A Cultural History of Climate Change

Tom Bristow, Thomas Ford, Tom Bristow, Thomas H. Ford

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317561439
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Economics
• Thema: Sustainable Development

Charting innovative directions in the environmental humanities, this book examines the cultural history of climate change under three broad headings: history, writing and politics. Climate change compels us to rethink many of our traditional means of historical understanding, and demands new ways of relating human knowledge, action and representations to the dimensions of geological and evolutionary time. To address these challenges, this book positions our present moment of climatic knowledge within much longer histories of climatic experience. Only in light of these histories, it argues, can we properly understand what climate means today across an array of discursive domains, from politics, literature and law to neighbourly conversation. Its chapters identify turning-points and experiments in the construction of climates and of atmospheres of sensation. They examine how contemporary ecological thought has repoliticised the representation of nature and detail vital aspects of the history and prehistory of our climatic modernity.

This ground-breaking text will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in environmental history, environmental governance, history of ideas and science, literature and eco-criticism, political theory, cultural theory, as well as all general readers interested in climate change.

Part I

Climates of history

1Voices of endurance

Climate and the power of oral history

Deb Anderson

Sheep scatter as a little blue car burls past a stubble-lined paddock, where barely a century ago someone’s predecessors staked out an isolated existence by rolling and burning their ‘block’ of mallee scrub.¹ It’s 39 degrees, it’s February. Earlier in the day I had embarked on what felt like a drive to the end of the Earth to reach this blip on the map of Victoria’s northwest – a now-memorable point on a learning curve through the band of semi-arid country that demarcates the inner edge of Australia’s commercial cropping zone, the Mallee. Scooting west of the wheatbelt town of Ouyen, from my car window I note the outward signs of ecosystems in flux: patches of dryland salting, wind erosion and sand-drift bringing fence-posts to their knees. Then abruptly the sand hills slope away and flatten into a vast, quiet expanse of earth.

By the hour I reach Hubie Sheldon’s farm, my thoughts have turned to an infamous account of the Mallee. In 1878, a Royal Commission into Crown Land described it as ‘sand, scrub and mallee below, the scorching sun and bright blue sky above, and not a sound of life to break the solemn silence’ (Blainey, 2006, 147). Such words formed the narrative bed, so to speak, for colonial engineer Alfred Kenyon’s futuristic 1912 Story of the Mallee, a pioneering battle saga of Australian rural establishment – of men with ‘hearts like lions’ (Bromby, 1986, 55), new methods and evermore-advanced machines who would make this country ‘profitably productive’ (Kenyon, [1912] 1982, 1–2). But that story has been retold with time. As Australian environmental historian Tom Griffiths wrote towards the end of the twentieth century, the word ‘Mallee’ became ‘synonymous for heroic, even bloody-minded settlement’ (1994, 21).

Unlike Kenyon with his evocative oratory, or Griffiths with his compelling environmental history – or me, here with a voice recorder to capture snippets of the past in the present – Sheldon knows the Mallee as ‘home’. Tellingly, he calls this country ‘forgiving’ (Sheldon, 2005).² Not far from Ngallo (‘a spring’) and a shearing shed shy of the South Australian border lies the remote wheat-sheep property where Sheldon lives on his own. He has spent most of his life here, as did his father and mother before him – and his father’s parents before them, having selected their block before the First World War, in 1910. Almost a century later, across an old kitchen table in an ageing farmhouse on the edge of a colossal swathe of tilled soil, Sheldon picks up the threads of his story of the Mallee. He draws upon a multigenerational ‘archive’ of memories – oral testimony of a way of life, preserved on grounds of enduring cultural, historical and evidentiary value – to speak of the lived experience of drought.

The story begins in an all-too-familiar Australian saga of rural pioneering endurance. This is a boom-and-bust tale of backbreaking work, told with grim humour. Anchored in that wide-brown-horizon version of the past, this becomes a survivor narrative through sporadic environmental extremes: severe droughts, monster dust-storms, ‘nasty’ frosts, ‘hellishing’ heatwaves and plagues of rabbits and mice. The tale twists into a period of rural decline – of crisis so commonplace as to seem clichéed (Bourke & Lockie, 2001, 1) – to depict an agro-industrial present clouded by economic uncertainty, amplified by prolonged drought and heightened by public debate on global climate change. Then, the plot thickens. The scene itself, of climate in the wheatbelt, shifts in ways that defy generations of lived experience. That final straw, so to speak, prompts a reflexive idealisation of history as the future, and of ‘a new generation of pioneers’ who will ‘survive’ by learning to ‘pull back’ (Sheldon, 2005, 2007).

‘When you look at Australia and its history,’ Sheldon says, ‘while we’ve been here a coupl’a hundred years, we’ve probably only really developed the country in the last hundred, and more particularly in the last fifty.’ He looks at me intently:

That’s a very, very brief time. And we’ve altered this landscape a hell of a lot in a short period o’ time. And if that’s gonna change our weather patterns – which it, well, it looks like it is – we need to look at what we’ve done in the past and try and learn (Sheldon, 2005).

Valuing oral history

Cultural engagement with climate is under constant renegotiation – as oral historical research is apt to reveal. Oral history has already challenged the historical enterprise, if not the hegemony of scholarly authority, generating heated debate over the relationship between memory and history, past and present (Perks & Thomson, 2006). Amid the groundswell of interest in recent decades among humanities scholars in addressing ecological issues and crises, oral historians have been ‘listening on the edge’ (eg. Cave & Sloan, 2014), gathering discourse on social-environmental problems grounded in stories of lived experience. The documentation and interpretation of life narratives can be viewed as instrumental, insofar as they shed light on the significance of storytelling context. As historian Stephen Sloan wrote:

[M]oments of crises or disaster can offer an environment when the larger weaknesses or strengths of a society are quite visible … rendering quite clearly societal, political, cultural and economic realities that may not be as obvious during periods of comparative tranquillity (Sloan, 2014, 265).

My research explores moments of extreme weather experience and climate perception in a bid to illuminate not only how climate shapes culture, but also how culture shapes climate. Through the spontaneity of oral narrative, the animated interchange of dialogue and the compulsion to ‘share authority’ when working with living memory (Frisch, 1990), how might we broaden and deepen the national climate conversation ‘beyond’ the science?

This chapter argues for the significance of the cultural and historical dimensions of climate (cf. Hulme, 2015), while exploring the power and application of oral history to shed light on the interpretive problems of climate change.³ Such problems have been branded ‘wicked’, a term anthropologist Steve Rayner (in Hulme, 2009, xxi–xxii) qualifies as ‘a way of describing problems of mind-bending complexity, characterized by “contradictory certitudes” and thus defying elegant, consensual solutions’. In this respect, oral history research can help us understand the tensions implicit in the ways experience, memory and history act on lives over time. For even as oral history can mediate change or promote a more widely shared historical consciousness, oral tradition may form a source of resistance to it (Frisch, 1990). This facet alone serves as a constant reminder of the density of life stories as cultural artefacts – and, arguably, it affords opportunity. As historian Marjorie Shostak notes: ‘It is just this tension – the identifiable in endless transformation – that is the currency of personal narratives, as they reveal the complexities and paradoxes of human life.’ (2006, p. 392)

Indeed if, as Australian historian Tim Sherratt wrote, ‘climate and culture create each other across a shifting, permeable frontier’ (2005, 4), then those words form a near-maxim for the dynamics of research on which this writing draws. An extensive oral history collection was conducted in rural Australia for Museum Victoria, the state’s premier cultural institution, from 2004 to 2007 – a series of annual recordings with twenty-two members of wheatbelt communities dotted across the semi-arid Victorian Mallee.⁴ This was a period that became known as the millennium drought, which peaked in 2006–7 and some scientists deemed the ‘worst drought in 1,000 years’ (Vidal, 2006). Discursive themes emerged early in these history recordings: of drought anchored in the celebratory remembrance of past survival; of uncertainty as ongoing change in the Australian countryside posed a threat to Mallee livelihoods; and of putative adaptation as local communities sought solace in a historicized capacity to cope with trying social-environmental conditions.

Meaning is seldom static, however, for memory is innately revisionist. Fortuitously, the timing of the research coincided with a momentous shift in Australian public awareness of climate change. That shift, to me, formed a moment of big history – elevating how people live with stories over time. The Mallee Climate Oral History Collection thus captured significant moments of reflection and self-reflexivity on the meaning of drought, revealing contestation over expertise and experience as inherently partial forms of knowledge, exposing the core interpretive problems of climate change. Despite shifts in climate change perception, each Mallee oral history represented a historical, battler narrative of endurance – revealing both livelihoods and identities at stake.

Thus, this chapter examines the notion of the self-preservative power of narrative and oral tradition for a rural culture under threat. Framed by discourse analysis and the ethnographic techniques of cultural journalism and anthropology, each of which seeks to comprehend the world in the interviewees’ own terms (Bird, 2005), it allows space for the richness of detail that oral history offers – illuminating the other types of history that oral stories can tell, and their distinctive transference at the interstices of history, biography, culture and place. Amid divisive debate over rural futures in Australia, this work underscores how strongly conceptions of climate are shaped by historical narratives of identity, in this case forming both a cultural legacy and a shield from anxieties about the future. In the face of imminent and immense change, many people in the dryland Mallee have been gearing up to endure more.

Endurance

In the late twentieth century, the development of climate science has brought undeniable evidence that global warming is altering the Earth’s climate. Attempts to assemble a ‘big picture’ of global risk has manifested as a polarising moral and political dispute over human agency, both within and outside of the scientific community. Since the 1980s at least, as historian William Stevens noted (1999), public debate over whether global warming was human-induced was cast as a dispute between two positions: the doubters and the believers. Early in the twenty-first century, across the globe there appeared to have been a rapid rise in the number of believers. This ‘history of the present’ formed the backdrop for this research.

Ideas of aberrance have been common to most ways of thinking about drought throughout the modern period of Western culture – and formed the forefront of the research. Insofar as ideas about nature represent an interplay of physical and social forces, the social construction of drought in Australia has been shaped by an at-times brutal social and environmental history that commenced on this continent at the climax of the Industrial Revolution – a 200-year struggle to ‘green’ a drought-prone, brown land (Barr & Cary, 1992). In that context, drought has been apprehended as a temporal shock, exciting horror, alienation and dread. As art historian Roslynn Haynes wrote, ‘memories of drought and fear of its recurrence have stalked the collective memory for two hundred years’ (1998, 251).

Despite a growing awareness of Australia in biophysical terms, the drama of aridity still grips the popular imagination: drought makes national news headlines today much as it did a century ago (West & Smith, 1996). Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology records since the 1860s can show a ‘severe’ drought has occurred in Australia, on average, once every eighteen years (Lindesay, 2003); conversely, the longest sequence of years Australia has been relatively free of drought is but eleven years (Heathcote, 2000). Yet as government scientist John Williams lamented during the millennium drought, the Australian psyche remains ‘dominated by dreams of water’ and drawn to notions of drought-proofing the land (Williams, 2003, 40). The editors of Beyond Drought, Australia’s foremost anthology on the topic, took that idea one step further. Linda Courtenay Botterill and Melanie Fisher argued a more sophisticated climate literacy was an overdue aspect of ‘learning to be Australian’. ‘Ideally,’ they wrote, ‘the term “drought” itself should be struck from the national language and replaced with “climate variability” – or perhaps not be the subject of discussion at all!’ (2003, 3)

In contradistinction, exploring life stories about drought as cultural artefacts can open the door to a nuanced historical approach. Droughts – like floods, bushfires and cyclones and yet distinct in terms of time, space and mythology – have ‘punctuated’ Australian rural, regional and national cultural histories (West & Smith, 1997). ‘Drought’ has played a role in the construction of a ‘harsh’ and ‘unpredictable’ climate and in the mythologising of rural battlers, shaping foundational narratives of struggle and hope. As sociologists Brad West and Philip Smith wrote, drought retains ‘a unique place among Australian natural disasters as the generator of a national solidaristic narrative’ (1997, 205). The concept of drought to which I refer, therefore, is a cultural term. Through an examination of how the past shapes present understandings of climate, drought can be viewed as a concept whose primary connotations are less related to rainfall than to an overarching, mythic narrative of endurance.

Remarkably, for a country where the effects of isolation, landscape and colonialism have been invoked repeatedly as explanations of Australian character (Gillen, 2002), there was little published on drought as a cultural concept when I began this research in 2003 – in stark contrast to the swell of interest in the topic since (eg. Botterill & Fisher, 2003; McKernan, 2005; Sherratt, Griffiths & Robin, 2005). Sherratt (2005) wrote that, until recently, even historians neglected to take seriously the topic of Australian climate. He noted Geoffrey Blainey’s lament in 1971 that although climatic events such as drought have shaped ‘some of the most dismal eras of our history’, the influence of climate on Australian history has been ‘largely unstudied’ (3). Climate, Sherratt continues, was instead ‘often imagined as the backdrop against which history is played out’. Further, in Cultural History in Australia, Griffiths outlined a dominant sense of causality in Australian historiography, which runs from nature to culture. Nature has often been thought to be the ‘hard, physical, earthy, empirical reality against which culture defines itself’ (Griffiths, 2003, 67).

Recording oral histories on drought puts ways of thinking about climate and identity front and centre. Indeed, the approach I took to the Mallee was concerned first with how meaning is created, rather than simply what the meaning is. Perhaps it was an approach born of necessity, for there was and remains but a handful of ethnographic studies on the Australian lived experience of climate (the prominent exception is Stehlik, Gray & Lawrence, 1999). Yet where recollections of a ‘golden age’ of agriculture still loom large in Australian rural historiography (Davison & Brodie, 2005), oral history presents a means to explore the tensions between the rural past and present.

Drought ‘makes who we are’

In Victoria, the most intensively settled of Australian states, the northwest corner is the most sparsely populated region, with the lowest annual rainfall (Lumb, 1987). In counterpoint, it is an ultra-productivist landscape – a region driven by forces of capital accumulation and engaged in ever-larger-scale industrial agriculture. The Victorian Mallee covers 39,300km², or about one-sixth of the state.⁵ Up to one million hectares is put in dryland (or rain-fed) crops each year, ‘fed’ on an annual ‘average’ of 200 to 500 millimetres of rain (Department of Primary Industries Victoria, 2007). Here ‘productive land’ is considered ‘the backbone of the economy’ and about 2,000 dryla...