May 8: introduction & In the before times

Concepts, Frameworks, Positionality, and Debates

~What is environment History Video Notes

Environmental history results in the impacts of pass decisions and what is lead to the current
- The London smog which was caused by excessive smoke released from factories
- Lakes being dried up
- The more we take the more vulnerable we are to ecological impacts

“Environmental history explores the ways in which the biophysical world has influenced the
course of human history and the ways in which people have thought about and tried to
transform their surroundings” - Donald worster

History has to be about climate due to climate impacting how we have developed and
progressed (windmeles, paintings from historical weather)

~Historians have became interested in fossil fuels and its regard to global warming→ additionally
connection towards pass issues and how they may have solved it
- Humans have influenced climate since the invention of agriculture (clearing forest and
steps leading to warming cause of greenhouse gasses)
The high levels of greenhouse gasses are punctuated by pandemic killings of large numbers of people →
The Black Plague
Alongside the great political social economic and intellectual revolutions we have to place the
ecological revolution that is now referred to the columbian exchange
- Most significant exchanged of eastern and western exchanges that occurred after 1492
- Columbus brought many agriculture but also diseases that killed many americas
(natives)

Earth day: An SOS for survival: April 22, 1970 (Video)

The perception of earth day is different from current civilization
- The pollution was seen while now its hidden

LECTURE NOTES
~1.2 intro to history of the environment
What the history of the environment is NOT

1. Not science where the study and the scientist are separate systems
2. Not geology, anthropology etc, although methods are used from them
3. Not ecology although both fields are similar
4. Not a history of “Enviroemntal movement” although it emcompasses our changing
notions and perceptions

What is the history of the environment?

1. It aims to study and document human interactions with environment/nature
2. Complex systems of interaction between human and environmental realm
3. Gives deeper understanding than traditional history which is human based
Reductionism
~western eye of reductionism
- Descartes the word ‘i think, therefore i am’
- It implies the human mind is separate from the material world
- Which implies the human are separate from the environment
- Reduces the world down to just the thing(s) measured/studied
There is no prefigurative nature to return to which is unspoiled by humans → we are deeply
embedded in and cannot be removed in the environment
~Reductionism is a false premise regarding the biosphere, because you would have to be on a
spaceship looking down on earth for it to be true

Earth Day
- The birth of the EH roughly coincides with the FIRST earth day in 1970
- Each result from a growing conscious that today is our perceptions of nature, what we
allow ourself to do in it, etc
- EH is a multidisciplinary field looks to do these vary things
- Within the video it shows different reactions to earth day in comparison to current time

Three Main concerns within environmental History

Donald worster has recognized three main clusters of issues to be addressed in environmental
historians (1988: 289-308)
The first cluster
- Deals with the human intellect realm consisting of perceptions, ethics, laws, ,myths, and
other mental constructions related to the natural world
- Ideas about the world around us influence the way we deal with the natural environment
Second Cluster
- The level of socio-economic realm. Ideas have an impact on politics, policies and the
economy through ideas are materialized in the natural world
The world is not stagnant it reacts to the humans action onto the world (feedback from
economy, policies, natural world limits etc)

Human Impact, Finite planet

● EH gets interesting going into the holocene era- span of time starting at the end of the
last ice age glaciation (about 12kya)
● We have entered by many definition the anthropocene because it denotes the span
during which we started to affect the environment at ever greater scale- whatever that
means quantivity
● We don't know earth's carrying capacity although it is determined by the interactions
made with the earth's environment and how much it is willing to tolerate
● Studying communities from past can show us different formulas for some human/nature
equilibrium
LECTURE 1.3 PART:2 OF INTRO TO HISTORY OF THE ENVIRONMENT
Main themes:
1. Climate
2. People
3. Geography
4. Population
5. Human social structures
6. Stakeholders
7. Ecology
8. Knock ons (unintended consequences, feedback loops)
Domains of human/nature interactions → Land, water, atmosphere, our overall interactions over a cycle
of time
- Our environment forms a system in a nonlinear way
- We can never predict what is going to happen
- This leads to the possibility of something that happens in the past will come back in the
future
- Not cause and effect but iterative Feedback loops

The Last Frontiers

- The seabeds and the bottoms of the ocean are being contemplated for resource
extraction next
- Climate change opens up new habitable environments for exploration
- International treaties (for now) protect antarctica
- Our probes lay dead on many of the bodies within the solar system
- Humans have already breached space with satellites, electromagnetic broadcasts and
the voyager projects probes

EH THEMES
● Initiators, mediators, influencers, receivers of interaction
● especially technology and social structures as mediators
● Also keep in mind politics, economy, and culture

Technology as a mediator
- One way to interface with the environment
- We can invent and produce and also cultivate to pass down through oral and written
- Used to turn “nature” into the “environment” and the “environment” to resources to be
extracted
- Heidegger's view of nature is “Standing Resources”
- Can also work other way and mitigate our waste flows
But can you run a flour mill on it?
~Energy is often used as an instructive domain to frame environmental history with, since all of
our infrastructure and activity is based on exertion
 - New energy sources or ways of extracting from the environment form pivotal advances
for our species
- Any source of of energy beyond eating wild plants involves technology (fire to burn,
agriculture to make more fuel, domestic animals working for us, wheel to harness
moving water)

Rementiating the relationship

Our relationship with nature changes with two mechanisms
1. Technological innovation
2. Changes in behaviour of individuals (Social)
Technology is not a sure bet and its own effect may be unknown → think of geo engineering as a solution
to climate change
- There are knowns and unknowns
~Social change is difficult and takes work, in that relies on human institutions and physcology
that are used for maintain stability

How our present self influences the view of the history

- To analyse the impact of the past and changes through this must use modern agendas
onto it but passes a threat towards the past due to history not having the resources
within then. We are looking at the past with the eyes of today which leads to a distorted
and false vision of the past

~Finding a true about our past and present is impossible, although fields like EH try to find the
closest example through frameworks
- The inclusive lens EH uses are undetermined by the most powerful stakeholders
involved in the story telling, who used their own visions
- Rather than the cohesive narrative we are caught in a overload and short term results,
answers

LECTURE 1.4 IN THE BEFORE TIMES; HEDERIK PART 1

FROM HERE ON IS EXAMINABLE MATERIAL// IMPORTANT STUFF STARTS NOW
~discussing how we have evolved and other environmental stuff

Homo Erectus
- “Homo” is the genus of bipedal animals that include us, homo sapiens
- Homo erectus (standing man) was one of the more recent extinct ancestors- appeared in
africa in 1.9 and 1.6 mya
- Jaws and guts were smaller
- Brain was two size of ours
First species to use fire → which indicated they roasted their meat
Homo Erectus: From erectus to neanderthals
~Homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis probably evolved from a common ancestor
- Until neanderthals disappeared 28 kya, they inhabited europe from african erectus
- Short and stocky, heavier set
- Brains were larger from homo sapiens
- Evolved during eurasia during the ice age- tem much lower than present day
- They adapted to their environment, had more body fat

WHAT MAKES US HUMAN

~Homo heidelbergensis went north and became homo neanderthals. Homo heidelbergensis
also went south and became homo sapiens in 200 kya

Key insight: Rather than adapting to their environment as neanderthals did, homo
sapiens began to CHANGE their environment to meet their needs
But lead to animal extinction//carrying the capacity of the environment

Bottleneck and exodus:

- Like many hominis, homosapiens left africa to search for more resources
- There population however crashed to perhaps 200 individuals
- Toba volcano in indonesia may have played a part
- They were hunter and gatherers
- They kept there numbers low so they can use the resources to the most
HISTORY OF THE ENVIRONMENT; IN THE BEFORE TIMES 1.5
~MAP OF MIGRATION OF HOMO SAPIENS

Australian extinction & environmental change

- After humans arrived 15 out of 16 species of large mammals, or 19 out of 20 including
large reptiles and mammals went vanished
- Whether humans were the cause of it is controversial
- Large animals breed slower and have fewer offspring, killing a few female mammals will
cause a defect in the environment
Cont.
- With the extinction of large herbivores, the vegetation was no longer being eaten or
fertilized
- Fires impoverished the soil, caused soil erosion, increased fire, promoting species rather
than fire sensitive ones
- The aboriginal populations in australia adapted and call it “Fire stick farming”
- These fires deliberately set by humans so that vegetation is kept under control in
absence of herbivores
- Prevents larger fires, leaves enough grasses for herbivores left

CASE STUDY: Eurasia

● We were able to adapt and cluteraly adapt
● Meantherdthals became more fit physically while they have adapted by sowing clothing
● The needle was found 40,000years old
● Fitted clothes allowed further exploration and habituation
 ● Early sapiens had a longer life than neanderthals
● Elderly was very important with transmitting knowledge down

CONT.
- The extinction of the wooly mammoth, wooly rhino, irish elk, and cave lion are attributed
to humans
- Neanderthals went extinct during this period too, homo sapiens adapt and evolutions of
adapting dogs, clothes, and mind beat neanderthals
- Humans didnt reach americas until the ice melted
- Around 14 kya the ice melted and allowed movement towards alaska
- How they reached america is a mystery, maybe boats

Paleo Indians
- Were opportunist (like neanderthals) instead of exclusively hunting they gathered all
sorts of food
- They used fire to open up forests and encourage herbivorous to multiply
- Some grew food and created complex society based on agricultural

LECTURE 1.6 FINAL PART

XKCD:a timeline temperature → still being modified till this day

Mesolithic and melting:

Mesolithic: Refers to the final period of hunter and gather cultures; starting with the last glacial
maximum (around 18 kya) ot the agricultural revolution (10kya)
- Oceans rose, due to huge melting
- Many parts of the world became isolated due to ocean levels
- Tundra gave away to forests , the middle east became very warm and moist producing
seeds and grass
- Homo sapiens multiplied

Homo Sapiens and the mesolithic

We are very adaptable
● Adaptable: large animals became rare, they moved to fish and collecting all kinds of
plant matter
● Creative: replaced thrusting spears with throwing spears to kill smaller prey
● Manipulative: used fire to increase prey animals, cultivated grasslands
KEY POINT; humans were no longer living off bounty of nature but rather they were
manipulating nature for its own benefit

How did homosapiens begin to settle down????

- Needed to figure out how to store food, baskets, pots, and even pottery from japan,
more northern people froze food in the permafrost
- Began to live in smaller villages particularly around fertile scent
The younger dryas
- The laurentide ice sheet, sometime around 12,900 bursted a damn of melt water which
gave fresh water to the atlantic and arctic, this influx of water turned off the ocean
circulation that keep europe warm
Consequences of this
- Caused draught on middle east
- Made america as cold as serbia
- Grass was scarce
- Began to farm

May 10th, Agricultural Revolutions

Lecture 2.1: Testot, CHapter three (The wheat deal)

Catalysms → book made by Laurent testot
- Traces human history on earth from 3 mya to present

Chapter 2, The wheat deal

- 12,000 or so years ago humans invented agriculture in what is known collectively as the
middle east
- We made a pact with the plants which created wheat
- Wheat is a grass and until this time had seeds that pollinated with the wind which made it hard to
store → WHICH IS A GENETIC MUTATION
Shaping genes with wheat
~a genetic mutation in wheat that prevents the head from separating and blowing off only
occurs in a million plants naturally, because it prevents a chance of survival
- As Testot puts it: “people made a deal with wheat: you entrust your reproduction to us,
and we will eat you, but we will ensure your legacy”
- Wheat is now the top agricultural grains in the world
- 13000 years ago this mutation became common because humans were encouraging it
to grow
- The human population then was not able to exceed 2.5 - 5 million; but then 10,000yrs
later there was an estimated 50-100 folds increase in human population to 200-250
million (an enormous increase)
- Most of them were farmers, wheat was there along the way

A critical heatwave
~Throughout many global fluctuations with the weather we have always migrated where an
environment is less harsh, rather than adapting genetically like the neanderthals, we would
migrate
- 15,000 years ago the climate got hotter which lead the laurentide ice sheet breaking up
all at once and depositing a huge amount of freshwater right at the top of the north
atlantic current
 - At the end of younger dryas humans took advantage of the warming and became
farmers (due to scarcity it led to an evolution of change encouraging innovations)

3 Grains, Most common grains in the world

~First grain; wheat- Originally domesticated in the middle east ( followed by lentils and
chickpeas)
- Estimated that hunters gathered populations consumed 40% meat to 60% plants on
average
- After domestication of grains, this ratio shifted to 90% plant to 10% meat
- Common wheat comes from hybridization of two wild types: emmer wheat and einkorn
wheat
- Over 30000 subspecies of wheat today, through variety disappearing due to
industrialized agriculture

Agriculture, A Global Invention

~as long as accepted stereotype that civilization is a linear progression from the agricultural
revolution: I.e people invented pottery so they could store preserved grains
- Looking at other parts of the world we see that storing is much more complex
- Pottery in CHINA precedes the innovation of any agriculture, as much as 20,00yrs ago
- Another assumption is that agriculture spread from the initial innovation in the middle east →
NOT ALL IS TRUE
Second grain: Rice-;
Differs from the other grains in two aspects:
1. More productive than grasses, needed viewer grains to reproduce
2. Buried in mud rather than sown in dirt, much more labour intensive
~Collected and probably cultivated 13,500yrs ago
- Probably gardens rather than farmed for the first 6000 yrs of its cultivation, not
intensively focused on the way we do today

THE AMERICAN COUNTEREXAMPLE

Third grain: Maize (aka corn)
Followed by sugarcan being number four
- Wild parent plant is teosinte → a small grass with seeds that are too fine and husks that are
too tough to be edible
- Still not sure how teosinte become corn, but a possibility is that the dense planting could
have encouraged it to grow taller to seek light
- Instead of cultivating the land (due to lack of draft animals) the indigenous populations of
americas instead became masters of fertalizing and companion planting

The Three Sisters

Maize, Beans, Squash
~ The broad leaves of the squash cover the ground and prevent evaporation and grazing
animals with their spikes (bred out of contemporary plants)
- Beans would climb up and stalk of maize and provide nitrogen fixing for the corn and
squash as they grew
- Smart way to ensure the success of three crops

The Roots Of All Evil?

“Growing Grains like wheat, barley, millet, and rice enabled the emergence of hierarchical
civilizations around 6000 yrs ago”(65)
- The agricultural revolution was based on storage of food stocks as the foundation of
wealth
- The regular harvest of these grains led to stratified society: Peasants produced, civil
servants taxed and managed food stocks, soldier maintained order, and kings hoarded
wealth( along with priests)
- Hierarchical religion appears as well

The submission of animals

~Due to middle east laying at the junction of the east, west, north and south half the animals
and third of the plant species arises from there

The domestication of dogs, cats, pigs and aurochs

1. Dogs: probably as long as 30,000 yrs ago, symbiotic relationship, probably selected by
most juvenile/submissive traits
2. Cats: around 11,000 yrs ago, commensal relationship
 3. Pigs:long as 14,000 then independently 11,000 yrs ago etc: domesticated several times
independently, → would fence them at night, and be allowed to roam in the day
4. Arouches: now extinct, that were to cattle as wolves to dogs, selected by the most
docile, smaller animals, eventually became our cattle

The Price Of Comfort

~From hunting and gathering to agriculture, people experienced a steep decline in size of
muscle mass, bone density
- Not necessarily due to a grain based diet, though it played a role
THREE FACTORS PLAYED
1. Child labour: if a child works from ages 6-13 there bones feus to stay smaller
2. Nutrition: lack of food due to hierarchical societies, where food was hoarded by the rich
3. Disease: certain parasitic diseases can affect height during childhood
BUT: Allowed us to have more children, as children would be weaned sooner on a grain diet,
hence population growth even if was less healthy
- Also required social cohesion: more used to collective action and technological

2.2 LECTURE; FROM FOODPLANES TO ZIGGURATS; HUGHES CHAPTER 3

The Urban ecosystem

~” the city is a structured human relationship with the natural environment”-hudges 30
Cities
● Large concentrations of human population
● Mostly displaced or destroy natural habitat
● Form their own unique ecosystem
Dependent on surrounding areas and ecosystem for resources and waste streams
- More concentrated consumption compared to rural or small, dispersed villages often
lead to sustainability issues in surroundings and feed ecosystems
- Surplus or food allows development of non agricultural social roles, organizations and
institutions
- Cities are artifacts, but also accelerators of human culture
- First cities used large walls for protection but this removed their inhabitants further from
land
- Hughes discusses the great divorce of culture from nature

The Early Citizen

~Organizations and structures of a city spurned cultural innovations to meet changing needs:
1. Stock keeping
2. More incentive agriculture
3. Production from raiders of other cities
Early cities had poorer life expectancies and health measures compared to villagers, farmers,
nomads,and hunter-gathers
- Shorter in height, died earlier, were more prone to disease
- Due in part to poor sanitation, population density limited diets among the class
BACKGROUND:Agriculture

•Neolithic peoples had developed various agricultural technologies as we settled

•These included domestication of cereals and pastoral and draught animals
•The surplus and constancy of food this produced may have caused, or been caused
by, the settling of small villages
•Also allowed the beginnings of non-agricultural roles in a community/tribe, in terms of
leadership and spiritual roles, although pre-city village settlements were highly
egalitarian
•An actual priesthood employed on a dedicated site was used by the various
communities and settlements of the surrounding area and allowed for a more uniform
culture within a region

The First Temple: Göbekli Tepe

•Located in Turkey, the site dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic between 9500 and 8000
BCE
•May have begun as a means of serving nomadic hunter-gatherers who brought tribute
and feasted
•Used later by semi-agrarians who lived and farmed part-time in villages, and hunted
and gathered at other times of the year as evidenced by stone mills and wild game
remains
•Circular buildings are indicative of spiritual spaces, and other buildings indicate
permanent residency there
•Coincided with the first permanent human settlements and may have been instrumental
in their development

Villages and Proto-Cities

•With surplus produce afforded by irrigation, villages proliferated while some grew
•On trade routes especially, to allow for better importation of resources
•Some grew to house many thousands of people
•These proto-cities exhausted their surrounding ecosystems, especially through
salination of soil, and became untenable
•Inhabitants then dispersed into smaller villages with fewer needs
•Population of Mesopotamia did not change, so just migration, not die-off of people
First Cities (global)
•Uruk in Mesopotamia, and also cities in Nile valley, on Indus river, and in Northern China
•Allowed formation of States with religious and political institutions, job specialization, class
stratification and income disparity, arts like monument building, civil works, writing, pottery,
measurement of space and time
•Each agricultural innovation allowed cultivation of more land = deforestation, draining of
wetlands, irrigation of dry lands, loss of habitat, etc.

Critical Uruk Technologies

•Dairy – allowed accelerated weanging/birthing
•Plough & draught animals – early ploughs pulled by oxen make tillage much easier
•Pottery – wheel allowed for mass production, conformity, trade
•Seals – on ceramic containers allowed for storage, ownership
•Writing – initially just to keep inventory and offer records of mercantile transactions
•Bureaucracy – dedicated, specialized role to keep track of surplus goods and trade
•Monolithic architecture – in situ terraced ziggurats with temple on top
•Metallurgy – Smelting, refinement of copper, later tin (Copper Age -> Bronze Age)
•Agriculture – seed selection, fallow periods and crop rotation, fertilization techniques

Ecological Impacts
•Increased number of grazing pastures and fodder harvest required for growing domesticate
base = deforestation

•Fields slowly salinized by irrigation

•Deforestation increased salt and silt load of flowing water due to soil erosion

•Deforestation also increased flood potential without mitigating influence of wild foliage in water
absorption by land

•Deforestation accelerated by need for wood or charcoal fuel to heat and cook, for kilns and
smelting, for construction as material and fuel for bricks

•Quarries/mines for stone, ore, and riverbanks provided clay for bricks

•Wastes from humans, animals, slaughter, metallurgy in high concentration

Ecological Impacts of Water Management:
Irrigation
1. •Fields build up salts, forcing move to more tolerant cereals like barley, and eventual
desertification
2. •More surplus food = higher concentration of humans and wastes
3. •Evaporation on land as opposed to flow-through = salts from upstream rocks exposed
via deforestation
4. •Diversion of water can lead to problems downstream
5. •Flood control/travel via levees/dikes/canals
6. •Increased silt and organic matter content of water from deforestation required more and
more dredging
7. •Canals and levees ended up 10m above height of fields they were protecting, as
dredged material made banks higher, and silt collected at bottom of waterway

The “Great Divorce”

~In cities, the “Feedback from natural systems was less instantaneous. Therefore it
could seem to them that culture and nature were two separate realms, and that culture,
representing order and security, should be dominant over chaotic nature.” – Hughes 33

Uruk

•Is in southern Iraq today, not far NW of where Tigris and Euphrates meet, and was part
of the larger Ubaid people’s settlements
•May have become habitable due to innovations in water management including levees,
canals, irrigation
•Coincided with earliest forms of pottery wheel, so proto-manufacturing, and Ubaid
pottery appears all around southern shores of Persian Gulf
•Were pre-cursor communities and constellations of villages prior to Uruk expansion era
of 4000–3200 BC
•Uruk was the first city in Mesopotamia, in the first Mesopotamian civilization –
Sumerian

Mythology of Gilgamesh
•Main arc is of a bored, decadent Gilgamesh - priest/king of the civilization where writing and
literature was born, and subject of epic poem detailed the Sumerian culture, sometimes in
metaphor
•Enkidu is made by the gods as balancing factor to Gilgamesh as his friend
•Enkidu is hairy, lives in wilderness among animals, and is seduced into Uruk by women, bread
and wine
•Bread and wine are technologies of fermentation and preservation - definitively urban
phenomenon
•Note Gilgamesh killing lions for sport, carrying on Paleolithic policy of extermination of
competing predators
Further Sumerian/Babylonian Mythology
•Cosmogony (creation myth), tells of Marduk, the male warrior who conquers the female,
chaotic force Tiamat. Tiamat is serpent, connected with water
•Marduk represents male order, institutionalized via cities, forced upon nature
•Relating of order to males comes from increasing power of better and better armed male
soldiery required to defend cities from other cities
•Cities saw much stricter gender separation and stratification

May 15: LECTURE 3.1// THE SICK CITY (MCNIEL AND ENGELIKE)
~An Urban Planet
•There are 500 cities where population over 1 million
•74 cities where population over 5 million
•12 cities where population over 20 million
•Largest city = Tokyo, population 37 million (more than all of Canada in one city!)

•Cities act to concentrate a population well beyond the carrying capacity of the land upon which
it is built

•The more people, the heavier the environmental load, and the wider it is spread out beyond the
city

•Need sources for energy and materials, sinks for liquid, solid, gas wastes
so a basic understanding of cities – how they came to be, what are their problems and
advantages, and how do we square living in cities with an environment in balance?

Sources – energy and materials

•Clean water for drinking, at least grey water for washing

•Food for humans and animals (mostly pets in Canada)

•Energy was wood, then coal and other fossil including gasoline in 20th century

•Energy often drawn from external sources like hydro, wind & nuclear

•Energy needs increased greatly with industrialization

•Construction materials like clay, wood, stone, cement, steel, glass

•Manufactured goods brought in, as well as made and sold/exported where raw materials needed

•Usually built on best agricultural land, often on rivers, estuaries

Sinks – effluent and wastes

•Human wastes carried in water to be treated, returned
•Discard and refuse ie. “garbage” and since the 1980s, recycling
•Food waste: point of consumption and last mile – 30% of food grown is wasted
•Industrial/Manufacturing wastes
•Heat, light, noise “pollution”
•Sinks include atmosphere, ground/soil/land (dumps, air-born pollution over regional
area), water source like lake, river or ocean,
•Even human bodies act as sinks within the city and regionally, often marginalized
communities via socio-economic situation or ethnicity
•Indoor air pollution for/from the “energy poor” who use combustibles to cook and heat
at home

Cities as Systems
•Cities are dynamic and changing, with their relationships with adjacent/encompassing
ecosystems always being negotiated
•Form their own ecosystems with trees, parkland, urbanized animals (raptors, pigeons, trash
pandas, foxes, coyotes, squirrels &c) and the rest of the city and built-environment
•Influence hydrological cycle with excess heat, less greenery, land paved over, aquifer
depletion, rainwater overflow in sewers to treat
•Downstream algae blooms/dead zones from human wastes
•Agricultural intensification is a result
•Energy generation, combustion, industrial, consumer air pollution

Benefits of cities
•Concentration of human activity leads to cultural enrichment including arts and
innovation
•Efficiencies in services and goods distribution mean lower resource requirement per
capita
•Now have higher life expectancy, lower birth rates, than rural population
•Mass transit, living closer to work and play, lower transportation costs

Cities before 1800

•Cities were uncommon prior to industrialization and colonization

•Exceptions were usually Imperial or commercial centers

•Reached carrying capacity of surrounding areas, exhausted the resources that could easily be brought
in, usually via water

•Unsanitary and overcrowded, higher mortality rate than rural population

•Sheer density and interconnectedness to other populations through trade meant that they were more
susceptible to epidemics, as we will see in the next lecture
What changed 1800+

•London was Imperial seat of British Empire, also the first country to industrialize, as its land
resources ran out

•1600s and 1700s saw increase in English food production, increased surplus food and labour
for cities

•British Industrial Revolution fueled by innovation and cheap local coal

•Other parts of Europe soon followed

•Japan, where cities were already cleaner, larger, more in number, had early national industrial
policy to foster growth

•Steamship and later railroad transportation helped in both commercialization and migration,
moving goods and labour

•Rail was especially revolutionary as it was first real, economically viable land transportation for
goods/resources cities needed

•Mid 1800s sanitation became a focus, and 1880s germ theory of disease

Drive-In to the 20th Century

•Late 19th early 20th centuries saw advent of Urban Planning

•US & Canada in early 20th century built the auto industry, that: affected how cities were planned, led to
later car-centric urban sprawl

•Post WWII rest of the world developed automobile industry/culture and saw explosion of urbanization

•At the same time the Cold War, much like Italy and Germany in the interwar period, led to massive
military infrastructure projects to develop large highway systems such as the Interstates, as civil defense.
This led to further development of auto-centric planning/living

•These inter-city highways opened vast amounts of natural habitat to recreational purposes

Same problems, new century and places

•During the Industrial Revolution, population growth often outpaced infrastructure. Still happens due to
changing political and migration patterns

•In the developing world this leads to slums and shantytowns and squatters who could comprise up to a
third of total population.

•Even substandard informal housing became more permanent and connected to services over time

•Disease burden in poor slums remained of the infectious and parasitic type, while more affluent parts of
developing world cities moved to chronic disease (mostly affected by change in diet)

•Developing world still uses a lot of coal for energy and combustibles for cooking, so air pollution is a
problem

•In wealthier countries/cities, move away from coal and deindustrialization coincided with increased
commuter use of automobiles into the city, a trend soon replicated in developing world
Retreat to the ‘Burbs!
•Road infrastructure, as well as Polio epidemic, led urban flight and rural influx to suburbs
•1950: Two thirds of Americans lived within the city, 1/3 in suburbs
•1990: One third of Americans remained, 2/3 in suburbs
•Suburbanization is especially pronounced in the US, Canada, Australia where cities could grow
outwards with much lower density than European suburbs, which were 3x as dense.
•East Texas crude kept oil/gas prices low in North America
•1990 Americans drove more than twice as far as Europeans while driving larger, less efficient
cars
•This pattern has reversed itself to a certain extent in the past 30 years, as urban renewal and
gentrification has increased the desirability of living in urban areas
~Towards Greener Cities
•Automobile exhaust and CO2 emissions from wealthy cities biggest drivers of anthropogenic
carbon emissions
•Plastics ubiquity in packaging food and goods for urban consumption also has become a
problem
•In 1990, William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel formulated the idea of an “ecological footprint”
to give conceptual and quantitative expression to global reach of cities
•While the particulars might be debated, eco-footprint conveyed idea and growing anxiety about
urban loads on diminishing resources
•Spawned a move towards eco-centric urban planning and greener architecture
~Not so green after all…
•‘Every city, Rees argued in an early (1992) and groundbreaking paper on the concept, “co-opts
on a continuous basis several hectares of productive ecosystem for each inhabitant.” Rees
estimated that every resident of his own city, Vancouver, required 1.9 hectares of productive
agricultural land for food. Rees calculated that the city consumed enough resources (including
food, fuel, and forest products) and emitted enough wastes to “occupy” a land area about the
size of South Carolina or Scotland. He thus demonstrated that Vancouver, by most standards
one of the greenest cities on Earth, had an enormous ecological footprint.’ (123)

What has worked

•In Central/Northern Europe, many cities looked for policy solutions from the 1970’s onwards

•Recycling waste heat from electrical generation, designated growth areas, higher density, recycling,
gardens, green roofs, eco-restoration

•Further moves away from car-based planning, investments in solar energy, public transit, use of bicycles,
pedestrian zones

•Curitiba in Brazil pioneered dams, reservoirs, parkland for flood control, and began to prioritize city bus
transit system as early as 60s
•Cuba experienced economic distress with break-up of USSR and had to “deindustrialize” agriculture,
tractors for oxen, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides for organic/natural ones

•Residents of Havana also began to guerilla garden, which was soon accepted and formalized by
government so that the city grew much of its food -> urban agriculture

LECTURE 3.2// HAMMOND: CHOLERA AND THE INDUSTRIAL CITY

Etiology and Early History
u“Cholera reflected the new technologies and emerging social tensions brought by
industrialization and the spectacular growth of cities.” (192)
u“The cholera microbe is a vibrio, a comma shaped bacteria with a long tail that thrives in warm,
salty water.” (193)
u“When these vibrios are ingested through contaminated water or seafood, their distinctive tails
propel them into the host’s intestinal lining.” (193)
u“This triggers the secretion of a toxin that ruptures the bonds between cells…the cells empty
salts and waters into the gut; profuse vomiting and diarrhea often ensue within hours of
infection, causing death unless fluids are replenished” (193)
uOrigins linked to the Ganges River delta that embraces northeast India and Bangladesh. (193)
~ The growth of cities brought the growth of cholera, which then brought the much needed
infrastructure that allows cities to exist without poisoning their populations.
- in the past that we are looking at, only around 15% of people lived in cities, and the
cities were generally not the preferred place to live
- Cholera, or Vibrio Cholerae, to be more specific, is a gram-negative flagellate bacteria,
which means that the stain that is used to be able to see them is of a certain type (gram
negative) and that it has a tail
- a part of a larger genus of bacteria that include pseudomonas bacteria
- But v. cholerae, particularly the serotypes O1 and O139, are incredibly harmful
- The beginning of the book links the Mt. Tambora eruption with a disruption of weather
patterns worldwide, and after the monsoon came early to the Ganges that year, an
explosive outbreak of disease occurred.
Europe’s Pandemic of 1831-1832
u“In 1829-30, the disease travelled north from India and branched out overland trade routes and
waterways” (194)

u“The fear of disease set many social controls in motion… but cholera was not plague. Quarantines and
disinfection of goods did little against a pathogen that traveled by water and often caused no visible
symptoms.” (195)

uCholera riots targeted authorities rather than their fellow humans (196).

u“In the 1830s imperatives of morality and hygiene were bound together, much as they were during
previous epidemics. The ancient notion that a person’s constitution or habits predisposed them to
illness was updated to reflect city-dwellers… diseases of cholera could be viewed simultaneously as
natural occurrences and as a reflection of God’s displeasure.” (196)
~The first major pandemic of cholera in the 19th century was during 1831 and 1832. While there were
many social controls like border control and quarantine enacted against it, they didn’t have much
effect as cholera is waterborne and often causes no symptoms.
 - Because of the lack of public infrastructure with respect to water and sewage, if people
arrived with asymptomatic cholera, it would end up the waterways and end up being
ingested by people.
- miasma was the way that they understood disease – ie, it was an environmental cause,
by filth and stink.
- Because so many cities were in estuarine environments (ie. there was an interplay
between the salty water of the sea and the fresh water of the canal) it became a perfect
breeding area for cholera, especially the Thames.
- Many attitudes shifted towards whom to blame and responsible for the control of the
disease and who's not. (divine providence, blaming the poor)
- The increased amount of social control was rioted against – so that experience is not
new. There have always been protests against hygienic measures taken to control
disease, lest you think that anti-masking protests are a new thing.

Cholera and Industrial London

uLondon had 2 million inhabitants in 1840.

uFamilies crowded into tenement buildings or windowless cellars with mud floors and and no
water. (197)

u“The water infrastructure in London and other growing metropolises was conducive to the
spread of various waterborne diseases. Alongside cholera, these included typhoid… and
dysentery, a condition of intestinal inflammation that is caused by various bacteria” (197)

uThese unwholesome conditions captured the attention of social reformers who grappled with
the challenges of urbanization. (198)
~the explosion of population was – there was too much shit for the night soil men to keep up
with. tenement buildings is in the woodcut above. Usually multiple families would be living in
a single building, all sharing a backyard privy or cesspit. Causing filth

Edwin Chadwick, a lawyer, began from the premise “that government offices should oversee
large scale investments in public welfare.” These included:
- Poor relief schemes that focused on health policy - because they were more productive
if they were healthy
- Targeted living conditions but sidestepped factory conditions – avoided the criticism of
capitalism that was also going around at the time
- Reformers arguments also reflected growing interest in using data to study populations
- William Farr – standardized disease names – and encouraged officials to draw
conclusions from consistent reporting and to identify the most urgent social problems.
The miasma theory is an abandoned medical theory that held that diseases—such as cholera, chlamydia, or the
Black Death—were caused by a miasma, a noxious form of "bad air", also known as night air. → Google
~based in miasma theory – the environment, particularly piles of filth, caused disease. Their
attack on filth demanded social improvement.
- Chadwick was eventually ousted because he was too heavy handed, but the idea stayed,
particularly to create massive public works projects, esp sewer construction and water
filtration.
 - because of miasma theory thinking that water diluted the miasma and therefore the
disease, often what those public works projects did was dump into the Thames. The
Thames has a backwards tide sometimes, where the sea flows into the city and reverses
the course of the river – which means that all the waste they dumped into it came back
at high tide.

•They figured that cholera was a disease that was only contagious under certain circumstances
•Called it the “contingent contagion” theory
•Began to think that the process to describe fermentation (ie. rot) was somehow linked to
cholera
•Called it ‘zymotic disease’ – had a catalyst that Farr called “cholerine” that could spawn
outbreak when it met the wrong atmospheric conditions.
•Farr proposed a “consistent relationship between the elevation of houses above sea level and
the frequency of cholera deaths.
•Once contaminated air met dirt and hunger all it needed was to spark to ignite an outbreak
among the poor people.

John Snow (not that one) and London’s Water

uJohn Snow – trained as a surgeon, apothecary, physician
uFascinated by gases – studied ether and chloroform, successfully chloroformed Queen
Victoria for the birth of her children
uBecause of his study of gases, “it encouraged him to question the belief that cholera spread
through the air” (201)
u”Snow could not see how inhaling offensive miasmas on a city street could spread disease,
especially since many workers like tanners or butchers breathed in noxious fumes daily but
did not get sick.” (201)
uInstead linked the disease to the symptoms – because the symptoms were gastrointestinal, so
too must be the route of transmission

uCholera is a disease of both poverty and climate change.

uExperts now reckon with a world in which an epidemic of cholera is a permanent possibility.

uUrbanization in the 21st century far outstrips the speed and the scale of earlier transitions to
urbanization.

uIn the 21st century, cholera remains persistent in sub-Saharan Africa – the high prevalence of
malnutrition and infections such as malaria and AIDS that depress immune systems contribute to the
incidence of cholera in the region.

LECTURE 4.1// ENTER THE MACHINES

~The english industrial revolution wilkinson (80/90)
•Traditionally, the Industrial Revolution is thought of as an enormous technological innovation – times of
great minds which came up with wondrous machines.

•Wilkinson proposes that a lack of land-based resources – specifically wood – drove the English Industrial
Revolution instead.
- England is a particularly good example of this phenomena, as it is where industrialization
began in many ways, with the invention of the steam engine, which was necessitated by
the exhaustion of land and its resources.
England Background
•Population at the beginning of the time period (~1700): 5 million

•Population at the end of the time period (~1800): 9 million

•More people needed:

•More land for living
•More land for cultivating for food (~1 acre per family)
•More land for resources (trees in this case)
•More land for transport (horses require ~4-8 acres of grazing land apiece)

•Great Britain is an island – limited land!

•Population growth in preceding period, 1500 to early 1600s, began “timber famine” for fuel and
construction

•Firewood up to 1630 increased in price 2.5x faster than inflation

Climate/Geography

England: Social Structures -1700

•Most people on small-hold subsistence farms, one acre (or so), with cottage-industries to
supplement incomes as prices rose
•Wool industry, and many other cottage-industry craft industries, were controlled/regulated by
guilds and merchant companies (p. 93) that helped distribute the meagre profits

•Industry/manufacturing were initially dispersed so that they could use water wheels for rotary
power

•Commons mostly replaced/privatized by enclosures previously, which began the competition

for land for animals, human food, and eventually wood. Use of remaining Commons regulated.

•Horses/carts and rivers/coasts provided transportation needs with large cost in land (fodder,
timber) and limitations on quantities/volumes moved

•Towns increasingly non-self-sufficient, requiring more and more shipment of material and
goods

~Centralization and agricultural efficiencies led to large waves of migration to cities,Formerly

wood building codes – bricks used after the Great Fire of 1666 used MORE wood! Colonies
around the world provided raw material & markets for finished goods
•Cheap/slave exploitative labour from India and southern US, especially for cotton (horizontal
expansion vs. vertical expansion for minerals)
•Turnpike Trusts (p. 88) were first institutional framework for road maintenance
•Price shocks from war (Napoleonic 1793-1815) and longer-term, slower inflation related to
population growth (demand) outstripping resource availability (supply) drove innovation
•Price shocks allowed sometimes irrational expansion on large works like canals and rails, also
necessitated by growing volume of materiel shipped
•Air quality legislation for coal fires in towns
Technologies
~Resource substitution was NOT due to preference over traditional ones; most substitutions
were for inferior materials and required more labour, especially when the technology was new.
- Substitute resource often had much greater ecological impacts than previous resource.
- Once land exhaustion necessitated the switch from wood to coal, and coal mines out-
dug extant potential to remove water via horses and rag pumps, innovation was required
and resulted in ever-improving steam engine designs (1698 onwards)
- Late 1700s the reciprocating steam engine joined by rotary power models designed for
increasing number of cotton mills as it replaced wool, and lack of unused water-power
streams
- Switch to coal had far-reaching implications, as industrial processes had to be re-
designed (smelting, glass-making, brick baking, bread baking, salt & soap boiling,
brewing, chemicals, tallow, &c)
- Steam locomotives and Ships - fodder land exhaustion and increased trade
- Construction - timber exhaustion, brick used more wood than wood!

Stakeholders
•Population growth between early mid-1600s to mid-1700s stagnated, easing pressure on price inflation
and wage decline
•Growth began again mid-1700s, and England became net importer of wheat 1760

•Large but decreasing rural poor peasant class, increasing urban poor working class

•Colonies provided raw material and markets for finished goods, rise of powerful monopoly companies
like East India Company

•Exploited labour in India and chattel slavery system in US kept costs of raw materials low

~when considering stakeholders not only to look at human class, ethnic, race, demographic and
geographic distinctions, but also towards non-human actors like the ecosystems surrounding and
impacted by human activity, as well as those who are temporally displaced from that action
- Industrialization has made those stakeholders much more important as we affect the
global ecosystem instead of the smaller, finite ones that impacted the past.

SEVERAL CASE STUDIES MENTIONED IN THE ENDING SLIDES

(CHECK LECTURE FOR MORE INFORMATION)
LECTURE 5.1 COLONIZATION: MIGHT IS RIGHT
What is colonialism?
~Geographical and political expansion of a population or nation (the metropole) so as to control
an external people(s) and/or land(s) (the colony)
Some types of colonialism
- •Settler Colonialism: forced introduction of settlers from the metropole (originating,
ruling territory) to a land already inhabited (colony). E.g. US, Canada, Australia,
Argentina, South Africa &c. Many scholars describe settler colonialism as inherently
genocidal in regards to Indigenous peoples
- •Exploitation Colonialism: fewer resident colonists inhabiting colonized land in order to
exploit resources. Trading posts and small settlements, as in the European colonization
of Asia and Africa
- •Surrogate Colonialism: where the immigration/settlement policy encourages third
party settlers, as in the British colony of Palestine encouraging early Zionist settlement
- •Internal Colonialism: in areas of different cultures under a single jurisdiction whereby
colonial practices create uneven power structures
European colonialism
~European” indicates more a shared politics and technology than physical markers, with
habitation across northern Eurasia where early colonization was into contiguous lands
- They expanded to (co-, re-)inhabit most of the temperate zones, across oceans and very
distant from originating lands, such that “Europeans” are all completely, or at least 2/3, in
the north or south temperate zones with climates roughly like Europe.

The “Neo-Europes”
- •Dispersed geographically, but with dominant European populations
- Apart from the geographic dislocation, Neo-Europes are extraordinary for their
agricultural surpluses
Neo-Europes in 1800
- North America, colonized already for 200 years, had a European population of less than
5m, as well as 1m slaves from Africa
- Neo-Europes had population growth rates that exceeded those in Europe, which were
high already, by many-fold due to the increase in quality of life and the youth of
immigrants

Neo-Europes today
- Neo-Europeans perform “extensive” cultivation (use of lots of land) versus the “intensive”
cultivation used elsewhere (optimization of land use)

The Columbian Exchange

~Transfer of plants, animals, minerals, technology, microorganisms and ideas* between the
New World (Americas) and the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) starting late 15th century
- Europeans took the plants and animals they were accustomed to with them wherever
they went
- Some unintentional guests were included, like fungi and worms, and the diseases that
had deadly effect on Indigenous populations
- Endemic crop fungi introduction often lagged, so yields were initially high in a “yield
honeymoon”

Some Impacts:

- Potatoes, corn, rice and sugarcane introductions in Europe led to a caloric increase in
the diets of Europeans

~Introduction of pastoral, enclosed domesticates to the Americas, which required an individual

to own the pasturelands, was a key factor in the disenfranchisement of Indigenous communities
which had no concept of such individual ownership, only territories at a tribal level

- Increased hunting of bison to the brink of extinction using European technology changed
the Great Plains ecosystem

Horrible Impacts:
- Perhaps 130 million Indigenous people along with their cultures and relationships with
ecosystems were rapidly replaced by a far fewer number of people of totally different
cultures and expectations of their ecosystems
- Colonization of the Americas by Europeans liquidated so many indigenous people that it
changed the climate and initiated a period of global cooling.1

Tragedy of the commons

~After colonization we see a Tragedy of the Commons in which European livestock grazed on
agricultural plots and traditional lands that indigenous peoples relied on and considered
themselves a part of.

From the americas

~•Maize/corn and sweet potatoes contributed to population growth in Asia once
introduced there and was widely adopted in Africa
- Potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, peppers exchanged, live stock from the americas( turkey,
guinea pig, duck), SILVER (from argentina)

Hornborg poses Three question:

1. How many annual hectare yields and hours of human labor were embodied in the British
imports of raw cotton, wheat, and other commodities?
2. •How many annual hectare yields and hours of human labor were embodied in the
British production of textiles, and at which rates were they exchanged for those
embodied in imports?
3. •How many domestic (British) annual hectare yields and hours of human labor were
liberated for other purposes by the displacement of land and labor inputs to other
nations?

Recursion- iteration and feedback

~Recursion is a process that happens over time, such that the outputs of a system
become, in turn, the inputs to the next cycle, in a sort of feedback loop.
- What Hornborg is looking for is the mechanism whereby asymmetrical trade in
space and time, land area and labour, reinforces itself in the technological and
industrial development of the profiting entity.
- That recursion, the feedback loop in trade, means that the metropole always
outpaces the colony in technological advance.

CONCLUSIONS
- These figures would permit a great number of observations on the asymmetric
exchanges of embodied labor and land that contributed to the accumulation of industrial
capital in nineteenth-century Britain.
- The British textile industry for two centuries played a central role in generating revenue
to maintain an expanding technological infrastructure, originally as a means of coping
with a severe shortage of land (Wilkinson 1973).

~Often British labour was traded for foreign land in a highly asymmetrical manner once
converted for comparison
- In exchanging £1,000 worth of woolen manufactures for £l,000 worth of imported raw
wool, Britain in 1850 lost 76 percent in terms of embodied labor but gained 258 percent
in terms of embodied land.

IT ALL ADDS UP TOO

~Hornborg finds in his analysis of cotton, wool, and wheat trades between Britain and its
colonies that an asymmetry becomes self-reinforced over time

LECTURE 5.2 LIBOIRON

~Pollution is colonialism
Sanitation engineering
¡A new discipline in the 1930s
¡The dominant understanding of modern environmental pollution comes from two engineers:
¡Earle B. Phelps
¡H. W. Streeter
¡Took measurements in the Ohio River, and came up with the Streeter-Phelps equation:
calculated the ASSIMILATIVE CAPACITY of a body of water, ie. How much pollution a
river/lake/sea could stand before it was no longer able to dilute it
¡For many years, “Dilution was the Solution to Pollution”
¡Environmental regulations in most of the world since the 1930s are based on this idea
Bad Relations…
¡The “threshold theory” of pollution is Bad Relations – meaning relations to the land and
relations to those that were here before us.
¡It is a scientific theory that allows “some amount of pollution to occur and its accompanying
entitlement to Land to assimilate that pollution.” (5) ie. Colonialism.
¡Colonialism is “the assumed access by settler and colonial projects to Indigenous lands for
settler and colonial goals.” (5)
¡Liboiron’s point here is that the structures that allow for global plastic pollution are based on
colonial land relations.
Three arguments
1.Pollution is not a manifestation or side-effect of colonialism but is rather an enactment of
ongoing colonial relations to Land. That is “pollution is best understood as the violence of
colonial land relations rather than ‘environmental damage’.”
2.There are ways to do pollution action, particularly environmental science, through different
Land relations, and they’re already happening without waiting for the “decolonial horizon” to
appear.
3.Liboiron shows how methodologies – whether scientific, writerly, readerly, or otherwise – are
always already part of Land relations and thus are a key site in which to enact good relations
(sometimes called ethics).

Colonialism
● ¡Disposability assumes infrastructural access to Indigenous Land. Without it, there is no
disposability.
● ¡Assimilative capacity also assumes infrastructural access to Indigenous Land.
● ¡Different types of colonialism: settler colonialism, extractive colonialism, internal
colonialism, external colonialism, neo-imperialism – but they all have in common that
they describe relationships characterized by conquest and genocide that grant
colonialists ongoing state access to land and resources.
● ¡It’s about genocide and access – and it always (always) has to do with Land.
 ● ¡Land as resource, Land as scientific base, Land as ‘pristine’ and especially ‘untouched’
wilderness without people in it – these are all colonial pursuits.
Colonialism and environmentalism → Liboiron particularly engages in how environmental crisis
has become a way of maintaining stability in a system rather than radically changing it.

Colonialism and capitalism:

● But colonialism isn’t unique to capitalism – many different economic systems depend on
access to Indigenous Land.
● Sometimes the colonial state enacted conservation specifically to reserve Land for
capitalist accumulation.
● But differentiation and specificity is what matters here – focuses on a monolithic
capitalism or colonialism (or imperialism, etc) erases horizons of meaningful action.
Otherwise and alterlives
● Things could have been otherwise – by denaturalizing and demythologizing plastics,
Liboiron aims to make apparent their ongoing relationships to maintaining colonial Land
relations.
● Therefore, Liboiron’s orientation for this book takes from Murphy’s idea of “‘alterlife’ –
“words, protocols, and methods that might honor the inseparability of bodies and land,
and at the same time grapple with the expansive chemical relations of settler colonialism
that entangle life’s forms in each other’s accumulations, conditions, possibilities, and
miseries.” (20)
Differences and Obligations:
● The question is: how to take up science so that it enacts good Land relations, without
appropriating Indigenous Land relations (if they aren’t yours).
● Liboiron’s solution is specificity – instead of attempting a ‘one-size fits all’ solution, the
solutions to Good Science (and good Land relations) is attending to a nuanced
connection and humility.
Problems, Theories, and Methods of We:
● “We” is rife with assumptions – and in relationships where there is an imbalance of power, it
erases that power imbalance and difference.
● There is no universal “we,” despite its common use in environmental admonishments.
● The problem with “we” is that it isn’t specific enough for obligation – the oldest daughter has
different obligations than the youngest son, for example. DuPont has different obligations toward
plastic pollution than a disabled person using a straw to drink.
● Liboiron offers “standing with” rather than “fixing” or “giving back” which assume a power
difference. – ‘standing with’ attends to specific obligations, power structures, and circumstances.

→Decolonization is NOT something you can do to course syllabi, panels and other academic
nouns without actually giving land back (sorry, York.)

Plastic’s specificity
~The term “plastic” obscures 10,000 different types of polymers, depending on what additives, processes,
and precursor chemicals are used.
● Plastic in the singular obscures so much nuance about plastic – think about ‘single use plastic’
being medical plastic, disposable packaging, etc. Conflating them can cause harm – particularly
when there are calls to ban all single use plastic.
● Without differentiating between all of the different types of plastic (PVC – toxic; Silicone – less so)
and all of the different uses of plastic, we erase understanding and can cause harm to those who
need certain types of plastic goods to be able to have quality of life (ie. bendy plastic straws are
essential to some people with disabilities.)
● There’s not even a ‘we’ for plastics.

JUNE 5/ 6.1 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF ENVIORMENTALISM

History vs. Philosophy of Environmentalism
~EH is rife with philosophical scholarship looking at environmental ontology, for example, which is our
state of “being” in nature. It speaks to the manners in which we approach and engage the
environment(s) we inhabit.
- Evernden’s conundrum is exactly these philosophical approaches and their weaknesses →Evernden asks
the questions, while the New Yorker article attempts to answer many of them within the historical record.
-
- The “history” part of this lecture will look at important milestones, but concentrate on perspectives and
paradigm shifts
- Lastly, we’ll look at how early racialized perspectives are echoed today

Perspectives – The Land →Our concept of the Land has changed over time, often culturally and legally
codified:

● Hunters & Gatherers

● Creeping Settlement & Agriculture
● Roman Legal Structures re: Property
● Feudalism and Ownership
● Civil Society: Coal burning in London was limited by King Edward I in 1306, and the English
government organs later subsidized water and wind power (water mills on streams, windmills
for rotary power)
● Landless Peasants and the “Commons”
● (almost) Everything Privatized!

~We see further legal structures put in place to codify a PUBLIC’s relationship with the Land
- Peasants could graze in a “Commons” which was shared pasture, but this often led to
“Tragedy of the Commons” where individuals would overgraze in fear that someone
else might beat them to it, leaving them with nothing. Commons were slowly privatized
in the “enclosure” movement.

People – The Malthusian Trap

- Thomas Malthus, in 1798, wrote an essay regarding human population growth which tied it to available
arable Land and how each increased.
 - Malthus realized that population growth was the inevitable outcome of increased agricultural production,
rather than lifting standards of
living in the long run by distributing
surplus

~Malthus stated that population

increased in a geometric progression
(ie., 10, 20, 40, 80 -> doubling,
multiplication) while food production
increased in arithmetic progression (ie.,
2, 4, 6, 8 -> 2 more, adding). Population
thereby grew faster than food
production in Malthusian Theory

- Malthus did not take into

account a number of factors,
like additional food production
from the added population, or
technological advance. His
model is based strictly on a pre-
industrial revolution Britain

Public/Private Property – Smokestacks & Slag

~Benjamin Franklin lobbied for the public “right” to be protected from waste and have clean air, in
particular regarding sewage after a Yellow Fever epidemic, and tannery effluent, in the 18 th century

- The Industrial Revolution introduced a new consequence of changing social organization

(urbanization) and resource usage in the carbonization (and sulphurication, among
other chemicals in coal smoke and ash) of the atmosphere at the same time particulate
matter was being dumped into that social “Commons”
- Fourier wrote about the “Greenhouse Effect” in 1824

~The Copper smelting industry in mid-19 th c England created toxic Sulphur and fluorspar emissions, as
well as CO and CO2, that local residents adjacent to the metallurgical works suffered by in terms of
respiratory distress and acid rain
- Metallurgy took off with the advent of cheap coal and innovation in smelting processes to the point
Britain had to import ore
- Communities next to refineries suffered “smoke disease” in people and livestock (swollen joints, rotting
teeth) and vegetation (stunting)
- The toxic effluent impacted neighboring regions

Legal notions of:

● Private encroachment and affect
● Public nuisance
● Public health
● Occupational safety
Were key aspects of the legal debates over the pollution →Grassroots activism and legal challenges to
control copper effluent streams were unable to resolve the issue

- Industry was favored by the courts for the most part, and it was easier to show loss to property
like Land, vegetation and herds than it was people and “the public”
- Systemic change was prevented, in part because of not knowing what that would look like and
favoring the economic benefits in terms of public interest
 - There was a lack of empirical knowledge of the pollution, and it was even considered to be
beneficial to health by some
- Pollution only abated once technological improve

Perspectives – American Romanticism

- American authors and poets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature in 1836) and Henry David
Thoreau (Walden in 1854) wrote eloquent, poetic accounts of their interactions with nature
- They spoke of nature’s intrinsic value, and the virtues of “unspoiled” Land and its benefits to
humankind

People & Perspectives – Conservation

- Madison Grant: helped create the Bronx Zoo and the first organizations
dedicated to preserving California Redwoods and bison and was a peer of
Teddy Roosevelt.
Turning Points – Silent Spring
- England, in 1956, enacted the first ever “Clean Air Act” after the death of 4000 people in the “killer fog”
due to coal burning
- Rachael Carson, a marine biologist turned activist, wrote “Silent Spring”, published in 1962, to make an
empirical case for the harm caused by synthetic pesticides, especially DDT and other dioxins

Evernden – Vulnerable Heartstrings

Concern for nature = “environmentalist”
•Preservation of “pure” wilderness and “pristine” environments
•Conservation which is concerned with sustainable use
•Pastoralism as a closer-to-the-Land lifestyle

~Past environmentalist movements have both concentrated on and been accused of over-reliance on
appeal to emotions, and speak of inherent value and spiritual aspects of nature, like the American
Transcendental Naturalists

- That made them easy to sideline, and their arguments quickly refutable
Evernden
- Stakeholders created a demand for a technocratic ecologist resource management class to form
arguments for both sides of exploit/conserve debates and ongoing custodianship of resources

~•Evernden’s argument is that by arguing that people should manage the environment for their own
self-interest as opposed to ephemeral, immaterial reasons, they have allowed short-term interests to
continue, so long as the impact to the environment is quantified

Lastly, he points out two streams in the modern Environmental Movement:

•A managerial one that attempts to limit, but not prevent entirely, impact on the environment
•Deep ecology which tries to change our basic assumptions about our relationships with nature
Eco-Fascism
~Fascism is not just a European or ethnic-White phenomenon, in that instances among India’s Hindu’s,
the Han Chinese, Sri Lanka’s Buddhists, among others, exist.

- Adolph Hitler was framed as a vegetarian, conservationist, and animal lover, and a back-to-the-
Land narrative, along with the concept of “living space” for the German people, was very much
part of Nazi mythologizing

Characteristics of Fascism

- Sacrifices the “weak” for a greater good, often with arbitrary or ideological measures of
hierarchy
- Willingness to use violence to achieve political aims
- Resources and Land belong to a “superior” race/people
- Racial purity is often conflated with environmental purity
- Denigrates other races/peoples as pollution in and of themselves

JUNE 7/ ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Environmental Justice: Key Concepts

~Environmental Justice refers to “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people
regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development,
implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. (EPA
Definition)

•Environmental Racism refers to “environmental policies, practices, or directives that

disproportionately disadvantage individuals, groups, or communities based on race or colour”
(Bullard, in Waldron).

- Coined in the 1980s, “Dumping In Dixie” was the original text that brought widespread
academic attention to the issue.

Environmental Racism in Canada: Africville

- Started with escaped and former slaves who were promised land and supplies for their service to
the British during the American Revolutionary War.
- First documented land transfer dates it back to 1848.
- Despite it being a well established community for 120 years, Halifax never put in sewage/water
lines/roads for the community
- Also located prisons, dumps, slaughterhouses there
- Victim of ”urban renewal” projects that were popular in the 1950s-60s
Environmental Racism in Canada: Chemical Valley

- Sarnia is the home to many

petrochemical and energy facilities
– accounts for about 40% of
Canada’s chemical industry
- Aamjiwnaang (am-JIN-nun) First
Nations is downwind from Sarnia
- More than three dozen petroleum
refineries within a 25km radius of
Aamjiwnaang

Environmental Racism in Canada: Grassy Narrows

~Asubpeeschoseewagong (Ah-sub-pee-cho-see-wa-gon) First Nations, known colloquially as
Grassy Narrows

- Were relocated in 1963 to a new reserve along the Wabigoon River

- Between 1962-1970, Dryden Chemicals discharged ~ 10 tons of mercury into the river.
Mercury, when dumped in water, forms methylmercury – a highly toxic and bio-
accessible form of mercury which becomes concentrated through the ecological food
chain
- Because of the socioeconomic status of most of Grassy Narrows, Northern food
insecurity, as well as the importance of fish to indigenous culture, continued
consumption of fish occurs in the area despite the known risks.

Waldron: Four Objectives

1. To open a dialogue about how environmental racism manifests within intersectionality

2. How environmental racism operates as a form of state-sanctioned violence against
already vulnerable communities
3. Illustrate how health inequities in Indigenous and Black communities are not only
because of disproportionate exposure to toxins, but also are worsened by pre-existing
social and economic inequality
 4. .Document the long struggle against Environmental racism in Canada in general, in
Nova Scotia in specific.

Social Determinants of Health → Structural Determinants of Health

•Social Determinants of Health are the non •Structural Determinants of Health are like the
medical factors that determine health social determinants of health, but take into
outcomes. They include: account the power disparity of structural racism,
sexism, and colonization, amongst other things.
•Education Access and Quality They include:
•Economic Stability •Governance
•Neighbourhood and Built Environment •Macroeconomic policies
•Health care and Quality •Social policies (like housing)

•Social and Community Context •Public policies (like smoking/nutrition)

•Cultural and Societal Values

JUNE 12// MEASURMENT, MODELLING & POLICY (nuclear, sick buildings)

Measurement’s Middle Ground

~One way of approaching our environment is the empirical one, where it is quantified and
measured, often while testing a hypothesis or for monitoring conditions such as air/water
“quality”, solar-flare activity, ambient/airborne radiation, &c.

What, Where, When, How to Measure?

~The very act of measuring introduces bias and exclusions to the study, What is to be measured is
mirrored by what is chosen NOT to be measured

- How measurements are done can skew results

- Not taking important factors like temporality (measuring the entity many times over time)
- Cherry-picking results can also skew conclusions
- The inherent property of measurement in the Environmental context related to the fact that not
everything, everywhere, always can BE measured can be used to cast doubt on science
- Science is NEVER an EXACT endeavour. There are ALWAYS errors and uncertainties such that
results are usually given a value and a margin of error

Not really numbers…

•As the systems used to measure become more complicated, and as the systems being measured
themselves become increasingly complicated the more we can measure them, we more and more see
results and conclusions that offer probabilities of certain outcomes based on chosen scenarios to model

- •This is especially true of climate and Land, as those systems are exceedingly non-Linear (as in
“complex” or “dynamic” or “chaotic”)
Copper Mine pollution in Britain during the Industrial Revolution

- Apart from showing how the Industrial Revolution changed the Land and our relationship with it
in regards effluent streams, the copper smelting example was included to show how different
perceptual, legal, and social constructs also change our relationships with each other in
negotiations over Land use
- The struggle to define and measure the smelters’ effects on people and the Land is common
when new technology is implemented or when we enter new frontiers like International
seabeds or the Low Earth Orbit zone of our planet

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) & the Ozone Layer

1. •One such struggle came about with the advent of satellite technology that sent back
disturbing pictures of a rapidly depleting ozone layer in the atmosphere
2. •It was being “eaten up” by a family of chemicals commonly used in air-conditioners
and aerosol sprays
3. •Were the hole measured in the satellite surveys to grow too large, it would become
dangerous for humans to be exposed outside
4. •The global scientific community and legislative bodies both international and sovereign
came together and agreed to phase CFC’s out

Nuclear Exchange - Computer Modelling

~Now we get into this week’s first reading which concerns not just measurement capabilities available
now, but using computer modelling to foresee the consequences of our actions using and/or assuming
those measurements

- Harwell is one of three Environmentalists who engaged the group of scientists investigating the
consequences of various levels of nuclear exchange
- discovered that scientists had recently determined that just about ANY nuclear exchange carried
with it significant existential risk for our entire
ecosystem

Nuclear Exchange - Arms Reduction

- •a second case of the scientific and
environmentalist communities coming
together to raise public awareness of an
existential threat to our planet
- •Dr. Lewis Thomas has said that the nuclear
winter discovery may turn out, in a world
lucky enough to continue its history, to have
been the most important research findings in
the long history of science."

From Nukes to Super Storms

~Dr Walter Orr Roberts said the following to conclude the conference, but read it twice – the first time
thinking of how it applies to a nuclear holocaust, and a second time perceiving it as an important
realization about Climate Change which the public has yet to completely accept
“Sacrifice zones” and their unequal share of pollution
1. Measurement has been used to entrench the system of poor communities and people of colour
who are more affected by pollution
2. Measuring in certain places where the pollution doesn’t reach, or at certain times when the
plant is not discharging, skew results and hide problems
3. Testing costs money! You need gear, maintenance, and a team of regulatory officers to oversee
the program and collect data for a second team of scientists to interpret. It’s easy just not to
fund monitoring efforts when it comes to sacrifice zones
4. Thus measurement can be part of an oppressive system

“Sick Building Syndrome” (Part III of this lecture)

What is measured implies things that are not measured – were buildings really making people
sick? Were people getting sick due to buildings? What is revealed and what is hidden by
measurement modalities and protocols is important when studying complex, interrelated
systems