Other Histories and Other Futures
Alice Bell in conversation with Michelle Kim Hall
Alice Bell is a climate campaigner and writer based in London. She co-runs the climate change charity Possible, working on a range of projects from community tree planting to solar-powered trains. She has a PhD in science communication from Imperial College London and a BSc in the history of science from University College London, and has worked as both an academic and journalist, writing about everything from the radical science movement of the 1970s to plastic recycling in labs. We were delighted to correspond with her as Counterpoint prepared to publish Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis.
Michelle Kim Hall: First, thank you for writing such a comprehensive account of this urgent and complex issue. The subtitle of your book includes the apropos word “epic” in describing the history of the climate crisis. You impressively take readers on an epic journey through history as diverse as hunting whales for fuel in the 17th century, to the discovery of air’s molecular particles in the 18th century, to modern day climate change “doubt-mongers and delayers.” How did you arrive at this comprehensive scope for your storytelling? What challenges did you encounter in undertaking such an ambitious project?
Alice Bell: It’s funny you pick up on this because it’s only “epic” in the US edition, the British publishers avoided the word (though the content of the book is the same). It’s certainly deliberately large in scope. I came to the project wanting to tell the big story of the climate crisis. It’s partly a consequence of how I approach research and storytelling – I couldn’t help digging deep back into the histories of the key greenhouse gases, from the earliest versions of soda water infused with CO2 to the first experiments getting high on nitrous oxide (something about nominative determinism and Alice’s chasing rabbits down holes, perhaps). But more seriously, I think it’s worth telling that large, sometimes sprawling story – the climate crisis has deep and complex roots, and I wanted to show that. In terms of how I went about it, I did what I always do for a big project: do enough basic research to draw up a project plan, and then adjust as research throws up new lines of inquiry or inspires different threads of analysis. I was helped by the fact I have a BSc in the history of science, which gave me the basic “Plato to Nato” architecture a lot of the story sits within. Also, I’ve been collecting stories around energy and climate change for years. I started doing walking tours of London on the topic around the time of the Paris climate talks in 2015 and first started thinking about the topic a few years before, when I was pulling together a course on climate change for Imperial College. A bit of my brain’s been working on this book for about a decade.
MKH: In your introduction, you quote climate scientist Myles Allen in reference to the intersectional complexity of social, economic, and environmental issues that make “fixing” the “great tragedy of our time” all the more difficult. According to Allen: ‘People ask me whether I’m kept awake at night by the prospect of five degrees of warming. I don’t think we’ll make it to five degrees. I’m far more worried about geopolitical breakdown as the injustices of climate change emerge as we steam from two to three degrees.’
In the face of this chilling prediction, how can we prepare for what, as you put it, “may well be the end of us”? Is this geopolitical breakdown even possible to prevent at this pivotal moment of the age of humans?
AB: I suppose it depends a bit on what you count as geopolitical breakdown. Arguably, it’s already started – we’re just hiding from the reality of that. A few years ago I wrote a piece for the Guardian arguing we’re all everyday climate deniers – although it was deliberately being provocative, and a lot has shifted in terms of the public debate on climate, but I’d still stand by it. People around the world are already suffering not just from the more obvious direct impacts of climate change like floods or heatwave but the ways in which years upon years of weird weather have baked in and heated up already existing social, political and economic problems. All over the world climate impacts are meeting other social, economic and political problems and deepening them.
In terms of preparing for how it’ll get worse, it’s vital we don’t just work to cut carbon, build flood defenses and set up cooling centres, but we appreciate that climate change is going to make everything else that’s hard even harder. Causes we might already care deeply about – be it access to healthcare, domestic violence, housing, global economic justice, migrant solidarity or something else – are even more in need of our time and resources. We’ve left it too late to just worry about counting greenhouse gases, we need to look very broadly across society and invest in supporting each other.
MKH: You open your book inside the Crystal Palace designed for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Showcasing the latest feats of human innovation—“including a cigarette-rolling machine that produced 100 cigarettes a minute”—I was struck by how expediency plays such a large role in establishing “a way of life that would become our modern climate crisis.” Do you see a tension between innovation and restoration? How much of addressing the climate crisis will require techno-fixes versus sacrificing modern conveniences?
AB: You’re right, I think this expediency has been part of the problem – or at least the way it’s allowed us to simply forget all the work and processes that go into producing our goods and services. It’s one of the reasons I picked out that image from the exhibition. For me, it’s not just the expediency of how easily we can buy and throw things away, but the distance between us as consumers and the making and disposal of goods. It’s partly outsourcing work to machines but it’s also about building ever larger and more complex systems of knowledge and production (and disposal and destruction for that matter) which we sit within, and can only ever see a bit of. It relates to an argument I make in the conclusion to my book, that a sort of constant cluelessness is a price we pay for living in modernity.
On the flip side, we get to draw on a range of areas of expertise without needing to have it all ourselves. We can press a button and get electric light without having to generate it ourselves or even know how that works. We can get COVID vaccines, some super-clever vegan cheese that melts so close to the real thing, the internet, an exciting book, or a plumber to fix our broken toilet. These are all wonderful things. But it can make it hard to interrogate, change or simply even navigate these systems because we don’t know enough about what’s going on. I’d like to think we could keep the good things all these complex networks of specialists give us whilst also managing that problem of constant cluelessness more effectively with more investment in public engagement with science and tech, and more democratic approaches to industry and infrastructure.
“Wonder can feel great but it can put some space between you and the thing you think is wondrous.”
MKH: On a related note, you trace the disenchantment embedded in innovation: What had once been so wondrous became something no one bothered to wonder about, the everyday matter of turning a switch. In the book’s conclusion you discuss the need for everyday people to “be connected to technological and industrial systems that might otherwise be hidden.” How can we be more “mindful consumers of technology” in order to “make better choices?” In what ways might we cultivate wonder for technological and industrial systems that we too often overlook?
AB: That’s an interesting way of putting it. Yes, maybe we do in part need to learn to rediscover some wonder in our energy system. I certainly find it puzzling how often colleagues in climate campaigning write off something like energy efficiency is boring – it’s nothing of the sort! Before the pandemic put a hold on in-person events, Possible, the climate charity I work for, was running heat treasure hunts giving groups thermal imaging cameras that attach to a smartphone and getting them to see what they’d find. It was great watching people getting really excited by something as simple as a pile of freshly laundered (and so warm) towels or a really well insulated pipe – they loved just watching the movement of heat, and when it was wasted.
Still, I worry that too simple an approach to wonder could get in the way of more meaningful relationships. Wonder can feel great but it can put some space between you and the thing you think is wondrous, like it’s an awesome god, in the original sense of “awesome.”
I’ve done a lot of work with the community energy sector in the last few years – people who’ve clubbed together with their neighbours to build their own solar or wind farms which not only power their local area but are controlled by local people, and where local people take the profit (often using it for climate change work). I don’t think everyone needs to be part of those sorts of co-ops, I understand that not everyone cares enough or has time for it, but I think if more of us were involved in such projects it’d be easier to have more of a democratic debate about energy and climate change. So if you’ve read something in the news about hydrogen boilers or tidal energy or nuclear vs wind or whatever, you might not have loads of expertise to understand it but you’d be more likely to have a friend who’d know more and could help you get a better grip on it.
I also think we need to ensure our education system includes a good spread of learning, and doesn’t force us to specialise too early. For example, a friend of mine who teaches engineering used to get her first year undergrads to fix toilets – not because she wanted them to be able to do their own plumbing, but so they understood enough of the basics and felt confident enough when they were talking to expert plumbers. Years ago I read an article from the 1970s which complained that science education taught people to be scientists, technicians or failures and it’s really stuck with me. I think it’s still all too true. Science education needs to train people who’ll end up in science and engineering for sure, but it needs to ensure the rest of us can have critical, educated conversations with scientists and engineers.
MKH: The discord between religion and science plays a central role in the debate about climate change. Sometimes religion resisted innovation. For example, when engineer James Blyth tried to bring wind-generated electricity to local villages that “branded these newfangled sparks ‘the work of the devil’ and turned him away.” At other times, religious institutions leap at the chance to modernize: “Worried they might be left in the shade, local churches invested in electric crosses.” In The Unchained Goddess cartoon series, you include Frank Capra’s goal to combine scientific and religious messaging: “God has given us reason to ask and answer big questions, and we’ll use it so we can live hand in hand with nature.”
In what ways has the history between religion and science shaped today’s discussion of climate change? In what ways might religion better align with the science of environmental activism?
AB: Plenty of the characters in the book were motivated by religion alongside science. Joseph Priestley, for example, saw his science and religion and politics as all connected. He’s also a good example of someone who arguably did some of most interesting scientific work because he was excluded from the formal English education system of the time due to his religious beliefs. I’m not convinced the people in Blyth’s village were against wind power because of religion per se, they just used the language of religion to express their fear of something new, which is totally understandable.
The Unchained Goddess in the 1950s is a really interesting case though. I sometimes wonder if Capra’s religious framing of the issue is one of the reasons why climate change is seen as a problem people will manage, or won’t ever get too large. Something that really came home to me while I was writing the book is that one of the reasons people brushed off worries about climate change for so long was that they couldn’t imagine humans would have that much impact on the world. That attitude can come from lots of places, but can be influenced by a range of religious takes on the role of humanity in nature. I think for people today, those of us who’ve grown up in an era where people start appreciating the anthropocene with tech all around us and news stories about plastics in rain in the Arctic, the idea that humans might change the chemical makeup of the atmosphere doesn’t seem that odd. But I think for the Victorians and even for a lot of the people watching The Unchained Goddess it would have felt ridiculous – even though they were living in eras of huge technological change, they’d have felt the biggest power over the Earth was God, not people.
In terms of ways religion might better align with environmental science and activism, I think in lots of places it is already. I’m not sure there is that much of a “discord.” It depends a lot on how people approach both religion and environmental work, and I appreciate that there is a particular history of science vs religion in the USA, but there are loads of ways science, faith and environmental campaigning can and do complement each other. In the UK at least, I’m quite used to turning up at a meeting about climate action and there being a wide range of faith based groups present. They don’t see a disconnect and I don’t think others necessarily should either.
MKH: Toward the end of your book, you refer to Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, who was given the job of running the UNFCCC. After despairing that climate change agreement was not possible in her lifetime, she later decides to shift the tone: ‘Impossible is not a fact, it’s an attitude. And I decided, right then and there, that I was going to change my attitude, and I was going to help the world change its attitude on climate change.”
How has researching this book changed your attitude on the climate crisis? How do you hope this book will change the attitude of your readers?
AB: Going into writing the book I was already very much of the stubborn optimist point of view. I made that decision about ten years ago. In fact I have a really strong memory of being at the gym near my old flat, on the treadmill trying to run off a load of frustration, fear and anger about climate change. I was failing, just making myself more angry and exhausted. I realised I needed to switch – that a more positive approach was not only going to get me further but would be more emotionally sustaining too. It’s hard keeping optimistic at times, and I think it’s vital we temper that feeling with an appreciation of how incredibly bad the climate crisis has already got for so many people. There’s a place for anger and fear and grief, and we need to let those feelings out. But a doomist attitude that believes there’s nothing we can do strikes me as simply giving into a future filled with so much mass suffering I can’t personally endure it for very long.
Researching the book didn’t necessarily change my attitude, but it was really interesting to read so many different attitudes to the climate crisis over time. It’s one of the many things I had to skip over in the book, but there’s a history to doomist thought, it’s not a new phenomena at all – Heinrich von Ficker who thought Turkestan was a dying land back in the 1920s, or Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr in the 1940s, regaling whatever wealthy New Yorker he could get to buy him a dry martini with stories of how the Earth was on course to become as dead as the Moon. I also found it fascinating to trace the changing attitudes of scientists over time – from Guy Callendar thinking we should take the issue seriously but that it was probably a good thing, to fights between Helmut Landsberg and Stephen Schneider in the 1970s about how to engage politically, or groups like Scientists for XR forming today.
I’m not sure I necessarily set out to write a book that changed people’s attitudes. Mainly I wanted to give people a good read, make them go “oooo, I didn’t know that,” and help them feel like they understand the climate crisis a bit more. I also hope I’ve showcased there were many points along the way where things could have gone in a different direction. As we look to the future, I think it’s important to remember all those forks in the road – the possible other histories and other futures – because the decisions about technology we make today will have impacts long into the future. The carbon legacy we’ve been left by people in the past means we’re going to have to do a lot of tech change very quickly. It’s vital we do that work well. I hope at least that some of the stories of gas vs electric fridges or how Shell started off selling shells might help us be a bit more mindful about what we let happen next.
