Unpacking Nature is No Walk in the Park: Zach, the Environmental Historian (#14)
Last spring I helped to organize an event for students to visit the Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise, which was docked in Honolulu, in a spot normally occupied by cruise ships like Diamond Princess and Star of Honolulu. I thought it was an exciting opportunity to board a vessel that is, to me, iconic. There were public tours, and an onboard cocktail party with local politicians, followed by a special film screening in the hold of the ship, for invited students. The film was How to Change the World, a documentary about the origins of Greenpeace.
We had just completed a series of campus waste audits, and Senate Bill 522 banning single use plastics was up for vote. (It passed.) It was an exciting time in the ocean plastics world, and I invited several students who had been part of the waste audit and our service-learning program. Greenpeace had just completed a waste-audit of the ocean and found that Coca-Cola was the #1 contributor to the truckload of plastic bottles that enter the ocean every minute.
This is going to be awesome, I thought! What could go wrong?
Well, the film was very long, and sitting on wooden benches in the hold of a metal ship gets actually very uncomfortable. There was no ventilation and no pizza (and obviously, no Coca-Cola). And I guess if you are a normal 20-something college student not regularly involved in Soviet whaling ships or nuclear testing on obscure islands, or LSD, then, maybe this was not going to be a transformative experience for you.
One student emailed me after the event, FURIOUS with me, saying something like “Dr. Hiser how could you subject me to this long boring movie when I’m so busy, and then I didn’t even get to share my presentation.” It was confusing, and disheartening, and a bit scary. Like, here we were learning about the origin of the American environmental movement, and the student wants extra credit for sharing some powerpoint slides?
It ended up being a mental health episode, some personal problems, stress. Point is that this was a “star” student activist who crashed and burned after getting really involved in single use plastics. I learned that there are risks to student activism, especially if it’s architected by zealous faculty (like myself). Should we be modeling or encouraging political action? Is this part of Teaching Climate Change?
I was reminded of this incident on the Arctic Sunrise by my interview with Zach (a pseudonym), an environmental historian at University of the Pacific (also a pseudonym). We had this conversation weeks ago, but to process the interview, I’ve had to read an entire book that Zach wrote about the history of Greenpeace, as well as some articles related to his current research about activism and science around the issue of water flouridation. (It’s been kind of like diving into an anti-vaxxer world during a freaky time when scientific realities seem to be a blend of personal opinion, local jurisdiction, and federal policy.)
“Flouride,” according to this article, for which Zach won a big award from the American Society for Environmental History, “is the story of an industrial pollutant that came to be seen by many as a medical miracle.”
This sentence makes me imagine a Mad Libs exercise like:
Let’s try it!
DDT is the story of a malaria remedy that came to be seen by many as the triggering event for extinction.
Obesity is the story of High Fructose Corn Syrup that came to be seen by many as an agricultural subsidy scam.
I think that basically sums up what it might be like to be an environmental historian. The way Zach looks at the world is informed by history; and, remember, we are actually making our own climate history right now. Zach said,
“I think it’s important to help people understand how certain policies, if you look, are very questionable, but nonetheless remain completely unquestioned in society.”
I didn’t actually even know that environmental history was “a thing” and I suspect that most of the UoP faculty, administrators, and students don’t, either. I don’t think they even know that Zach is here. He’s new to our university, and housed in a department that was dominated for decades (especially the 1960s and 70s) by an 800-student lecture course, World History, which used to be taught every semester by the quite famous and now retired writer Gavan Daws at the Varsity Theatre.
“Until about ten years ago, the history department just had a lock on that World History course,” said Zach, “Because you had to take world history and that was seen as the foundation course. everyone needed to know history in broad outline.” And then they could learn about the climate crisis. Or plastics, or DDT, or nuclear waste, or whatever.
Zach was recently part of a highly regarded Environmental Studies department at a highly regarded “green” university in the Continental U.S. It sounds crazy….but we actually don’t have an environmental studies program. We have Natural Resource Management, and Oceanography, and Geography (which you shouldn’t ever confuse with Geology because they hate that). We have an Interdisciplinary Studies degree in Sustainability Science. But which one of those is the best degree for a student who wants to study Environmental Science or Environmental Studies?
Readers of this blog will know, I’m sure, that these are completely different things. Environmental Science is a BAS degree, and Environmental Studies is a BA degree, which seems like just one little letter “S” but is actually a huge deal involving several years and many dollars, if you are an undergraduate student trying to determine the trajectory of your career. At this other university, Zach taught a course in global environmental history which he described as:
“A kind of history of ourselves in a nonjudgemental way, looking at the whole sweep of our species’ history and the big points at which we crossed over into new ecological relationships with the planet from which there was no going back.”
Like what?
“The big one being agriculture and the complete transformation that results from that, and the different relationship with the rest of the global ecosystem both in terms of physical impact cultural impact and the way we thought differently about nature after that.”
Hmm. Thinking about the way we think about nature….“Unpacking Nature,” wrote Zach in his award-winning article, “is no walk in the park.” I’ve been stuck on that sentence for weeks now. What is Nature? What is a park? What is walking, and why do professors so love to “unpack” things?
Zach’s demeanor is extremely calm, maybe even a bit skeptical or dare I say dispassionate. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would go to great lengths to orchestrate a student waste audit on campus, or drag students onboard a ship to claustrophobically watch a boring film about white guys in the 1970s. That’s just not his vibe.
“My courses emphasize that this is a long term process and that there’s all sorts of reasonable theories about humans impacting global climate for hundreds if not thousands of years. Not just since 1950 or something…the whole question about when did the Anthropocene begin? There are some who say there’s never really been a Holocene… it’s all been an Anthopocene, because 10,000 years ago or even before that there was a lot of burning of landscapes, and agriculture beginning, and that was on a scale already to tweak the trace gases in the atmosphere, especially methane and CO2 and that was already kind of messing with the climate…So I try to show that global warming is a long term issue, one that, you know, obviously increases dramatically in more recent times.”
Zach was fourteen in 1985 when the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk in the Port of Auckland in New Zealand by the French. This, along with some protests in Tasmania over a dam, was an influential event that led him to cast his identity as an environmentalist from a young age. Not so much a direct action activist, but an observer. A witness. This is what a historian does — holds the long view.
I was in junior high in Nebraska when the Rainbow Warrior was bombed by the French in New Zealand. I am sure I had no idea. What kind of environmental history do we share? How much of the history that has brought us to the current climate crisis do we even really know? World history, yes. But environmental history…and how do these differ? Is there an environmental “canon”? Where do we teach this? Here are some events I’d put in an environmental history timeline.
(Another fun party game to play along with Environmental Mad Libs….how many environmental history events can you list in one minute?)
How do we, as college educators, interact with this history?
When I was in graduate school, I remember being taught that we must somehow be “neutral”, that our role was to teach critical thinking but not ideologies. I will never forget a faculty member who said, in a focus group for the Worry & Hope study,
“I’ve spent 25 years being objective in the classroom, not pushing my viewpoint, but I’m finding it hard because I want to push my viewpoint. It’s too important to be posturing in my ‘academic balance’ when the planet is dying.”
I have to wonder, what are current college students involved in, and how do we, as educators, interact with organizations such as Extinction Rebellion or Standing Rock which are the equivalent of the formative events that Zach experienced as a young person in the 1980s. Bill McKibben’s book, The End of Nature was another important influence he mentioned: “It’s the first thing I remember reading that put forward this notion of how everything in nature is now in some way touched by human activity.” Reading The End of Nature as an undergraduate, and discussing it with fellow students and professors was something that influenced Zach to become an environmental historian.
Zach acknowledges that he is still pretty new here, but shares that his impression so far is that students “seem much more passive and uninterested.” But the difference may be departmental — at his former university, he was in Environmental Studies, but now, he’s in the History department.
“So I’m getting history majors, or people taking a history class for whatever reason, and i don’t know where those activists, the equivalent of the students I used to have, I don’t know where they are, or what department they go to…are they predominantly in natural resources, in geography? Ihave no idea really but I would be curious to know if they exist and where they are because they certainly aren’t taking my classes.”
I have often observed that climate education in college is “hit or miss.”
It’s definitely there, incredible teachers and experiences are available, but who finds them, and how? Who takes Environmental History, and why? Who even knows that Zach’s Environmental History course exists? How well do General Education requirements guide students to an understanding of the global climate crisis? (Answer, not very well.)
This is why I advocate teaching some aspect of climate change in every single academic discipline. Just this morning I had a Zoom conference with a student in my summer literature course who said, “wow, there was so much of this climate stuff I didn’t know and I wasn’t expecting in this course.” But in order to read a book like Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach, or Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver, or Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (all of which are on the reading list for my climate fiction class), well, you have to start with some basic science of climate change. How can we imagine a future if we don’t start with understanding the science….and the past?
Zach’s long view of history is actually kind of comforting. He said:
“Humans have been affecting the environment for a long time and it’s hard to know if we’ve crossed some threshold or not where things will speed up and ecosystems will break down quickly as a result.”
Students of course want to know “how long do we have?” and Zach said:
“I sort of tell them yeah it’s not looking too great, but I don’t want to leave them in this total despair, where it’s all sort of happened and it’s just this kind of momentum that’s unstoppable…that it’s going to happen when they’re in their 40s or 50s…that the whole world is going to collapse as a result of global warming or some kind of climate change-triggered events, so…you know, I can’t say that with any certainty one way or the other, so I sort of leave them with the idea that the situation is pretty bad and serious, but it’s not hopeless…We just don’t know, we don’t really even know how much the planet can bear, really. For all we know, we might be thinking, ‘oh we are destroying the planet’ but how do we know? Maybe the planet will be just fine if it’s completely dominated by humans and a handful of species that we control — cows and sheep and what have you, and there’s 15 billion of us.”
