Exploring Apocalyptica

EXPLORING APOCALYPTICA EXPLORING APOCALYPTICA COMING TO TERMS WITH ENVIRONMENTAL ALARMISM EDITED BY Frank Uekötter University of Pittsburgh Press Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2018, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4523-9 Cover art: Photographs by Ratana21/Sutterstock.com and iStock.com/pepifoto Cover design: Nick Caruso Design CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION THE APOCALYPTIC MOMENT: WRITING ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL ALARMISM 1 FRANK UEKÖTTER 1 POWER, POLITICS, AND PROTECTING THE FOREST: SCARES ABOUT WOOD SHORTAGES AND DEFORESTATION IN EARLY MODERN GERMAN STATES 12 BERND-STEFAN GREWE 2 GRASSROOTS APOCALYPTICISM: THE GREAT UPCOMING AIR POLLUTION DISASTER IN POSTWAR AMERICA 36 FRANK UEKÖTTER 3 “A COMPUTER’S VISION OF DOOMSDAY”: ON THE HISTORY OF THE 1972 STUDY THE LIMITS TO GROWTH 49 PATRICK KUPPER AND ELKE SEEFRIED VI v CONTENTS 4 THE SUM OF ALL GERMAN FEARS: FOREST DEATH, ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM, AND THE MEDIA IN 1980S GERMANY 75 FRANK UEKÖTTER AND KENNETH ANDERS 5 THE ENDANGERED AMAZON RAIN FOREST IN THE AGE OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 107 KEVIN NIEBAUER 6 GREENPEACE AND THE BRENT SPAR CAMPAIGN: A PLATFORM FOR SEVERAL TRUTHS 129 ANNA-KATHARINA WÖBSE 7 A LANDSCAPE OF MULTIPLE EMERGENCIES: NARRATIVES OF THE DAL LAKE IN KASHMIR 150 SHALINI PANJABI 8 THE ADIVASI VERSUS COCA-COLA: A LOCAL ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT AND ITS GLOBAL RESONANCE 169 BERND-STEFAN GREWE Notes 195 Contributors 261 Index 265 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THIS IS THE FIRST book that grew out of the Birmingham Seminar for Envi- ronmental Humanities (BISEMEH). It demonstrates what the environmental humanities should do: seize on an unresolved issue and explore ways to advance debates with the intellectual resources of the humanities. The project benefited from a workshop at Bielefeld University that took place with sup- port from the School of History and Cultures of the University of Birming- ham. I wish to thank Hannah Smith for translating the articles by Kevin Nie- bauer, Patrick Kupper and Elke Seefried, and the two articles by Bernd-Stefan Grewe, and Frances Foley for doing the same with Anna-Katharina Wöbse’s article. Two anonymous reviewers provided helpful feedback. And it was a pleasure to work with Sandy Crooms and Alex Wolfe at the University of Pittsburgh Press. My greatest thanks go to the authors, who took part in an academic endeavor with an elevated risk level. You cannot write about alarmism without stepping out of the ivory tower, which is what the environmental humanities should be all about. It also means to aim for an intellectual middle ground that may not exist yet. With the world being as it is, it is quite possible that vested interests will search this book for ammunition in VIII v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ongoing conflicts. We hope to convince them that, rather than perpetuating long-standing disputes, it is more rewarding to reflect on why we are stuck with certain lines of reasoning. But every book runs the risk of being misun- derstood, and misunderstandings about a book on environmental alarmism can be particularly painful. But, all things considered, it would not be the end of the world. EXPLORING APOCALYPTICA INTRODUCTION THE APOCALYPTIC MOMENT WRITING ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL ALARMISM FRANK UEKÖTTER ONCE UPON A TIME the apocalypse was a topic for special occasions. It was there for wars and other existential emergencies, for a preacher in need of a sermon that really scared the flock, and for the lunatic fringe. Those days are gone in the new millennium. If aliens were to listen in on one of today’s news outlets, they would surely diagnose an infatuation with the end of days. Apocalyptic overtones permeate broadcasts from stock market projections to the latest news from the White House, and every political cause seems to ride on the back of some dramatic horror scenario. The alarmist mode has turned into the default mode of political communication. Western environmentalism has followed its own trajectory when it comes to alarmism. From the 1970s to the 1990s, environmentalism gained a repu- tation as a cause that was particularly prone to alarmist rhetoric. To cite just one example, Rick Perlstein argues that since the publication of Rachel Car- son’s Silent Spring in 1962, “Environmentalism had sometimes seemed a sort of transideological apocalypticism.”1 But in the new millennium, two trends have challenged this received wisdom. On the one hand, scientific research has painted an ever more precise picture of environmental hazards. While academic uncertainties cast a pall over discussions when anthropogenic cli- 2 v FRANK UEKÖTTER mate change first emerged as a political issue in the 1970s and 1980s, today we can talk about the world’s climate with a degree of precision and reliability that has turned denial of climate change into an intellectual embarrassment.2 On the other hand, apocalyptic rhetoric seems to have lost the political thrust of former years. The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit followed up on a ver- itable barrage of alarmist rhetoric from the authoritative reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, and yet the event turned into the greatest debacle of global environmental policy.3 Apocalyptic environmental rhetoric has drawn a broad range of com- ments over the years. Julian Simon challenged one of the leading prophets of doom, Paul Ehrlich, to a famous bet whose outcome is a topic of ongoing discussions.4 Bjørn Lomborg sought to cut through environmental fears with a deep plunge into statistics. A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism of 1994 attacked mainstream U.S. environmental organizations as members of a “‘crisis of the month’ club.” In 2013, the French writer Pascal Bruckner published a lament, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse, which takes on an ecol- ogy that invokes nature solely as “a stick to be used to beat human beings.” Others count on the enduring allure of the environmental apocalypse. After unmasking scientists and scientific advisers who downplayed environmental risks in a painstaking empirical critique, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Con- way moved on with a book of fiction that chronicles the upcoming collapse of Western civilization between 2073 and 2093.5 Asked about what readers should take away from the book, one of the authors expressed his hope that readers “think more clearly about the climate of the future.”6 Horror scenarios remain a fixture in the public discourse on climate change, but they increasingly come with a sense of ambiguity. When New York Magazine published an article with gloomy warnings about an uninhabitable earth, it sparked unease as well as a nagging feeling that an alternative narrative was nowhere in sight. “Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism,” Robinson Meyer noted in the Atlantic, but he was unsure what would take its place: “No one knows how to talk about climate change right now.”7 Controversies typically centered on matters of legitimacy, political clout, and topical focus. First, was alarmism justified in light of the best available evidence? Was speculation about future events a legitimate endeavor for experts, given that the future is uncertain by its very nature, and if so, what INTRODUCTION v 3 were the criteria for legitimate projections? Second, did horror scenarios really galvanize the attention of people and policymakers, or was that an act of wishful thinking? Third, did environmental horror scenarios grow out of a concern for sustainability, or was the environment camouflage for more sinister motives?8 But as the environmental heydays of the last third of the twentieth century move into perspective, a fourth dimension is emerging that remains vastly underexplored both within academia and among the public at large: what is the legacy of environmental apocalypticism? The apocalypse is about the here and now by nature. Horror scenarios typically relate to the challenges of the day, and the full drama is bound to unfold in the not-too-distant future. The urgency of the moment usually renders reflections on long-term effects into second-rate affairs, a matter for antiquarians and literary critics who may eventually seize on the matter when the dust has settled. As Frank Kermode has noted in his seminal The Sense of an Ending, “Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited.”9 But in the twenty-first century, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the legacy of past environmental alarms matters for the challenges of the day. The horror scenarios linger, and they shape the ways in which we engage with environmental issues. In the fable of Aesop, the boy who cries wolf learns a powerful lesson: those who lie will eventually receive punishment. But in the real world, the moral bottom line is far messier: tropes remain in circulation long beyond their prime, and their effects go in many directions. They no longer have the meaning that they used to have, let alone the urgency, and yet people find it difficult to reflect on topics without this legacy. As Patrick Kupper and Elke Seefried show in chapter 3, the Club of Rome’s study Limits to Growth lingers in debates over resource scarcity, along with a vague notion that it was not all quite so dramatic, and similar statements can be made for the Amazon rain- forest, forest death in Germany, and the great upcoming air pollution disaster: tropes barely change, and to the extent that they do, they are just fading from memory rather than being digested and replaced by more sophisticated views.

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