Is climate change a “turning point” in history?
The Lepage Center’s 2021–22 programming theme is “Turning Points in History.” To deepen our understanding of significant transitions in the present, the six-month series looks to past turning points to impart lessons for today’s world. The theme for the month of September was climate change.
What makes climate change a turning point in history?
In his keynote address, Dr. Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago) argued that climate change represents both a turning point in history and a turning point in the way historians write history. The reality of climate change is forcing historians to confront the collapse of Enlightenment distinctions between natural history and human history, animal and human. According to Chakrabarty, since the nineteenth century, historians have operated under the assumption that only humans have history and that history should center human life, human freedom, and human agency. What Chakrabarty called “humanocentric history” is defined by a belief in human liberation from (and power over) nature.
The modern historians’ preoccupation with humans has blinded us to the disastrous collective impact we have had on the planet. Citing staggering twentieth century statistics on population growth, increased industrial output, technological connectivity, chemical production, car ownership, and more, Chakrabarty argued that we have celebrated our scientific achievements and successes and ignored the dangerous consequences of dominating nature. Nature, understood as the domain of scientists, is not something historians have concerned themselves with.
In recent decades, Earth system scientists who study climate change have revealed the false distinction between human history and natural history. They hypothesize that we have entered a new geological era called the Anthropocene in which human actions dominate biological, chemical, and geological processes. Long-term processes of geological epochs or “deep time” have been transformed by human activity, which means that humans have become a force of nature in a geological sense.
Is “the human race” collectively responsible for climate change?
From an Indigenous perspective, what exactly is new here? During the roundtable on “Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Change,” Dr. Clint Carroll (University of Colorado — Boulder) described the current climate change crisis as the “fourth removal” of Native peoples: “The first removal [is] literal removal from homelands… The removal of children from their families during the allotment and assimilation period, the relocation to urban centers during the urban relocation period of federal Indian policy, and then climate change being the fourth removal.” Carroll argued that if climate change is understood as the “loss of worlds” then this “reframes the question of when indigenous people started experiencing climate change. When you do that, it really began with the onslaught of colonialism, so we might refer to it as the ‘Colonialocene’ as opposed to the Anthropocene.”
Chakrabarty called for historians to consider our collective impact on the planet. However, Carroll drew attention to the fact that Indigenous people, people of color, and impoverished communities are at greater risk of suffering from the effects of climate change while also being least responsible for causing it. Carroll called this the “paradox of vulnerability.” Dr. Elizabeth Hoover (University of California — Berkeley) argued that most of the blame should be pinned on the “dirty fossil fuel companies who are doing the most to contribute to climate change.” Drawing on example of how the Exxon-Valdez oil spill devastated Indigenous communities and their food systems, Hoover emphasized that “being able to properly point fingers at some of the really big and bad actors is important.”
How is climate change a problem of knowledge?
A long tradition of thinking in European philosophy and religion places humans as “top dog” in a hierarchy of life forms. However, according to Chakrabarty, scientists claim that human beings play no positive role in life-sustaining processes on earth. We need the atmosphere but the atmosphere doesn’t need us. Our existence is utterly dependent on the supply of oxygen provided by forms of life that we consider inferior, such as bacteria, fungi, phytoplankton, and plants. These so-called “inferior” organisms are largely responsible for making the planet habitable for human life. This means that human history begins and is made possible by a complex series of non-human processes. According to Chakrabarty, what historians have celebrated as progress and the expansion of human life have come at great cost to the planet where we remain a minority form of life by weight and numbers.
Enlightenment ideas about humanocentric history, progress and the modern ambition to free ourselves from the forces of nature are not shared and celebrated by all people. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) present an antidote to ways of knowing that hold the human as a superior species dominant over, rather than connected to and dependent on, all forms of life. During the roundtable, Dr. Daniel Wildcat (Haskell Indian Nations University) suggested that “If we are going to successfully deal with climate change, I’m willing to wager that [Indigenous] voices are going to be the most important voices of the 21st century because they understand that we’ve got to change our whole worldview of our relationship with the balance of life we share this world with.” Dr. Hoover provided a specific example of TEK in action, discussing the success of indigenous land stewarding practices such as controlled burns. She distinguished “prescribed burns” undertaken by government organizations and the “cultural burns” undertaken by Indigenous people who apply experiential knowledge rooted in local landscapes.
If this is a turning point, where will we turn? The climate change crisis presents an opportunity to begin listening, observing, and exploring our fundamental interconnectedness on a planetary scale. We must draw on both the insights of Western science and the knowledge of Indigenous people to embrace what Chakrabarty calls our “creaturely selves.” To cope with climate anxiety and the unimaginable prospect of the ending of worlds, Dr. Wildcat advises, “Take a walk. Get outdoors… you’ll be amazed at the beauty that surrounds you.”
Recordings of our events can be found on the Lepage Center YouTube Channel.
Special thanks to Lepage Graduate Fellow Hannah Bourne for her excellent work on this blogpost!
RESOURCES:
“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch”
Jade Begay, “An Indigenous Systems Approach to the Climate Crisis,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (2021)
Page Buono, “Indigenous Tribes Restore Prescribed Burns in California,” Nature (2020)
Clint Carroll, Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance (2015)
Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2020)
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
Elizabeth Hoover, The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community (2017)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2020)
Joseph Stromberg, “What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?,” Smithsonian Magazine (2013)
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (3rd edition, 2021)
Daniel Wildcat, Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge (2009)
