How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
The climate crisis has a history, and it is not the history of “humanity” in general. This lens traces how a particular way of organizing production came to treat the living world as a machine and a free resource: the scientific revolution’s remaking of nature, the colonial ecology of 1492, the choice of coal and steam to discipline labor, the mining of the soil that produced the Dust Bowl, and the siting of poison in Black and poor communities. It scales the theme of accumulation from the capitalism theme up to the biosphere.
Anchor questions
- Nature was not always treated as a free resource to be used up. When did that change, and why?
- Where did fossil fuels come from as the basis of the economy? Who chose coal and oil, and why?
- Whose land was taken and whose bodies were used to build the extractive economy?
- Why do the poorest and darkest communities so often live where the poison is?
- Whose knowledge of how to live with the land was destroyed or ignored?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.
Books
- Carolyn Merchant (b. 1936), The Death of Nature (1980). Traces how the scientific revolution replaced the image of the earth as a living organism with the earth as a machine, licensing the domination of both nature and women. A bridge to Gender, Reproduction, and the Household. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: harpercollins.com. Merchant’s own lecture gives the same arc free, about 9,900 views: youtube.com
- Alfred W. Crosby (1931 to 2018), The Columbian Exchange (1972). The founding study of colonial ecology, on how the transfer of crops, animals, and disease after 1492 reshaped ecosystems and cleared the ground for European conquest. No borrowable copy exists, and this publisher blocks automated checks though the page is live. Paywalled: bloomsbury.com. Crosby wrote the thesis up himself for teachers, free and assignable: nationalhumanitiescenter.org
- Donald Worster (b. 1941), Dust Bowl (1979). A classic of environmental history arguing that the 1930s ecological catastrophe grew directly from a capitalist land system that treated soil as a commodity to be mined for profit. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Robert D. Bullard (b. 1946), Dumping in Dixie (1990). The first book to name environmental racism, documenting how polluting industry and waste were systematically sited in Black and poor communities across the U.S. South. A bridge to Race and Racial Capitalism. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: routledge.com. Bullard’s own lecture is free, about 22,800 views: youtube.com
- The Ecologist (collective), Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (1993). Connects present ecological destruction to the long history of enclosure, from medieval Britain to the Global South, and defends community control of land, water, and forests. Free to borrow: archive.org
Articles
- Andreas Malm (b. 1977), The Origins of Fossil Capital (2013). The article distilling the core of Malm’s Fossil Capital, arguing that manufacturers chose coal and steam not because they were cheaper but because they gave capital better control over labor. The full book is not free. Free article: cominsitu.wordpress.com
- Will Steffen (1947 to 2023) and colleagues, The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration (2015). The open-access paper behind the famous graphs showing socioeconomic and Earth-system indicators shooting upward together after 1950. Useful for dating the crisis and questioning who the “human” driver really is. Free: openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au
Video
- “How Corporations Shifted The Blame For Climate Change” (Second Thought, 2019). Roughly 7 minutes, about 87,000 views. A short, sharp history of the personal-carbon-footprint framing and the fossil-fuel public-relations interests who invented it. A good corrective opener before any session that starts with individual guilt. youtube.com/watch?v=ZU6JBBO2NKg
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially environmental histories of the Global South, of extraction and plantation ecology, and of Indigenous land management.