In the New York Times last Sunday, David Wallace-Wells offered an essay on climate change entitled, “Time to Panic.” We have been downplaying the risks of our situation, Wallace-Wells argued, for psychological and political reasons. Now, as he quotes David Attenborough, “If we don’t take action the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”
In our new situation, we could base an entire social studies course on the two images below, a course to replace the “World History” classes often taught to teenagers. The course would begin with the creation of ever-rising wealth and an improved quality of life for most people on earth. Beneath that story would run a second narrative, a tale of environmental destruction and looming chaos.
The Industrial Revolution is the starting point, a stalwart topic in secondary school history courses. The narrative about technological development has changed over time, perhaps. The story of “great men”–Stephenson, Bessemer, and so on–gives way to lessons on “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” in which the question of why the leaps in technology took place in Western Europe are attributed to circumstances of geography and the somewhat happenstantial creation of “inclusive institutions” in Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
In the figure below, we see the Great Divergence and the unprecedented growth in wealth after 1800.
Stories of European technological triumph are often tempered nowadays by the following unit–on colonialism. Europeans used their technological advantage to invade dozens of places in Asia and Africa, brutalizing peoples and savaging cultures for the sake of profit and racist-nationalist pride.
But now we may consider yet another narrative. One where the central story is … what? Certainly not progress. Hubris perhaps? (Our current “revolution” in technology feels a bit flimsy here: will our digital wondertools help us?)
Mirroring the growth in wealth is the concentration of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide–again, after 1800. Today, global wealth continues to rise–good news. But it is shadowed by the rising tide of global environmental destruction.
Fossil fuels powered the steam trains of England, the steamboats of the Mississippi, and then, with the creation of the internal combustion engine, the automobiles of Daimler, Benz, and Diesel. Now they threaten to be our undoing. And unlike that other great threat, nuclear technology, there is no upside.
What are our options? To engineer our way out of this mess with new forms of technology; to return to a per-capita income like that of 1800 (I can’t see how this would happen without something dreadful happening first); and … “staying the course.” Most likely, I think, we will limp through the century, struggling to change while the climate rages at us and the seas rise. I wonder what lessons we will learn from all this.
Is it a global lesson in caution, in modesty, in our ignorance of our own creations? Perhaps our students today can suggest where the story goes from here and what it might mean.
Images: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/geschichte/abteilung/arbeitsbereiche/wirtschaftsgeschichte/index.html; https://www.co2levels.org/
THE BIGGER PICTURE: Educating Students for the Globalized Present 