0090 | September 23, 2019
Climate Change: What We’ve Learned
The podcast welcomes a new contributor, Sarah Bond, PhD, and the hosts reflect on their climate change discussion.
| C.T. WEBB: 00:19 | [music] Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age. The American Age podcast is not technically a professional podcast. None of us work for a large podcasting outlet, and we don’t have sponsors. That being said, we do do our best to make a professional podcast. That is we do our best to make the sound and quality of the podcast sound as good as something you might download from NPR or The Atlantic or any of the other various podcasting outlets that are out there. We didn’t quite reach that bar in this podcast as you’ll see. We had a technical difficulty that fried one of our audio feeds, and so we had to rely on our backup recording method which we use on all of our podcasts, which is recording over Skype. So this podcast, which I think was a great conversation and introduces you to one of our new co-hosts Sarah Bond, the quality isn’t going to be quite there. But for the most part, the conversation is discernible, and you should be able to pick up what’s being said. So as always, we very much appreciate you listening, and we will definitely get back to the quality that you expect in future episodes. Thanks very much. |
| C.T. WEBB: 01:36 | This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age, and I’m speaking to you from pretty hot and sunny Southern California. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 01:46 | Hi. This is Steven G. Fullwood. I’m the found– co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project; don’t want to take full control or credit for founding the Nomadic Archivists Project. I’m coming to you from Harlem, and it’s too hot. |
| S. RODNEY: 01:59 | I’m Seph Rodney. I’m a senior editor at the Hyperallergic arts magazine and recent author of The Personalization of the Museum Visit, and I’m coming to you from the South Bronx. |
| S. BOND: 02:14 | I’m Sarah Bond. Hi. I’m associate professor of history at the University of Iowa and a public historian who blogs and writes a lot about particularly ancient and medieval history. |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:29 | And where are you talking to us from, Sarah? Where are you today? |
| S. BOND: 02:33 | Oh, I’m in Iowa City, Iowa; steamy Iowa City, Iowa [laughter]. |
| C.T. WEBB: 02:38 | This is to remind our listeners that we practice what we like to call intellectual intimacy, which is giving each other the space and time to figure out things out loud and together. And as you probably surmised, we have an additional contributor today on the podcast, and who we hope is going to be with us for a while, but it’s sort of feeling everything out. And that’s Sarah Bond who you just heard from. So Sarah, do you want to tell us a little about your background and your specialty, and – I don’t know – why you’re here? Besides the fact that we invited you [laughter] and begged you to be here [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY: 03:14 | Yeah. That would be it. Yeah [laughter]. |
| S. BOND: 03:17 | Well, I know it might seem odd to have somebody who specializes in ancient history, but I actually specialize in a lot of social justice issues that transcend just the ancient world and look a lot at ancient slavery. I used to work at Monticello, which I’ll probably bring up another time or two, especially in future podcasts, that I became interested in social justice in part because I started as an archaeologist and excavating sites in Sicily. But it was really working at Monticello that I began to think about relationships between themes from antiquity and then themes from today, and how they have relationships, and how they have [inaudible] with each other, and how important it is to understand how the shaping of narratives today really then shapes how we see the past, and how we understand things. |
| S. BOND: 04:16 | So I think that I focus predominantly on a lot of issues around labor unions. My first book is called Trade and Taboo and was about how labor unionization in the ancient world allowed for ancient workers and artisans to have collective abilities to get good contracts and good pay and insurance. So a lot of the issues that I will probably discuss and bring into the podcast are issues that I’ve worked on in how they manifest within the ancient world. But I’m also very interested in those same issues today. So just because I wrote a book about ancient labor unions that also required me to do a whole lot of understanding of unionization and the industrial revolution and things that go far outside the premodern history world that I was trained in. So I guess I’m interested in all periods of history even if I specialized in Latin and Greek as my two best dead languages. |
| C.T. WEBB: 05:25 | It’s funny – so if I can make an observation – the degree to which that you felt you needed to justify your academic specialty that it’s relevant to the things that we’re doing today is an aspect of the academy. The fact that– I mean, of course– |
| S. BOND: 05:40 | Oh, I think– yeah. |
| C.T. WEBB: 05:42 | –of course, your expertise in that area is relevant today. Of course, it is. And of course, because you’ve studied something in depth means that you can bring that intelligence to a totally seemingly tangential issue. The fact that we– and you’re not alone in feeling the inclination to do that, right? I mean, this is something if you go to academic conferences, there’s so much tiptoeing around like, “Well, I haven’t done all eight languages in that time period, but I can possibly–” okay. We get it. It’s fine. So I appreciate the background. And when Seph– I mean, Seph and Sarah have– they work together at Hyperallergic. And when Seph recommended that Sarah might be someone that was interested, I laughed at the opportunity because I think contextualizing United States in historical sweep is something that’s sorely needed in all corners. So I’m very happy that you’re here. |
| S. RODNEY: 06:42 | Yeah. We all are indeed. All right. |
| S. BOND: 06:45 | I’m glad to be here. |
| C.T. WEBB: 06:46 | So we’re finishing our last podcast on climate change. And as the pattern we’ve kind of fallen into – and Sarah is going to weigh in when she feels like it – we like to kind of start with an overview, and we take particular issues, and we try come at those issues a little bit differently, and then we kind of do a final summation. So Steven or Seph, where are you guys at with the conversation, the topic? Have we learned anything? Have we become more frustrated [laughter]–? What do you guys think? |
| S. RODNEY: 07:23 | Well, I think that one of the things that this conversation has done for me is it– well, for one, it forced me to finally look at An Inconvenient Truth. I mean, that movie came out – I don’t know – like 20 years ago, and I hadn’t bothered to see it. And now I understand why it was such a big deal, and at the same time, why it was so reviled because in a way, like Steven said – I think the last time we talked about it – it is a kind of glorified TED talk. However, it does that thing that I think a lot of climate scientists wish they could do, which is it begins to set fire to public opinion and claim it and make people understand– and not make but encourage people to understand that what we’re talking about– and I like that people like Ocasio-Cortez says it this way, “We’re talking about a crisis. It’s a crisis that’s unfolding slowly, but it’s a crisis.” And I think that’s the sort of point of clarity I’ve come to through our conversation around climate change, and I don’t think I was there before. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 08:38 | So I was thinking similar about what you said– what I said about the TED talk, but I thought that the entertainment industry, and how we’ve been sort of inundated with all these movies around what happens when climate change happens that it’s a sort of– it’s a way to sort of get people desensitized to it; that it’s just inevitable. That’s what I kind of took from a lot of what we’ve been talking about related to climate change: that people feel that it’s inevitable; that they don’t have any part in it or feel like it’s sort of hopeless. So recycle, but what will it do? That kind of thing. I took that away from the argument. I was wondering how to– and I think I said this in another podcast. How do you make something important to people when it’s not on their plate? It’s not part of the daily diet. It’s not a part of the daily thing you do, right? I mean, I think a lot about recycling in areas where they’re food deserts. You’re just trying to eat. You’re trying to live every day. So how do you do that? So I think I took that from it, and I was thinking that climate change, even though this is our last episode, we could take it in a lot of other directions as well. So we can think about climate change as a way to– I like the fact that Sarah is here because then she could kind of bring in– okay. So was there anything comparable to the idea of climate change in the medieval space, anything at all? |
| S. BOND: 10:06 | The most well-known was just that simply it got– there is what we’re calling a mini ice age during the High Middle Ages that had a very global effect. And this was something that people noticed, obviously, that it was getting colder, and people wrote down in chronicles and in primary documents. But it wasn’t seen as something that could be resisted against, right? So a lot of the reactions that we hear are in many ways reverberated within the evangelical community today that when there are changes in the weather, that it must be because God is angry, right? I mean, there are a lot of narratives after 9/11 and have been many narratives after many environmental disasters as well from Christian communities that say, for instance, that this shows us that we’re simple people. That this is part of God’s wrath. And so we aren’t the agents. It’s God’s agency, and so we can’t do anything to combat it except for being less [sensible?]. And that’s a lot of the take within the Middle Ages as well. So I think it– |
| C.T. WEBB: 11:27 | Well, it affects us too. I mean, it affects secularists too. I mean, the Lisbon quake in 1755, which, basically, absolutely devastated the city, changed the direction of Rousseau’s philosophy, right? I mean, it happened on a Sunday. Not that he was a God-fearing man exactly, but that we are intimately affected and connected to the planet out of which we arose, right? And of course, as far as our responses to it go, to round out the initial sort of like where we are at in climate change, I tend to have, just by disposition, I think, a more sanguinary opinion of most things. And so climate change, I sort of feel like, well, we’re socially wired monkeys, and we’re not really dreaded figuring out what’s going to happen in the distant future. We’re good at assessing threats at the edge of the savanna. And we’re doing the best we can. But one of the things that came out in our conversation about– and that’s probably something that age has caused but– I was certainly less sympathetic about my fellows when I was younger. But one of the things that came out in our conversation, Steven and Seph, earlier, before you were with us Sarah, was that it’s very easy to be sanguine when my immediate future is not under threat, right? |
| S. RODNEY: 12:51 | Right. |
| C.T. WEBB: 12:52 | Like one of the analogies we– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 12:53 | Yeah. Absolutely. |
| C.T. WEBB: 12:54 | –talked about was population displacement is ancient, right? And that’s what will happen in climate change, right? The poorer will get fucked as they always have. And so I think it’s important for me, right? Not necessarily for you guys but for me to remember that and to hold onto that and to not be quite so zen-like about my sympathies for, “Well, we’re doing the best we can.” Well, we’re probably not doing the best we can. We probably can do a bit better for people that are going to suffer the most when sea levels rise; when water shortages continue to expand; when water tank supplies are contaminated. We can probably do better for the people in Flint. We can probably do better for the people in the Maldives or wherever it’s going to be swallowed by the ocean, so. |
| S. RODNEY: 13:49 | Well, maybe this is one of the things too that comes out of the whole climate thing discussion for us is realizing that the very things that are sort of endemic or most clearly descriptive of our species are our inability to plan past tomorrow, our sense of sort of clannishness and tribal affiliation– really making our politics what they are; lots of other things that I could name. These things all kind of get shown in greater relief for the climate change crisis because the climate change crisis makes it obvious that one of the things that we like to do, that we tend to do even before we actually begin to enact real social change in a way that we behave is we like to create fantasies about what the end looks like. So what Steven alluded to earlier, which is the spate of movies from, basically, the end of the ’90s to now that show us being destroyed in all kinds of [laughter] Hollywood fight ways like aliens coming down, tsunamis wiping out entire– |
| C.T. WEBB: 15:14 | Meteors, meteors– |
| S. RODNEY: 15:16 | –or meteors– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 15:16 | Volcanoes. |
| S. RODNEY: 15:17 | Exactly [laughter]– |
| S. BOND: 15:19 | Yes. In LA– yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 15:21 | That’s right [laughter]. That’s right. |
| S. RODNEY: 15:22 | Or you have destruction, right? It’s something that is– like the signifying monkey likes to do. And I can mix this little pile of whatever, and I play with it, and then look at all the stuff that I can– in a way it’s like like staving off destruction by focusing on the thing that we make that is a picture of our destruction. So it’s an odd and in a way fascinating psychological game we play with ourselves, but the climate change crisis makes it obvious, more obvious to me that that is the game we love to play with ourselves. |
| C.T. WEBB: 16:06 | Yeah. And I think along those lines– to riff on that for a second, I think that’s what you see, honestly, more on our side of the isle when it comes to– I mean, as far as the left in our politics, which is that there’s a lot of rhetoric around what needs to be done for the climate, and what should be done for the climate. But in reality, the actual practice of how we live is not altered at all, right? I mean, I think sort of like Silicon Valley, for example. It’s one of the major– so building these cold storage supercomputers is tremendously environmentally costly. The amount of rare earth metals that go into making the silicon wafers and all the rest of the stuff– but yet, we would absolutely– if we were to identify sort of an aspect of corporate America that’s serious about climate change, it would be Silicon Valley, right? Apple, Google, they’re talking about it, right? They have Facebook campaigns. Maybe you would not do that– but that is a move that would not be strange to see, whether it’d be in mainstream media or even maybe even The Huffington Post– well, maybe not Huffington Post, but the scale to which the crisis needs to be addressed is basically unprecedented, and it’s not something that rhetoric is going to fix. It’s something that is going to take a massive readjustment of the scale– not to trail too far off. |
| S. BOND: 17:51 | And I think that– yeah. I think that that’s very true, but I also think that Americans in particular are very conditioned towards immediate responses and visual change that when we see visual change, we very much know that we should react to it, and we should do something to rectify it. So when I sat in a theater in Chapel Hill and watched Inconvenient Truth, and they put that cartoon frog on, it was one of the first times I had ever thought about this analogy that was being used of the frog heating up in boiling water. He’s not jumping out immediately because he doesn’t quite know that he’s getting cooked. And I think Americans, we oftentimes are told that what is economically beneficial at the moment to us should take precedence over kind of a long-term economic condition that we may not be able to see over the longue duree. The longue duree, it’s been very difficult for us, I think, sometimes to– |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:02 | I would say as a species though. |
| S. BOND: 19:03 | –to wrap our minds around it, so. |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:04 | Not just Americans though. I mean, I would say– I mean, I think other cultures also have a difficult time, I think, dealing with the long sweep of history and the ultimate consequences of how we’re living now. I don’t think it’s– I mean, it’s certainly true of America, but it’s– |
| S. BOND: 19:19 | Capitalism as an economic system kind of conditions us in a different way than socialism does in terms of the good will of humanity. I mean, the rhetoric surrounding socialism is just very different in terms of the collective versus the individual capitalism. And so I think that is not– obviously, capitalism is not [inaudible] but– |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:44 | So if I can push that a little bit. So you think that socialism inherently orients people towards the long now, the future as opposed to– but if that were true, it would be essentially utilitarianism because if it were true that you would be willing to sacrifice the present for a greater future– I mean, this is the rhetoric of Qin Shi Huang. This is the rhetoric of sort of– we must collectively sacrifice now so that the future can be glorious. And so I don’t think socialism necessarily does a better job of orienting us towards the future. I think you could make an argument that it does a better job of redressing the inequalities now, right? Sort of how the poor are suffering now, but it’s very feasible, and undoubtedly there are libraries of science fiction novels written about the ways that the present can be sacrificed to a greater future. And so I don’t– and that is, from my point of view, the justification for a lot of inhuman policies. So capitalism, it’s a short-handed– often gets used by people that share our politics to sort of out of hand dismiss kind of the current state of affairs, right? So if we could wipe– if we could wipe away the current system, we would have a better future. And where I think the boundary condition is our own sort of natures, right? Our own jealousies, our own realities. |
| S. BOND: 21:23 | You don’t think that capitalism is more inherently narcissistic as a system than perhaps socialism; that perhaps socialism is less narcissistic and does more future thinking than capitalism? |
| C.T. WEBB: 21:36 | I definitely would not ascribe narcissism to one or the other. I think narcissism is a personality tendency, and economic systems do not necessarily produce personalities. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 21:48 | But it kind of feels like you’re not really addressing it, Travis. That’s a really good question when you think about it. Does one think more of oneself versus the collective? Is that what you’re getting at, Sarah? |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:01 | So I think that thinking of the collective can just be as selfish as thinking of oneself. |
| S. RODNEY: 22:07 | Oh, explain that, good sir [laughter]. |
| C.T. WEBB: 22:10 | So you can only ever be in your own head, right? So I think that– again, to use my very low-hanging fruit easy example, I think that Qin Shi Huang who is the first emperor of China who perpetrated countless brutal acts against what would become Chinese citizens– they weren’t at the time. They were a variety of tribes. He believed that what he was doing was acting for the greater collective. I do not think that collective action leads to virtuous behavior, and I think history bears that out. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 22:46 | I don’t know the virtuous behavior– |
| S. BOND: 22:47 | Is it the rhetoric of collective action now, or is it the actuality? Because I think sometimes we use the rhetoric of collectivity for the greater good in order to mask an individual will. And that’s what emperors like Augustus did. That’s what Constantine would do. Many, many a Roman emperor would use the idea of the collective Senatus Populusque Romanus as a foil for their objectives on an individual level. And so I guess we sometimes have to separate the rhetoric of the collective versus a virtuous attempt at the collective, which I think most socialist tendencies within governments today are kind of going for. |
| C.T. WEBB: 23:32 | So I would say that– I would say that I’m sympathetic to that move, but I think it assumes a lot. And I think it grants a– essentially, you’re presupposing because of the outcome that was the outcome of imperial Rome, the outcome of sort of what these people did in order to accomplish their goals, acquire power, etc, right? I would say that because of that you’re trying to unmask it in saying, “Well, okay. It’s not really acting for the collective.” So we’re saying that any action that’s done for the collective that leads to an inhuman consequence, therefore, must necessarily be someone’s selfish action. |
| S. RODNEY: 24:21 | No. I don’t think she’s being there [fast over?] the reasoning. |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:23 | No. No. I’m simplifying in order to make a point. I agree that Sarah is not doing that. What I’m saying is that– I’m saying that if that’s the move you make, then I can’t bring any counterexample because the argument is always going to be, “No. That was that person’s selfish attempt at a power grab.” |
| S. RODNEY: 24:45 | Right. So I would– no. Go ahead, Travis. It’s okay. |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:47 | No. No, please. No. I’m done. Please, go ahead. |
| S. RODNEY: 24:49 | Well, I want to pose a question to the group to simply– |
| C.T. WEBB: 24:53 | Climate change– |
| S. RODNEY: 24:55 | Well, no. No. No [laughter]. That’s hilarious. I want to say where do you think our best hopes lie? I mean, if we continue to sort of– what did the writer in the 1619 magazine call it? The low-road capitalism. If we continue with that, right, that sort of supercharged, mercenary, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism that we have here in the States versus the kind of socialism– these are terms that– I could be a bit more specific about what I’m talking about, but let’s take the example of Sweden. The kind of socialism there, right, where you have 90% of the people– I think it’s either Sweden or Iceland; 90% of the people are in unions. Where you have a version of– and it’s really a mix of socialism and capitalism, but you have that kind of culture, that kind of society. Where do you think our hopes lie in terms of climate change with our example or with that template? Because I mean, maybe the answer is super obvious. |
| C.T. WEBB: 26:09 | Yeah. Okay. So I think that because it’s super obvious is a problem [laughter]. I think that you’re taking a small homogenized society with deep cultural similarities and roots and looking at their ability to act collectively. And you’re saying, “That’s the model for us.” But we’re heterogeneous society, a very large unwieldy, possibly untenable heterogeneous society. And so I don’t think– and I would not ever defend unrestrained capitalism. I’m not even sure where I sit on defending capitalism per se. I just am absolutely against the ready-at-hand dismissal of a system under whose watch a number of things have changed in human history that had not changed prior to that. |
| C.T. WEBB: 27:08 | So I’m not saying that– I’m not a great defender of unrestrained capitalism. I do think that the– now, one of you can help me out, but I’m assuming it’s the 1619. I loved– I found compelling and persuasive the connection between American-style capitalism and plantation mentality. I think that rings true to me. But as far as a system that apotheosizes the best and worst of what it means to be human, I think that capitalism unleashes that, makes that realizable, manifests it in the world. And so I don’t know– let’s try and come back to climate change. Let’s take that as an example. I don’t know how we address climate change without a capitalist solution. I don’t know how we do that without money, without monetizing it on some level. What other purely signifying fungible object do we have to motivate people but money? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 28:15 | Governmental power. |
| C.T. WEBB: 28:15 | What else–? Right. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 28:17 | Governmental power. |
| C.T. WEBB: 28:18 | And you know what? I’m suspicious of government because governments historically have not proven themselves to be very reliable partners for the individual. |
| S. RODNEY: 28:30 | No. No. No. You’re right. No. No. No. That’s true. Yeah. Okay. |
| C.T. WEBB: 28:33 | Like 1970s France, but I wouldn’t have wanted to live in France in the 18th century. Fuck that. I don’t inherently trust governments. I mean, collective action I think is dangerous in general, so. |
| S. RODNEY: 28:46 | Well, I mean, the example that comes to my mind, and I know that we’re going to have to wrap this up soon [laughter] is Great Britain and the United States coming together– well, [inaudible] is Great Britain’s [fault?]– coming together and making the debacle that was Palestine. The way they just divvy the Palestine and said, “Oh, yeah. State of Israel should be here. And Palestine as well, they’ll sort it out.” Or Great Britain and the partition, right, between India and Pakistan. Governmental power sometimes skews it up so bad that we don’t actually understand how bad things are until it’s like a century later. So you have a point. Anybody else want to weigh in? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 29:39 | Yeah [laughter]. I was going to say– |
| C.T. WEBB: 29:42 | [crosstalk] money as a motivator. |
| S. BOND: 29:42 | I guess what I think is that economic competitiveness is part of the capitalist system. And so I think that the road to climate change within the United States is much more in terms of policy and incentivizing through economic incentives, the shifting towards things are seen as greener. And I think we were already doing this really in the ’90s when Earth Day and recycling overtook our televisions, and green became a commercial selling point. But I think you’re right that it can’t just be policy and government on its own. It has to be married with the idea that this is marketing to the populus, and that companies will oftentimes do this in order to get good spend. So for instance, talking about– when you go to a hotel room these days, and they tell you that they’re trying to be green, and they don’t actually wash the sheets every night unless you tell them to. The economic suspicion in me is you just don’t want to pay to wash the sheets every night, but it is greener in order to– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 30:53 | Absolutely. Absolutely. Green washing– |
| C.T. WEBB: 30:57 | I don’t want to take up the time, but there’s a great thing in support of what you’re saying, but I’ll leave it there. But anyway, so. |
| S. RODNEY: 31:05 | Steven, you were going to say– |
| C.T. WEBB: 31:06 | Steven? |
| S. BOND: 31:07 | So in Iowa– |
| C.T. WEBB: 31:08 | Oh, sorry. |
| S. BOND: 31:09 | –we have [laughter] wind farms. Yeah. We have a lot of wind farms that are becoming much more popular. But of course, wind farms are then supplanting a lot of other forms of energy. President Trump is not in support of them. He says that they make too much sound; that they create pollution. He’s against wind farms, but that is because of an economic interest, I think, and the lobbyists that support him rather than the reality that we could transition Iowa to be much more of a wind state. And that’s where we were headed under Obama up until the 2016 election. But yeah. There have to be economic incentives for farmers to transition from growing soybeans and corn to being wind farmers now. So yeah. There have to be– |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:02 | Steven, do you want to–? |
| S. BOND: 32:03 | –tax incentives and– |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:04 | Steven, do you want to close this out? No. No. You have to [laughter] say– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:09 | No. So I was just stuck on something you said. Is money the only motivator in a capitalist society for people to change? That’s all I have to say. I’m still merely– |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:19 | This is a great question. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:19 | –thinking about it because I’m not so sure it’s true. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:21 | It’s a great question. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:21 | But yeah. That’s all. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:23 | Yeah. It’s a fair question. I think you’re right. I mean, I think that’s a fair question, so. And I probably would argue against myself in answering no. This is probably not the only motivator, so. |
| S. RODNEY: 32:32 | Agreed. Agreed. [inaudible] that too. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:35 | Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a good question. Okay. So Sarah, thank you. Welcome to the podcast. This is great. I like the shift in dynamics, so. And I’ll speak to all of you next week. Yes? |
| S. RODNEY: 32:49 | Yeah. Sounds good. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:51 | Sounds good. |
| S. BOND: 32:51 | Yes. |
| C.T. WEBB: 32:51 | Take care. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 32:53 | Take care. Bye-bye. [music] |
References
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