Division professor in history of technology Nina Wormbs has written the very interesting essay “I Still Do a Lot of Good” for the Rachel Carson Center Review on 23 May 2023.
In this piece, Nina discusses the frequently occurring instances of cognitive dissonance that emerge once one does critically engage with the climate crisis we are in right now. How do we justify the things we do and which we know will further harm the environment? How do we relate towards flying in academia? How large is the influence of economic thought in our own evaluations of these instances?
The Division’s PhD-Candidate Erik Isberg wrote an essay for Sveriges Radio P1 (Radio Sweden), about the question why throughout history, it was so difficult to realise potential technologies that fostered utopian promises – at least in theory. Below you find an English translation of his text that was originally published here on Sverigesradio’s website today on 20 February 2023 at 6am. You can also download the text as .mp3 under the same link!
Erik Isberg, historian
A misconception continues throughout the history of online doctors
Technology has utopian potential, but why is it so difficult to realise it? Erik Isberg is looking for an answer in the history of technological remote care.
One afternoon in Boston in 1876, physician Clarence John Blake saw a telephone for the first time. I imagine him gently picking up the phone and holding it to his heart, whereupon his friend Alexander Graham Bell, who had been showing his new invention, looked at him questioningly. Why didn’t he hold the phone to his ear, as was intended? They began to discuss what kind of device they had in front of them. Their notions of the phone differed. Where Graham Bell saw a means of communication, Blake saw a kind of electronic distance stethoscope. The possibilities, Blake said, were enormous. Around Boston, people would hold the phone to their chests and let their heartbeats travel through the newly drawn-out telephone lines, finally landing in a liaison center where Blake and his colleagues sat ready to listen and diagnose.
A couple of years later, Blake was forced to state that despite diligent attempts, he was “nowhere near” to get a good enough sound quality. There would never be a liaison centre. The patients pressed their phones to their chests, but Blake only heard noise.
The dreams of practicing care remotely, despite Blake’s failure, have hardly disappeared. Today, the collection of health data constitutes a billion-dollar industry, app companies offer doctor’s visits via video calls, where crackly telephone lines have been replaced with high-resolution front cameras. In 2016, the then government and Sweden’s municipalities and regions decided that Sweden will be the world’s best country when it comes to digital care. Communication technology has never, the agreement wrote, offered such great opportunities.
On TikTok, a large amount of followers can take part in KaisTheSurgeon’s attempts to perform surgeries remotely. With the expansion of the 5G network, the idea is that remotely controlled scalpels will be able to carry out operations with the patient in one country, and the surgeon in another. While waiting for human patients, KaisTheSurgeon is allowed to hold on to fruit. In his almost hypnotic clips, he elegantly dissects grapes, bananas and oranges without being in the room himself.
When KaisTheSurgeon fillets an orange that is in the room next door, the future seems for a while both bright and high-tech. But while utopian promises of technological revolutions are succeeding each other, many of healthcare’s central problems don’t seem to be going away at all; It concerns accessibility, equality, staff density. Why is it so difficult to realize the utopian potential of technology?
The physician and medical historian Jeremy A. Greene argues in his book The Doctor Who Wasn’t There. History, Technology and the Limits of Telehealth that one reason why those who have made grand promises of technological innovations often found it difficult to realize them is a one-eyed focus on technology itself. Just because a technology exists and works, it is not obvious that you know how it will be used, or who will benefit from it.
In the late 1800’s, it wasn’t just Blake who experimented with the telephone. Exactly what one would use it for was unclear. It was used for live broadcasts of concerts as well as for private conversations. Gradually, it became clear that the phone had created a new kind of room: where you could be physically apart but still close. The voice could be disconnected from the body. But the telephone also became a symbol of modernity’s anonymous and lonely existence, where thin telephone lines were the only thing that bound the isolated individuals together. In Franz Kafka’s The Castle, the telephone is the tool of faceless bureaucracy. Protagonist K watches in despair as the bureaucrats make their calls, but what is actually being said and who it is that says it, remains unclear.
In healthcare, during the first decades of the 1900s, the telephone came to have an opposite symbolism. Rather than marking distance, it became an expression of a modern and alert medical profession that was constantly present. A doctor who didn’t answer the phone was not only archaic, but also bad at his job. In the United States, the new doctor role was summed up with a slogan: The doctor is on call.
Over time, other communication technologies came into the picture. But while they often worked excellently, Greene shows how this still wasn’t enough for them to be long-term successful. He finds one such example in a pilot project in Harlem, New York, in the early 1970s. In poor areas of America’s major cities, it was not uncommon at this time for an area to share a television antenna, which was then connected by telephone cables to the households around it. A group of doctors in Harlem realized that these local cable networks could be used to organize video meetings, thus reaching a group of patients who were used to a racist care system and were reluctant to seek care.
A local telemedicine system began to take shape: film cameras were rigged up in assembly halls around Harlem and nurses who themselves lived in the area were on hand to assist. The cable network was owned by the residents themselves. Although the project was not perfect, it showed a way forward for a democratically anchored remote care, which put the needs of the most vulnerable at the center. But this was not enough. In 1977, the project was discontinued. State money was running out and local cable networks had begun to be bought up by major telecom companies, with the aim of creating a national television market. Economics, not technology, decided the outcome.
If everything had instead been just about the performance of the technology, the story would have been different. Then all it took was for Blake’s liaison center to work is a good enough sound quality and the video calls in Harlem had continued as long as there were patients. Our delight in spectacular technical solutions obscures the view, all that other stuff – money, people, knowledge – crowds into the background.
The path from Clarence John Blake’s heartbeat liaison center to KaisTheSurgeon’s viral fruit surgeries may not be as long as it might seem. They both represent a utopian view of technology, which captures the potential of new technology but at the same time misses everything that is around and that is necessary for the technology to work. After all, it doesn’t really matter if the phone can perceive one’s heartbeat if there is no doctor to call. The opposite of presence, recalls technology historian Hannah Zeavin, is not distance, but absence. In KaisTheSurgeon’s comments section, one of his followers writes laconically: “That orange probably gets better health care than me”.
—
Literature:
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air. A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Jeremy A. Greene, The Doctor Who Wasn’t There. History, Technology and the Limits of Telehealth (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Hannah Zeavin, The Distance Cure. A History of Teletherapy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
Sverker Sörlin (KTH Professor of Environmental History and member of the Swedish Climate Council 2018-2022), Maria Wolrath Söderberg (docent in rhetorics with a specialisation in climate adaptation, Södertörns högskola) and Nina Wormbs (KTH Professor of History of Technology) have published a highly commentated opinion piece in Dagens Nyheter on 25 September 2022. Following Sweden’s close parliamentary election results, which find the left and the right block head to head with a slight advantage for the right, the three authors try to situate necessary climate policy within a potential future right-wing government. In the following we post our English translation of the article.
Photo: Unsplash
Translation:
DN Debatt. “It is patriotic to protect the climate”
It looks like that we are getting a government with low ambitions and bad premises to achieve the climate goal. But all is not lost. The person who searches through the parties’ fundamental ideological values can actually find something to build on – in all four parties. A smart leader does best when listening. To the person’s own conscience, to science and to the electorate – write three researchers.
In the past it was difficult for Sweden to live up to its reputation as a pioneering country for environmental policy. Just one out of 16 environmental goals set by the Riksdag/Parliament were met. Every year since 2018 the Swedish Climate Council has stated, that decided policies were inconclusive, and that Sweden belongs to the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, with an emission per citizen twice as high as the global average.
Emissions need to shrink with more than 10% per year, thus most in the next few years, for Sweden to have a chance to keep within the national emissions-budget specified in the Paris Climate Agreement. Before the pandemic hit, the rhythm of reduction was 1-2%. Nearly 2000 researchers recently have demanded that climate policy should be drastically sharpened.
This difficult situation has been drastically exacerbated by the election of the Swedish parliament. It looks like we are getting a government with parties which, according to several studies, have the lowest ambitions and the worst premises for reaching the climate goal.
The Moderates (M), Christian Democrats (KD) and Liberals (L) have put all their political weight into the electrifying campaign and they show no signs to reevaluate, even though we are witnessing skyrocketing prices. They do not want to offer adjustments to Swedish way of life, even though science is unified in saying that personal and societal transformations are necessary.
But isn’t there nevertheless a possibility for a powerful climate policy with the new government? We do not ask this question of changing the reasoning of a government without being unsettled by the possibility that climate politically invaluable years could be lost. This gives us the moral right, independently of the parties forming the government, to push that Sweden takes responsibility.
Big and durable political changes cannot happen during a conflict between the parties’ fundamental ideological values. Therefore we have evaluated those under the question whether they can be used – by smart and responsible leaders – to form the parties towards work on reforms. This is an urgent task.
We presume that the governing parties are not hypocritical, but that M, KD, and L actually want to achieve the climate goals they themselves have been involved in deciding. Hence it would be smart from the Moderates to link up to their conservative heritage and underscore that nature is not only a resource for the industry, but also has spiritual and national value. The conservative tradition highlights personal responsibility over the generations and that there are higher things other than material gains.
Even those who usually focus on ownership and entrepreneurship have something to pick up here. The business community is already criticising the right-wing parties for their unwillingness to see Sweden take the lead, most recently in the petition of 227 Swedish companies ahead of the election.
The Christian Democrat’s climate policy so far was messy and inconsistent. Agriculture is highlighted as already climate-smart (a puzzling exaggeration). Transition work is supposed to happen in other countries. They see a rising electricity usage unavoidable in Sweden.
But Christian values have a lot to offer. Christian Democratic parties on the continent like to emphasise the idea of solidarity: that you cannot unilaterally take advantage of the limited resources of the atmosphere just because you are a rich country. The creation should be managed for the good of all. Older generations need to think about younger ones. Christian values show special consideration with the people suffering and weak. Ideological conditions for being cautious thus exist.
A key point in liberalism is that one’s freedom should not inflict upon the freedom of others. The liberals’ climate policy is more ambitious than those proposed by the Moderates and Christian Democrats. L takes the climate crisis serious, but their hopes into techno-fixes, bio-fuel and CO2-captureing are unrealistic. Many of their favourite technologies take decades to materialise and it is not probable that they can be scaled up to the degree necessary.
To join freedom with responsibility is part of liberalism’s understanding of freedom, for example by living modestly. John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt have warned against the barbaric circumstances, which lurk around the corner if we do not manage to create a sustainable society, which in turn can only achieve legitimacy if it can be combined with justice, as the Paris Climate Agreement presumes. But in our time, liberalism’s understanding of freedom has been pushed into the direction that one’s freedom is to choose what one wants. Such a position does not at all guarantee that the planet could be preserved.
Within the government base, the Sweden Democrats stand out. They deny climate science and claim that “Sweden has no climate crisis”. They want to shift responsibility for the large Swedish emissions to other countries where it is envisaged that corresponding emission reductions can be made at a lower cost. The Sweden Democrats want to reduce electricity prices and prices for fossil fuels, remove the reduction obligation and the aviation tax, the very driving forces that the progressive business community wants to maintain and strengthen in order to speed up the transition.
Support can thus be found in the values that once bestowed on us conservative and liberal parties: solidarity, care for the neighbour, love of creation, freedom for all not to suffer from the freedom of choice of others.
SD draws from two irreconcilable myths: that Sweden is the best and that this is a pity for us. None are true. For a responsible right-wing government it would be easiest to completely isolate SD in questions of climate policy. But if SD demands influence on the basis of its de facto position of power, the governing parties should appeal to the natural ideology that SD’s sister parties in eastern and southern Europe run, where their own “national nature” is nurtured as a unifying primordial force. Successful climate work would also reduce the risk of large climate migration, which SD wants to prevent.
In order to achieve that the Swedish climate policy does not fully lose contact with its goal, we have to think about the becoming government parties as open for development. They have so far more or less ignored research and facts. At the same time, nine out of ten Swedes think the climate is an important question which influences them. There are also many in M, KD, and L who really want to see a sustainable future.
Regarding the climate question it is not the people that deceive, but politicians who deceive the people. Therefore, they should listen to their consciousness and take responsibility in regard to this fateful question. There is also support to be found in the value that once gave us conservative and liberal parties: solidarity, care for your neighbour, love towards creation, freedom for all to avoid suffering from the freedom of choice of others. The argument is not only that we all deserve that the climate goal can be reached and promises been kept (like with the saying “pacta sunt servanda”, pacts should be kept). The parties should also be positively surprised, to get sympathy and to be able to develop a long-lasting greener right-wing policy. The parallel is of course the Reinfeld-government’s wise triangulation of welfare policy. The new Moderates took over their opponents’ best policy, safety for everyone, and called it their own.
This is just the beginning. After that it should be clarified that Sweden listens to science (which is patriotic) and that we shape policies in accordance to research. Then Sweden does not need to be embarrassed amongst climate-progressive Europe.
Nina Wormbs, professor in history of technology at the division, has published a chapter together with Elina Eriksson (KTH Skolan för elektroteknik och datavetenskap) and Maria Wolrath Söderberg (Södertörn) about the debate on flying in academia. This chapter with the title “Exceptionalism and Evasion: How Scholars Reason About Air Travel” is part of the edited volume “Academic Flying and the Means of Communication” by Kristian Bjørkdahl and Adrian Santiago Franco Duharte (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
Abstract:
Understanding how scholars reason about their own flying habits is important when dealing with the problems of large emissions from academic air travel. This study is based on a travel habits survey with scholars at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. KTH has relatively high emissions from air travel, but at the same time, it has a high profile in matters of sustainability and a lot of research related to this theme. One can therefore assume a high degree of knowledge about the climate crisis and the climate impact of various actions. It is also plausible that KTH scholars meet special expectations to be role models and that practices in conflict with their teaching can have consequences for the public confidence in the university. In this study, we look at how scholars reason about how emissions from their flying could be reduced. Their responses display a spectrum of varying attitudes, from climate scepticism to a commitment to radical transformation, with the majority in between, either suggesting different types of concrete changes or invoking arguments to justify the status quo. The proposed interventions, several of which are ingenious and wise, can guide university managements to strategies that have support from employees. The more reluctant arguments point to cultural and discursive habits that must be understood and met in an empathetic way.
I am spending a long weekend with my parents in the Lower Rhine region, not far from the Ruhr area. It is the end of August in Germany and, like much of Europe, the country is suffering from persistent heat and drought. It’s that “summer of the century” again. Record low water levels are being reported from the Rhine near Duisburg, the city where I was born. The media speak of a “historic low”. The Rhine and other rivers in Germany have exposed their Hunger Stones. These stones in the riverbed mark exceptional periods of drought over the last centuries. They remind of the people’s suffering during these times, and their reappearance should alert the following generations to the dependence of humans on their environment and make them aware of the abundance and the deprivations that nature holds in store.
The last historic low on the Lower Rhine near Duisburg was just four years ago, in 2018. How can and how do we want to deal with the fact that natural events that we have long considered extraordinary are occurring at ever shorter intervals? In 2002, the people bordering the river Elbe experienced the “flood of the century”. Only last year, in 2021, a “century flood” hit the Ahr Valley. When such “century events” occur at intervals of decades, the extraordinary becomes commonplace. The residents of the flooded villages in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate worry now that they have fallen into public oblivion after the first large wave of donations. Even a catastrophe, it seems, can be gotten used to.
The concept of the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” refers to this habituation effect. A “shifting baseline” can be translated to a changing reference. Our ideas of the ordinary or normal change over time because our references change. The two-year Covid-19 pandemic has made us practice some new behaviors, such as wearing face masks and keeping our distance, which now seem normal to us. The ongoing war in Ukraine has brought with it the fear of a creeping acceptance or even numbing of the European population. The war situation becomes normal. Likewise, in times of global climate change, we experience environmental changes as normal that previous generations experienced as extraordinary, extreme or catastrophic.
The originator of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome, Canadian fisheries expert Daniel Pauly, had such long-term environmental changes in mind when, in the 1990s, he described his observation that each new generation of fishermen along the North American coast was hauling in smaller and smaller catches over the course of a century. Instead of questioning it, they accepted their situation. The overfishing of the oceans rose to new dimensions obvious, but the fishermen’s concern did not. Taken together, Pauly’s observations were symptomatic of one finding: those most affected by an environmental condition were most accommodating.
Pauly used the medical term “syndrome” to describe his diagnosis that people are able to normalize extreme situations relatively quickly. What we consider ordinary or normal is not naturally given but derived from the lived context. Normality needs a frame of reference. Every generation experiences the situation into which it is born as normal. Poverty and war can seem as normal as can peace and prosperity. A life expectancy of roughly 40 years was just as normal in Germany around 1880 as roughly 80 years are today.
The “baseline” designates the respective reference. We measure and evaluate our situation in spatial and temporal comparison. We compare our economic power not with the countries of the Global South but with our European neighbors. Our temporal baseline is our lifetime or generational time, which is commonly measured in 30-year periods. Our reference is usually our own childhood. The baseline of my generation is the 1960s, 70s and 80s. “Everything was better back then” means that the 1970s were best. And vice versa: despite all its problems, every generation wants to believe that it lives in the best of all possible worlds.
In addition to lived normality, statistical normality is an expression of our baselines shifting over time. The average, the mean, is calculated from data collected over specific periods of time. Here, too, the reference values are constantly being newly agreed upon. The “summer of the century” is a statistical entity. It states that, on average, one summer in every hundred will be extremely hot and dry. When we speak of the “warmest summer on record”, we mean records that make it possible to form mean values in a meaningful way. Those systematic weather records have been around for 150 years since the late 19th century. When we speak of the “two-degree target”, we mean limiting global warming, i.e., the global average temperature increase, to 2 degrees Celsius “since industrialization”. A period of about 250 years serves as our baseline. Likewise, the zero point of gauge is not the lowest point in the Rhine’s riverbed, but the geographical location at which the water level gauge is placed. Gauge zero is a convention.
Whether measured values or data reconstructed from ice cores and sediments, climate research has a wealth of reliable information to share that goes far beyond the time we have ourselves experienced. Yet again, what appears as statistically normal or deviant depends on the time period we refer to. If we were to extend the time span to include the entire history of the earth with its many warm and cold periods, our present climatic changes would be practically negligible. However, if we compare ourselves with the current stable warm period of the last 12,000 years, the Holocene, the climate change of the last 200 years becomes highly significant. What we perceive, and what we perceive as normal, depends on the baseline, the “climatological reference period”. Like the generational span, the climatological reference period encompasses 30 years. Average temperatures are formed over periods of 30 years. This reference period determines our “normal climate”. Until recently, our normal climate was derived from the period 1961 to 1990. In 2021, the reference period was updated to the new period 1991 to 2020.
It makes sense to update the statistical reference periods, just as it makes sense to use generational time as a moving temporal frame of reference. The new statistical reference period is more up-to-date and closer to the climate experienced by the living population. However, the mean temperature of the new reference period is more than 1 degree higher than the mean temperature of the previous reference period. Very warm years are statistically no longer noticeable, because all years in this new period were relatively too warm. Shifting baselines are important not only in social psychology but also in statistics. When the frame of reference for statistical observation changes, deviations can become invisible – they are statistically normalized.
On the one hand, acclimatization may be our best coping strategy to deal with climate change. It seems as if humans cannot experience situations as permanently extreme, nor can they remain on constant alert. Normalizing a situation by shifting the reference points is an individual and collective adaptation strategy. As a society, we delegate dealing with extremes to our institutions. We institutionalize preparedness for crises and disasters. “Climate adaptation” is one such collective strategy that envisages new social and technical solutions to normalize climate change.
On the other hand, we will have to cope with the fact that long-term and especially slow changes can neither be experienced nor easily recorded statistically. They fall out of our lived time, and as series of data they often remain abstract. They also fall outside of the short cycles of media and politics. Daily press and daily politics make the baseline the day, the month, the year, possibly the legislative period. Political and medial memories are short. Pauly perceived the habituation effect of the Shifting Baseline Syndrome as a problem because habituation makes it difficult to mobilize for political opinion-forming and political change. After all, the normal is not necessarily the desirable, at least not always and for everyone.
Stories and events are needed to raise awareness about slow changes such as climate change. Stories can renew memories beyond our own generation. Historical dimensions can become concrete to us like the Hunger Stones in the river Rhine, which allow unique insights into the lives of past centuries. And isn’t the bread and butter of our profession of historiography to narrate, analyze and comment on changes over long periods of time? Besides recollecting the past, future narratives and science fiction stories can project current questions and problems into the future to make them concrete for us. This was Rachel Carson’s plot device in her book Silent Spring. Finally, it will also be important to communicate long-term statistical trends. The World Meteorological Organization WMO recommended keeping the reference period 1961 to 1990 to assess long-term climate developments. For us not to acclimatize to new social, political and environmental climates too quickly, we need meaningful baselines.
Our colleague Anna Storm (now professor of technology and social change at Linköping University) has been involved in an intellectual exchange with the state-owned power company Vattenfall about the future of Ågesta Nuclear Power Plant in the context of its decommissioning in the magazine NyTeknik.
In Anna’s first article from 28 July 2022, she displays her consternation by the fact that Sweden’s first nuclear power plant (1963-1974) was already being dismantled, disregarding demands for making this cultural heritage of modern Sweden accessible to a wider audience via the cooperation with musea and heritage scholars. Especially in the case of the iconic control room, Anna objected to the practice of the company.
Five days later, on 02 August, Melker Drottz, the acting head of decommissioning of Ågestaverket from Vattenfall, published a response to Anna in the same magazine. In his eyes, Vattenfall did simply, what they were legally obliged to do. Since the control room, among other facilities, would be an irradiated environment, he objected to Anna’s wishes for creating a cultural venue from this heritage site. Furthermore, he pointed to the various other ways, Vattenfall would contribute to the memory of the Ågesta plant.
One day later, on 03 August, Anna responded by stating that future generations also need the actual sites as witnesses of their cultural history. In her understanding, photographs and oral stories will not be enough.
Anna Storm
Here are full citations for this exchange:
Storm, Anna: “Ågestaverket – en unik kärnkraftsanläggning slängd i containrar”, in: NyTeknik, 2022-07-28, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/agestaverket-en-unik-karnkraftsanlaggning-slangd-i-containrar-7035908 [2022-08-09].
Drottz, Melker (operativ chef för nedmontering och rivning av Ågestaverket, Vattenfall): Replik “Vi är skyldiga att montera ned Ågestaverket”, in: NyTeknik, 2022-08-02, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/vi-ar-skyldiga-att-montera-ned-agestaverket-7035985 [2022-08-09].
Storm, Anna: Slutreplik “Det hade varit möjligt att behålla kontrollrummet från Ågestaverket”, in: NyTeknik, https://www.nyteknik.se/opinion/det-hade-varit-mojligt-att-behalla-kontrollrummet-fran-agestaverket-7036016 [2022-08-09].
You can read and even listen to the full text on the Aeon-Website. Here is a small extract from Erik’s piece:
The recently resurfaced planet, I argue, can be traced back to fantasies like Richardson’s. Contemporary planetary governance relies on a specific trajectory of planetary monitoring. Even though efforts to map and measure global space have a far longer history – not least as a primary vehicle of Western colonialism and imperialism – the efforts to monitor and govern planetary dynamics have also relied on a particular history of knowing, seeing and measuring the planet. Thinking of the planet as an interconnected system required quantified and centralised approaches as well as a wide set of scientific instruments and technologies. A specific kind of planet was able to emerge, not by itself, but through the interconnected histories of geopolitics, technology and grand visions of planetary monitoring.
It is no news that we are in a situation of climate crisis right now. Temperatures are going wild in many places of the earth. Already since March a severe heat wave struck Pakistan and India, affecting hundreds of millions of people. In the Pakistani city of Nawabshah a high temperature of 49.5 °C was measured. In the meantime, people have to pay more and more worldwide to get food onto their tables, while “over 2 billion people live in water-stressed countries”. The Great Barrier Reef, giving home to a unique biotope and one of the natural wonders of the earth has recently suffered a mass bleaching event and will most probably be gone soon. The situation is not coincidental as it is a clear result of accelerated humanmade climate change.
A recent update from the World Meteorological Organisation puts this into perspective. It says that there is a “50:50 chance of global temperature temporarily reaching [the] 1.5°C threshold in [the] next five years”. According to the Paris Climate Agreement from 2015, the 1.5°C threshold contained severe but somewhat manageable consequences of anthropogenic climate change. Many countries of the world had ratified this agreement, and ostensibly made it their goal to curb emissions in an effort to avoid a collapse. But instead and despite the Covid-19-recession, global CO2-emissions have been at an all-time high in 2021. The trajectory shows far beyond 1.5°C.
While a temporary increase in global temperature by 1.5 °C does not qualify as a permanent temperature increase, it nevertheless represents a looming cornerstone towards mass extinctions and the threatening of the foundations upon which human existence depends upon. It seems like the chance to act had been forfeited.
Susanna Lidström (researcher at KTH), Tirza Meyer (postdoc at KTH) and former division’s PhD-colleague Jesse Peterson (now postdoc at Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet) have published an exciting opinion piece about our approach towards the ocean in the context of climate change and increased pollution. The authors argue that the health metaphor would be problematic in regard to describing the state of oceans.
The state of the ocean is increasingly described in terms of ocean “health.” The Implementation Plan for the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development describes the aim of the decade as achieving “a sustainable and healthy ocean” and refers to the ocean’s “health” throughout, including references to an overall “decline in ocean health” [Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), 2020], p. i, 6. Likewise, Sustainable Development Goal no. 14 aims “to achieve healthy and productive oceans” and “to improve ocean health” [United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), 2015, p. 23, 24]. In addition, scientific studies from all disciplines routinely use the same metaphor, including statements such as “the many benefits that society receives from a healthy ocean” (Duarte et al., 2020, p. 39), “the health of marine ecosystems” (Hagood, 2013, p. 75), and the “importance of ocean health” (Borja et al., 2020, p. 1).
However, we argue that the health metaphor (Suter, 1993; Jamieson, 1995) continues to be imprecise, ambiguous, and problematic. We suggest that the idea of ocean “health” misrepresents the Earth’s history of ever-changing and adapting ecosystems through time, wrongly suggests that ocean health is an apolitical and objective state and obscures how conditions in the ocean are irreversibly intertwined with human activities.
Erik Isberg: Will the climate lead Jeff Bezos to vote left?
Climate scientist Johan Rockström and sustainability analytic Owen Gaffney have presented in their new book not only their take on the planet’s geological and biological history, but also on human development and future solutions for the climate crisis. It is a mixture of popular science, civilisation history, and climate journalism, while at the same time presenting like an eco-political manifest. The book came out last year in English in combination with a Netflix-documentary. David Attenborough contributed to the film as speaker. Greta Thunberg wrote the foreword to the successful book.
As such it is a typical example of its time, as it combines the relationship between climate science, history and politics. Dipesh Chakrabarty said that scientists of earth systems, like Johan Rockström, would be the historians of our time, who write within a new narrative, combining the planet, life, and human history in one story. This would be an adequate description of the book at hand. It is divided into three parts: first it focuses on planetary and human history, second it elaborates on climate science and the situation of science today, and third it offers solutions to deflect the climate catastrophe.
Its main argument is that humanity would have developed in different distinct episodes, just like earth. Suddenly, the growth of unicellular organisms and today’s digitisation process look alike: both have swept over the world, without anything someone could have done about it. This would be a reductionist and well-known narrative. Yuval Noah Hararis “Sapiens” and David Christians “Berättelsen im allt” also use it. Humanity becomes a passenger in a journey, which someone else has determined. Industrialisation, colonialism and capitalism were processes working out of themselves, while humanity would watch from the stands and wonders. For example, the steam machine would have involuntarily started the industrialisation, as ostensibly all other options would have disappeared as James Watt started his machine for the first time.
A similar worldview can be seen in the second part of the book, which presents a possible option to avert an climate catastrophe. Although many of the proposed measures, such as higher capital tax, state investments in green technology, and closing the gap between rich and poor, were not presented as a part of a political discussion apart from the goal of society’s change towards a green future, these proposals can nevertheless be called leftwing.
The hope is portrayed that everyone, from Jeff Bezos till Extinction Rebellion could unite for the common goal of what Rockström and Gaffney call “Jordresan” (Earth’s Journey) towards sustainable “Jorden 5.0” (Earth 5.0.).
The will to see future climate policy already as a step in earth’s development, rather than a part of an ideological conflict, leads to oblivion towards power relations and material interests within the corresponding political discussion. Maybe in reality, planetary and social change work according to another set of rules, rather than in the simplistic way the two authors present it. Rockström and Gaffney provide an acute reminder of the crisis we are in, but are probably wrong within their deterministic argumentation.
