Recent read: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

 David Wallace-Wells paints a grim picture of human future in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. He elucidates all the terrible forecasts and statistics in section one, “Cascades,” and in section two, “Elements of Chaos.” Rising oceans will drown the largest cities, two-thirds of which, are on the coast. Increasing temperatures will render the entire tropical zone of the planet uninhabitable, potentially creating heat that humans simply cannot survive in. Catastrophic drought, deadly food shortages, and millions of climate refugees surging north will create chaos, disorder and conflict for billions of future humans. The hot age will be defined not by a “new normal,” but by the absence of any normal. What once were considered “500 year” natural disasters will become annual occurrences. Forget standards of living, economic growth, or even enlightenment liberal values, survival will be the sole objective for most people. We are already seeing this world come into focus in our own time as the first waves of climate refugees, super storms, fires, and other troubling signs are battering the earth. 

 

Section three, “The Climate Kaleidoscope,” contains some intriguing ruminations. Wallace-Wells takes on shibboleths, such as the idea that consumer choices are meaningful substitutes for political action, or that somehow technology – which, honestly, created this situation in the first place – will somehow come to the rescue and save us all. He notes that we, the living generation, have created much of the problem ourselves (for example, despite the increase in green energy, coal use has jumped 80% since 2000 due  to our increased reliance on energy for electronic gadgets, air conditioning, and home appliances, among other things) and we can be the ones to mitigate its effects with adjustments and changes now. It’s not just the economic and political power structures that are stalling action, either. In seeing climate change as the foremost and most immediate threat, he argues that environmentalists get “distracted” in what seem to be side issues, like recycling (no tangible impact on global warming), plastic pollution (ditto), GMOs (might actually be necessary in the new hot world), nuclear power (it’s better than coal), green energy (its good, but is supplementing fossil fuel use, not supplanting it), and straws (again, no impact on warming). He argues that we will have to live in a world with a certain amount of pollution (at least it reflects sun light) and the resulting chronic health conditions that will come with that when the alternative increases temperatures. Wallace-Wells tackles a lot more in this section, such as the meaning of civilization, future of politics (most likely will see more authoritarian regimes and less democracy), and ethics. All of which are equally thought evoking.  

 

Wallace-Wells posits that future civilization will likely live amidst the ruins of the past, like Europe in the post-Roman Empire, pining for the order and stability of the old world. But as that fades increasingly into the past, future humans could lose sight of even that and sink into a sort “Planet of the Apes” world (my analogy, not the author’s) where there is no memory at all of the past. 

 

In light of recent culture war debacles over monuments, public memory, and the teaching of history, I wonder what future generations on a charred earth will think of us. Will they wonder why we could not get rid of our cars, multiple electronic devices, and carbon-fueled vacations? Will parched mouths ask why we never fixed our leaky pipes that waste astronomical amounts of fresh water? Will hungry people be outraged by our carbon-heavy diets and food industry that they could no longer able to sustain? As millions, if not billions, of people are displaced from coastal and tropical zones, will they ask in despair why we bothered to build cities in the desert, like Phoenix, or on the coast, like Florida, in the first place? Will they in short, look at us in the same contemptible and angry manner that we do when looking at slaveholders? 

Recent Reads: Speece, Defending Giants

 In my twenty years of teaching at community colleges I was continuously fascinated by the experiences that my students shared in class. One student in my environmental history class a couple  years ago had been a lumberjack in the northwest. He described to the class what that entailed, confrontations with protesters, and even what an unpleasant experience it was to strike a tree spike with a chainsaw. I couldn’t help thinking about this as I read Darren Speece’s superb Defending Giants: The Redwoods  Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017). 

 

The Redwoods Wars transpired in the northwest coast of California from the early 1980s to the end of the twentieth century. From Speece’s description of the events in that twenty-year period, it certainly sounds like so many battles fought over a long, grueling war as local activists battled both external environmental groups and a multinational corporation. Their objective was to ensure sustainability. They were radical for employing direct action to confront loggers and for seeking to regulate timber harvesting on private land. The battleground went beyond the forests, reaching into the courthouses, trailblazing a new front for both environmentalists and business resistance to regulations. Their great success was in bringing this local matter to national and even international prominence. 

 

For much of the first three quarters of the twentieth century a corporatist approach protected the Redwoods from over harvesting. Save-the-Redwoods League and Sierra Club supported the California Board of Forestry who worked with Pacific Lumber to set harvest goals. For their part, Pacific Lumber was a paternalistic corporation who feared depleting a valuable resource. This arrangement had its drawbacks, of course, and the cooperation is a bit of a simplification, but this status quo lasted until the 1980s. What changed?

 

Well, lots of things changed, as Speece tells us. First off, Redwoods country became a prime destination for back-to-the-land hippie refugees fleeing urbanization. They arrived with an anti-government and anti-corporate mindset and many years of grass roots organization and protest experience. Second, an external firm, fueled by junk bonds and loaded with debt took over Pacific Lumber. This business had no interest in the local economy or sustainability. The Redwoods to them were one more resource to be leveraged to maximum financial payoff to stabilize their finances. Third, the emergence of a more militant environmentalism as exemplified by Earth First!. Finally, on the other end of the spectrum was the radicalization of the anti-environmentalist movement often referred to as the Sage Brush Rebellion.   

 

Local activists battled the international lumber giant for two decades. This is the meat of the book and Speece covers much ground in detail, examining the personalities, intent, tactics, strategy, sources, and outcomes of each of the scores of battles waged during the Redwoods Wars. Direct confrontation created more distrust, and violence. Each success by either side further enflamed mutual hostility. A car bomb seriously injured activist Judi Bari. The FBI even arrested her on the assumption that she was a terrorist who was on her way to bomb someone else. Pacific Lumber violated laws and regulations in their quest to cut trees, an opening that activists sought to exploit with lawsuits. On their other flank, local activists resented and resisted efforts by national environmental organizations to take control of their protest movement. The dedication and strength of the local activists is one of the main points of Speece’s interpretation of the Redwoods Wars.

 

The Redwoods Wars ended with “The Deal,” a bundle of compromises brokered by the Clinton administration in an effort to shore up the president’s support among environmentalists in the lead up to the 1996 election. Pacific Lumber agreed to sell land to California and promised to file the necessary plans with the proper agencies. A deal on paper was one thing, lining up all the parties and implementing it took another few years. There definitely was a hang-over effect. Unsurprisingly, considering the emotional investment, both sides struggled with second-guessing and regrets.

Colorado State Pioneer Museum

The Colorado State Pioneer Museum (CSPM) is housed in the old El Paso County courthouse that was built in 1903. It is free to the public and well worth the time. Guests will learn about Colorado Springs and the American West. 

One of the museum staff told me that decision to convert the courthouse to a museum was done to save the building from being razed to make room for a parking garage. That would have been a terrible shame! It is a beautiful example of the architecture and style of the Progressive Era city beautiful movement. There is a recreated courtroom on the third floor and functioning 1906 Otis elevator, which moved a lot quicker than I thought it would. There are numerous items representing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

General William Jackson Palmer was the founding spirit of Colorado Springs. He was a Civil War cavalry officer who won the medal of honor in 1865. After the war Palmer became a railroad executive, industrialist, and, in 1871 founded the settlement that would become Colorado Springs. As a wealthy man and town leader, Palmer attracted much attention from newspaper writers and gossips. Unsurprisingly, many myths and legends emerged about the Palmer family. CPSM has an entire room focused on separating Palmer family fact from fiction. 

Author Helen Hunt Jackson lived in Colorado Springs. Her house is partially rebuilt in the CPSM. In addition to A Century of Dishonor 1881), her ground-breaking work on American treatment of Native Americans, Jackson also wrote poems and other stories. 

Colorado Springs became known as a playground for rest and recuperation, especially for those suffering from tuberculosis (TB). A room with replica doctor's offices, TB patients, a pharmacy counter, and explanative plaques tells this prominent part of early Colorado Springs history. There is a small exhibit on women's suffrage, which Colorado granted in 1893. In my humble opinion this could have been expanded upon. An exhibit entitled "Any Place North and West" examines the life of African Americans in Colorado Springs. Although there as no de jure (legal) segregation in Colorado, there was de facto (practiced) segregation. I think it is always important to remind people that segregation was not a strictly southern phenomenon. There were many examples of segregation practiced in northern and western cities. And not just small ones like Colorado Springs. Chicago was a heavily segregated city through the use of public housing money and restrictive covenants to ghettoize African Americans. 

There were several different collections of Native American artifacts. The most impactful to me was the work of guest curator Gregg Deal who used the photographs of Roland Reed taken around 1910 to show how the camera distorted native life. Deal's exhibit is divided by theme with about five or seven Reed photographs in each theme. For example, one theme was entitled Romanticism and showed how Reed's staged and posed photographs and the use of scenery and costume, were designed to best appeal to white Americans who felt pressured by the pace and demands of modernity and industrial capitalism and longed for a primitive life. Here Reed gave it to them. The larger point that I think Deal was making is that this was appropriating Native American images and then using those photographs to define their lives without their own agency for the gratification of a white audience. Yet, another example of appropriated Native American culture. However, I should mention that Deal is not overly didactic in his presentation. After a brief five minute introductory video, the emphasis is on the creation and organization of the themes around the very large images, not explanations. The point is to let the guests do their own thinking about this. Ironically, I was wearing my St. John's University t-shirt and hat. Their sportsteam used to be called the Red Men. Although this was probably more  because of the school color, it did, nonetheless, appropriate the image of Native Americans. When I was a master's student there in the early 1990s, St. John's renamed their teams the Red Storm. It is long overdue for others to follow.  

Cannery Row (1945) by John Steinbeck

 I finally checked off a long pending item on my reading list, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, published in 1945.[1]Cannery Row is the story of life on a small stretch of street based on Ocean View Ave. in Steinbeck’s home town of Monterrey, California. Ocean Ave. has since been renamed Cannery Row. Although he cheekily declares in his dedication that all characters “are, of course, fictions and fabrications,” they are indeed modeled on Monterey residents the author knew. Doc, the main protagonist is a facsimile of Ed Ricketts, a noted California scientist and the author’s closest friend, to whom the book is dedicated. Other characters, like Mack and his band of homeless men and Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer, are likewise depictions of people in Steinbeck’s acquaintance. Like other Steinbeck novels, Cannery Row depicts individuals living on the margins of society.[2]

 

Honestly, I did not enjoy the book but struggled to put my finger on the exact reason why until I read a contemporary review of Cannery Row by Joseph Warren Beach in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Among other things, Warren criticizes Steinbeck’s “soap-boxing for a way of life which he demonstrates to be precarious and unsatisfying.”[3] This really hit the mark for me. There is too much of a romantic flavor to the lives of Mack and the boys. I make no claims to be an expert on homelessness or life on the streets, but I do know it is a terribly difficult and rough existence filled with risk and danger, not a romantic rebellion against the dehumanizing aspects of a capitalist/industrial society. 

 

My strongest personal connection with the story was not Steinbeck’s “soap-boxing” but with Doc’s work. He is a naturalist who collects specimens, like frogs, octopi, and starfish, that he ships to his clients for research purposes from his lab, Western Biological. As many roads to me seem to lead back to my pal William T. Hornaday, so did this one. As a young man, Hornaday served in the employ of Henry A. Ward’s Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York. Between 1874 and 1879 a young Hornaday travelled to Florida, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia in search of specimen’s that Ward sold to the ballooning number of museums in American cities and universities in the decades following the Civil War. While Doc sent live animals for scientific research, Ward shipped skeletons, skins, and taxidermically-prepared (a.k.a. “stuffed”) specimens as learning objects. At a time before zoos access to most animals was limited to their remains – a fact that Hornaday would work to change in his twenty-five-year reign as director of the New York Zoological Park, more commonly called the Bronx Zoo.[4]

 

I doubt Hornaday, or Ward, for that matter, would appreciate the comparison. Both were men of the Victorian age in which they lived and upheld its rigid moral code. Certainly, they would have denounced Doc’s proto-Beatnik/Hippie lifestyle. They certainly would look at Mack and the boys with undisguised contempt. Steinbeck might have sympathetically portrayed them as noble individuals who refused to be cowed by the capitalist economy into a robotic existence, but Hornaday and Ward would be repulsed by their lack of morality, thirst for drink, unwillingness to work for their keep, and their abandonment of their families. In other words, their having forsaken any sense of responsibility. Hornaday, who was an outspoken supporter of 100% Americanism during World War I, would undoubtedly have described Mack and the boys as slackers, or much worse, during World War II.

 

 

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[1] John Steinbeck, Novels 1942-1952 (New York: The Library of America, 2002).

[2] San Jose State University, “Cannery Row – Critical Reception,” Steinbeck in the Schools, August 23, 2020, https://sits.sjsu.edu/curriculum-resources/cannery-row/critical-reception/.

[3] Joseph Warren Beach, "SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS ANTIDOTE." The Virginia Quarterly Review 21, no. 2 (1945): 291. Accessed August 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26441972.

[4] See Gregory J. Dehler, The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday & His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

My history grandparents, part 2 of 3, Paul Boyer and Merle Curti

In a previous blog post I introduced Allen Nevins as one of my historical grandparents. Nevins strongly influenced my love of biography as a method for studying and presenting the past. In this installment I will discuss the importance of two other historical grandparents who pointed in quite a different direction: cultural and social historians Paul Boyer and Merle Curti. 

 

The first PHD-level history course that I took at Lehigh University in the fall of 1995 was U.S. History in the Twentieth Century taught by the late John Pettegrew. I believe it was his first graduate class at Lehigh. Compared to the older professors that I had at St. John’s, Pettegrew was young and dynamic, only a couple of years older than myself and perhaps younger than some of the older students in the class. As an intellectual historian, he also was more interested in theoretical frameworks, for example including works by Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan, among others, as required texts, for contextualizing the past. We hit the ground running in the first week of seminar by reading the classic Peter Novick work, That Noble Dream, and supplemented that hefty tome with several articles on narrative usage in historical writing. As we moved through the century, Dr. Pettegrew emphasized the importance of ideas and culture in framing norms, ideology, choices, politics – well, everything! His expansive definition of source materials included films, images, music, recordings, and other such items, that I never before really thought of as historical records. It seems like a “no-brainer” now, but it was an eye-opener at the time. 

 

Pettegrew spoke openly of those who shaped his development as an historian. The most direct and strongest influence was that of his mentor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the great Paul Boyer. In books like Purity in Print (1968), Urban Masses and Moral Order (1978), and By Bomb’s Early Light (1985), Boyer examined the conflict between cultural and societal norms and those who dared to challenge these rules. Whether it was comic books, progressive social reform, witch trials, or atomic bombs, Boyer studied this tension, the power of the state, competing ideas, and the power of fear and hysteria. One generation back from Boyer stood Merle Curti, a pioneer intellectual and social historian, whom John described as a grandfatherly figure who freely gave his time to a young historian. Pettegrew’s gratitude for Curti’s generosity is evident in an article he wrote in 1998 for The History Teacher. Curti is probably most remembered today as the author of Roots of American Loyalty, which moved along the same track as Boyer would later, which is to say, how loyalty was defined, determined, challenged, and punished, over the course of American history. We read a fragment from Curti’s classic in that first seminar, but I have since read the complete book. Written in 1948, it is clearly dated and of an older style, but still worth a sampling if you are drawn to the historiography of the concepts Curti reviewed. 

 

Training I received in cultural, intellectual, and social history at Lehigh vastly expanded my horizons. This did not contradict biography, but complemented it. Individuals were better understood when placed in their cultural and social milieu. I learned to better appreciate ideas and their implementation. Deeds, or end products like policy, were important, but I became more concerned with understanding the process of how individual agency, cultural/social environment, and clashing ideas and purposes, forged an outcome. 

Recent Reads: Robert Caro's Passage of Power, vol. 4 of his biography of Lyndon B. Johnson

Thought I would just dip and out of this weighty tome, picking and choosing certain topics, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Wrong!! Caro’s lively storytelling, keen sense of detail, thoughtful reflections, and compelling portraits of key individuals completely drew me in. I found this to be a quick read despite the size of the biography. The first third (roughly) of the book focuses on Johnson’s botched bid for the presidency in 1960, acceptance of the vice presidency, and years in that second office. Despite the fact that his bread and butter had always been his ability to read individuals quickly and accurately and determine their strengths and weaknesses , he failed to do so with John F. Kennedy. After failing to gain a real measure of the man during the 1960 campaign for presidential nomination, Johnson compounded this by thinking he could steamroll Kennedy into giving him more power and access than any previous vice president. Kennedy easily dismissed this. If he failed to include Johnson in important legislative strategy discussions – a place the Texan could have greatly benefitted the administration – it is due to in some measure to the vice president’s behavior when he was around the president. For example, Johnson rarely spoke out in meetings, even though he frequently shared his misgivings with others. Johnson’s constant and tactless pleading for appointments, photo-ops, and other considerations did not help either. Lastly, Johnson’s long running feud with Robert Kennedy further alienated him from the inner circle. Caro devotes considerable time discussing the relationship between these two men. Clearly, he will return to this theme in the next and final volume. Yet, President Kennedy intended to keep Johnson on the ticket because he needed Texas, or so it seemed until September 1963. A combination of the Bobby Baker (a very close Johnson associate and protégé ) scandal splashing across the headlines and Governor John Connally’s (another close Johnson associate and protégé) rapidly ascending influence in Texas hurt the vice president’s chances of remaining on the ticket in 1964. It was the nadir of Johnson’s long career in politics. Then everything changed at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Johnson is at his best from the assassination through to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He consoles the nation, brilliantly steers major legislation through the Congress, establishes himself as president, and inspires bold new action, including the landmark Civil Rights Act. Caro is impressed by these achievements and Johnson’s personal restraint. Throughout this period Johnson contains himself, holding his unpleasant personality traits – his self-pity, need to dominate others, bullying, narcissism, etc. – in check. Unfortunately, that Lyndon Johnson will be back in the next volume when we will see him mix great achievements and terrible disasters.

David Ramsay on Columbus...woke in 1787?

David Ramsay was one of the first to write a history of the American Revolution. His very whiggish work was published first published in 1787. Ramsay begins with his account with the discovery of the Americas itself. Considering current controversy over memorialization one passage about Christopher Columbus really jumps out. I took the liberty of breaking it into two different paragraphs for readability and clarity. Here it is:

“When we consider the immense floods of gold and silver, which have flowed from it in to Europe, the subsequent increase of industry and population, the prodigious extension of commerce, manufactures, and navigation, and the influence of the whole on manners and arts, we see such an accumulation of good, as leads us to rank Columbus among the greatest benefactors of the human race…”

“…but when we view the injustice done the natives—the extirpation of many of their numerous nations, whose names are no more heard—the havoc made among the first settlers—the slavery of the Africans, to which America has furnished temptation—and the many long and bloody wars which has occasioned; we behold such crowd woes, excites apprehension that the evil has outweighed the good.”

From David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution (1787; Lexington, KY.: Downing and Phillips, 1815), 1 24. Available on hathitrust.org courtesy of Pennsylvania State University.