ecological crisis essay

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The home of africa’s adult education community, an essay on the ecological crisis: some reflections.

13 December 2021 | Britt Baatjes Ecological crisis

Once I learned this stuff, I needed no convincing that ‘people and planet matter’ and that we need education - not necessarily formal - to assist us with this.

In the following journal entries, I reflect on my feelings, frustrations and fears as I attempted to write an essay about ‘educating as if people and planet matter.’ I look back on my own unlearning and re-learning; on what I experience in South Africa when it comes to the ecological crisis and education; and also on how things that work in the Global North do not necessarily work in the Global South and why. I do not offer a list of solutions, but rather share many thoughts, feelings and questions I grapple with daily.

I have read about and studied many extraordinary and doable ideas and propositions and witnessed actual demonstrations of ‘educating as if people and planet matter,’ that I can’t think of anything to add to this already-existing, irrefutable evidence. So what do I offer in my essay, Dear Diary? I could just say, please go read or re-read. Go take a look. This stuff exists. FULL STOP.

Dear Diary, the above is not quite the requisite word count. So I could say something about education - as you know I have long critiqued formal education - I just don’t agree with what is taught, how or why. Today, more than ever, I think we are wasting our children’s and youth’s time. In South Africa, where I live, the official youth unemployment rate is 74%, which means it’s actually higher. Some of the unemployed are graduates. They are told they are not ‘work-ready,’ whatever that means. I don’t think I was at 22 when I got my first job. It’s the dominant discourse way of saying we need to think of a way to explain our way out of this. Oh yes, we’ll blame the victims. On the radio the other day I heard: ‘We must introduce youth to big business, big celebrities and big brands.’ I reacted with my usual steps: I argue with the radio; I switch it off; I shout profanities. Yes, we do need to prepare children and young people for a different future - indeed for a different present - but certainly not one with big business, celebrities or brands!

Maybe for my essay I should give a personal account of my climate and ecological justice learning journey - how I learned that ‘people and planet matter’ - a journey that started over 20 years ago and happened mostly outside of formal learning spaces.

I think the actual moment it started was in my brother’s kitchen in Belgium. There was mandatory recycling of waste. In South Africa we did not do this then, and still, today, it is not mandatory (at this point I will say that I write with disclaimers - yes, there are recyclers, but it is still not law. Yes, I have read Forget Shorter Showers , so I know the limitations). My next memory of learning that something was not quite right with the Earth was a few years later in Austria. I visited a children’s museum with my niece and nephew and, with them, learned about food miles and carbon footprints. Reflecting now on those exhibits, it was the first time I was made aware of how the global food system works, how unjust it is, and the importance of localisation. I was in my 30s with a university degree.

Then there was the gradual connecting of the dots between my work in adult and community education and the ecological crisis. The research I did focusing on the ecological crisis made me feel despair as I came face-to-face with the reality of what is happening and is still to come. Thankfully the despair was balanced by many articles, books, videos, discussions and demonstrations showing people around the world, usually within struggle, doing, or attempting to do, things ‘differently.’ Differently to the mainstream or dominant way of being and doing.

Once I learned this stuff, I needed no convincing that ‘people and planet matter’ and that we need education - not necessarily formal - to assist us with this. But what would we learn and teach in South Africa? We know (or should know) that the Global South is in trouble, Africa is in trouble, South Africa is in trouble. Why are we not screaming about this issue? Reflecting, unlearning, re-learning, re-imagining, acting with urgency? (Disclaimer again - I’m not referring to the few people who are!). Should this be the focus of my essay? Why are not enough people screaming?

Here’s some ‘research’ which I offer as a way to make sense of why not.

The ‘powers-that-be’:

In the Nelson Mandela Bay metro (Eastern Cape), where I live, we are in a prolonged drought - our main storage dams are at the lowest levels in recorded history. We are fast approaching Day Zero. In a radio interview the other day, the Mayor and the interviewer said nothing about climate change. Yes, I offered my usual response, including an added step - my mouth fell open.

In 2020, the school curriculum was ‘trimmed and re-organised’ in order to assist with getting students, particularly Grade 12s, through the grades, since learning and teaching had basically stopped when South Africa went into lockdown. Human Impact on the Environment (part of Life Sciences) was one such ‘trim.’ So, during the Covid pandemic (see the link?), Dear Diary, the teaching time for this topic was reduced, while Entrepreneurship, Coding and Robotics are introduced into our schools with applause and enthusiasm.

I decided to do a snapshot kind of ‘survey’ and asked a number of primary and high school students what they know about climate change, global warming and the ecological crisis. Once again I offer a disclaimer, but overwhelmingly, the sum of what I got was: ‘Climate change has to do with changes in the weather.’

Me: Have you ever learned about climate change at school?

High school student: Yes, last year.

Me: What did you learn?

Student: I don’t remember.

My mouth falls open in disbelief…often.

But wait a minute, there are other reasons why not enough of us are screaming about climate change and the ecological crisis in South Africa.

There’s a small middle class, who might recycle, collect rain water, have solar but that is probably because South Africa has a very unstable power supply (load shedding), and embrace veganism on Mondays - the ‘Global North’ people in the South - who are (I’m pretty sure) booking their spots on Musk’s great escape to Mars. The majority of South Africans are not them - they are materially poor and continue to suffer the injustices of class and ‘race’ apartheid. They may be landless, homeless, hungry or malnourished, jobless or in precarious labour, without proper healthcare or education. Even though the above list is intricately linked to the climate and ecological crisis, in South Africa it is not acknowledged as such, and links are not made (disclaimer!).

So, Dear Diary, what exactly are the lessons to teach and learn here?

Definitely not ‘sufficiency’ lessons.

I could use some Global North examples of how educational institutions can ‘go green’ to explain why they would not work here:

Organise a local food day.

This presupposes that families have food.

Ask the school to install energy metres.

This presupposes electricity and water.

Carpool, ride a bike or walk .

This presupposes access to cars and bikes. Many South African children already walk to school, possibly after completing household chores, sometimes very far distances and not necessarily safe, through bushes, in rain, across rivers, in the early morning cold and darkness or midday heat.

Teach care, concern, co-operation and conviviality .

The majority of South African children already know this because their families embrace the concept of Ubuntu - the philosophy ‘I am because we are’ - about the collective, not the individual - a way of being and doing that is practised in most indigenous societies across the world.

Then, Dear Diary, there’s what I call the ‘backwards/forwards’ thing. Again I offer some examples to explain:

When presenting some research findings about a group of mostly female farmers doing urban farming in a poor part of South Africa, I was asked: ‘Why do you want poor Black people to remain backwards?’ For me, the women demonstrated an example of food sovereignty, of localisation - an attempt to break free from the corporate global food system, perhaps even a small act of revolution. There is an incongruity, an oddness, when it comes to this backwards/forwards thing. There is a strong ‘aspirational’ pull to be like those in the Global North and to be ‘successful individuals’ (as in ‘women too can be CEOs’), but at the same time to hold onto our values and beliefs that come from days gone by. So you may hear the words Ubuntu and capitalism in the same sentence as if you can be a devotee of both. ‘Growth,’ ‘development’ and ‘progress’ are not critiqued (disclaimer) - in fossil-fuelled South Africa we’ll do it by being ‘kind capitalists.’

I’ve said a lot but haven’t explained what type of education is required. The ‘answers’ lie in the many alternatives and possibilities - the ongoing collective efforts for change. Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes remind us:

Wake up all the teachers [all of us] time to teach a new way Maybe then they'll listen to whatcha have to say.

The world won't get no better if we just let it be The world won't get no better we gotta change it yeah, just you and me.

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Friday essay: thinking like a planet - environmental crisis and the humanities

Emeritus Professor of History, Australian National University

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Many of us joined the Global Climate Strike on Friday, 20 September, and together we constituted half a million Australians gathering peacefully and walking the streets of our cities and towns to protest at government inaction in the face of the gravest threat human civilisation has faced.

It was a global strike, but its Australian manifestation had a particular twist, for our own federal government is an international pariah on this issue. We have become the Ugly Australians, led by brazen climate deniers who trash the science and snub the UN Climate Summit.

Government politicians in Canberra constantly tell us the Great Barrier Reef is fine, coal is good for humanity, Pacific islands are floating not being flooded, wind turbines are obscene, power blackouts are due to renewables, “drought-proofing” is urgent but “climate-change” has nothing to do with it, science is a conspiracy, climate protesters are a “scourge” who deserve to be punished and jailed, the ABC spins the weather, the Bureau of Meteorology requires a royal commission, the United Nations is a bully, if we have to have emissions targets, well, we are exceeding them, and Australia is so insignificant in the world it doesn’t have to act anyway.

It’s a wilful barrage of lies, an insult to the public, a threat to civil society, and an extraordinary attack on our intelligence by our own elected representatives.

The international Schools4Climate movement is remarkable because it is led by children, teenagers still at school advocating a future they hope to have. I can’t think of another popular protest movement in world history led by children. This could be a transformative moment in global politics; it certainly needs to be. The active presence of so many engaged children gave the rally a spirit and a lightness in spite of its grim subject; there was a sense of fun, a family feeling about the occasion, but there was a steely resolve too.

A girl in a school uniform standing next to me at the rally held a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 in her hands. Many of the people around me would normally expect to see in the 22nd century. Their power, paradoxically, is they are not voters. They didn’t elect this government! They are protesting not just against the governments of the world but also against us adults, who did elect these politicians or who abide them. There was a moment at the rally when, with the mysterious organic coherence crowds possess, the older protesters stepped aside, parting like a wave, and formed a guard of honour through the centre of which the children marched holding their placards, their leadership acknowledged.

Read more: Guide to the classics: Orwell's 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today

One placard declared: “You’ll die of old age; I’ll die of climate change”; another said: “If Earth were cool, I’d be in school.” One held up a large School Report Card with subject results: “Ethics X, Responsibility X, Climate Action X. Needs to try harder.” Another explained: “You skip summits, we skip school.”

In Melbourne, as elsewhere, teenagers gave the speeches; and they were passionate and eloquent. The demands of the movement are threefold: no new coal, oil and gas projects; 100% renewable energy generation and exports by 2030; and fund a just transition and job creation for all fossil-fuel workers and communities. There were also Indigenous speakers. One declared: “We stand for you too, when we stand for Country.”

There were 150,000 people in the Melbourne Treasury Gardens, a crowd so large responsive cheers rippled like a Mexican wave up the hill from the speakers. I reflected on the historical parallels for what was unfolding, recalling the Vietnam moratorium demonstrations and the marches against the first Gulf War, the Freedom Rides and the civil rights movement, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the suffragettes’ campaigns.

Inspired by this history, we now have the Extinction Rebellion , a movement born in a small British town late last year which declares “only non-violent rebellion can now stop climate breakdown and social collapse”. Within six months, through civil disobedience, it brought central London to a standstill and the United Kingdom became the first country to declare a climate emergency. We are at a political tipping point.

In Australia, the result of this year’s election tells us there is no accountability for probably the most dysfunctional and discredited federal government in our history, and now we are left with a parliament unwilling to act on so many vital national and international issues. The 2019 federal election was no status quo outcome, as some political commentators have declared. Rather, it was a radical result, revealing deep structural flaws in our parliamentary democracy, our media culture and our political discourse. For me it ranks with two other elections in my voting lifetime: the “dark victory” of the 2001 Tampa election , and the 1975 constitutional crisis . Like those earlier dates, 2019 could shape and shadow a generation. It is time to get out on the streets again.

Skolstrejk för klimatet

The founder, symbol and the voice of the School Strike movement is, of course, Greta Thunberg. It is just over a year since August 2018 when she began to spend every Friday away from class sitting outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign declaring “School Strike for the Climate”.

When she told her parents about her plans, she reported “they weren’t very fond of it”. Addressing the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2018, she said : “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to your children.” Thunberg quietly invokes the carbon budget and the galling fact there is already so much carbon in the system “there is simply not enough time to wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge.”

In late September, Thunberg gave a powerful presentation at the UN Climate Summit; Richard Flanagan compared her 495-word UN speech to Abraham Lincoln’s 273-word Gettysburg Address. It’s a reasonable parallel that reaches for some understanding of the enormity of this political moment.

It is sickening to see the speed with which privileged old white men have rushed to pour bile on this young woman. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin quickly recognised her power and sought to neutralise and patronise her. Scott Morrison chimed in. Australia’s locker room of shock jocks laced the criticism with some misogyny. It’s amazing how they froth at the mouth about a calm and articulate schoolgirl. They are all – directly or indirectly – in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.

Read more: Misogyny, male rage and the words men use to describe Greta Thunberg

Denialism is worthy of study . I don’t mean the conscious and fraudulent denialism of politicians and shock-jocks such as those I’ve mentioned. That’s pretty simple stuff – lies motivated by opportunism, greed and personal advancement, and funded by the carbon-polluting industries. It is appalling but boring.

There are more interesting forms of denialism, such as the emotional denialism we all inhabit. Emotional denialism in the face of the unthinkable can take many forms – avoidance, hope, anxiety, even a kind of torpor when people truly begin to understand what will happen to the world of their grandchildren. We are all prone to this willing blindness and comforting self-delusion. Overcoming that is our greatest challenge.

And there is a third kind of denialism that should especially interest scholars. It is when some of our own kind – scholars trained to respect evidence – fashion themselves as sceptics, but are actually dogged contrarians.

Read more: There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one

One example is Niall Ferguson, a Scottish historian and professor of history at Harvard University, who calls climate science “science fiction” and recently joined the ranks of old, white, privileged men commenting on the appearance of Greta Thunberg. I’m not arguing here with Ferguson’s politics – he is an arch-conservative and I do disagree with his politics, but I also believe engaged, reflective politics can drive good history.

Rather, Ferguson’s disregard for evidence and neglect of science and scholarship attracts my attention. His understanding of climate science and climate history is poor: in a recent article in the Boston Globe he assumed the Little Ice Age started in the 17th century, whereas its beginning was three centuries earlier .

How does a trained scholar, a professor of history, get themselves in this ignominious position? For Ferguson, contrarianism has been a productive intellectual strategy – going against the flow of fashion is a good scholarly instinct – but on climate change his politics and the truth have steadily travelled in different directions and caught him out. We can say the same of Geoffrey Blainey, another successful contrarian who has cornered himself on climate change . Like Ferguson he appears uninterested in decades of significant research in environmental history – and thus his healthy scepticism has morphed into foolish denialism.

Denialism matters because all kinds of it have delayed our global political response to climate change by 30 years. In those critical decades since the 1980s, when humans first understood the urgency of the climate crisis, total historical carbon emissions since the industrial revolution have doubled . And still global emissions are rising, every year.

The physics of this process are inexorable – and so simple, as Greta would say, even a child can understand. We are already committing ourselves to two degrees of warming, possibly three or four. Denialists have, knowingly and with malice aforethought, condemned future generations to what Tim Flannery calls a “grim winnowing”. Flannery wrote recently “the climate crisis has now grown so severe that the actions of the denialists have turned predatory: they are now an immediate threat to our children.”

Read more: The gloves are off: 'predatory' climate deniers are a threat to our children

The history of denialism alerts us to a disastrous paradox: the very moment, in the 1980s, when it became clear global warming was a collective predicament of humanity, we turned away politically from the idea of the collective, with dire consequences. Naomi Klein, in her latest book On Fire , elucidates this fateful coincidence, which she calls “an epic case of historical bad timing”: just as the urgency of action on climate change became apparent, “the global neoliberal revolution went supernova”.

Unfettered free-market fanaticism and its relentless attack on the public sphere derailed the momentum building for corporate regulation and global cooperation. Ten years ago, thoughtful, informed climate activists could still argue that we can decouple the debates about economy and democracy from climate action. But now we can’t. At the 2019 election, Australia may have missed its last chance for incremental political change. If the far right had not politicised climate change and delayed action for so long then radical political transformation would not necessarily have been required. But now it will be, and it’s coming.

A great derangement

We are indeed living in what we might call “uncanny times”. They are weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them.

The Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable , published in 2016. The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the great derangement”, a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, in which we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of the Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. We have developed two powerful metaphors for making sense of it. One is the idea of the Anthropocene , which is the insight we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of the Earth and have now left behind the 13,000 years of the relatively stable Holocene epoch, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, putting us on a par with other geophysical forces such as variations in the earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid strikes.

The other potent metaphor for this moment in Earth history is the Sixth Extinction . Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century.

Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. The current extinction rate is a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature. There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth: five of them – sudden, shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting – and causing – the Sixth Extinction?

These two metaphors – the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction – are both historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into the Anthropocene; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller.

Earth is alive

I’ve been considering metaphors of deep time, but what of deep space? It has also enlarged our imaginations in the last half century. In July this year, we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. I was 12 at the time of the Apollo 11 voyage and found myself in a school debate about whether the money for the Moon mission would be better spent on Earth. I argued it would be, and my team lost.

But what other result was allowable in July 1969? Conquering the Moon, declared Dr Wernher von Braun, Nazi scientist turned US rocket maestro, assured man of immortality . I followed the Apollo missions with a sense of wonder, staying up late to watch the Saturn V launch, joining my schoolmates in a large hall with tiny televisions to witness Armstrong take his Giant Leap, and saving full editions of The Age newspaper reporting those fabled days.

The rhetoric of space exploration was so future-oriented that NASA did not foresee Apollo’s greatest legacy: the radical effect of seeing the Earth. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped :

Frank Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty! Bill Anders: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and it became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the 20th century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Bill Anders declared : “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

In his fascinating book, Earthrise (2010), British historian Robert Poole explains this was not supposed to happen. The cutting edge of the future was to be in space. Leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was seen as a stage in human evolution comparable to our amphibian ancestor crawling out of the primeval slime onto land.

Furthermore, this new dominion was seen to offer what Neil Armstrong called a “survival possibility” for a world shadowed by the nuclear arms race. In the words of Buzz Lightyear (who is sometimes hilariously confused with Buzz Aldrin), the space age looked to infinity and beyond!

Earthrise had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities. Within a few years, the American scientist James Lovelock put forward “ the Gaia hypothesis ”: that the Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book, The Population Bomb , an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth , revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and influential report The Limits to Growth , which sold over 13 million copies. In their report, Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Earth systems science developed in the second half of the 20th century and fostered a keen understanding of planetary boundaries – thresholds in planetary ecology - and the extent to which they were being violated. The same industrial capitalism that unleashed carbon enabled us to extract ice cores from the poles and construct a deep history of the air. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon, it now emerged, were endangering our civilisation.

The American ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949 of the need for a new “land ethic” . Leopold envisaged a gradual historical expansion of human ethics, from the relations between individuals to those between the individual and society, and ultimately to those between humans and the land. He hoped for an enlargement of the community to which we imagine ourselves belonging, one that includes soil, water, plants and animals.

In his book of essays, A Sand County Almanac , there is a short, profound reflection called “Thinking like a mountain.” He tells of going on the mountain and shooting a wolf and her cubs and then watching “a fierce green fire” die in her eyes.

He shot her because he thought fewer wolves meant more deer, but over the years he watched the overpopulated deer herd die as the wolfless mountain became a dustbowl. Leopold came to understand the beautiful delicacy of the ecosystem, which holds “a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”

Today, 70 years after Leopold’s philosophical leap, we are being challenged to scale up from a land ethic to an earth ethic, to an environmental vision and philosophy of action that sees the planet as an integrated whole and all of life upon it as an interdependent historical community with a common destiny, to think not only like a mountain, but also like a planet. We are belatedly remembering the planet is alive.

Climate science is climate history

Climate change and ecological crisis are often seen as purely scientific issues. But as humanities scholars we know all environmental problems are at heart human ones; “scientific” issues are pre-eminently challenges for the humanities. Historical perspective can offer much in this time of ecological crisis, and many historians are reinventing their traditional scales of space and time to tell different kinds of stories, ones that recognise the agency of other creatures and the unruly power of nature.

There is a tendency among denialists to lazily use history against climate science, arguing for example “the climate’s always changing”, or “this has happened before”. Good recent historical scholarship about the last 2000 years of human civilisation is so important because it corrects these misunderstandings. That’s why it’s so disappointing when celebrity historians like Niall Ferguson and Geoffrey Blainey seek to represent their discipline by ignoring the work of their colleagues.

Climate science is unavoidably climate history; it’s an empirical, historical interpretation of life on earth, full of new insights into the impact and predicament of humanity in the long and short term. Recent histories of the last 2,000 years have been crucial in helping us to appreciate the fragile relationship between climate and society, and why future average temperature changes of more than 2°C can have dire consequences for human civilisation.

We now have environmental histories of antiquity, and of medieval and early modern Europe – studies casting new light on familiar human dramas, including the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death in the medieval period, and the unholy trinity of famine, war and disease during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century.

These books draw on natural as well as human history, on the archives of ice, air and sediment as well as bones, artefacts and documents. And then there is John McNeill’s history of the 20th century, Something New Under the Sun , which argues “the human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on earth”.

These new histories encompass the planet and the human species, and provocatively blur biological evolution and cultural history (Yuval Noah Harari’s “brief history of humankind”, Sapiens , is a bestselling example). They investigate the vast elemental nature of the heavens as well as the interior, microbial nature of human bodies: nature inside and out, with the striving human as a porous vessel for its agency.

In Australia, we have outstanding new histories linking geological and human time, such as Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth and Tony Hughes d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt .

Australians seem predisposed to navigate the Anthropocene. I think it’s because the challenge of Australian history in the 21st century is how to negotiate the rupture of 1788, how to relate geological and human scales, how to get our heads and hearts around a colonial history of 200 years that plays out across a vast Indigenous history in deep time.

From the beginnings of colonisation, Australia’s new arrivals commonly alleged Aboriginal people had no history, had been here no more than a few thousand years, and were caught in the fatal thrall of a continental museum. But from the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: Australia’s human history went back aeons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age. In the late 20th century, the timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just 30 years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

Read more: Friday essay: when did Australia’s human history begin?

It’s no wonder the idea of big history was born here, or environmental history has been so innovative here. This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm – and are now intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience.

Even the best northern-hemisphere scholars struggle to digest the implications of the Australian time revolution. They often assume, for example, “civilisation” is a term associated only with agriculture, and still insist 50,000 years is a possible horizon for modern humanity. Australia offers a distinctive and remarkable human saga for a world trying to come to terms with climate change and the rupture of the Anthropocene. Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. Our nation’s obligation to honour the Uluru Statement is not just political; it is also metaphysical. It respects another ethical practice and another way of knowing.

Earthspeaking

In 2003, in its second issue, Griffith Review put the land at the centre of the nation. The edition was called Dreams of Land and it’s full of gold, including an essay by Ian Lowe sounding the alarm on the ecological and climate emergency – which reminds us how long we’ve had these eloquent warnings. As Graeme Davison said on launching the edition in December 2003:

At the threshold of the 21st century Australia has suddenly come down to earth. […] Earth, water, wind and fire are not just natural elements; they are increasingly the great issues of the day.

It is instructive to compare this issue of the Griffith Review, with the edition entitled Writing the Country , published 15 years later last summer. In the intervening decade and a half, sustainability morphed into survival, native title into Treaty and the Voice, the Anthropocene infiltrated our common vocabulary, the republic and Aboriginal recognition are no longer separable, and land decisively became Country with a capital “C”. In 2003 the reform hopes of the 1990s had not entirely died, but by 2019 it’s clear the dead hand of the Howard government and its successors has thoroughly throttled trust in the workings of the state.

Perhaps the most powerful contribution in GR2 – and it was given the honour of appearing first – was an essay by Melissa Lucashenko called “Not quite white in the head”. This year’s Miles Franklin winner, Lucashenko was already in great form in 2003. Tough, poetic and confronting, the words of her essay still resonate. Lucashenko writes of “earthspeaking”.

“I am earthspeaking,” she says, “talking about this place, my home and it is first, a very small story […] This earthspeaking is a small, quiet story in a human mouth.”

“Big stories are failing us as a nation,” suggests Lucashenko. “But we are citizens and inheritors and custodians of tiny landscapes too. It is the small stories that attach to these places […] which might help us find a way through.”

I think earthspeaking is a companion to thinking like a planet. Instead of beginning from the outside with a view of Earth in deep space and deep time, earthspeaking works from the ground up; it is inside-out; it begins with beloved Country. So it is with earthspeaking I want to finish.

Four months ago I was privileged to sit in a circle with Mithaka people, the traditional Aboriginal owners of 33,000 square kilometres of the Kirrenderi/Channel Country of the Lake Eyre Basin in south-western Queensland. In 2015, the Federal Court handed down a native title consent determination for the Mithaka enabling them to return to Country. Now they have begun a process of assessing and renewing their knowledge.

I was invited to be involved because I have studied the major white writer about this region, a woman called Alice Duncan-Kemp who was born on this land in 1901 where her family ran a cattle farm, and grew up with Mithaka people who worked on the station and were her carers and teachers. Young Alice spent her childhood days with her Aboriginal friends and teachers, especially Mary Ann and Moses Youlpee, who took her on walks and taught her the names and meanings and stories that connected every tree, bird, plant, animal, rock, dune and channel.

From the 1930s to the 1960s Alice wrote four books – half a million words – about the world of her childhood and the people and nature of the Channel Country, and although she did find a wide readership, her books were dismissed by authorities, landowners and locals as “romantic” and “nostalgic” and “fictional”.

Her writing was systematically marginalised: she was a woman in cattle country, a sympathiser with Aboriginal people, she refused to ignore the violence of the frontier and she challenged the typical heroic western style of narrative. The huge Kidman pastoral company bought her family’s land in 1998, bulldozed the historic pisé homestead into the creek, threw out the collection of Aboriginal artefacts, and continues to deny Alice’s writings have any historical authenticity. Yet her books were respected in the native title process and were crucial to the Mithaka in their fight to regain access to Country.

It was very moving to be present this year when Alice’s descendants and Moses’ people met for the first time. It was not just a social and symbolic occasion: we had come together as researchers and we had work to do. Across a weekend we pored over maps and talked through evidence, combining legend, memory, oral history, letters and manuscripts, published books, archaeological studies, surveyors’ records, and even recent drone footage of the remote terrain, all with the purpose of retrieving and reactivating knowledge, recovering language and reanimating Country. We could literally map Alice’s stories back onto features of the land, with the aim of bringing it under caring attention again.

This process is going on in beloved places right across the continent. Grace Karskens and Kim Mahood write beautifully in GR63 about similar quests, and of their hope written words dredged from the archive “might again be spoken as part of living language and shared geographies.”

Earthspeaking and thinking like a planet are profoundly linked. As the Indigenous speaker at the Melbourne Climate Strike said, “We stand for you when we stand for Country.” In these frightening and challenging times, we need radical storytelling and scholarly histories, narratives that weave together humans and nature, history and natural history, that move from Earth systems to the earth beneath our feet, from the lonely, living planet spinning through space to the intimately known and beloved local worlds over which we might, if we are lucky, exert some benevolent influence.

We need them not only because they help us to better understand our predicament, but also because they might enable us to act, with intelligence and grace.

This essay was adapted from the Showcase Lecture, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Queensland, Wednesday, 9 October 2019

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Ecocriticism

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Ecocriticism by Derek Gladwin LAST REVIEWED: 03 June 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0014

Ecocriticism is a broad way for literary and cultural scholars to investigate the global ecological crisis through the intersection of literature, culture, and the physical environment. Ecocriticism originated as an idea called “literary ecology” ( Meeker 1972 , cited under General Overviews ) and was later coined as an “-ism” ( Rueckert 1996 , cited under General Overviews ). Ecocriticism expanded as a widely used literary and cultural theory by the early 1990s with the formation of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) at the Western Literary Association (1992), followed by the launch of the flagship journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (cited under Journals ) in 1993, and then later the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader ( Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 , cited under Collections of Essays ). Ecocriticism is often used as a catchall term for any aspect of the humanities (e.g., media, film, philosophy, and history) addressing ecological issues, but it primarily functions as a literary and cultural theory. This is not to say that ecocriticism is confined to literature and culture; scholarship often incorporates science, ethics, politics, philosophy, economics, and aesthetics across institutional and national boundaries ( Clark 2011 , p. 8, cited under General Overviews ). Ecocriticism remains difficult to define. Originally, scholars wanted to employ a literary analysis rooted in a culture of ecological thinking, which would also contain moral and social commitments to activism. As Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 (cited under Collections of Essays ) famously states, “ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies,” rather than an anthropomorphic or human-centered approach (p. xviii). Many refer to ecocriticism synonymously as the study of “literature and the environment” (rooted in literary studies) or “environmental criticism” (interdisciplinary and cultural). Ecocriticism has been divided into “waves” to historicize the movement in a clear trajectory ( Buell 2005 , cited under Ecocritical Futures ). The “first wave” of ecocriticism tended to take a dehistoricized approach to “nature,” often overlooking more political and theoretical dimensions and tending toward a celebratory approach of wilderness and nature writing. Ecocriticism expanded into a “second wave,” offering new ways of approaching literary analysis by, for example, theorizing and deconstructing human-centered scholarship in ecostudies; imperialism and ecological degradation; agency for animals and plants; gender and race as ecological concepts; and problems of scale. The “third wave” advocates for a global understanding of ecocritical practice through issues like global warming; it combines elements from the first and second waves but aims to move beyond Anglo-American prominence. There are currently hundreds of books and thousands of articles and chapters written about ecocriticism.

This section looks at some of the pioneering work in ecocriticism, as well as some of the most read work introducing the subject. Meeker 1972 , presenting comedy and tragedy as ecological concepts, connects literary and environmental studies as a cohesive field of study. As an ethnologist and comparative literature scholar, Meeker helped to pioneer the critical discussion of ecocriticism in what he called “literary ecologies.” Following Meeker, Rueckert 1996 (first published 1978) actually coined the term “ecocriticism,” arguing for a way “to find the grounds upon which the two communities—the human, the natural—can coexist, cooperate, and flourish in the biosphere” (p. 107). Love 1996 builds on the work of Meeker and Rueckert by essentially anticipating the explosion of and need for ecocriticism in just a few years. Ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory significantly expanded in the 1990s—paralleling other forms of literary and cultural theory, such as postcolonialism and critical race studies—largely due to the publication of Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 (cited under Collections of Essays ), the first edited collection of essays and anthology to introduce a comprehensive critical outline of ecocriticism. Buell 1995 , another critically dense and timely study, outlines the trajectory of American ecocriticism by way of Henry David Thoreau as a central figure. Kerridge and Sammells 1998 (cited under Collections of Essays ), which expanded studies in race and class, as well as ecocritical history, followed both Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 and Buell 1995 . Phillips 2003 offers a skeptical and refreshing critique of ecocriticism amid otherwise quite praiseworthy—bordering on mystical—celebrations of “nature” in the scholarship of the 1990s. Garrard 2012 (first published 2004), along with Coupe 2000 (under Anthologies ) and Armbruster and Wallace 2001 (under Nature Writing ), serves as a political and theoretical turn in ecocriticism because it addresses more of the “second wave” concerns about animals, globality, and apocalypse. Clark 2011 is a contemporary overview that integrates a unified critical history of the “waves,” including nature writing, literary periods, theory, and activism, while it also provides sample readings that deploy specific ecocritical methods to literary texts. Garrard 2014 is the most recent overview volume, with many noteworthy ecocritical scholars; it serves as a somewhat updated version of Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 . (See also Anthologies and Collections of Essays for some other notable overviews.)

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Looks back at the history of American nature writing through literary analysis—with Thoreau’s Walden as a “reference point”—to establish a history of environmental perception and imagination. It examines how humanistic thought, particularly through literary nonfiction, can imagine a more ecocentric or “green” way of living. (See also Nature Writing .)

Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Provides updated introductory material to previous studies. It offers an excellent range of topics, and despite serving as an introduction, it employs incisive analysis of previously overlooked issues in introductory books on ecocriticism, such as posthumanism, violence, and animal studies. It is one of the best contemporary overviews.

Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism . New York: Routledge, 2012.

Examines a wide range of literary and cultural works. Two notable strengths: (1) it acknowledges the political dimension of ecocriticism; and (2) it explores a range of issues, from animal studies and definitions of “wilderness” and “nature,” to postapocalyptic narratives. It is available as an inexpensive paperback. Originally published in 2004.

Garrard, Greg, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism . New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

One of the most ambitious collections to date, with thirty-four chapters, this book is aimed at both general readers and students, but it also revisits the previous twenty years of ecocriticism to offer contemporary readings from the most prominent names in the field. It is an essential work for ecocritics.

Love, Glen. “Revaluating Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology . Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 225–240. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Argues that literary studies must engage with the environmental crisis rather than remaining unresponsive. This essay advocates for revaluing a nature-focused literature away from an “ego-consciousness” to an “eco-consciousness” (p. 232). Originally published in 1990. See also Love’s Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).

Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology . New York: Scribner’s, 1972.

One of the founding works of ecocriticism. It spans many centuries—looking at Dante, Shakespeare, and Petrarch, as well as E. O. Wilson—and analyzes comedy and tragedy as two literary forms that reflect forces greater than that of humans. The “comedy of survival” is at its core an ecological concept.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195137699.001.0001

One of the more prominent critiques of ecocritical theory, this book challenges neo-Romantic themes explored by ecocritics, many of which Phillips argues support the use of mimesis as a standard way to read environments, instead of looking at more pragmatic approaches.

Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology . Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 105–123. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Notable primarily because it was the first publication to use the term “ecocriticism” as an environmentally minded literary analysis that discovers “something about the ecology of literature” (p. 71). Originally published in 1978.

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The Climate Crisis – A Race We Can Win

Climate change is the defining crisis of our time and it is happening even more quickly than we feared. But we are far from powerless in the face of this global threat. As Secretary-General António Guterres pointed out in September, “the climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win”.

No corner of the globe is immune from the devastating consequences of climate change. Rising temperatures are fueling environmental degradation, natural disasters, weather extremes, food and water insecurity, economic disruption, conflict, and terrorism. Sea levels are rising, the Arctic is melting, coral reefs are dying, oceans are acidifying, and forests are burning. It is clear that business as usual is not good enough. As the infinite cost of climate change reaches irreversible highs, now is the time for bold collective action.

GLOBAL TEMPERATURES ARE RISING

Billions of tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere every year as a result of coal, oil, and gas production. Human activity is producing greenhouse gas emissions at a record high , with no signs of slowing down. According to a ten-year summary of UNEP Emission Gap reports, we are on track to maintain a “business as usual” trajectory.

The last four years were the four hottest on record. According to a September 2019 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, we are at least one degree Celsius above preindustrial levels and close to what scientists warn would be “an unacceptable risk”. The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change calls for holding eventual warming “well below” two degrees Celsius, and for the pursuit of efforts to limit the increase even further, to 1.5 degrees. But if we don’t slow global emissions, temperatures could rise to above three degrees Celsius by 2100 , causing further irreversible damage to our ecosystems.

Glaciers and ice sheets in polar and mountain regions are already melting faster than ever, causing sea levels to rise. Almost two-thirds of the world’s cities   with populations of over five million are located in areas at risk of sea level rise and almost 40 per cent of the world’s population live within 100 km of a coast. If no action is taken, entire districts of New York, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, and many other cities could find themselves underwater within our lifetimes , displacing millions of people.

FOOD AND WATER INSECURITY

Global warming impacts everyone’s food and water security. Climate change is a direct cause of soil degradation, which limits the amount of carbon the earth is able to contain. Some 500 million people today live in areas affected by erosion, while up to 30 per cent of food is lost or wasted as a result. Meanwhile, climate change limits the availability and quality of water for drinking and agriculture.

In many regions, crops that have thrived for centuries are struggling to survive, making food security more precarious. Such impacts tend to fall primarily on the poor and vulnerable. Global warming is likely to make economic output between the world’s richest and poorest countries grow wider .

NEW EXTREMES

Disasters linked to climate and weather extremes have always been part of our Earth’s system. But they are becoming more frequent and intense as the world warms. No continent is left untouched, with heatwaves, droughts, typhoons, and hurricanes causing mass destruction around the world. 90 per cent   of disasters are now classed as weather- and climate-related, costing the world economy 520 billion USD each year , while 26 million people are pushed into poverty as a result.

A CATALYST FOR CONFLICT

Climate change is a major threat to international peace and security. The effects of climate change heighten competition for resources such as land, food, and water, fueling socioeconomic tensions and, increasingly often, leading to mass displacement .

Climate is a risk multiplier   that makes worse already existing challenges. Droughts in Africa and Latin America directly feed into political unrest and violence. The World Bank estimates that, in the absence of action, more than 140 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia will be forced to migrate within their regions by 2050.

A PATH FORWARD

While science tells us that climate change is irrefutable, it also tells us that it is not too late to stem the tide. This will require fundamental transformations in all aspects of society — how we grow food, use land, transport goods, and power our economies.

While technology has contributed to climate change, new and efficient technologies can help us reduce net emissions and create a cleaner world. Readily-available technological solutions already exist for more than 70 per cent   of today’s emissions. In many places renewable energy is now the cheapest energy source and electric cars are poised to become mainstream.

In the meantime, nature-based solutions provide ‘breathing room’ while we tackle the decarbonization of our economy. These solutions allow us to mitigate a portion of our carbon footprint while also supporting vital ecosystem services, biodiversity, access to fresh water, improved livelihoods, healthy diets, and food security. Nature-based solutions include improved agricultural practices, land restoration, conservation, and the greening of food supply chains.

Scalable new technologies and nature-based solutions will enable us all to leapfrog to a cleaner, more resilient world. If governments, businesses, civil society, youth, and academia work together, we can create a green future where suffering is diminished, justice is upheld, and harmony is restored between people and planet.

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In order to solve our ecological crisis, it is crucial to have a fair understanding of its background. In this article I integrate the most important driving forces of human transformation of the biosphere into a general model. First, I show that it is the economic subsystem of society that produces nearly all human transformation of the biosphere. Then I differentiate between direct driving forces, which are the number of people/households, the economic output per capita/per household, the environmental impact of technologies, the structure of the economy and the geographical pattern of the economy; and indirect ones, which are the mind of people, social institutions, biological factors and physical geographical features. The behavior of individuals, groups of people and organizations mediates between indirect and direct driving forces. The model also shows us the basic strategies of environmental sustainability. Cultural changes are needed to attenuate the direct driving forces. In turn, these changes will happen only if those desiring them will have enough power to reshape social institutions and the mind of people.

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Introduction

What are the main driving forces behind our ecological crisis? The question is simple, but the answer is complex. Nevertheless, if our aim is to solve this crisis, it is crucial to have a fair understanding of its background. The thorough uncovering of the factors behind our ecological predicament is pivotal to the identification of the basic strategies of environmental sustainability.

The current ecological crisis (comprised of interwoven environmental problems such as global climate change, loss of biodiversity, soil degradation, smogs, toxic effects of synthetic chemicals etc.) is the result of excessive human transformation of the biosphere. Footnote 1 This means that our biosphere transforming activities are not necessarily problematic. By now, however, they have become so extended and accelerated that even our own well-being—as well as the existence of many other species—is already threatened.

In this article I try to integrate the most important driving forces of human transformation of the biosphere into a general model. The goal here is not the quantification of the particular driving forces or determining the relative role of these various factors, but gaining a better understanding of the causes of our ecological crisis and its potential solutions. The analysis will be done on the global scale, though it may be valid on smaller scales as well.

The model has its predecessors. It is built around the well-known IPAT-formula (see below). Nevertheless, the formula is refined, developed and put in a wider context here.

• Economic metabolism

Every living organism transforms the biosphere due to its own metabolism—this process is called niche construction (Odling-Smee et al. 2013 ; Laland et al. 2015 ). First, living creatures transform the biosphere by appropriating nutrients from it. Second, they also receive energy with these nutrients (heterotrophs) or able to capture external energy (autotrophs) to live their lives—this amount of energy (at least part of it) is available for them to transform the biosphere. Third, they also modify the environment by their waste products. Organisms that alter the biosphere the most are dubbed ecosystem engineers (Jones et al. 1994 ).

Humans are by far the most significant ecosystem engineers. It is because while the energy use of all other living organisms is limited to the amount they can appropriate by their metabolism and thus incorporate in their bodies, we are able to use extrasomatic energy sources too, ever since we learned to use fire. In the past millennia we managed to increase the amount of extrasomatic energy available for us to a great extent (Smil 2017 ; Takács-Sánta 2004 ). Nowadays we have diverse energy sources from fossil fuels through renewables to nuclear to create a huge amount of energy that can be used for our own goals.

To put it in another way, in the case of humans biological metabolism is complemented (and also overwhelmed by now) by economic metabolism driven by extrasomatic sources of energy. Footnote 2 All economic activities must begin with the extraction of natural resources in order to get raw materials and energy sources. And at the end point all economic activities generate wastes and pollution (Fig.  1 ). Basically, we created a huge animal called economy eating natural resources and defecating polluting materials and wastes (Daly 1993 ).

The general scheme of the economic process

The three fundamental subprocesses of the economic process are the extraction of natural resources, the production of goods and services, and finally the consumption of them (Fig.  1 ). All of these subprocesses are aided by technology, which can be defined here as a system of means causing us to increase economic output by extending our biological abilities. In historical comparison, technologies of our time are especially complex and efficient, thus making us able to generate enormous economic output.

Direct driving forces

As we have seen, through the three fundamental economic subprocesses it is the economic subsystem of society that produces nearly all human transformation of the biosphere (beside the comparatively tiny amount caused by our biological metabolism). Hence, it is quite obvious that human transformation of the biosphere is a direct function of economic output : the more goods and services are produced, the more the biosphere is altered.

Nevertheless, it is also evident that environmental impact per unit of output can differ vastly. For instance, the same item can be produced by the use of recycled or non-recycled materials as well as energy-efficient or energy-wasting production technologies, etc. Hence, beside economic output, our transformation of the biosphere will be the direct function of another factor as well: the ecological efficiency of economic output . This factor comprises the transformation of the biosphere deriving from the use of natural resources (i.e., materials and energy) as well as from the waste and pollution arising during the generation of a unit of output.

All the above can be expressed in a simple formula:

where B is the extent of human transformation of the biosphere (usually called “environmental impact”), Y is (total) economic output and Z is defined as transformation of the biosphere per unit economic output.

Deconstructing Y

What kind of factors influence economic output? Obviously, the number of people is one of them: roughly speaking more people need more goods and services. Therefore:

where P is population size (the number of people) and O p is economic output per capita .

It is important to stress, however, that this is not the only way to deconstruct Y. It is possible, for instance, that the number of households determines the extent of transformation of the biosphere more directly than population size in itself (e.g., O’Neill et al. 2001 ; Keilman 2003 ; Liu et al. 2003 ; York and Rosa 2012 ). It is because the same number of people will have higher environmental impact if they are divided among more households, since, for instance, more equipment is needed, more homes are heated, etc. in this case. Thus, Y can be deconstructed also as:

where H is the number of households and O H is economic output per household .

Accordingly, a general deconstruction of Y can be written as:

where D is the number of a certain demographic unit and O D is economic output per that demographic unit.

A general form of the formula after the deconstruction of Y can be written as:

Depending on the demographic unit chosen, it can be specified as:

The first one of these latter versions of the formula is basically identical with the classic, widely-used IPAT-formula (Chertow 2001 ). Footnote 3

Deconstructing Z

Many authors identify Z with the T factor of the IPAT-formula. However, the ecological efficiency of economic output depends not only on the technologies used, but on two further factors, too.

First, also important is the structure (or composition) of the economy , that is the relative importance of the different sectors and industries. Obviously, this factor is partially overlapping with the technology factor, since the structure of the economy partly determines the technologies applied (and vice versa). However, it is also evident that regardless of the technologies used the transformation of the biosphere caused by certain industries will always be greater than that of others. (For example, it is almost certain that chemical industry will be less environmentally friendly than education.)

Second, also relevant is the geographical pattern of the economy , that is, the extent of spatial separation between the economic subprocesses (e.g., between production and consumption). The more the economic subprocesses are separated in space, the greater the extent of transformation of the biosphere is (if the other factors on the right hand side remain unaltered). The explanation for this is at least threefold. First, because of geographical distance people, including economic decision-makers, have less experience on the environmental changes taking place during the economic cycle of a certain product (Princen 1997 ). Second, even if these environmental changes are known, the more distant they are, the less one cares about them generally. Third, since transport requires energy, more transport results in greater transformation of the biosphere (e.g., because more fossil fuels are combusted).

Accordingly, Z can be deconstructed as:

Where T is the environmental impact of technologies, S is the structure of the economy and G is the geographical pattern of the economy. Footnote 4

To sum up, the most detailed version of the formula can be written as:

Depending on the demographic unit chosen the following two versions can also be drawn up:

The factors on the right hand side of the latter two equations can be regarded as the direct driving forces behind human transformation of the biosphere. Footnote 5

Indirect driving forces

Factors lying behind the direct driving forces discussed above can be regarded as indirect driving forces of human transformation of the biosphere. These indirect forces can be divided into two groups: cultural and non-cultural factors . Footnote 6 Two subgroups of factors can be determined in both of these categories. The cultural subgroups are mind and social institutions . Mind refers not only to the cognitive layer (i.e., knowledge), but deeper layers as well, such as values and worldview. Social institutions are the constitutive elements of a society that are able to reproduce themselves and thus are typically trans-generational. Institutions can be typed as economic, political, legal, etc. (Miller 2019 ).

Cultural factors are constantly formed and preserved by people, groups of people and organizations as far as their respective power makes it possible. Accordingly, power is defined here as the ability to shape and control culture, that is social institutions and the mind of people.

The non-cultural subgroups contain biological and geographical factors (cf. Sack 1990 ). Biological factors refer to our “inner nature,” that is mostly to genetics. Geographical factors are mainly physical geographical features, such as terrain features and climate. However, the spatial distribution of people (a social geographical, but basically biogeographical feature) is also important: it matters whether the same number of people are aggregated in a smaller space (i.e., cities) or distributed more evenly in space (i.e., countryside), as shown by examples below.

The behavior of individuals, groups of people and organizations mediates between indirect and direct driving forces. This means that our behavior is shaped by our mind, social institutions, as well as biological and geographical factors. On the other hand, behavior directly affects population size (or the number of households), the economic output of the demographic unit chosen, the technologies used, and the structure and geographical pattern of the economy. Footnote 7

Now our model is completed (Fig.  2 ). It shows us that indirect driving forces determine the way individuals, groups of people and organizations behave. Their behavior in turn affects the factors that determine the extent of human transformation of the biosphere (i.e., direct driving forces). These actors, in proportion to their respective power, can reshape (or preserve) the cultural driving forces as well. By the help of some simple examples, let’s see how the model works.

A general, global model of the driving forces behind human transformation of the biosphere

In the first case the actor using power is a government that imposes a new tax (an element of an economic institution) on a particularly environmentally harmful industry, thus making this industry less profitable. Consequently, investors may turn to environmentally more benign industries reducing the extent of human transformation of the biosphere (B) due to the decrease in the formula’s S factor.

In the second case the actor is a non-governmental organization targeting the mind of people by creating a powerful booklet about voluntary simplicity. Several readers will change their lifestyle (behavior) according to the booklet, hence the O P factor of the formula decreases, and so B, as well.

Generally, non-cultural factors cannot be shaped by the actors mentioned above, but nevertheless their behavior is affected by these factors. Our third case is that human sexual behavior is to a great extent determined by genes, and this behavior in turn affects the P factor of the formula. In the fourth case the flat terrain of a city makes the riding of bicycle a convenient behavior choice contributing to a low T factor of the formula (at least regarding mobility).

Finally, let us consider a quite rare case when a non-cultural factor is modified (indirectly) by a human actor. A government trying to foster urbanization can use propaganda to make city lifestyle more appealing (thus affecting the mind of people) or can help to create new jobs (elements of economic institutions) in cities and so attracting people there. The environmental impact of the resulting urbanization is controversial (Dietz et al. 2010 ; Rosa & Dietz 2012 ) since, for instance, it causes the increase in the formula’s G factor (as long-distance transport is indispensable to satisfy the needs of a lot of people living in a densely populated area), but may decrease O H (since, for instance, the heating of attached flats is more energy-efficient than that of single houses).

Limitations and strengths of the model

On the one hand, every model is just a caricature of reality. On the other hand, a good model can help us to understand our world by focusing our attention on what is important and neglecting what is not so important.

There are at least four significant limitations of the present model. First, this is a static model lacking any dynamics—though the rate of increase (or decrease) in human transformation of the biosphere is as important as its extent. Footnote 8 Second, it does not capture the various interactions between the direct driving forces (cf. Footnote 5). Third, indirect driving forces are not sophisticated, but just lumped together in broad categories (e.g., mind, social institutions) instead. Fourth, the model cannot help us neither quantifying our environmental impact, nor determining the relative roles of the various driving forces in it.

Nevertheless, the model has its strengths, too. To my knowledge, this is the most detailed global, general model aiming to understand the causes of our ecological crisis so far. Compared to similar former models it identifies more direct driving forces; it not just distinguishes between direct and indirect driving forces, but also identifies non-cultural indirect driving forces beside cultural ones; and it finds the place of human behavior as a mediator between indirect and direct driving forces. Furthermore, the model may help us to identify the main strategies to resolve the ecological crisis.

The basic strategies of environmental sustainability

The simplest form of the formula shows us the two main strategies of environmental sustainability. The first one is the strategy of sufficiency , that is, the decrease in economic output (Y); and the other is the strategy of (eco-)efficiency , that is, the reduction in transformation of the biosphere per unit economic output (Z) (e.g., Sachs 1995 ).

The versions of the formula obtained as a result of the deconstruction of Y and Z show us that both strategies can be decomposed into sub-strategies. The sub-strategies of sufficiency are the reduction of the number of a demographic unit (D) (that is, the reduction of in population size or the number of households), and the reduction of economic output per a demographic unit (O D ). The sub-strategies of (eco-)efficiency are the use of environmentally friendly technologies (reduction of T), the shifting of the structure of the economy in an environmentally friendly direction (reduction of S), and the localization of the economy (reduction of G). Footnote 9

Finally, indirect driving forces show us that the realization of the above (sub-)strategies depends on cultural changes , that of mind and social institutions. Footnote 10 These cultural changes may result in the pro-environmental behavior of individuals, groups of people and organizations, that is behavior causing the decrease in environmental impact (cf. Stern 2000 ) through the attenuation of the direct driving forces.

Will a new ecological culture ever be born globally? It depends on whether the actors desiring this change will have enough power, that is whether they will be able to reshape social institutions and the mind of people. Hence, the struggle for environmental sustainability is ultimately a struggle for power.

Biosphere is the part of the Earth in which life engaged in active metabolism naturally exists (Hutchinson 1970 ). In some rare cases human transformation of the natural environment goes beyond the boundaries of the biosphere (e.g., the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer). For the sake of simplicity, these processes are also considered as transformations of the biosphere in this article. The use of the term “biosphere” is preferred here instead of “environment” or “nature,” because it is more well-defined than the others.

A significant share of our economic metabolism (most notably food production) is meant to support our biological metabolism, but it is not part of biological metabolism.

The IPAT-formula (also frequently dubbed as model, identity or equation) was born in the early 1970s. It crystallized during the course of a fierce debate between three renowned environmental thinkers of that age: Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren on the one side and Barry Commoner on the other (e.g., Commoner 1971 , 1972 ; Ehrlich and Holdren 1971 , 1972 ). The essence of the IPAT-formula is that the extent of human impact on the environment is the direct function of the product of three factors, expressed as: I = PAT. Where I is the extent of human impact on the environment, P is population size (number), A is affluence per capita, and T is technology, that is how environmentally (un)friendly are the technologies used. For the sake of accuracy, all of the above factors (except P) are redefined here based mostly on Goodland & Daly ( 1996 ). To put it shortly, human transformation of the biosphere is a more precise term than human impact on the environment (see above); “affluence” would be an inaccurate and misleading term in this context, since as Harrison ( 1994 ) points out: it cloaks the fact that even subsistence levels of consumption have an environmental impact”; and the third factor on the right hand side should contain not only technologies (see below). There also exists a stochastic reformulation of the IPAT-formula called STIRPAT, which has been a valuable tool for the operationalization of the formula (Dietz & Rosa 1994 ; Dietz 2017 ).

In an earlier paper (Takács-Sánta, 2004 ) I identified the S and the G factors as important driving forces behind human transformation of the biosphere (but did not analyze them in detail). Ekins ( 1993 ) mentions in passing the first of these (though his wording is not entirely unequivocal) and later also Rosa & Dietz ( 2012 ) and Rosa et al ( 2015 ) emphasize its importance. However, building the second one in the formula was likely to be an absolutely new idea, at least I have not found any other work raising this issue before.

The factors on the right hand side are treated as independent of each other. This is a simplification, since the factors can have an impact on each other (O’Neill et al. /2001/ gives several examples for the possible impacts).

Most authors do not make the distinction between direct and indirect driving forces. Instead, Z (or in the original formula T) is often treated as a residual term including all the driving forces of human transformation of the biosphere that are not included in the other factors of the right hand side: values, beliefs, social institutions, etc. (e.g., Dietz and Rosa 1994 , Gardner and Stern 2002 —see also Dietz 2017 ). Though Vlek ( 2002 ) makes the distinction, he identifies only cultural factors. Hence, incorporating also non-cultural factors in a model like this is a novelty here.

Schulze ( 2002 ) had a good gut feeling when he tried to incorporate behavior into the IPAT-formula. However, his solution—putting it simply among the direct driving forces as I = PBAT—seems to be misplaced.

It is mostly because the faster the rate of the increase is, the more difficult is the adaptation of humans and other living organisms.

In some cases, using one of these sub-strategies might jeopardize another sub-strategy. For instance, the localization of an economic activity might result in the increase in S, if that activity does not fit the local environment. An example is the desiccation of the Aral Sea, which was the result of (a not ecologically minded) localization: trade was eliminated by the cultivation of high-water-requirement crops in a semi-arid environment, the intensive irrigation in turn caused a regional ecological catastrophe (Micklin et al. 2014 ).

We can hardly change most non-cultural forces in preferred ways, and it might also be undesirable to try.

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Takács-Sánta, A. Clarifying the driving forces behind our ecological crisis: a general model. BIOLOGIA FUTURA 73 , 405–410 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42977-022-00137-0

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Stay up to date:, future of the environment.

Global environmental risks caused by human activities are becoming increasingly complex and interconnected, with far-reaching consequences for people, economies and ecosystems.

We are now in the Anthropocene – a geological epoch where humans are a dominant force of change on the planet. The Anthropocene is characterized by an increasingly interconnected and accelerating world.

This hyper interconnectivity and pace of change demands that we reconceptualize risk. The architecture that connects crises causes their impacts to ripple out in unpredictable ways. This was widely seen in the 2008-2009 financial crisis, which had significant impact on food prices that ultimately drove land grabs in Africa, Asia and South America.

International policy groups have made several, increasingly sophisticated efforts to capture complex risks, using frameworks such as The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Reasons for concern regarding climate change risks ; and the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Report .

It’s an annual meeting featuring top examples of public-private cooperation and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies being used to develop the sustainable development agenda.

It runs alongside the United Nations General Assembly, which this year features a one-day climate summit. This is timely given rising public fears – and citizen action – over weather conditions, pollution, ocean health and dwindling wildlife. It also reflects the understanding of the growing business case for action.

The UN’s Strategic Development Goals and the Paris Agreement provide the architecture for resolving many of these challenges. But to achieve this, we need to change the patterns of production, operation and consumption.

The World Economic Forum’s work is key, with the summit offering the opportunity to debate, discuss and engage on these issues at a global policy level.

While environmental risks – such as water stress and extreme weather – play a growing role in these assessments, the literature on global systemic risk has hitherto been dominated by finance and technology. This is, in part, due to the value placed on markets and technological solutions. Although all of these initiatives contribute in important ways to current understandings of global risks, none of them are able to fully capture the human–environmental processes that are shaping new systemic environmental risks.

A recent paper published in the journal of Nature Sustainability, emphasizes the need to embrace concepts of global, human-driven, environmental risks and interactions that move across very large scales of space and time. This is not just a question of adjusting quarterly financial outlooks to consider the next five or ten years. The non-linear and complex reality of humanity’s changes to the entire Earth system, require us to look much further forward and backward in time.

The authors highlight four case studies that examine different dimensions of Anthropocene risk. For example, it turns out that groundwater extraction for Indian irrigation leads to increased rainfall in East Africa . However, if India moves towards more sustainable groundwater extraction, that could lead to a trade-off in countries that may now be reliant on changed precipitation.

Another case study considers coastal megacities and the long-term prospects of sea level rise. By 2100, global sea levels could rise by as much as two metres , with some regions experiencing even higher levels. That is a problem for investments being made today in built infrastructure that is intended to last for 50 years or more.

The Anthropocene as a concept is itself a contested notion. The idea that all of humanity is somehow responsible for the current crisis does not reflect the reality. Specifically, a significant amount of the world’s wealthy and powerful accrued their wealth and power on the back of carbon emissions . This disparity between those that emitted carbon and became rich, and those that have not emitted carbon and remain poor, is a defining feature of Anthropocene risk.

It may seem odd to emphasize power imbalances when considering global environmental risks. However, the non-linear and complex reality of the Anthropocene suggests that the prevailing international order will not last, and that addressing our past and present problems is necessary to chart an equitable and sustainable future.

What is the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact summit?

The wealth and power that many organizations and people have accrued while emitting significant amounts of carbon should be mobilized, in significant part, to start addressing the pronounced environmental and social injustices that are perpetuating these Anthropocene risks. This is already occurring to some degree, but needs to be accelerated.

As the world enters a new era of surprise and uncertainty, a pronounced opportunity exists to embrace a different economic model for the future. This requires doing things differently, such as engaging with social and environmental justice organizations.

Acclaimed physicist Richard Feynman once said: “If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”

Humanity has never faced the types of changes that we are facing today and will continue to face in the decades to come. The scale of economic, environmental, geopolitical, and social changes that the Anthropocene will bring to our doorstep has no precedent. So, as Feynman suggests, the door must be left open to allow new ideas and solutions to enter in.

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1 The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis

Jeremy H. Kidwell, PhD, is Associate Professor in Christian Ethics in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham.

• Published: 20 April 2022
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This chapter analyzes the provenance and legacy of the influential article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” published in the journal Science ( White 1967 ). It argues that White’s analysis is significantly embedded in his late-modern scholarly context and fails to transcend some embedded prejudices, not least of which is his tendency to portray religion not as a complex lived phenomenon but rather in forms that are reduced to simple binaries. It explores the modern conceptual legacy surrounding the use of “crisis” in the interpretation of historical events and documents, particularly in relation to the environment and suggests that the concept of “crisis” comes with its own intellectual baggage and cannot be invoked as a purely neutral observation. It notes several ways that the text of the Bible resists such framings, particularly given the array of other-than-human voices that convey prophetic speech. As a metaphor, “crisis” may mobilize our attentions, but it also can obscure the more complex dynamics at work in the present moment and in biblical texts. The chapter concludes by arguing that biblical hermeneutics would be well served by dispensing with the hand-wringing over “anthropocentrism” which was a hallmark of White’s generation of scholarship and instead focusing on more complex creaturely entanglements and hybrid geographies.

Introduction

Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967) is one of the most cited articles to be published on religion and ecology, 1 and serves as a standard reference point for scholarship seeking to correlate Christianity and the environmental crisis. Regardless of the veracity of his claims (which have indeed come under a wide range of scrutiny especially over the last decade), White captured a common, and particularly modern, anxiety among Western scholars over the role of Christianity—including its texts—in underwriting the environmental crisis. As a result, his small article has in many ways set the agenda for the scholarly discourse on Christianity and ecology for the last fifty years. Given the ways that the elements of this discourse in religion and ecology are affected by the gravity of White’s article, like small planets orbiting a mighty “scholarly” star, I begin this chapter by assessing White’s paper as an object of hermeneutical inquiry. For the first half of the chapter I (1) briefly survey the argument White offers in the paper itself and (2) assess the Sitz im Leben for the paper. While this first half is largely descriptive, the second half of the chapter engages in critiques of White’s article. It is my hope that by deconstructing some of the problematic structures of White’s approach to the issue of the “ecologic crisis” and the study of religion, we might clear the way for new and more attentive exegesis. In particular, I note how there are a variety of possible hermeneutical approaches toward the concept of “crisis.” As the environmental humanities have recently shown signs of maturing as a set of overlapping scholarly foci—into literature, history, religion, and culture—the deepening of environmental sensibility in each of these kinds of inquiry has brought about new opportunities for exegetical scholarship. Environmental history has brought a new level of awareness of the influence of environmental change on historical events and toward the presence of kinds of ecological sensibility in ancient cultures. Ecocriticism has increased the volume of other-than-human voices in literary texts and their production. Human geography has highlighted the ways in which the very ideas of “crisis” and “ecology” are culturally conditioned, constructed, and maintained. It is my hope that demystifying White’s article and setting it as a product of a very modern scholarly context may clear the path for texts and modes of reading that have been neglected in the subsequent clamor to grapple with anthropocentrism. As I argue, there is a range of ways to view our ecological moment, and a range of ways that critical scholarly work on the Bible can help inform a response to the increasing levels of biosphere distress we can see all around us.

Lynn White and His Essay

Let us begin this exegetical exercise with the author, Lynn White. It is important to note at the outset that White was not a trained specialist in working with biblical texts, their theologies, or the scholarly study of religion. He was a professor of history and, more specifically, a medievalist specializing in the history of technology. However, from within this field of study he was well placed to observe the gradually intensifying ecological impacts of Western society and their intertwining with medieval Christianity. It is also worth noting that White is surprisingly well read in the environmental science of the early twentieth century. For example, in the “ecologic crisis” article he conveys a level of awareness of paleobiology (as it was in the 1960s), and this foreshadows a level of interdisciplinary environmental science–humanities engagement that was unusual at the time, but which has become far more common in recent decades, particularly with the discussion of human ecological impacts across time toward the recently announced “anthropocene” ( Steffen et al. 2011 ).

Turning to the content of White’s article, the historian opens his commentary by noting a recent conversation with Aldous Huxley in which the two had been discussing “Man’s unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results” ( White 1967 : 1203). He muses over the way the people have, from time immemorial been a “dynamic element in their own environment” and observes how the levels of modification and harm to the natural world have become uniquely harmful in recent decades. White dismisses simplistic calls that address anthropogenic environmental change as simple cause and effect as well as moves to “revert to a romanticized past” (1204). A proper approach to this problem of “the ecologic crisis,” as he terms it, must involve an effort to “rethink our axioms” (1204).

White suggests that although environmental stresses begin to be seen in the mid-nineteenth century, the roots of modern science and technology lie far earlier than this. Along these lines, White observes that the middle ages is a good place to begin precisely because this is when “both our technological and our scientific movements got their start, acquired their character, and achieved world dominance” (1205). White’s argument regarding the history of science and technology in this Science article rests on a broader argument that runs through his other work (e.g., White 1940 , 1962 ). The crux of this argument is that the presence of Christian values caused medieval Europe to become technologically enhanced at a more accelerated pace than other civilizations. It is important to note that this thesis has subsequently been contested, particularly by Historians of Islam. White highlights (mostly indirectly) a range of elements within the “Judeo-Christian tradition” which in his view were deployed with special force in the medieval development of science like the idea of creation ex nihilo ( White 1967 : 1205) or the way the description of “dominion” in the text of Gen 1:26–28 was taken to commend a mandate sanctioning “dominance over creatures” (1207). One of White’s scholarly peers, the historian Elspeth Whitney (1993) , suggests that in White’s view, the sophisticated machines developed by European monks, like clocks and organs, “demonstrated that medieval people had developed a unique conception of technology as morally virtuous and divinely sanctioned” (152). The ecologic crisis, driven by a relentless complex of modern science and technology is, according to White, ultimately caused by “the Christian doctrine of creation” (1206). This doctrine was mobilized by “every major scientist” from the thirteenth century until the late-eighteenth century toward an unfettered creative exploration of the natural world through experimentation and exploitation.

Taken by itself, White’s thesis regarding the history of science and technology (which forms the preamble for the Science article) is an interesting one and has generated much debate. However—and this may be part of the reason the article has had such persistent and broad appeal since its publication—it is clear that he intends for this to serve as more than a scholarly proposal. Compared to White’s other scholarly writing (in his monographs, for example), his writing in the Science article has a more personal tone and as such brings to the surface less-than-scholarly conceptions of theological thought. For example, it is clear that White believes, following Max Weber, that the theological convictions he has found in the medieval context have strong determinative power for later generations, including the current one. Even though he attempts to distance himself from such an approach, it is also clear that his reading of religious “traditions” is essentialist. We find such an appeal in his now famous statement, “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (1967: 1205). In reaction to such a statement, it would be quite appropriate to ask “which Christianity”? As I note further in what follows, some more recent scholarship—including work by Nancy Ammerman—has pressed for scholarly attention to the possible plurality of lived religions, including Christianity. This point is particularly important given the way in which subsequent scholarship in the social scientific study of religion and ecology, inspired by White, has gone on to highlight significant differences in attitudes toward nature among denominations and regional expressions of Christianity (e.g., Hagevi 2012 ). It is also important to note that White’s concern is not founded on scholarly detachment, the concern that led to the writing of the article in Science was in fact quite personal. White expresses elsewhere his own identification as a believing Christian ( White 1971 ; Whitney 1993 : 154–155). Seen in this way, the response that White presents in this article to the ecological harms brought about by (medieval) Christian promotion of technology is not flight to another religious tradition or away from Christianity altogether, but rather represents a proposal toward a rehabilitation of contemporary Christianity. His proposal for this rehabilitation is identified explicitly in the final section of the article, where he calls for the adoption of “an alternative Christian view” (1967: 1206). Such an alternative, he hopes, will offset the impacts of a thoroughly demythologized “man–nature relationship” (1967: 1206). For White, the solution lies in the approach typified by his proposed patron saint of nature, Saint Francis, who “tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation” (1207).

Lynn White in Context: Modern Diagnosis of the Ecologic Crisis

The idea that the Judeo-Christian tradition paved the road for the development of Western science was hardly a new one when White first made this argument in 1967. It is important to note, in fact, that this discourse had been brewing since at least the 1930s with the publication of three articles in the philosophy journal Mind by Michael Foster ( 1934 , 1935 , 1936 ). Seen in this way, White’s analysis, which looks to the relationship between theological exposition and the history of technology and invention in the late-medieval period (mostly by Christian monks) is actually a more developed version of an argument that had become popular in the early 1960s. This is captured in a statement by John Macquarrie , who suggested in the 1970s, “it has been fashionable in recent years among some theologians to make much of the claim that Western science and technology owe their origins to biblical influences and especially to the biblical doctrine of creation” (1971).

In a related way, White was also caught up in a tendency popular in mid-twentieth-century social science to set up a binary opposition between “humans” and “nature.” Though this binary represents the formalization of a range of intellectual trajectories set in the early modern period by scholars such as René Descartes and Francis Bacon which differentiate human from nonhuman nature, this way of thinking was consolidated in the context of empirical study of environmental values and attitudes in a particular way by social scientists towards the middle of the twentieth century. Among these scholars, Florence R. Kluckhohn had already begun the work of consolidating this bifurcation a decade before White’s essay, arguing that among the world’s cultures, environmental attitudes could be construed in terms of a “man–nature” value orientation. She provided three options for possible orientations: as “subjugation-to-nature,” “harmony-with-nature,” or “mastery-over-nature” (1961: 13). Drawing from this new emerging discipline of moral psychology and environmental values, writers like White simply expressed a growing consensus which implied that much of the Judeo-Christian tradition from Moses to Billy Graham underwrote a mastery-over-nature orientation. To summarize, White participated in two key intellectual moves that determine to some extent the way that he diagnoses the crisis: (1) he has a binary opposition of a human antagonist against “nature” or “the environment,” which is then seen as a passive protagonist and (2) he works with essentialized interpretations of religions and cultures, like “Western Christianity” which is either for or against “nature.”

White’s diagnosis, based as it is on these simplistic binaries, fails to take into account a variety of relevant factors. To take just one example, that of economic status, within a particular society there are naturally some persons with a high degree of control over their environmental impacts while others have little choice over the sourcing of energy and food. Ecologic impacts are widely variable: A majority of humans continue to live with a modest ecological footprint with very extreme contributions to environmental change at upper demographics. To say that “Western societies” are responsible for the ecologic crisis, fails to grasp the differential contribution by wealthy members of those societies ( Chancel and Piketty 2015 ).

Part of the reason that I highlight the role of these intellectual stances in forming White’s argument is because self-consciousness and anxiety over the presence of a “mastery-over-nature” orientation has had a great deal of influence over twentieth- century scholarly exegesis on texts such as Gen 1:26–28. One can see how such a concern has even become formalized in at least one strand of the ecological hermeneutics project. This is conveyed in the application of a “hermeneutic of suspicion” in the Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics volume edited by Habel and Trudinger (2008) .

More recent scholarship in theological hermeneutics has defended the possibility that theological interpretation does not require a monolithic anthropology, and that text (or hermeneutic), can work within canonical polyphony. Projects in ecological hermeneutics like the Ecological Hermeneutics volume edited by Horrell et al. (2010) leave open the possibility that there may be a variety of voices in the Bible reacting to the ecological crisis in a range of different ways. There is much more to say about these projects, which I leave for the insight and analysis of David Horrell in Chapter 3 of this volume. Suffice it to say for now that some scholarship in modern hermeneutics has configured itself in a very specific way around the notion of “crisis” and that this configuration has been shaped by these binary constructions of “man” and “nature,” which reached their social scientific apex in the 1960s–1980s but which have continued to carry an influence on more recent scholarly work on the Bible.

The point of this brief hermeneutic exercise on Lynn White’s article is not to displace the notion of crisis as a valid theme for exegetical reflection, but rather to highlight the ways in which the constitution and centrality of crisis as a paradigm for interpreting human–nature interactions has been taken for granted, and this in turn has influenced the shape of ecological scholarship in a range of ways. If interpreters of the Bible want to proceed with a more robust critical construction of “crisis” as I have already implicitly argued, it will not do to merely set aside White’s specific interpretation of the Christian causality of crisis. We must account for the ways that “crisis” has served as a central theme for interpreting the ancient world more broadly as well and draw the resources that are available from this wider discourse for conceptualizing “crisis.”

Whose Crisis?

In seeking to formulate a critical response to White, I want to look closely at the concept of “crisis” that he invokes in the essay. Here too, there is a long modern conceptual legacy surrounding the use of crisis in the interpretation of historical events and documents. However, new scholarship in crisis studies hints at the possibility that, as I go on to suggest, we may be able to reconfigure our hermeneutics of crisis toward more effective modes of reading.

A key focal point for modern scholarly work in history, archaeology, anthropology, and classics has been the dynamics of civilizational decline and collapse. Starting in the eighteenth century, works such as Edward Gibbon’s six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788) have narrated the arrival at a point of crisis of various human societies. The collapse of ancient empires has also often served as a proxy by which to imagine the trajectory of contemporary ecological troubles. In spite of the long run of this scholarly conversation, it has only recently been the case that narratives of collapse could be empirically tied to environmental factors, and in particular, environmental change precipitated by human interaction. A touchstone for this new appreciation of crisis in the ancient world was the 2005 book by the geographer Jared Diamond, aptly titled Collapse . Diamond’s work has done much to popularize the idea that ecological overreach is inextricably entangled with wider societal decline.

Building on this early work, a new interdisciplinary field has arisen, “crisis studies,” which seeks to critically appraise scholarly interpretation and construction of historical crises. One key finding, which Diamond is attempting to address to some extent, relates to the way that historians (and the surrounding society) have failed to narrate the specifically environmental context in which civilizations rise and fall. We are very quick to point to ways that our civilizations create an ecological crisis, but slow to recognize how the events coming from the natural environment can foment social crises. Further, as crisis scholars have begun to suggest, there are a range of different agendas that can arise in response to the mobilization of human response to a “crisis.” For example, in Middleton’s (2012) analysis, Diamond’s text is “catastrophist” and thus we should not be surprised to find that Diamond’s critique of the ways that civilizations may outstrip their landscape ends with a neoliberal argument for so-called “smart” growth. The crucial point to be made here is that the concept of “crisis” comes with its own intellectual baggage and cannot be invoked as a purely neutral observation.

Indeed, while the act of naming something a “crisis” tends to indicate comprehensive decline, this can actually obscure unexpected forms of liveliness that may persist in spite of negative conditions or even because of them. As I have indicated earlier, both Lynn White and Jared Diamond see the narration of crisis as the prelude to a call to action. Though they may not characterize the other-than-human forces that drive “ecocide” as malevolent, and they do not neglect to narrate the complicity of humans in contributing to crisis, the agent of destruction is ultimately natural, and the agents of deliverance from collapse are decisively human. To use Diamond’s narrative in Collapse as one example, he argues that many of the features that contributed to collapse have intensified such that we find “today’s larger population and more potent destructive technology, and today’s interconnectedness posing the risk of a global rather than a local collapse” (Diamond 2006 : 521). Yet, we need not sit around and wait for catastrophe; as Diamond argues, “the future is up for grabs, lying in our hands” (521–522). In this way, past crises serve as both the carrier of foreboding and hope:

We don’t need new technologies to solve our problems … we “just” need the political will to apply solutions already available. Of course, that’s a big “just.” But many societies did find the necessary political will in the past. Our modern societies have already found the will to solve some of our problems, and to achieve partial solutions to others. (522)

Diamond’s argument parallels White’s in many ways, calling for new forms of cosmopolitan human solidarity, with crisis serving as a rallying cry.

The potential trouble with this kind of narrative is that other-than-human voices are left silent, and plant and animal agencies ignored. The Bible serves to challenge such an approach with a range of examples of nonhuman speech and action (see Habel and Trudiger, 2008 , for several good examples). My point is that our fixedness on crisis can serve (ironically) to reify antinature perspectives and prevent new forms of collaboration on ecological restoration with other-than-human creatures. Here, the work of actor-network theory provides a helpful model, seeking to deemphasize agency, and especially the problematization of human agency, as the central feature of discussions of the environment (Latour 2005). Other methodological emphases on “hybrid geographies” ( Whatmore 2002 ) and “lively entanglements” ( Haraway 2008 ) offer a promising context for reenvisioning the role of agency in biblical texts. Rather than continue to intensify the focus on human agency as overwhelming all others, and by extension centering “the human” in our narratives, these accounts seek to account for shared space and lively entanglements that involve not just humans but all sorts of life, from microbes to mammals. As we seek to assess and respond to “crises,” it is particularly important to attend to the presence and agency of these other-than-human creatures in the way that we construe ecological distress. By identifying and amplifying the presence and significance of many forms of life in the biblical text, the work of biblical interpretation can provide a crucial context for bringing other-than-human voices to the foreground.

A final problem with crisis is the way that it can obscure a range of possible registers in which we might evaluate environmental phenomena. There are a range of other ways in which the formulation of an interpretive enterprise, whether it is textual or historical, in response to crisis can obscure meaning. In a similar way, a robust modern ecotheology needs to intermingle fear and hope, excitement and caution, joyousness and lament.

So the problem is not merely with White’s framing of Christian anthropocentrism as the source of the ecological crisis, but more broadly with the deployment of crisis itself as a way of framing the systemic and anthropogenic stresses that our biosphere is undergoing. As a metaphor, “crisis” may mobilize our attentions, but it also can obscure the more complex dynamics at work in the present moment and in biblical texts.

A Hermeneutics of Crisis

As I have noted, much of White’s scholarly argument has little to do with the text of the Bible and looks toward contemporary Christianity only as a kind of field in which medieval trajectories arrived. His essay does not have any single direct citation from the Bible. Furthermore, the “crisis” concept is itself problematic, especially for biblical hermeneutics. So why discuss “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” in light of the conversation in this volume on the Bible and ecology?

One reason for attention to White’s article is simply because it has been so influential, and close study of White’s conclusions and the responses that have ensued provides a crucial genealogy of the ecodisciplines which began in that period, including ecotheology, ecopsychology, and environmental history. In this way, we may appreciate how history shapes hermeneutics and note that the critical impact of White’s article is linked not to the convincing nature of his conclusions, but rather for the way in which his problematization of modern Christianity captured a broader sentiment that drove much of the formation of ecocriticism as a discipline in the twentieth century and which in turn had significant influence on the shape of ecological hermeneutics. As Mark Stoll observes, the date of publication for White’s article—March 10, 1967, at just three years before the first Earth Day, was a moment “in which National Concern about the environmental crisis was rising quickly” ( Stoll 2012 : 265). Part of the reason for this rise in interest was no doubt the fact that scattered about the 1960s were increasingly visible and well-chronicled ecological crises. In one instance Rachel Carson chronicled the impacts of pesticides (especially DDT) on bird life in her book Silent Spring (1962) . Another group of academics (founded in 1968) which came to be called “the Club of Rome” released a highly visible report in 1972 titled “The Limits to Growth,” which projected major shortages in a range of natural resources from fossil fuels to fertilizers and food stocks. It is fair to say that many of the consequences of these factors became suddenly and intensely visible in the 1950s and 1960s and that scholarly response was mobilized in response to these discoveries as they came.

Now that a half-century has passed, I think it is fair to say that ecological hermeneutics should take this genealogy in hand, but also seek to establish new reference points and critical frames for environmental reflection ( Jenkins 2009 ). Might we dispense with “anthropocentrism” and pursue some of the alternatives that have emerged in the environmental humanities more broadly, as I have noted, such as “lively entanglements” and “hybrid geographies”? The implicit challenge issued in White’s paper to which a wide range of scholars have sought to respond has undoubtedly and indelibly had an influence on hermeneutics and ecotheology in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, we may hope that the next half-century of scholarship will bring a series of seminal articles and monographs that are not reacting to White’s work, but rather seek new frames of reference that are not defensive or self-flagellating, but integrative, creative, and dynamic.

Particularly on the matter of defensiveness, it is also important to note a relevant shift that has been underway in global environmental politics. Almost fifty years ago, just after White’s article was published, the sociologist Peter Berger made the now infamous (and refuted) claim that, “By the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture” (1968). One can see now how many theological agendas were shaped by this perceived undercurrent of existential threat posed by secularization; or conversely by the perceived irrelevance of theologically specific and culturally situated forms of reasoning. In a similar way, many scholars, not just in biblical, theological, and religious studies but also within the humanities more broadly, had to fight for a place at the table where environmental policy decisions were being made. This is no longer the case. Wholly secular attempts to drive mitigation of climate change have not been a resounding success, and as a result, deliberative fora like the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary approach, integrating the study of climate science with things like human culture, values, and beliefs ( National Research Council 1992 ). In this newly reconfigured discourse, historians, classicists, theologians, and biblical scholars no longer need to defend their place in the conversation, but should bring a unique and equal voice into this interdisciplinary conversation.

This is a palpable shift away from skepticism about religion, and naïve trust in the ability of data to produce ethical responses to a “crisis” like climate change, toward an appreciation of the possible value brought by the world’s religions, and by theological thinking in particular. This shift maps onto a similar shift that has been underway in scholarship more broadly, away from the early presumptions of secularization scholars such as Peter Berger and Jürgen Habermas toward more complex postsecular approaches to religion. While I might dispute White’s claim that “the roots of our [environment-related] trouble[s] are so largely religious,” I would not disagree with his related claim that “the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not” ( White 1967 : 1207).

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Essay on Environmental Crisis

Students are often asked to write an essay on Environmental Crisis in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Environmental Crisis

Understanding the environmental crisis.

An environmental crisis refers to severe environmental problems, like climate change, deforestation, and pollution. These issues negatively impact our planet and all life forms on it.

Causes of the Crisis

The main cause is human activities. We burn fossil fuels, cut down forests, and produce waste, which harm our environment. These actions lead to global warming, loss of biodiversity, and pollution.

Impacts of the Crisis

The crisis affects all life. It leads to extreme weather, species extinction, and health problems in humans. It also threatens our food and water supplies.

Addressing the Crisis

We can address the crisis by reducing waste, using renewable energy, and protecting natural habitats. Everyone’s efforts are crucial to save our planet.

250 Words Essay on Environmental Crisis

Introduction.

The environmental crisis is a profound issue that has gained significant attention in recent years. This crisis is a result of various environmental problems such as global warming, deforestation, and pollution, which are largely driven by human activities.

Root Causes

The primary cause of the environmental crisis is the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources. The overconsumption and misuse of resources like water, soil, and minerals have led to severe environmental degradation. Moreover, industrialization and urbanization have contributed to increased pollution and waste production.

The environmental crisis has wide-ranging impacts on both the natural world and human societies. It has led to the loss of biodiversity, with numerous species becoming extinct or endangered. Additionally, it threatens human health and wellbeing, with pollution causing numerous health issues and climate change leading to extreme weather events.

Addressing the environmental crisis requires a multi-pronged approach. It necessitates sustainable practices, such as recycling and renewable energy use, to reduce resource consumption and pollution. Policymakers need to enforce stricter regulations on industries and promote sustainable development. Furthermore, individuals must be educated about the crisis and encouraged to adopt eco-friendly lifestyles.

In conclusion, the environmental crisis is a pressing issue that demands immediate attention. It is crucial for all stakeholders, from governments to individuals, to take responsibility and act towards a more sustainable future. The environmental crisis is not just a challenge, but also an opportunity to innovate and create a world that is in harmony with nature.

500 Words Essay on Environmental Crisis

The environmental crisis is one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century, characterized by global climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and the depletion of natural resources. The crisis is a result of human activities that disrupt the natural ecosystem, causing irreversible damage to our planet.

The Manifestation of the Crisis

The environmental crisis manifests in various ways. Climate change, primarily driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is causing global warming, leading to melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and more frequent and severe weather events. Biodiversity loss is another alarming aspect of the crisis. Human activities such as deforestation, habitat destruction, and pollution are causing the extinction of species at an unprecedented rate. Meanwhile, pollution, particularly plastic pollution, is wreaking havoc on our oceans, endangering marine life and ecosystems.

Underlying Causes

The root cause of the environmental crisis is anthropogenic, i.e., human-induced. Industrialization, urbanization, and population growth have led to increased consumption and waste, putting immense pressure on the Earth’s finite resources. Our reliance on fossil fuels for energy has resulted in the excessive release of greenhouse gases. Moreover, deforestation for agriculture and urban development has disrupted natural habitats and reduced the planet’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide.

The Consequences

The consequences of the environmental crisis are profound and far-reaching. They threaten human health, food security, and economic stability. Air and water pollution can lead to a range of health problems, from respiratory diseases to cancer. Climate change affects agricultural productivity, potentially leading to food shortages and increased prices. Moreover, extreme weather events and sea-level rise can lead to displacement of populations and economic losses.

The Response to the Crisis

Addressing the environmental crisis requires a multi-pronged approach. On a global level, countries must commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as outlined in international agreements like the Paris Agreement. Technological innovations can also play a crucial role, such as renewable energy technologies and carbon capture and storage.

On an individual level, we can contribute by reducing our carbon footprint, for example, by using public transportation, recycling, and consuming less. Education and awareness are also crucial in changing attitudes and behaviors towards the environment.

The environmental crisis is a complex and urgent issue that demands immediate action. It is a product of our disconnect from nature and disregard for the finite resources of our planet. To address this crisis, we need a fundamental shift in our attitudes and practices, recognizing that the health of our planet is intrinsically linked to our own well-being. Only through collective action and sustainable practices can we hope to mitigate the effects of this crisis and safeguard our planet for future generations.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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• Essay on Environment Protection
• Essay on Environment and Pollution
• Essay on Clean and Green Environment

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Environmental Issues Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on environmental issues.

The environment plays a significant role to support life on earth. But there are some issues that are causing damages to life and the ecosystem of the earth. It is related to the not only environment but with everyone that lives on the planet. Besides, its main source is pollution , global warming, greenhouse gas , and many others. The everyday activities of human are constantly degrading the quality of the environment which ultimately results in the loss of survival condition from the earth.

Source of Environment Issue

There are hundreds of issue that causing damage to the environment. But in this, we are going to discuss the main causes of environmental issues because they are very dangerous to life and the ecosystem.

Pollution – It is one of the main causes of an environmental issue because it poisons the air , water , soil , and noise. As we know that in the past few decades the numbers of industries have rapidly increased. Moreover, these industries discharge their untreated waste into the water bodies, on soil, and in air. Most of these wastes contain harmful and poisonous materials that spread very easily because of the movement of water bodies and wind.

Greenhouse Gases – These are the gases which are responsible for the increase in the temperature of the earth surface. This gases directly relates to air pollution because of the pollution produced by the vehicle and factories which contains a toxic chemical that harms the life and environment of earth.

Climate Changes – Due to environmental issue the climate is changing rapidly and things like smog, acid rains are getting common. Also, the number of natural calamities is also increasing and almost every year there is flood, famine, drought , landslides, earthquakes, and many more calamities are increasing.

Above all, human being and their greed for more is the ultimate cause of all the environmental issue.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Minimize Environment Issue?

Now we know the major issues which are causing damage to the environment. So, now we can discuss the ways by which we can save our environment. For doing so we have to take some measures that will help us in fighting environmental issues .

Moreover, these issues will not only save the environment but also save the life and ecosystem of the planet. Some of the ways of minimizing environmental threat are discussed below:

Reforestation – It will not only help in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem but also help in restoring the natural cycles that work with it. Also, it will help in recharge of groundwater, maintaining the monsoon cycle , decreasing the number of carbons from the air, and many more.

The 3 R’s principle – For contributing to the environment one should have to use the 3 R’s principle that is Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Moreover, it helps the environment in a lot of ways.

To conclude, we can say that humans are a major source of environmental issues. Likewise, our activities are the major reason that the level of harmful gases and pollutants have increased in the environment. But now the humans have taken this problem seriously and now working to eradicate it. Above all, if all humans contribute equally to the environment then this issue can be fight backed. The natural balance can once again be restored.

FAQs about Environmental Issue

Q.1 Name the major environmental issues. A.1 The major environmental issues are pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and climate change. Besides, there are several other environmental issues that also need attention.

Q.2 What is the cause of environmental change? A.2 Human activities are the main cause of environmental change. Moreover, due to our activities, the amount of greenhouse gases has rapidly increased over the past few decades.

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Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Environment Problems — Environmental Issues

Essays on Environmental Issues

Environmental issues are a crucial topic for essays, as they address some of the most pressing challenges facing our planet today. When choosing an environmental issues essay topic, it's important to consider the significance of the subject matter and the potential for impactful discussions. This article will offer advice on selecting a compelling topic and provide a diverse list of recommended essay topics, divided by category.

The Importance of Environmental Issues Essay Topics

Environmental issues encompass a wide range of challenges, including climate change, pollution, deforestation, and endangered species. These topics are critical because they directly impact the health of our planet and all its inhabitants. By addressing environmental issues in essays, students can raise awareness, promote solutions, and contribute to the global conversation about sustainability and conservation.

When choosing a topic for an environmental issues essay, it's essential to consider your interests, the current relevance of the issue, and the potential for generating thought-provoking discussions. You should also take into account the availability of credible sources and data to support your arguments. Additionally, choosing a specific aspect of a broader environmental issue can help narrow the focus of your essay and make your arguments more compelling.

Recommended Environmental Issues Essay Topics

• Climate Change
• The impact of climate change on global food security
• Policy responses to climate change in developing countries
• The role of renewable energy in mitigating climate change
• Climate change adaptation strategies for vulnerable communities
• Carbon pricing and its effectiveness in reducing greenhouse gas emissions
• The impact of climate change on wildlife
• Strategies to mitigate climate change
• The role of renewable energy in combating climate change
• Climate change and its effect on agriculture
• The importance of international cooperation in addressing climate change
• Plastic pollution in the world's oceans
• The health effects of air pollution in urban areas
• Regulatory approaches to controlling industrial pollution
• The impact of electronic waste on the environment
• Strategies for reducing water pollution in agricultural areas
• The effects of air pollution on human health
• Ways to reduce water pollution
• The role of government regulations in controlling pollution
• The impact of industrial pollution on the environment
• Deforestation
• The effects of deforestation on biodiversity in tropical rainforests
• Community-based forest management as a solution to deforestation
• The role of corporate responsibility in combating deforestation
• The impact of deforestation on indigenous communities
• Reforestation efforts and their impact on climate change mitigation
• Endangered Species
• The ethical implications of captive breeding for endangered species conservation
• The impact of illegal wildlife trade on endangered species populations
• Conservation strategies for protecting endangered marine species
• The role of ecotourism in supporting endangered species conservation
• The potential for de-extinction in preserving endangered species

Sustainable Development

• Challenges and opportunities for sustainable urban development
• The role of sustainable agriculture in addressing food insecurity
• The impact of consumer behavior on sustainable development goals
• Corporate sustainability initiatives and their impact on the environment
• The role of education in promoting sustainable development practices

Environmental Policy

• The effectiveness of international agreements in addressing environmental issues
• The role of government regulation in promoting environmental conservation
• The impact of environmental lobbying on policy-making decisions
• The potential for market-based solutions in environmental policy
• The influence of public opinion on environmental policy development

Water Scarcity

• The causes of water scarcity in developing countries
• Technological solutions to address water scarcity
• The impact of water scarcity on agriculture
• Strategies for sustainable water management
• The role of government policies in addressing water scarcity

Biodiversity Loss

• The importance of preserving biodiversity
• The impact of habitat destruction on biodiversity
• Strategies for conserving endangered species
• The role of ecotourism in promoting biodiversity conservation
• The ethical implications of biodiversity loss

Waste Management

• The challenges of e-waste disposal
• Strategies for promoting recycling and composting
• The impact of waste management on public health
• The role of circular economy in reducing waste
• The economic benefits of effective waste management

These environmental issues essay topics provide a wide range of options for students to explore and analyze. By choosing a compelling environmental issues essay topic, students can engage in meaningful discussions and contribute to the ongoing efforts to address the challenges facing our planet. It's climate change, pollution, deforestation, endangered species, sustainable development, or environmental policy - there are countless opportunities to explore and raise awareness about important environmental issues through essays.

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