history – The Green Ideology

Can History Ever Become “Total”?

The ‘total,’ it seems, is more of a myth to the historian nowadays. Although many historians have attempted to brand their work to capture the ‘total’ in the names of world history, global history, macro history, l’histoire total, the dream to capture the entirety of the human past seems a little far-fetched to be more than a flashy catchphrase. Quantitatively speaking, historians may never capture the total, as history is never about the entirety of past-times but about selectively categorising the past into present inquiries. Hence, the ‘total’ has existed in the minds of historians than anywhere in the real world among many schools of historical thought. As the idea of ‘total history’ has changed over time to indicate different types of histories, total history is not defined by a particular spatial or temporal range or a specific scale of analysis; rather, it exists as a heuristic value according to what historians regard as the ‘total’ compared to their conventional frameworks of historical analysis.

What is Total History?

Fernand Braudel (Instituto Fernand Braudel de Economia Mundial)

Total history’ has changed to encompass different meanings over time. Historians, as early as in the twelfth century (Bernard Itier, Chronicle), have generally assumed their works to account for the totality of their subject matter. However, ‘total history’ as an outspoken historical subdiscipline began with the Annales school of French historians in the early twentieth century. Early Annales historians like Fernand Braudel distinguished their practise of the ‘total external’ – the deep, slowly-changing geographic and economic structures – from the ‘event-based’ histories of the short-term political (Mediterranean, 1949). Other historians like March Bloch or later historians of the Italian microstoria school put forth the idea of ‘the total internal,’ arguing that the total only existed inside people’s minds and social relations. Recently, environmental historians have advocated for a total history of humankind as a geological agent, as the concept of the Anthropocene encouraged historians to consider nature as a historical protagonist. As such, the idea of ‘total history’ has constantly changed according to what historians have regarded as the ‘total’ as opposed to conventional frames of analysis used by their contemporaries. Hence, total history is a subdiscipline that aims to expand the frameworks in which historians conduct their analysis, rather than a term that denotes a particular type, scale, or spatial range of historical writing.

The term ‘total’ is often misunderstood. J.H. Elliott, in his review of Braudel’s Mediterranean, criticised that total history is ‘not dissimilar to total war’ as ‘in both instances, you throw in everything you’ve got,’ implying that the ‘total’ did not mean anything more than a mere aggregate of different types of histories without any distinctive features of its own (1973). Moreover, certain microhistorians, especially those who embraced the postmodern ‘incredulity toward master-narratives of all types’ (Jean- François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 1979), have critiqued the very notion of a ‘total’ history. Sigurdur Magnússon commented that by focusing on the uniqueness of the individual, microhistory denied the possibility of any overarching narratives (‘The Singularity of History’, 2003), while Giovanni Levi critiqued that the purpose of microhistory is to reduce the scale of analysis to undermine large-scale paradigms (‘Frail Frontiers?’, 2019).

However, these criticisms towards total history assume the ‘total’ is interchangeable with the ‘macro’ or the ‘global.’ Though colloquial uses of the word ‘total’ may have similar meanings to the macro (macroscopic analysis conducted on large groups of individuals) or the global (an extensive spatial range across geographic ranges), total history is not necessarily associated with large scales nor wide spatial ranges.

In terms of scale, the ‘total’ does not necessitate historians to focus on the macro. In The Cheese and the Worms (1976), Carlo Ginzburg wrote about the peasant culture during the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Italy from a microscopic scale of a single individual, a miller named Menocchio. From the fragments left by one idiosyncratic individual, Ginzburg constructed the totality of an unwritten peasant culture obscured from the view of previous historians.

Moreover, total history has also been written in small spatial spheres. Take, for example, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who wrote the total history of a single village by examining the ecological, cultural, religious, and sexual relations of its occupants (Montaillou, village occitan, 1978). Though certain total histories do cover wide spatial or temporal ranges, total history itself is not related to a particular scale nor any temporal or spatial range. These criticisms misunderstand total history as a field that quintessentially aims to establish definitive meta-narratives across wide spatial frames or macroscopic scales: neither of which concerns the aim of total history.

The Total External

History does not aim to establish a definitive ‘totality’ of the past; rather, historians seek to expand the frameworks of historical analysis to one in which their contemporaries are not accustomed to operating. To understand what frameworks historians try to expand requires considering the historiographical context in which different types of ‘total histories’ were written. To historians of the ‘total external’ such as Braudel, the ‘total’ meant considering structural factors external to human relations – the geographical and economic structures that shaped human interactions in the Longue Durée.

The Battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571, in which the fleets of Spain, Venice, and the Papal States defeated the Turks in the last great sea battle involving galleys; in the National Maritime Museum, London.

For instance, in writing about the Battle of Lepanto in The Mediterranean, Braudel challenged the human-centricity of the Histoire événementielle (narrative-based history focused on historical events) practised before him. As he downplayed the importance of the event itself as ‘surface disturbances’ and ‘crests of foam’, Braudel emphasised the deep, underlying structures that preconditioned the battle before its occurence (1949). Moreover, in Out of Italy, Braudel opposed the historian Jacob Burckhardt in interpreting the Italian Renaissance (1974). While Burckhardt periodised the Renaissance as a two-hundred-year conjuncture characterised by unique individuals, Braudel sought to identify a deeper explanation of the Italian Renaissance as a continuity of long-term historical change. As such, the Braudelian ‘total history of the external’ sought to bring the historian’s attention to the deep, structural factors beyond the fleeting, ‘short-sighted’ human relations in political and diplomatic history.

The Total Internal

This ‘expansion of frameworks’ stands the same for another school of total history: the ‘total internal.’ Historians of the French Mentalités school focused on the collective ideas that escaped individuals to form the total. Jacques Le Goff characterised this mode of total history as studying ‘that which is common to Caesar and his most junior legionary… Christopher Columbus and any one of his sailors’, thus constructing the ‘total internal’ from the collective ideas between human relations (Mentalités, 1983).

Carlo Ginzburg, *The Cheese and the Worms* (1976).

This mode of total history gained prevalence, especially after the ‘Cultural Turn’ of the 1970s. In this period, historians began focusing on the microscopic scale of individuals and small grassroots groups in their research. Whereas cultural historians before this period, such as Burckhardt or Johan Huizinga, tended to focus on high cultures of the elite while assuming high culture ‘trickled down’ to people at the grassroots level of society, microhistorians like Carlo Ginzburg established how historians could construct the entirety of the social relations within a whole peasant culture by looking at the records left by a single individual (1976). To these historians, the total could only be observed by reducing the scale of analysis to single individuals who served as ‘keyholes through which to view the world in which individuals lived’ (Tonio Andrade, 2010). Thus, the ‘total internal’ expanded the boundaries in which historians operated by incorporating these people marginalised from the top-down narratives of history before the Cultural Turn.

Total History Today

Likewise, environmental historians today – though the word ‘total history’ itself has generally fallen out of usage – have reinvented the old ambition to write a total history of humankind for the twenty-first century. Although historians practising Braudel’s structural analysis of the geological and the economic and Ginzburg’s small-scale archival research – both of which have generally become the norm of historical research today – claimed to be writing ‘total’ histories of their own, historians have only recently recognised the role of nature as an active agent in historical change.

However, as the concept of the Anthropocene (the current geological age in which human activity has been the predominant influence on the environment) quickly arose along with the ongoing climate crisis (Nicola Davison, The Anthropocene epoch, 2019), historians have questioned whether the conventional boundaries in which they operated were too human-centred. In 1996, William Cronon revealed that historians tended to dichotomise the relation between human society and nature in a naïve way that underwrote human society as where the ‘significant’ acts occurred and portrayed the environment as a passive ‘untouched nature,’ underestimating the degree to which human activity affects the natural environment (‘The Trouble with Wilderness’). Thus, the rise of nature as a driver of historical change challenged the portrayal of nature as a passive, theatrical background on the historian’s canvas upon which humans were the sole actors.

Accordingly, ‘total’ historians of the environment have challenged our place as central ‘human’ agents of historical change. Works that focus on the history of germs, animals, or pathogens and their relations to humans have redefined the place of human agents in the historian’s canvas and have expanded the boundaries of historical analysis to non-human agents. In Can the mosquito speak?, Timothy Mitchell (2019) analysed how disease and malaria shaped warfare and economic change, undermining the idea that humans were in command of the environment as fully active agents. As Bruce Campbell emphasised in ‘Nature as historical protagonist’ (2010), it has only been since the enlightenment era that humans saw themselves as omnipotent agents against a passive, benign natural environment. Like Campbell, many ‘total historians’ today aim to expand the twenty-first-century historian’s scope of research to non-human actors and the environment by recognising the role of nature as a historical protagonist.

Both Anna Lownhaupt Tsing’s *The Mushroom at the End of the World* (Left) and J.R. McNeill’s *Mosquito Empires* (Right) are excellent examples of how history can be expanded to include the non-human.

All of this is not to say history establishes a definitive ‘totality’ of the past. Every historian inadvertently prioritises some aspects of the past in choosing what better represents the ‘total.’ Historians of the ‘total external’ prioritise unchanging geographic and economic structures than short-term events, while historians of the ‘total internal’ disregard some parts of the past that are beyond the individual’s cognition in pursuit of a total history of the mental world. Nevertheless, the objective of total history has always been to achieve a comparative total by expanding the frameworks upon which historians operate. This is demonstrated by an active interest in interdisciplinary approaches shared by total historians of the ‘external’ and the ‘internal’ alike (Marc Bloch; Lucien Febvre, 1929). As total historians incorporate methods used in geography, economics, anthropology, or the natural sciences to the historian’s toolbox, they challenge the conventional frameworks in which historians view the past. Thus, the aim of total history is to expand the boundaries in which historians operate, not to claim their works to be definitive ‘totalities’ of the past.

In 1973, Le Roy Ladurie stated, ‘by the year 2000, historians will either be computer programmers or will no longer exist.’ In his remark, Le Roy Ladurie assumed historians had already expanded on all possible frameworks and that the only thing left of historical research would be the job of digital computers and quantitative analysis, which operate within the frameworks established at the time (‘L’historien et l’ordinateur’) Living in the twenty-first century, we know this has certainly not been the case. As conventional ideas of the ‘total’ are challenged, historians have been confronted by the elements to which they had been turning a blind eye: first to the ‘total external’ that revealed factors beyond the sphere of human relations and politics; then the ‘total internal’ which revealed the grassroots totality that had been marginalised by the top-down narratives before the Cultural Turn; lastly, the environmental total that redefined our position as human agents in relation to the environment and non-human agents around us. Thus, the historian’s work is only ‘total’ as they seek to expand the frameworks in which historical research is conducted.

Women’s Rights Before Feminism: Abigail Adams and the Founding Fathers

Abigail’s Window
(Massachusetts Historical Society, c.1800)

With the rise of Women’s history and Social history in the 1960’s, history since then has often reflected the interests of activist agendas. One such document that presented present-day activists with much resonance is Abigail Adams’ series of letters to John Adams, more commonly referred to as ‘The Adams’ Letters.’

On 31st March 1776, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John Adams, in an attempt to persuade John of the need for women’s protection by law. As John was making his way to draft what would later be called the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Abigail’s words to one of the nation’s so-called ‘Founding Fathers’ bares particular weight on how we view the constitution in relation to the cause of women’s rights in today’s context, not to mention her own.

Abigail’s words echo an ongoing political discourse of her time: a discourse on individual liberty and autonomy with which her audience, John, was directly involved. Although her logic was too far from that of the mainstream to be endorsed by John, Abigail makes several significant points that extend the revolutionary cause to women, drawing upon multiple intellectual traditions that strengthen the authority of her non traditional reasoning. Primarily, metaphorical allusions to two political concepts allow Abigail to link the cause of women to that of the founding fathers: independence and slavery.

Abigail opens her letter with an appeal to the revolutionary cause of independence. A direct response to the news that a declaration of independence was soon to come, Abigail’s letter unfolds with a sympathetic gesture (that she longs ‘to hear that you have declared an independency) towards a cause for which John is striving. In doing so, Abigail succinctly casts metaphors that associate the image of the patriarch with an absolute monarch.

For instance, Abigail predicates that ‘all men would be tyrants if they could’, advising that John should not endow ‘unlimited power’ to men. Using metaphorical language that equates the state of women to that of the American colonies in relation to the monarch, Abigail makes a subtle yet compelling case to extend the revolutionary cause to women. Hence, Abigail implicitly suggests that it would be contradictory for John to support the revolutionary cause while not addressing women’s legal protection.

Abigail Adams, “Letter to John Adams” (31 March 1776)

Abigail’s Letter to John
(Massachusetts Historical Society, 1776)

“I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you; and tell me if you may where your Fleet are gone?

What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence?

Are not the Gentery Lords and the common people vassals, are they not like the uncivilized Natives Brittain represents us to be?

I hope their Riffel Men who have shewen themselves very savage and even Blood thirsty; are not a specimen of the Generality of the people.

I am willing to allow the Colony great merrit for having produced a Washington but they have been shamefully duped by a Dunmore.

I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs.

Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and christian principal of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us. . . .

I long to hear that you have declared an independancy— and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.

Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.

If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.

Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.

Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.”

The Language of Women’s Protection

Another concept that Abigail invokes to argue her case is slavery. Repeatedly utilising metaphorical language, this time between the patriarch and the enslaver, Abigail portrays harsh husbands as ‘Masters’ and those sympathetic to the cause as ‘friends’. This linkage between the state of slaves and women is cleverly designed to touch upon ongoing political tensions among Abigail’s contemporaries, including John’s own views on slavery and the conflict of interests among the Northern and Southern colonies.

John Adams (Gilbert Stuart, c. 1800-1815)

During the creation of the Declaration, the founding fathers avoided directly mentioning the issue of slavery for fear of alienating the slave owners in the Southern colonies. John Adams, for one, was opposed to the use of slaves in favour of freemen labourers. Abigail, knowing John’s position on slavery, also exploits this fact to argue that the revolutionary cause should be extended to women. Abigail then expounds on how women would be determined to ‘foment a rebellion’ under laws that do not cater to the unequal state of women.

Appealing to the same concerns that confronted her husband regarding the possibility of factions over the issue of slavery, Abigail uses John’s logic against himself to persuade him that women’s legal protection was, in fact, ‘rational’ under his logic. For Abigail, it is essential to include a clause that reflects women’s interest in the new code of laws, as much as it is essential for John to concede to the interests of the Southern slave owners to prevent a rebellion.

Radical or Moderate: Was Abigail Adams “Feminist”?

Molly Pitcher [i.e. Molly McCauley loading cannon at Battle of Monmouth, 1778]

It is worth discussing the extent to which Abigail is advocating for a sort of “women’s rebellion” when she mentions its possibility. As radical as Abigail’s suggestion for women’s legal protection was, a manifesto for a social movement against patriarchal governance in Abigail’s time would be unthinkable. However, the private character of the document, designed for the readership of a single John Adams, demonstrates that Abigail’s purpose could not have been to deliver a public manifesto. Without additional sources to clarify her motives, Abigail’s true intentions about a women’s rebellion remain obscure.

Nevertheless, it is certain that, as far as this document is concerned, her intentions were never to foment thousands but to persuade a single audience, her husband. Abigail’s true purpose of mentioning a women’s rebellion here is to argue that women be recognised ‘voice, or Representation’ in the new code of laws.

Abigail’s argument for legal recognition takes on a religious language towards her proposed solution. Towards her final remarks, Abigail asks John to think of women as beings that are to be protected by men under ‘providence’ and to use the power of men for women’s happiness, as does God, or ‘the Supreem Being’. Abigail does not concern her solution with voting rights nor equality between the sexes; she accepts that women are subjects to be protected by men and argues for this ‘protection’ to be legally stipulated in the new nation. According to Abigail, laws were to protect women as subjects of God from unrestricted masculine power. Hence, Abigail concludes that men, as the ruling sex, must legally recognise women’s need for protection.

Abigail’s letter has attained much social and scholarly attention in posterity, especially by activists who read Abigail as a feminist thinker. However, from her Letter to John Adams, we see that Abigail herself did not intend to advocate for a change in inequality through social action. Even the very nature of the document (a private letter) tells us that Abigail could not have foreseen her writing gaining the social significance it did over the centuries. To avoid imposing present values on past subjects, we must treat ideas as articulations against their respective historical contexts, not as disembodied beings independent from time and space.

In this sense, Abigail is addressing the cause for women in a distinctly different way from the feminist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the present, her resolution for the legal recognition of women as subjects to be ‘protected’ is no longer radical nor deemed necessarily appropriate. To meaningfully place Abigail’s ideas into our present debates would require a critical interrogation into the late-eighteenth-century political environment, not a unilateral ‘application’ of her words into our own.

What Can History Do for the Current Climate Crisis?

New Temporalities: Blurring the Environmental and the Political in a Planetary Age

This post is a book review of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History in a Planetary Age” (2021), with my own opinions on how historians should practice history in a planetary age.

IPCC, Working Group 1 6th Assessement Report, Physical Science Basis (Policymaker summary) (August, 2021)

A New Conception of ‘Time’ in the Anthropocene

Despite its obvious Eurocentric and parochial shortcomings, the ‘Anthropocene’ is a representative attempt to address the issue of human-induced climate change through history. In his book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Dipesh Chakrabarty proposes that we have entered a new era of writing history as the geological conception of time has converged with the political. According to his thesis, the Anthropocene – the geological definition of our current climactic epoch of humans as geological actors – has coincided with the human-defined periodization of time of ‘modernity’ as the present. As our ability to act as geological agents in the Anthropocene is inseparable from our building of modern political regimes and globalisation, it only makes sense that the geological time of the Anthropocene is also the ‘now time’ of politics and history.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. *The Climate of History in a Planetary Age*, 2021.

Such a concept of Anthropocenic ‘temporality’ also reveals the inadequacy of politics under the old definition of ‘time’ to resolve the problem of planetary climate change. The international institutions such as the United Nations made in the twentieth century to combat ‘global’ issues of politics that assume open and indefinite calendars have not at all been designed to deal with planetary climate change which has a finite and definite calendar. Hence, Chakrabarty argues that the convergence of the geological and political ‘present’ requires a reconciliation of the old political concepts that considered politics to be distinctly separate from the environment. Chakrabarty’s book thus promotes a need for thinking beyond the ‘global’ – a human-centric construct – towards a ‘planetary’ in the Anthropocene, a geological time in which historians must begin to think of new ways of writing history.

The Politics of the Environment as a Human Construct

There is nothing ‘natural’ about the environment. The environment is quite an artificial human construct, designed for discrete political purposes. One only has to read works such as William Cronon’s ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ or Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism to discover that the myth of an untouched natural environmental space as dichotomous to human civilisation was created in the process of exerting European colonial dominion. These ‘untouched’ lands (for instance, the ‘wilderness’ beyond the Western U.S. frontier or the ‘tropical’ environment in Latin America) were, in fact, densely populated by local non-white peoples. However, claiming an ‘untouched wilderness’ was morally more justifiable and convenient than claims upon complex systems of local governance. Thus, the ‘environment’ was used with a distinctly political purpose to depoliticise the imperial subjugation of non-Western civilisations to European empires. The project of Western imperialism necessitated the conceptualisation of an ‘environmental’ space as strictly separate and dichotomous from the ‘social’– a dichotomy whose legacy continues to this day as politicians so easily shrug off the burden of environmental concerns for consumers and individual citizens, while remaining nonchalant about changing their attitudes towards ‘political’ matters of industrial production that lie at the core of our planet’s problems today.

Rethinking Our Old Conceptions of the ‘Political’

With this in mind, it is not enough for historians to simply do ‘environmental’ history in the wake of the climate crisis. Primarily, thinking of environmental history as a distinct sub-discipline will achieve the exact opposite of what environmental history should and is able to do. By framing the newly-emerging modes of environmental history and the Anthropocene into specialised fields (such as an ‘M.A. or Ph.D. Environmental History’ course), we unequivocally limit the power that environmental thinking promises for history. This is especially the case as the ‘environment’ is so omnipresent in our conceptualisation of every matter that constitutes any historian’s subject of interest. For instance, politics and economics are fundamentally related to questions of how to effectively make out of the land. Race, often expressed through racially-essentialist ideas such as ‘indigeneity,’ took part in the process of ascribing ownership to whoever belongs to that land. Gender was conceptualised from a discourse on who should and could most effectively make out of the land (often through crude definitions of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’) and the power relations that stem from that discourse. Empire was a project of designing a system that could make out of the lands beyond European civilisation for colonial benefit. Hence, we are all inevitably environmentalists in that we are all inseparable from our relationships with the land and our surrounding environment.

Not surprisingly, outspoken ‘environmental’ works of history have often confined themselves to the conventional definition of the environment as a natural space ‘out there.’ Many works of ‘environmental history’ until the 1990s have limited themselves to merely recording histories about human destructions of the natural environment, without critically examining what the categorisation that framed their discipline as ‘environmental’ exactly was. Hence, a distinct sub-discipline of ‘environmental history’ is not something that historians must identify themselves with when thinking about the environment. Ultimately, according to Chakrabarty’s definition of the ‘planetary,’ historians must free themselves from the sub-disciplinary divide of the post-Enlightenment drive of university institutions to examine the environmental underpinnings that nature and science hold for the politics of human affairs.

The Point of History in a Planetary Age

The need to rethink our old conceptions of ‘political’ matters as being exclusively human and discretely separate from the ‘objective,’ ‘value neutral’ spheres of science and the environment is ever more prescient. International institutions designed based on an indefinite conception of time – or a human-centric ‘global’ in the place of a ‘planetary,’ as Chakrabarty puts it – that put excessive faith in humanistic values are not sufficient tools to equip ourselves in the struggle for a sustainable and intersectional climate justice. In this, historians can be at useful service. History has the power to denaturalise. Our discipline does not work with a fixed set of rules of what historians are meant to do; history has the power to question, deconstruct, and ultimately change the concepts that people so often tend to assume as given. Inevitably, all history is the history of the present. Amid a planetary emergency like ours, we as historians must continue to think outside of the Eurocentric, human-centric categories we have inhabited for so long to adapt our ways of political thinking to a ‘planetary’ age of climate change. Time is of the essence.

“Columbus Day” and the Dangers of Eurocentric Indigenous History

This eleventh of October marked the 29^th anniversary of the Indigenous Peoples’ Day since the City Council of Berkeley renamed the day from its original form ‘Columbus Day’ in 1992. The day, established to restore agency to the people indigenous to the Americas marginalised in the colonialist rhetoric of ‘Columbus Day,’ received particular interest this year as U.S. president Joe Biden formally signed a presidential proclamation Indigenous Peoples’ Day to become a national holiday, becoming the first-ever president to recognise Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Though the need for the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the historical narrative should be a pretty straightforward one even without approval from a white president, the long-overdue recognition does imply a pressing need to contemplate the perceptions we have unquestioningly held about the past and their Eurocentricity. In the light of such events in October, in this month’s article, I will introduce a brief history of how discourses around the environment and environmentalism have put a white ‘Europe’ at its centre, marginalising the voices of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) communities.

Native American protesters and supporters gather at the Black Hills, now the site of Mount Rushmore, on July 3, 2020 in Keystone, South Dakota. A multi-generational gathering, led by many young women and including different tribes, peacefully held the line. (Photo by Micah Garen/Getty Images) — “This is Stolen Land” – Protesters and supporters gather at the Black Hills, now the site of Mount Rushmore, on July 3, 2020, in Keystone, South Dakota. (Photo by Micah Garen/Getty Images)

How non-white communities were more vulnerable to the effects of western environmental degradation

Environmentalism has existed before we found the language to express it from a European viewpoint. Though we often associate the incorporation of environmental factors in building our social spheres of life as a modern concept, the history of non-European environmental thought predates the invention of European ‘science’ modern environmentalism. Moreover, the dichotomous way of categorising nature as an external ‘environment’ as opposed to a ‘social’ sphere of human life is a European way of conceiving the structures around us. As those privileged enough to have their stories heard were often white activists, the ideas and accounts for environmental justice of BIPOC communities were often ignored and silenced.

This Eurocentric way of thinking about the environment is problematic as it precisely leaves out the very people who are most severely impacted by climate change and environmental degradation from the environmental discourse. As history unfolded into the 19^th century and European empires went through mass industrialisation, the benefits of capitalist developments were exclusively reserved for WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) men, whereas non-white communities often had to deal with the consequences of industrialisation through the destruction of the environment. For instance, in the United States, cities were ‘colour-coded’ in order to regulate the kinds of housing you could purchase based on the colour of your skin. Even as the U.S. federal government created the Federal Housing Administration to provide loans so that the average person could own a home, ‘green’ coded homes that were of the highest value were all-white neighbourhoods, whereas districts that were coded ‘red’ were preserved exclusively for either integrated or all-black communities in the working-class. These red coded homes would be located where unregulated industrial production and waste emission affected life standards most severely (Melin Oliver, 2020).

Environmental degradation frequently threatened the lives of non-white workers in the agricultural sector as well. as Mexican workers deployed in the U.S. under the Bracero program were sprayed with DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a chemical compound used as insecticide famously introduced in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring for its hazardous effects on the environment and human health) before they were sent to their contractors. Even today, dump fields and industrial sewages are located in places populated predominantly by Black and Brown communities who were chosen, in the words of a North Carolinian environmental protester Almena Myles, ‘because we were rural and poor and they thought we couldn’t fight’ (Bergman, BBC, 2019). Ironically, Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian migrant communities were being exploited to accelerate environmental destruction, from which they themselves would suffer the consequences. The glorious narrative of ‘progress’ and ‘rationality’ we often associate with capitalist development often erase and silence the histories of these people, upon whose labour and sacrifice of living conditions Western industrial development fundamentally relied.

Why we should think intersectionally when thinking about the environment

The importance of thinking about intersectional histories of the environment and climate change comes from the fact that the obstacle to solving the climate crisis is a man-made one rather than a scientific one, in which certain individuals hold more responsibility than others. Merely directing the majority of the solutions to climate change to individualistic consumerism-based lifestyle reforms cannot address the bigger structural forces responsible for creating the climate crisis, while alienating people who are not affluent or privileged enough to maintain a consumerist “sustainable” lifestyle. Apocalyptic prognoses not based on sufficient scientific evidence that ‘we’re all doomed to die no matter what we do’ are bigoted and unhelpful, as such statements disregard the fact that climate change will first impact the peoples and societies least responsible for it. Environmentalism and the struggle for environmental justice can only be sustainable when people of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, classes, and nationalities have an equal voice in the solution. Such inclusivity can only be achieved by considering the environmental history and the intersectional history of environmental thought, and this is where we as historians, not scientists, can contribute to the struggle for environmental justice.

Introduction: Why I’m a ‘Green Ideologist’

Hey, thanks for clicking.

I am a student of history who wishes to do this type of thing for a living – thinking, writing, educating and, hopefully, changing. I have named my blog the Green ‘Ideologist’ because I believe ideas are central to our world is conditioned and conceived. As a historian my job is to challenge what most people in our age would deem ‘natural’ by deconstructing the narratives we build around it. Ultimately, I tend to show how that which is the most natural to us is that which is constructed. What I mean by this will be clearer in the posts that will follow.

What the ‘Green’ means in the name of my blog is harder to explain with words. Frankly, I am fine with you associating anything that the word ‘green’ invokes in your mind, except for the one-dimensional portrayal of nature as simply something green and sublime. The point is that I want you to think about what we imagine as we picture the word ‘green’ and why that might be the case. For some reference, taking a look at the short scraps of writings and images on my homepage might help.