Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art

Designing Nightmares

Sergio Fava

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415634014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136208935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

At a time when it is clear that climate change adaptation and mitigation are failing, this book examines how our assumptions about (valid and usable) knowledge are preventing effective climate action. Through a cross-disciplinary, empirically-based analysis of climate science and policy, the book situates the failures of climate policy in the cultural history of prediction and its interfaces with policy.

Fava calls into question the current interfaces between scientific research and climate policy by tracing multiple connections between modelling, epistemology, politics, food security, religion, art, and the apocalyptic. Demonstrating how the current domination of climate policy by models and scenarios is part of the problem, the book examines how artistic practices are a critical location to ask questions differently, rethink environmental futures, and activate social change. The analysis starts with another moment of climatic change in recent western history: the overlap of the Little Ice Age and the "scientific revolution, " during which intense climatic, scientific and political change were contemporary with mathematical calculation of the apocalypse.

Dealing with the need for complex answers to complex and urgent questions, this is essential reading for those interested in climate action, interdisciplinary research and methodological innovation. The empirical analyses amount to a methodological experiment, across history of science, theology, art theory and history, architecture, future studies, climatology, computer modelling, and agricultural policy. This book is a major contribution to understanding how we are precluding effective climate action, and designing futures that resemble our worst nightmares.

1 Deadly Weather

Narratives of Nature and Agency During the Little Ice Age

Perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our different relation to the cosmos. With us, all is personal. Landscape and the sky, these are to us the delicious background of our personal life, and no more. Even the universe of the scientist is little more than an extension of our personality, to us.

D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

In October 1637, the earl of Lothian wrote to his father, who was at the court in England, to say,

The earth hath beane iron in this land (espetially in Lothian), and the heavens brass this summer, til nowe in the harvest there hath beane sutch inundations and floodes and wyndes, as noe man livinge remmembers the like. This hath shaken and rotten and carried away the little corne [that] came up, [so] that certainly they [who] are not blynde may see a judgement come on this land. (quoted in Parker and Smith 1997:13–14)

The letter expressed the difficulty in meeting state tax requirements in the face of financial demands of the Thirty Years’ War. This was compounded by the economic hardship caused by crop failures and dearths that were ravaging Scotland and Europe.

His situation was not new; not to him, his country, or even his century. The growth of population in the sixteenth century had increased the pressure on natural resources, at a time when up to 95 per cent of the European population depended directly on crop yields (Fagan 2002; Parker and Smith 1997). Europe was enveloped in changes and events that affected all levels of society. Since Voltaire, a ‘general crisis theory’ of the seventeenth century has been proposed as a catch-all term for the multitude of crises that affected the world. From the popular revolts of Peru and Russia’s first civil war, to the Kyushu Rebellion in Japan and the Turkish–Persian wars, or the widespread riots, revolts, and war in Europe, the world was engaged in change, natural and human, many times violent. The intensity and global reach of the crisis is still a matter of discussion. To many it was a ‘general crisis’; others prefer to describe it as a set of loosely related crises.¹

At any rate, Europe underwent a very troubled period, and the unique contours of the set of crises were commonly framed in the apocalypticism pervading the continent, with acute expressions in Scotland and England. This systemic, even doctrinal, apocalyptic framework permeated the words of men like James I and VI, Cromwell, the writing of Joseph Mede, John Foxe, John Napier, John Bale, Philipp Melanchton, the accounts of Samuel Pepys, among many others. Alongside it, ‘anti-popery’ rhetoric spread from pulpits across Protestant Europe. This apocalyptic interpretative framework mapped narrative elements from the Book of Revelation (and passages from Daniel, Isaiah, and Mark) to personal, national, denominational, and international events. It was heightened with the Reformation in the sixteenth century and remained acute for a great part of the seventeenth century.

THE LITTLE ICE AGE

An important element in the difficulties faced at this time was the weather, severely affecting crops, livestock, travel, and the price of basic goods, especially grain. The floods and famines claimed many thousands of human lives, and have been factored in the general crisis theory. The climatic variability known as the Little Ice Age (a term first used in 1939 by the French geologist François E. Matthes) was characterised by lower average temperatures and, above all, changeable conditions that made agricultural yields (and therefore stock and cost of goods) unpredictable.

From the early fourteenth century, the number of wet summers, very cold winters, storms, and floods increased with no perceivable pattern, disrupting most sectors of life across Europe. Varying limits have been attributed to this period, with the wider limits set at 1315 and 1850. Whatever the endpoints of the Little Ice Age, the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century saw its peak (Pfister 1980; Behringer 2010), negatively affected by the earlier stages of the Maunder minimum and by the North Atlantic Oscillation. Brian Fagan notes, in his Little Ice Age (2002), how the seventeenth century literally began with a bang: in February 1600, the Huanyaputina (in what today is south Peru) erupted with such ferocity and duration that, today, South Pole and Greenland ice cores bear the evidence. The century was to see an increase in volcanic activity, with climatic impacts. When Mount Parker in the Philippines erupted on 4 January 1641, a “nearby Spanish flotilla lit lanterns at midday and frantically shovelled ash off its decks, fearing in the darkness “the Judgement Day to be at hand” (Fagan 2002: 105).

Overall, the seventeenth century saw some of the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, with 1601 being the coldest year of the millennium (Jones et al. 1998). Loss of life had been great on many previous occasions. Fagan notes how “more than 100,000 people are said to have died in the great storms of 1421 and 1446” (2000: 66). The real problem, more than the cold, was the unpredictable sharp variability of the weather (Grove 1988; Lamb 1995). The Royal Society expects the twenty-first century might be a century of crises: climatic, political, economic, environmental (The Royal Society 2012).

Weather and Apocalypse: A Missing Link?

There is something missing here, at least from a twenty-first-century vantage point. There were instances when the extreme weather, the cold (or seemingly inexistent) summers, storms, the engulfing of villages by glaciers in continental Europe, were interpreted as signs of the last days. Extreme weather events were indeed often interpreted as the wrath of God, punishment for the sins of humankind. But divine wrath is not synonymous with the Last Judgement, and ‘a judgement’ is not the same as the Judgement. Even if we work only the shorter periodisation of the Little Ice Age, when its effects were the strongest, a large number of extreme weather events were not seen as signs of the End. The weather was sometimes said to be bringing about the Last Judgement, but the instances do not show systemic correspondence with the overwhelming political and religious expectation of the impending Last Judgement. There were many explanations for the extreme weather.

At any rate, the severity of the weather did not become a part of the ‘apocalyptic tradition’, a mixed body of literature—theological, literary, political, artistic, military, or a mix of any of these—with common elements and a significant amount of intertextuality, subtended and sustained by biblical exegesis, and centred on Western Christian texts (see Firth 1979; O’Leary 1994). The ‘apocalyptic genre’, a related term, has a wider remit, encompassing Persian, Christian, Jewish, Gnostic, and other sources (see Collins 1979). In comparison, ‘apocalyptic tradition’ is a tighter, more precise term, also because the ‘apocalyptic genre’ is now also vaguely used to describe secular works, films, video games, and so on. At any rate, what is of interest here is that despite the growing size and influence of the ‘apocalyptic tradition’ instilling apocalyptic expectations, the changing climate was usually not interpreted through it.

Wolfgang Behringer notes how, on the 3 August 1562, in the wake of a thunderstorm and hailstorm, “a printed newsletter reported that many people feared the beginning of the Last Judgement” (1999: 335). Jankovic (2000) details how some people, under thundering skies, would abandon work and fall on their knees, gaping up at the sky, expecting the immediate End. Many other instances, however, are closer to Lord Lothian’s interpretation: ‘a judgement’. Friedman (1992) notes that a chapbook titled A Strange Wonder, or, The City’s Amazement, traced how the flooding of the Thames (on 4 February 1641) was interpreted, in pamphlets (News from Heaven, True News from Heaven, News from Hell) as God’s punishment for the rebellions in England. In all, Friedman notes, the flooding was seen as God’s punishment either of monarchists or of Parliament. A punishment, not the Judgement. Extreme weather events were commonly seen as local punishment for local insurrection, sin, ungodly political positions, more than signs of the Last Judgement. According to Friedman,

[T]he several-score published accounts of such activity during these years [mid-seventeenth century England], seem to indicate that many reader’s imaginations ran wild and saw every storm and peculiar event as a significant expression of God’s anger, Satan’s power, or the works of demons, angels and witches. (1992: 426; emphasis added)

These examples only hint at the diversity of interpretations of climatic events. At the same time, there was a systemic and well-established doctrinal apocalypticism, proposed from the pulpits and learned publications of the time (not only religious, but also from political and natural philosophy sources). Not that there wasn’t, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, political millennialism in the ‘lower classes’. In the case of the Fifth Monarchists, it extended to grocers, cow-keepers, basketmakers, apprentices and servants, as well as ministers and yeomen (Capp 1972: 83). During the height of the Little Ice Age, food riots had a political and social dimension, but were particularly associated with poor harvests (Wrightson 1982). England and Scotland lived obsessed with the Book of Revelation and the Book of Daniel (Reay 1985), and famine and death and riots caused by the weather were common. How is it, then, that the continued climatic hardship and disasters were not systematically related to apocalyptic expectations, after two centuries of destruction and loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, and when the populace did believe in the proximity of the End?

‘COMPETING MYTHS’

Alongside divine retribution, the array of imaginative interpretations included witchcraft, as Friedman mentions. While there was no single dominating interpretative framework, apocalyptic or otherwise, witchcraft was consistently linked to weather-making at the height of the Little Ice Age. Research into the relation between climatic change and popular culture has highlighted the connection between climate change and witch hunts, statistically (Oster 2004), in literary and narrative accounts (Behringer 1999; Fagan 2002), climatologically (Pfister et al. 1999) and demographically (Russell 1972; Lamb 1977 and 1988; Grove 1988). Witchcraft was, Behringer tells us, the crime of the Little Ice Age (2010: 119), peaking as the Little Ice Age peaked (2010: 130–132). Behring adds, by the way, that the Little Ice Age “may be regarded as a trial run for global warming” (2010: vii).

The decade of 1560, for example, was a time of poor weather, during which the pastor of Stendhal, in the Prussian Alps, commented that there were no distinguishable seasons and crops did not ripen, and “the fruitfulness of all creatures and of the world as a whole is receding; fields and grounds have tired from bearing fruits and even become impoverished” (quoted in Fagan 2002: 90). At this time, witchcraft accusations increased sharply across Europe, and “witchcraft accusations reached a height in England and France in the severe weather years of 1587 and 1588. Almost invariably, a frenzy of prosecutions coincided with the coldest and most difficult years of the Little Ice Age” (2002: 91). These beliefs and attitudes were older than the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Unnatural climatic phenomena were explained as “great conspiracy of witches” since the fourteenth century, despite several councils over the centuries designating weather-making by humans anathema (Behringer 1999: 335). The causes of bad or extreme weather, it seems, were often found closer to the earth than to the heavens, human more than divine. This amounted to a religious doctrinal problem.

Widespread beliefs with animistic traits were part of popular culture (Thomas 1971). Popular belief regularly attributed agency to nature, natural elements, or isolated natural objects (wind, unusual rocks, plants, etc.). Familiarity with scripture was common with ordinary people (see Barbour 1964; also Haller 1957), but also hybridised with non-Christian elements (Reay 1985). Nature’s agency was manipulable to varying extents. Material objects, rituals, prayers, and enchantments were efficacious vehicles of mediation or intercession. This way, the relation between humans and the weather had a maximal but not exclusive mediator in the Christian God. This was the doctrinal problem witchcraft presented: affecting the world (natural or human) did not depend wholly on methods of intercession validated by moral and religious authorities. These authorities held the Church, and its figures and deities, as obligatory channels for intercession, influence, or control over natural events. One might pray to saints or the Father in the face of tempestuous weather, but very little else was sanctioned as a form of influencing the weather. An almost infinite number of possible combinations in the construction of a pantheon of gods is possible, when one god is achieving primacy (Weber 1965[1905]: 21). And indeed the peak of the Little Ice Age coincided with times of religious dissent and of struggles for supremacy of different religious positions (some more systematised than others).

In learned circles, the distance between the weather and the End had an obverse dimension to popular culture. The authors mentioned above, from Melanchton to Pepys, understood history as a trajectory from beginning to End, from Adam to the Second Coming, the inexorable progress from Alpha to Omega, and worked in preparation for the certain great day. These were the type of men that developed the apocalyptic tradition. Friedman reports how Ellis Bradshaw wrote, in his A True Relation of the Strange Apparitions Seen in the Air on Monday, February 25, 1694, that the two opposing rainbows visible in a clear sky “symbolised the broken covenant or contract between king and Parliament” (Friedman 1992: 428). Notably, it did not symbolise the breaking of the covenant that the rainbow was accepted to symbolise after the biblical Flood; an expectable interpretation, since “it was a common belief in the sixteenth and seventeenth century that the sins of mankind were so heinous that they had damaged the world itself, as they had in the generation of Noah’s flood” (Goldish 2004: 9–10). To be precise, this does not intrinsically deny the apocalypticism of such an interpretation, but the apocalyptic dimension rested with politics, not nature.² Armies fighting in the sky were common apparitions, with many accounts recorded over the years across England. The dates and details of these occurrences were interpreted in the light of English or British or European politics. Storms were many times interpreted as God’s punishment for human actions, as was the case after Charles I’s decapitation. In the light of the numerous scenes in Revelation that take place in the heavens, it would not take much effort of the imagination to relate them to these atmospheric events. Instead, these were seen as depicting very earthly, political struggles. Struggles of good versus evil, but earthly struggles nonetheless.

Somehow, the indubitable holy narrative sustaining apocalyptic expectations did not translate the catastrophic weather into a functional element in the apocalyptic tradition. This is the more surprising in the context of Mark 13, also known as “The Little Apocalypse,” especially Mark 13:8: “and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows”.³ Theological and natural philosophy apocalypticism did not make systematic use of extreme weather events to sustain its expectations. The reasons, however, were opposite to those found in popular culture: nature was neutral, the passive realm of the material. It had no agency. To say ‘from Adam to the Second Coming’ is to say ‘from the first man to the return of the Son of Man’: history as human history. For the religious authorities to accept the efficacy of witchcraft would be to accept mediated human agency over preternatural elements, and allow a breach in the omnipotence of God, or at least allow a form of circumventing the necessary channels (God—and his saints, in the case of Catholicism). A nature with agency could be seen as undermining God’s omnipotence.

The Church’s slow—and theologically inconsistent—acceptance of weather-making by humans evidences the complications of the matter: recognising weather-making human agency was needed to suppress witchcraft (and replace magical rituals with Christian rituals); but recognising its efficacy also allowed a short-circuit between humans and nature, potentially bypassing God. These confrontations between explanations of the weather lasted the entirety of the Little Ice Age’s most severe period. As late as the 1630s, church policies were more about discipline and uniformity than doctrine, and “religious ideas and practices were central to one strand which fed the ‘competing myths’ which led to war” (Foster 1994: 80). The church vied for strict control of intercession rituals that asked God for weather changes, “culminating in years of crisis in formal processions and pilgrimages” (Fagan 2002: 52).

Witchcraft: Early Modern Anthropogenic Climate Change?

It is not my aim to reassess the origins, contours, and demise of witchcraft. To engage in an analysis of its role in society would lead to familial and community relations, gender roles, and a complex of elements that is beyond the purpose of the present analysis. What is relevant here is the changing climate, how it was interpreted, and how people tried to act upon it. In this, witchcraft was a central element, and its consistent connections to the weather allow us to understand the relative positioning, overlaps, and frictions of different interpretations of human, divine, and demonic agency.

When analysing this contested terrain, one needs to be careful with expressions such as ‘competing myths’. In a terrain criss-crossed by popular culture, ‘natural philosophy’, and theology, explanations for extreme weather events were sometimes opposed, sometimes easily fusing, sometimes part of a clearly defined doctrine. Sometimes they were a melting pot of religious and magic traditions, amalgamated by individuals into their everyday situations. As Weber said,

[N]owhere was the existence of spirits and demons permanently eliminated. Even in the Reformation spirits and demons were simply subordinated unconditionally to the one god, at least in theory. The decisive consideration was and remains: who is deemed to exert the stronger influence on the individual in his everyday life, the theoretically supreme god or the lower spirits and demons? (Weber 1965[1905]: 20)

To put it simply, divine omnipotence versus magical agency over nature. Those two poles were also in fluid relation with a third, composed of the developing scientific forms of enquiry and explanation. The acutest period of the Little Ice Age coincides with the lifetime of John Napier, a man who—as we shall see—did not dismiss magic and divination, despite his Calvinist beliefs and his mathematical genius. Some even considered him a warlock. During his time, his home country of Scotland suffered the consequences of adverse weather more than most. Famines resulting from harvest failures caused by poor weather resulted, in Scotland, in more deaths than the plague (Lamb 1977). Witchhunts were legalised in Scotland when Napier was thirteen years old. Alongside popular belief and church doctrine, the formation of early scientific practice (and its communities, academ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Boxes
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Deadly Weather: Narratives of Nature and Agency During the Little Ice Age
• 2 Counting the Days: John Napier’s Exegesis and Mathematics
• 3 Drawing the End: Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House
• 4 Assembling the Worldmachine: Mathematical Modelling of Climate Change
• 5 Imagining Futures: The Special Report on Emission Scenarios
• 6 Creating One Future: The Doomsday Vault
• 7 Reclaiming Futures: Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index