Learning to Scale
by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Pessimists have long warned that the scale of environmental change represents an unprecedented challenge for conventional ethics, politics, and economics. Geophysicist David Archer observes that everyday habits in fossil fuel burning societies now shape the deep future of the planet. A gallon of gasoline traps ‘one hundred billion kilocalories of… unwanted greenhouse heat.’ Some of these emissions will linger for millennia; in fact, the most long-lived particles will remain in the atmosphere over 100,000 years. The ethicist Stephen Gardiner calls climate change a ‘perfect moral storm’ because the effects of fossil fuel consumption are dispersed so widely in space and time, falling disproportionately on vulnerable people in poor parts of the world and people who have not yet been born. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty sees climate change as the collision of three distinct histories and scales: the history of the earth system, the history of biological life, and the history of industrial civilization. Fossil fuel consumption is interfering with the basic physical cycles of the Earth, modifying the conditions that make the planet habitable.
Yet, in political terms, voters and legislators seem very ill equipped to deal with change on this scale. David Archer worries that the attention span of most people is quite narrow, constrained by the temporal horizon of electoral cycles and financial markets. A minority of scientists and policy experts might bother to consider risks and commitments that extend a few decades or even a century into the future, but how can we persuade the wider public to rise above the short term? Is there a fundamental gap between experts and the public when it comes to imagining the future?[1]
Without wishing to make light of these challenges, I would suggest that these worries about myopic time spans are themselves born out of a peculiar historical moment. By turning back in time and delving into the historical record, we can explore societies with very different conceptions of generational bonds and future commitments. My own research examines the period when deep time first emerged as an object of public interest. In Britain, geology became all the rage in the early Victorian period. Middle class audiences avidly followed the scientific controversies of the time. Many of the best-selling science works of the era introduced a geological perspective on historical and economic developments.
A very good example of this trend is the book Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology from 1836 by the Anglican clergyman William Buckland. God had divided the island of Great Britain into three zones: the barren uplands represented the oldest primary rock formations, the mineral rich manufacturing region was the fruit of the secondary strata of coal and red sandstone while the most fertile agricultural land was shaped by recent tertiary limestone and chalk. For Buckland, the coal supply of Britain was a precious gift, forged through the wisdom of God in the depths of time, out of the forest of gigantic ferns from the Carboniferous formation. In a dramatic passage, Buckland reminded his readership that they were responsible to God for their use of fossil fuel. They had a ‘personal concern’ and ‘immediate connection’ with the geological origin of coal in the Carboniferous order. He also extended this sense of responsibility forward in time. In hearings held in the House of Commons in 1830, he explained that politicians and the broader public needed to safeguard the coal supply for the benefit of future generations. This peculiar cultural vision, fuelled by a combination of Anglican faith, Victorian geology, and a conservative understanding of tradition, became the foil for a long debate about coal in politics and popular culture.[2]
Over the course of the nineteenth century, politicians, geologists, and engineers increasingly began to see Britain as a carbon society. This neologism captures the combination of environmental, social and political peculiarities that shaped the understanding of coal in Victorian Britain. It has long been recognized how slow British observers were to catch on to the revolutionary properties of steam technology. Only by the middle of the nineteenth century did a new sense of optimism prevail over Malthusian fears of overpopulation and inevitable decline. However, historians have been less attentive to the place of coal in Victorian culture, treating it merely as a passive resource endowment or stroke of geological luck. Yet the Victorian science and politics of coal were fraught with a complex interweaving of religious, geological and political ideas. Coal stock was a providential gift, to be husbanded carefully by the state and the consumer. Malthusian political economy reinforced this gloom with its emphasis on island limits, stressing the need for self-sufficiency in basic resources. We can track this current into virtually every domain of Victorian society, from parliamentary politics and evangelical religion, to household economics and Arts and Crafts counterculture.
Above all, the birth of the carbon society ushered in new ways of thinking about scale. By scale here, I mean a range of concepts that make it possible to forge a link between disparate levels of space and time that appear incommensurable. Perceiving scale requires practice and technology. Scale then is not simply the ratio of a distance in a model or a map, but a form of thought and habit specific to different societies and times. Different patterns of scale are often nested together, combining spatial and temporal dimensions. Cultures of scaling come in many ideological varieties: imperial and liberal, romantic and managerial, popular and patrician. Scaling can be unlearned and forgotten, or transformed selectively into new cultural forms. In the course of the long nineteenth century, British men and women grew accustomed to thinking of their economy as a vertical frontier, the outgrowth of a vast endowment of fossil fuel, made visible in geological maps, stratigraphic sections, three-dimensional models, and tables of future consumption.[3]
The history of scaling can help expand our sense of possibility, but it does not provide exact models to emulate. Our problem is not to husband coal over the long run but rather to keep it in the ground permanently (at least until the next Ice Age begins). Besides, Buckland’s particular mixture of Anglican faith and Burkean conservatism is unlikely to sway many citizens today. Fortunately, we need not reinvent Victorian society to combat climate change! The real lesson here is that our notion of the shared future is historically contingent. Investigation into past practices of scaling can widen the scope of our political imagination, helping us imagine a different way of scaling between the present and the far future.
Notes
[1] David Archer, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate (Princeton University Press, 2010), 174; Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: the Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 2011); Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: on Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 41, №1 (Autumn 2014), pp. 1–23
[2] Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London, 1836, 2. Vols), 1:66–67.
[3] For this conception of scaling as practice, I am indebted to the seminal work of Deborah Coen, “Big is a Thing of the Past,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 77: 2 (April 2016): 305–321.
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is Associate Professor of British History at the University of Chicago. His research interests include the British Empire, the Enlightenment, science and environmental history, political economy, and cornucopianism and the Anthropocene. He is the author of Enlightenment’s Frontier: the Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, 2013) and, with Vicky Albritton, Green Victorians: the Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District (Chicago, 2016). His forthcoming book, Cornucopia and the Stationary Future: The End of Growth in the Age of Industry, focuses on the history of the stationary state and the rise of cornucopianism in Britain between Adam Smith and William Stanley Jevons.
https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/fredrik-albritton-jonsson
