’s distinction between “sacred” and “profane” time, the former having that expandable quality that goes beyond a simple or linear present moment). It’s a lovely vision for what historians can do – and then the question is what projects they choose to link it with!

          1. Cathy Stanton says:

            And yes, the threading thing can be confusing (especially when the posts get so narrow!). But I think this has been working really well – I’ve enjoyed it mucho.

  11. Rebecca Conard says:

    To answer your question (and then I really will sign off), Becker discusses the “specious present” at some length in “Everyman His Own Historian.” It’s the heart of the essay, as I read it, although I realize that’s a minority view. I also interpret the deeper meaning to be that historians are uniquely trained to expand and, in a sense hold open, the specious present in order to probe the past for patterns that are useful as the clock continues to move forward. I may be reading more into the concept than he intended, but I still find it to be useful. I hadn’t thought about it in connection with Eliade’s ideas of sacred and profane time, but that’s a good comparison. For me, on a more practical level, it seems to resonate with Donald Schon’s idea of reflective practice.

    I, too, enjoyed this quite a lot. Let’s keep it going.

    1. Cathy Stanton says:

      Thanks for clarifying, Rebecca. Makes me realize that it’s been WAY too long since I read “Everyman”!

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