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”Två fel gör inte ett rätt” – How China is taken as an argument to not act for the climate

Nina Wormbs, Professor of History of Technology at the division, has published an article relevant in the context of the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter on 17 November 2021. In the following we will present a short summary of its main points in English, while you can read the original in full length and in Swedish here.

Profilbild av Nina Cyrén Wormbs

Summary:

When climate issues are discussed in Sweden, China is often taken as a comparison. In fact, people use China as an argument to not act in regard to climate change.

During the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow, the focus was also on China, since the country is highly invested in coal both at home and abroad. It is obvious that we need to work with China together, since its emissions are enormous. Despite this, China has recently undertaken steps towards a sustainable society.

In particular, it has become normal to point to China in a debate, if one does not want to engage with those questions the current climate crisis is bringing up. This can include coal power plants but also a justification for flying to Mallorca or Thailand for fun, because Chinese tourists could be seen in Gamla Stan. In order for this practice not to spread further, we have to understand why those arguments are not valid and what they result in.

First, it makes no sense to motivate one’s own harm-doing by arguing that someone else would produce even more harm.

Secondly, the comparison with China’s emissions are an eternal but nevertheless problematic way of relativising one’s own influence. Because you are always able to find someone who produces more emissions than yourself. More than Sweden. More than Europe. Of course it is important how much we emit as humanity, but the China-argument suggests that there would be some form of give- and take, like as if life would be a zero-sum-game. Instead, it is the opposite: every ton of CO2 counts.

Additionally, the China-argument points to an understanding, in which one does not have to do a tiny bit of right, while someone else does so much wrong. Maybe this argument is spreading, because more and more people repeat it. People in Sweden have limited knowledge of China. China is bigger, has more people, and all of them are striving towards a better life. That’s why it might be easy to point to China, in order to relativise one’s own responsibility.

Thirdly, China is often portrayed as an enemy in Swedish media. It can therefore be seen as a nation different from Sweden, being imagined like the negative “other”.

Why are the USA never mentioned in this context, despite their higher historical and per-capita-emissions (IPCC and carbonbrief.org)? Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are also hardly ever named, even though they are leading the per-capita-emissions statistics.

If one looks into the emissions of production chains of consumer goods, of which a lot are produced in China but used somewhere else like in Sweden, the territorial basis for emission-calculations seems off.

Furthermore, within most individual nations the gap between rich and poor gets bigger, which means that the individual emissions are not what the average suggests, but rather high if you are rich, or low if you are poor. Therefore, it would be a great idea to change the focus from nations to individuals, like Chancel and Piketty suggested in 2015.  This makes even more sense, since the richest 10% of the world’s population accounted for 50% of emissions since 1990. Those 10% can be found in every country, but they are not evenly distributed. More so, since 40% of those live in the USA, while only 10% live in China. It might be a cold shower for a Swedish discussant that every Swede with a monthly income of over 27,500 SEK belongs to this group.

This is not being written to support China’s climate policies. Instead, it is to show that China is not relevant if one wants to discuss a domestic climate action plan, as the relationship between being rich and producing lots of emissions is evident – and Sweden is one of the richest countries on earth.

An Environmental History of Italian Migrations

Former colleagues at our division Roberta Biasillo and Daniele Valisena have written together with Claudio de Majo a new article in Modern Italy. The article with the title Environments of Italianness: for an environmental history of Italian migrations” is part of a special issue edited also by the three of them about the concepts of italianness, environment, and socio-natures.

Check out this great piece, which might lead to a new trend in environmental history!

Abstract:

Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Daniele ValisenaAntarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of materially re-imagining landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.

BIASILLO, Roberta • European University InstituteAbstract in Italian:

Le forme di mobilità degli italiani rappresentano un aspetto fondamentale della storia della penisola, ma non solo, poiché le comunità italiane hanno raggiunto tutti i continenti, fatta eccezione per l’Antartico. Nel periodo tra il 1876 e il 1976, la ‘diaspora italiana’ ha coinvolto più di 26 milioni di persone, facendo dell’Italia uno degli stati che più ha contribuito al fenomeno della Grande Emigrazione europea. A questi dati bisogna altresì aggiungere quelli relativi alle mobilità preunitarie e a quelle verso le colonie, argomenti inclusi tra i saggi qui raccolti. Adottando pertanto la prospettiva della storia ambientale delle migrazioni e muovendo dalle ricerche presentate nei singoli saggi, i curatori propongono una sintesi delle caratteristiche socio-ambientali che hanno influenzato e caratterizzato l’emergere di identità italiane all’estero, ovvero forme di italianità. Gli articoli contenuti in questo numero monografico illustrano come italiani e italiane abbiano trasformato e utilizzato gli ambienti naturali stranieri per ricostruire le proprie piccole patrie, i loro paesi. Allo stesso tempo, questi nuovi paesaggi dell’italianità hanno contribuito a formare identità ibride, collettive e individuali.

Marco Armiero and Cecilia Åsberg Respond to the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity

Both EHL director Marco Armiero and Division guest professor Cecilia Åsberg was published in the 2020 summer issue of Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities. Ecocene is a digital, open-access, peer-reviewed, international, and transdisciplinary journal of the Environmental Humanities.The June issue of the journal wrapped sixteen articles from different authors under the title Environmental Humanists Respond to the World. Read the abstracts and find links to the open access articles below.

Abstracts

Beyond Nonpartisan Discourses: Radical Knowledge for Extreme Times
by Marco Armiero

The majority of scientists agree on climate change and on the most daunting environmental problems humans are facing today. Moved by a commendable desire to contribute to the solution of these problems, several scientists have decided to speak up, telling the scientific truth about climate change to decision-makers and the public. Although appreciating the commitment to intervene in the public arena, I discuss some limits of these interventions. I argue that stating the reality of climate change does not prescribe any specific solution and sometimes it seems faint in distributing responsibilities. I ask whether unveiling/knowing the truth can be enough to foster radical transformations. Can knowledge move people towards transformative actions if power relationships do not change?Various environmental justice controversies prove that even when science is certain—and this is rarely the case in that kind of controversies—knowing might be not enough in the face of power structures preventing free choices and radical changes. In the end of my article, I state that it is fair to recognize that scientists have done their parts, and it is now up to social movements to foster the radical changes in power relationships that are needed for transforming societies.

Keywords: Politicization, scientific consensus, radical transformations, truth, environmental justice

Visit the Environment & Society Portal to download and read to full article: Beyond Nonpartisan Discourses: Radical Knowledge for Extreme Times” | Environment & Society Portal


A Sea Change in the Environmental Humanities
by Cecilia Åsberg

As we are living through a transformative response to a viral pandemic, this think piece suggests a reimagining of the environmental humanities in the open-ended inventories of feminist posthumanities and the low trophic registers of the oceanic. Sea farming of low trophic species such as seaweeds and bivalves is still underexplored option for the mitigation of climate change and diminishing species diversity in the warming oceans of the world. The affordances of low trophic mariculture for coastal life and for contributing to society’s transition into climate aware practices of eating, socializing and thinking is here considered, and showcased as an example of the practical uses of feminist environmental posthumanities.

Keywords: feminist environmental humanities, feminist posthumanities, oceanic studies, low trophic theory

Visit the Environment & Society Portal to download and read to full article: “A Sea Change in the Environmental Humanities” | Environment & Society Portal


Full list to the open access articles in the Ecocene June issue
Ecocene Volume 1/ Issue 1/June 2020 

 

The ‘physiologization’ of skiing – new article from Daniel Svensson and Sverker Sörlin

Publication Cover(2018). The ‘physiologization’ of skiing: the lab as an obligatory passage point for elite athletes?. Sport in Society. Ahead of Print.

Slow on updates in the blog doesn’t mean slow on updates on the rest of the Internet! Doctor Daniel Svensson who defended at the Division in the end of 2016 and our Professor Sverker Sörlin recently got this article published: The ‘physiologization’ of skiing: the lab as an obligatory passage point for elite athletes?: Sport in Society: Vol 0, No 0

 

In The Pasteurization of France, Bruno Latour argued that the rise of hygiene was dependent on collaboration between Pasteur, the hygiene movement, scientists and others. He also pointed at the importance of obligatory passage points such as the Pasteurian laboratory, to ensure the scientization and rationalization of hygiene. This article argues that there has been a similar process in elite sports, a ‘physiologization’ where scientists, sport organizations and specialized coaches have transformed training from a deeply personal and experiential matter to something universal and scientific. Physiologists made the test lab an obligatory passage point for athletes who wanted to compete on the highest level. Through theories of sportification and science and technology studies this paper analyses the scientization of endurance sports.

Paper written by Katarina Larsen and Johan Gärdebo published!

Division researhcer Katarina Larsen together with Division doctoral student Johan Gärdebo recently got published in the International Journal of Enginering, Social Justice and Peace. Follow this link to read all about it: Retooling Engineering for Social Justice: The use of explicit models for analytical thinking, critical reflection, and peer-review in Swedish engineering education | International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace

Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives 

Considering the current state of global and American affairs re the environment in general and climate in particular, I think we can humbly hope that this special issue has come out when it did to contribute to the debate about mediating and narrating environmental issues through popular communication (from film, music and literature to FB, news and TV). /Miyase Christensen

(2018). Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives. Environmental Communication: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 1-6.

You better not miss that Environmental Communications recently published an article with big represenation from our Division. Our guest professor and researcher Miyase Christensen is the author of the article together with co-editors Anna Åberg, who defended at the Division in 2013, researcher Susanna Liström who is currently on parental leave in San Diego and researcher Katarina Larsen who among other things is in charge of our Higher Seminars.

You can access the article by going here : Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives: Environmental Communication: Vol 12, No 1

What should we think about the starving polar bear?

Authors: Justiina Dahl and Peder Roberts

Images of a starving polar bear foraging through trash in a rather green northern Canadian landscape recently went viral. Paul Nicklen of Sea Legacy, who recorded the footage, placed the suffering of this individual bear in the wider context of climate change, “to convey a larger message about how a warming climate has deadly consequences.” Reporting soon became more cautious and the bear was even presented as evidence of how the media keeps getting the Arctic wrong.

There is some truth in both positions. Climate change is affecting sea ice levels, and will almost certainly affect traditional bear habitats for the worse. But what contemporary discussions tend to overlook is that polar bear populations were stressed well before climate change became recognized as an issue. The 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, signed by all countries that have polar bear populations, was a specific response to a sense that polar bear numbers were in retreat due to recreational human hunting. All this raises a bigger question. What is it about this animal that makes it so symbolically powerful, and how has this shaped its conservation?

Photo taken from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42322346

From individual trophy hunting to international cooperation

Indigenous Arctic residents have long hunted polar bears. The long-term patterns of this subsistence hunt require a high degree of practical knowledge about polar bears and their ways – knowledge that comes from living in surviving in that same Arctic environment. Sport hunting, which was one of the more divisive questions when negotiating the 1973 Agreement, derives much of its appeal from the idea of conquest, the white person (usually but not always a man) who travels to a distant, exotic, and often inhospitable land and comes home with a trophy to prove his superiority. Much the same was true for those who worked in the Arctic and returned to their southern homes with a bear-skin souvenir.

Individual national governments started to impose their own bans on polar bear hunting from the late 1950s, motivated largely by evidence that populations were in decline. These motivations were later accompanied by a wider sense that the winds of public opinion were blowing green, symbolized by the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. The 1973 Agreement did two things. Firstly, it committed its five national signatories to a program of practical action by preventing polar bear hunting with a small number of designated exceptions, and to collecting more data to enable sound management. Secondly, it used the bears as symbols of their of “common will and desire to protect the whole of the Arctic natural environment”, as Norwegian environment minister Tor Halvorsen put it in his opening address to the final negotiating session.

The Agreement proved broadly successful in protecting polar bears from human hunting, and in focusing attention on the ecosystems upon which their survival depended. It did not however lead spill over into larger-scale Arctic environmental cooperation between the five circumpolar states, something Norway in particular desired. In the revision meeting of the parties of the Agreement five years after its ratification in 1981, the Norwegians attempted to enlarge the treaty again. Part of the reason was the political situation in Svalbard. Indeed, Erik Lykke from the Norwegian government delegation confided to a Canadian diplomat during the meeting that his government wanted a multilateral approach to Arctic environmental management because it worried about the USSR isolating Norway in a bilateral agreement over the sensitive Svalbard archipelago.

It was only when Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev made a now-famous speech in Murmansk in 1987, calling for a de-escalation of tensions in the Arctic, that space opened for this larger-scale multilateral environmental cooperation. The concept of “charismatic megafauna” offers one explanation for why even though the Arctic states succeeded in multilaterally protecting the polar bear, it took nearly twenty years to achieve this desired spillover effect.

A polar bear walking across a street in Churchill, Manitoba. The idea that a single bear can provide evidence of something as complex as climate change is being rejected, just as an image of a fat bear would not prove that climate change is a hoax. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press) Photo and caption taken from http://www.rcinet.ca

Charismatic megafauna

The history of the conservation of the polar bear is in many ways a classic example of charismatic megafauna – a term used to described animals whose combination of size, grandeur, and cultural resonance makes them ideal vehicles through which particular values or arguments can be advanced. Cultural resonance is not inherent in the animal: it is a human product that says at least as much about the people for whom the polar bear possesses meaning (and the culture they are part of) as it does about the bear itself. As a recent comment piece in Nature put it, charismatic megafauna are “large, interesting animals that the public — and donors — love.”

In the context of collective Western history with the polar bear, part of the emotional effect of the contemporary Nicklen footage comes from the incongruence of a majestic predator, king of an icy domain, being reduced to an emaciated bag of bones within a landscape defined by human presence (trash and a snowmobile). This is why Nicklen refers to polar bears as “unwitting mascots of climate change”, whose kingdom retreats with the sea ice. The conception of polar bears as vulnerable in turn relies upon a conception of humans as powerful. (This is perhaps why some at the 1981 meeting worried about the effect on public opinion in favor of bear protection if the bears caused too many human fatalities.) In relation to the success factors behind the polar bear treaty, we find it tempting also to wonder whether there is a parallel with the great whales.

The collapse of Antarctic numbers led to the collapse of the Antarctic whaling industry, and ultimately to an international moratorium on commercial hunting that was signed in 1982. In the process whalers have become demonized figures in many (though certainly not all) parts of the world, at the same times as that the whales themselves have ceased to be regarded as floating oil barrels and have even been regarded by some as possessing sentience. Banning whaling has proved much easier than banning the other activities that interfere with their habitats, from waste dumping to sonic pollution. In the same way, banning the commercial hunting of polar bears is far easier than addressing the underlying causes of anthropogenic climate change.

A polar bear watches her cubs on the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada. The bay is famous for polar bears, but their population is in decline. Picture and caption from nationalgeographic.com PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM MURPHY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

What should we make of the starving bear?

So what should we make of the starving bear? It’s clearly an image designed to evoke emotion, and there is not necessarily anything wrong with that. Climate change is an important issue that will affect polar bears in general – even if this individual bear might have been suffering from cancer rather than being the victim of retreating sea ice. What is more problematic is trying to draw overarching conclusions on polar bears in particular and the role of humans in the Arctic in general based on a single uncertain albeit charismatic data point. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which had a leading role in the negotiations for the 1973 agreement, is cautious about making its assessment of polar bear populations appear “more reliable than it really is”, despite considerable effort invested in surveying their numbers. This attitude echoes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reluctance to make aggressively specific predictions. That’s not an attitude that seems to have much traction in the current political and cultural moment.

While it can be hard to stomach, never mind witness, animals starve to death all the time for a million different reasons. Picture and caption taken from slate.com Photo: National Geographic

Poland on fire: voices from the provinces | Irma Allen in openDemocracy

The place in Warsaw where Piotr Szczęsny set himself on fire. Wikicommons/ Mateusz Opasiński. Some rights reserved.

There is agrowing atmosphere of hatred in which anyone who opposes the current governmentis labeled the ‘worst sort’, or even ‘Soviet murderers’.

Thursday October, 19 at 16.30: An ordinary day, an ordinary man stands on the steps of the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science. He is reading something through a megaphone to inattentive passers by. Just another protesting voice in the Polish capital. Except, once finished, this 54 year old man, who would become known for some time simply as Piotr S., then sets himself ablaze, performing an act of self-immolation to the sound of a song by ‘Chłopcy Placu Broni’ coming from a tape-recorder.

‘Freedom. I love and understand freedom. I don’t know how to give it up…’ On the ground lie strewn the pieces of paper from which he had been reading – a manifesto outlining 15 points of protest against the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS). Ten days later, on October 29, he dies in hospital. It begins to sink in that this was a decisive, considered and dramatic political act. Where at first the media and politicians stay largely silent, following his death they now rush to assess his sanity, his past and his intentions.

All this he foresaw. He openly admitted that he struggled with depression for eight years – but this was nothing to do with that, though he knew politicians would try to make it so. Depression does not equal derangement. So how should he be understood?

Read doctoral student Irma Allen’s full post here: Poland on fire: voices from the provinces | openDemocracy