George P. Marsh: No Progress on the Environment
We've made no progress on the environment in 150 years.
A few days ago I was driving and listening to local radio in Albany, NY and there was some guy talking about “climate communication”, how to convince people who don’t care about or believe in climate change to care. He kept saying things like, “the world could literally end, and still nobody f***ing cares.”
Earlier in the day I had been reading George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature published in 1864. And I’ll be honest, its a trip—a global comparative historical study of environmental degradation from the Romans through Ottomans through Americans. It’s a cutting reminder that environmental devastation is a fundamental property of our society, has been for thousands of years, and that we have made essentially zero progress on this matter since the Civil War, let alone since Julius Caesar.
In an 1847 speech he gave in Rutland, VT, Marsh explained anthropogenic climate change. He gave examples of over-harvesting timber leading to irreversible soil erosion and the erosion’s effects on river turbidity and flow—how forests and soil hold water and slowly let it go, moderating rivers and keeping them consistent. He explained the albedo effect and gave empirical evidence for urban heat islands. I imagine everyone clapped.
In preparing Man and Nature (1864), he lived as an ambassador in the Ottoman Empire and Italy, traveled to Egypt and Syria, and concluded that it was colonial economies styled in the way of the Romans that led to this fundamental property everywhere. He poured over archives and discovered how Roman colonial taxation severed colonized people from land, committed them to the rat race of money, and forced the over-extraction of soils. He showed how violence and militarism was at the heart of it all.
A 1865 New York Times review of the book points out that the prevailing common sense at the time was that nature was so enormous and humans so small that there was no legitimate way that our species could really affect things, an assumption which “thus lessened the sense of man’s responsibility and position in the scale of nature.”
The Times goes on to say that:
“Partly in correction of this too absorbing view, and to show the importance of human life and action as a transforming power, and partly for the sake of the vast economic interest at stake, Mr. Marsh has written his book. It is one that appeals to no passion dominant in the present hurry of events; there is nothing in it that any political party can make capital of, and scarcely anything that can be turned into private advantage.”
More than 150 years later, we have made almost no progress on matter of integrating economy and ecology. Our solution thus far has been to just export the violence our economy brings upon the earth out of view elsewhere. In the 1600s when the English ran out of wood on their island, they colonized the Baltic. When they’d exhausted the Baltic, they turned toward New England and placed royal stamps on every Eastern White Pine greater than 24 inches in diameter. When Vermonters exhausted their soils they moved West.
Friedrich Hayek wrote that “Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that she must bear the consequences of her actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.”
In this sense, human societies styled like the Romans have only liberated themselves partially from nature. We have taken on the burden of preparing our own ecological destiny, but have yet to bear responsibility for the idiocy of parts of that vision.
Christopher Lasch’s True And Only Heaven opens with a simple mystery: “How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”
In his book, Lasch is focused on “progress” as the binding philosophical commitment of the modern American political cult of which both the Left and Right are a part. Our two political parties have institutionalized “so many of the same underlying convictions, including a belief in the desirability and inevitability of technological and economic development, that the conflict between them, shrill and acrimonious as it is, no longer speaks to the central issues of American politics.”
What Lasch misses, I think, is that we have made progress insofar as progress is bound by a normative goal. For instance, we have made progress toward the normative goal of gender and racial equality; or, toward the goal of widespread communication technologies.
But I have to say, listening to this guy on the radio basically be like, “nobody gives a fuck about the environment” was haunting. It’s the same shit that Marsh was saying 150 years prior, and in the biggest sense it doesn’t seem like we’ve made any progress at all. In fact, in terms of global ecological stability it seems like things have only gotten worse. It reminds me of one of my favorite Bruno Latour quotes, that “in practice, we’re all climate deniers.”
As was true 150 years ago, just as the NYT pointed out, the problem with environmental degradation is that it “appeals to no passion dominant in the present hurry of events; there is nothing in it that any political party can make capital of, and scarcely anything that can be turned into private advantage.”
In his 1864 review of the book, Charles Scribner wrote that “we are deeply interested in the subject discussed in this book,” but that “it appears that we live in an age too early to admit of a book being written on this subject.”
Later that same day a friend called who works high up in the government. He’d been to COP, been a part of negotiations, and is now doing climate work across the world. He told me that the personal adrenaline rush of being a part of global climate negotiations can fog the fact that they’re mostly useless. “It’s a circus over there.” Perhaps it’s a celebration of life in the same way a funeral is.
International climate negotiations remind me that the Greeks thought that societies aged like bodies. That social organisms were born, achieved things, asserted their agency, fell in love, had failures and setbacks, smiled, laughed, and eventually died before releasing their nutrients into the soil to aid in the rebirth of beings yet unseen. It is our thing, you know, to destroy life.