Dan Snow's History Hit - How History Inspires Environmental Activism

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

The world faces a unique environmental challenge. The scale of response to this looming catastrophe can be overwhelming. But economist and activist Andrew Simms believes that history provides us with a guide. It can inspire us to see that we have overcome greater challenges than those we face now. It can encourage us to be bold and believe that the solution lies in our hands. Andrew co-founded the New Weather Institute and Green New Deal group and is a lover of history. In this podcast Andrew shares his thoughts with Dan on episodes in the past that we should be looking to, from the New Deal to the allied victory in the Second World War. He believes we "are capable of extraordinary things."

Hello everyone, welcome to As Knows History. We've got fires in Australia. We've got coal-fired power stations in too many places belching out emissions that are contributing to global warming, to climate change, climate emergency. We've got too much plastic in our oceans. And here at History Hit we're keen to do our bit alongside lots of other media organisations to make sure we're doing our bit talking about the environmental challenges that we face. And it gives me huge pleasure to talk to Andrew Sims. He's a writer, he's an activist, he's a friend. We've worked together on a campaign for more woodland cover here in the UK. And he believes history can inspire positive change around the environment. He's written, he's an economist as well. He understands economics,

very exciting. So he's written lots of books talking about how we can change the way that we live, the way that we interact, the way that we consume energy without destabilising our entire economic, political and social order. He's a great guy. He's optimistic, positive as he'll hear. He's a wonderful communicator. So enjoy listening to Andrew Sims as he talks about some of the big moments in history that he takes inspiration from as he seeks to bring about change. Don't forget, everybody, you can go onto historyhit.tv. If you're listening to this podcast, you may have heard me mention it before. It's a new history channel. We got, as always, the exclusive offer for podcast listeners is Pod6.

Use the code Pod6, P-O-D-6. You get six weeks for free. If you don't like it, bin it. Just check it out, though. It's good. We're working on lots of big films at the moment. This year's very exciting, lots of big films. I was in the cabinet war rooms yesterday in London. I touched the bed that Winston Churchill slept in on a few nights

during the Blitz. It was very exciting. I put my fingernails in the grooves that his fingernails made in his chair from which he used to preside over meetings of the war cabinet. And you'd be so nervous that you'd see where his fingernails and his signet ring gouged out grooves in the arms of his chair. And I put my fingers, and I've touched those. So you know, I'm communing with the great man. There you go. So that will be coming up soon on History at TV, so go and check it out.

In the meantime, here is Andrew Sims. Enjoy. It's great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for coming on. Very nice to be here. You and I met in a forest, talking about the importance of trees. Yes, and the startling fact that even if you doubled Britain's tree cover, we'd still have less than the European average. Long way to go. It's amazing, isn't it? It is shocking. It is shocking.

But we bonded over sort of being, trying to be optimistic about our capacity as a species to make radical transformation. And so whether we're looking, it just takes political, financial will. And we can do pretty amazing things. And you've actually done some work on this, trying to find analogous examples of what we might have to do in terms of kind of rebalancing our economy away from carbon. Well, we've got this enormous challenge. The scientists are telling us that to hit our climate targets and avoid climate breakdown, we're going to need rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all areas of our lives. And of course, when you hear that, most people kind of want to run and hide. And I think quite often we forget

how when push comes to shove, we're actually pretty good at change and adaptation. And sometimes it can come in the most unexpected moments and times. Now, I remember I live in South London. I live under the flight path of one of the big airports, Heathrow. And of course, aviation is one of our most polluting ways of getting around. And yet there was a time, less than 10 years ago, when I woke up one morning and the skies were silent. And that's because a volcano in Iceland had exploded and the fine particulate matter was lethal to modern jet engines. And that meant that almost overnight, a switch was flicked to off for the whole of the aviation industry. This thing we'd come to take for granted suddenly wasn't available. And what happened overnight was people simply adapted.

They sofa surfed, they car shared, they got on social media. Supermarkets turned to local supplies instead of flying things in from Asia and Africa. Business people who would have been flying around the world turned to video conferencing. And the Norwegian prime minister, who was stuck at the United Nations in New York, ran parliament from his iPad. So at the drop of a hat, we found we had slack capacity,

we had resilience and the adaptability to learn to live without it. Now that I think could be repeated in many, many other circumstances. And we'd be capable of making far more dramatic changes much more quickly than we give ourselves credit for. I love it. What other examples do you, so you've got the Icelandic volcano, which I hadn't thought of, it's brilliant. I was busy ferrying people back and forth across the channel during that time. So that was quite fun. What other examples have you come up with?

Well, transport is a really interesting example because there's obviously two things that have to happen here. We've got to change the infrastructure within which we make our available choices because you can only choose so much if your whole system is locked into high-carbon ways of doing things. And I think transport is an interesting one, because if you go back to a time before modern logistics, you know, aided by computers,

and you look at something as humble as the railways, you know, today we think of the railways as being the environmentally friendly alternative. When they first arrived on the scene, people were slightly scared by these huge, lunking engines. But if you look at Britain's own history in the middle of the 19th century, there was a seven-year period there

in which we rolled out nearly 4,500 miles of railways. And yet, strangely, today we seem to struggle even upgrading a little bit of track up the East Coast and go billions over budget. So I think there's some sort of boldness and ambition that we could relearn from what we've done in the past. There's one example with the Great Western Railways. On a single weekend in 1892, they started work upgrading to a new gauge at dawn on Saturday morning.

And they had the job finished and the line open again at dawn on Monday morning. Now, can we imagine that at the moment? Well, we should be able to believe in and start to see these kind of changes being possible. But there's lots of other times, moments in history, when rapid change has happened. Yeah, because I remember I talked to you about this before was, I mean, you look at warfare, where you go from, you go from, you get like unimaginable transformation in the space of months. I mean, aircraft in the First World War were obsolete within months arriving on a battlefield. And you go into a situation in the Second World War where you've got canvassed biplanes on the front line in 1939,

and you've got jet aircraft with swept-back wings six years later. I mean, that pace of change is in one way quite inspiring. Well, wartime is obviously an extreme circumstance, but there's a lot of lessons that we can learn from it, especially from World War II, because sometimes we look back and think that everybody fell into line and was prepared to change. But actually, at the time, it was a hard-won progress

because there were large parts of the British establishment that didn't want to prepare for war, that wanted appeasement. There was a public which, to begin with, was not really that interested. And yet some of the groundwork done for it in the mid to late 1930s, for example the building of the Shadow Factories to prepare for armaments in the case of war, was something that was hard won in battles in Whitehall. Winston Churchill at the time kind of complained that we were in an era of complacency and we were sleepwalking to disaster. But there are other really interesting

lessons too, because yes, people had to make some sacrifices in that period. And we did have to see dramatic reductions in the consumption of resources, all resources from metals through to foodstuffs. But because of the way that it was approached, and because of the way that people were kind of looked out for, and because of the very equal way, for example, that rationing was done, in that period of time, in the four or five years period of time, the core period of the war, the health of the nation sort of at home leapt forward. Infant mortality declined. maternal mortality declined, life expectancy increased. We became a much healthier nation. And that experience of collective action did

something else very interesting too. It laid the groundwork, for example, for us being able to introduce the National Health Service in just three years from the time of the plan being written. It set us up to build homes at a rate which today is seemingly unimaginable. Under both Conservative and Labour administrations, we were putting up over 200,000 social homes, council homes a year. And if you look back to a recent year like 2014, there were just over 1,000 built. And the current targets are very, very small. So at different points in history, as you say, when the will has been there, when there's been a political consensus and people have said, right, let's get on with it, we can do incredible things.

Yeah, I mean, think about Apollo 11 anniversary this year. Kennedy announces they're going to go to the moon. There's no idea, no one has any idea how you're going to take manned spaceflight to the moon. And yet they just, with enough resource, which was a lot, they get it done. moon. And yet they just, with enough resource, which was a lot, they get it done. It's extraordinary the ability to do things when you set a vision and you marshal resources. And what's also interesting from both the Apollo example and also some of the great technological leap forwards that occurred during the 1940s is the way that these have enormous public spin-offs as well. You know, it was, you know, the microwave was a result of a spin-off from some of the investigations into communications technologies

during the Second World War. All sorts of things have spun off from the Apollo programme, but what it does show is just the ability you have once you mobilise resources and you have a focused mission to get on and do things. Now, that's a good example because it was a bold, stated idea. Let's go do something amazing. The other thing which is incredible is how much we're capable of when things just kind

of happen around us. If you think back to the time of the financial crisis, a little more than a decade ago, both in terms of economic policy and the way that people started to experiment with different ways of living. That was an extraordinary period. If you'd said just a few months ago that we were going to find hundreds of billions of pounds from the public resources to be able to bail out the high street banks, people would have laughed in your face. If you'd said that you were going to effectively renationalise great swathes of your financial institutions, then people would have laughed. And yet, overnight, the ability to do that was found. People have said that if the climate was a bank,

we would have found the money and the wherewithal to save it many, many years ago. But what it shows is that we can get the resources when we need them. Now if those resources, instead of being put into sort of just reflating the banks effectively, had been put into the low-carbon transition of the UK, we'd be in a much better climate change position today than we are at the moment. But we also found out, and some of the other responses, people for example experimented with shorter working weeks during the financial crisis. One state in the US, in the Utah, they put public workers onto a four-day week and they had the presence of mind to study the results of doing so. What they found was that the staff were happier, absentee rates went down, public approval with public services went up, and even though it wasn't the objective, they looked at their

energy use and they found that in just a six- month period they saw a 14% drop in carbon emissions So shorter working weeks as a way of kind of having some more of that slack Resilient capacity to adapt to make the changes we need to do some that's just something that we stumbled across So if you What where where are the areas that we would sort of so where are the areas that you would unleash this Manhattan Project effort in staving off climate breakdown? If we look around us, we know where we need to get the big wins in terms of cutting carbon and reducing our environmental impact. It's in the way we get around the transport systems we use, the way that we heat and power our homes, the kind of diets that we have. In all of these areas, and obviously in terms of the energy that we generate as well, in all of these areas, we know what the answers are.

We know we need to move to more plant-based diets. We know we need to both radically increase the supply of renewable energy whilst also stopping using the dirty stuff, coal, oil and gas. And we know that we need to move to mass public transport rather than giving our towns and cities over to private cars. And we know that we need the electric energy to power those systems. Now, we also know that there's a lot of win-wins in things like that, because if you get cars off the streets, you get cleaner air, you get healthier children, you get far fewer people dying prematurely because of the toxic air quality that we experience. In London alone, in the UK, each year about 10,000 people die prematurely because of mostly the pollution that comes from private cars. And we know that we can both get a safer climate and cleaner air and nicer places to live by

going that direction. These are no-brainer directions to go in. And for what it's worth, pump less money to some of the world's nastiest people. It must be said that, as far as I'm aware, no nation has yet been invaded for its wind turbines, whereas oil and fossil fuels have been the source of many conflicts and probably will continue to be so until we stop using them. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the

poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week Can you talk about the money that went into underpinning Britain's war efforts? It's sort of unimaginable. I mean, you're actually talking, presumably you're talking less money

to deal with the climate crisis that we've got now. Well, we estimate that, as a rough ballpark figure, that we could be spending around about 100 billion a year. Now, the important thing to say is, of course, that's not just a cost, because that goes to pay people to do things. Those people, when they're doing things, pay taxes. Those taxes flow back into the public coffers and are available for investing in other things. So this should be seen as investment rather than cost. Now, what we do know is, if you take another historical comparison,

if you look at Roosevelt's New Deal, which was necessary in the wake of another financial disaster. Now, the New Deal gave the defining measure of how today we look at the success or failure of new administrations coming in. He gave us the term, the first hundred days. And in Roosevelt's first hundred days in office, he passed 15 bills, he created the Civilian Conservation Corps, he re-regulated the banks,

he created new bank holidays, and it led to a period of time in which inequality was compressed, farmers were put back to work, and major public and environmental works were done. They created 250,000 jobs in conservation of forests alone. Now that cost the equivalent of about three and a half percent of GDP, which today's equivalent would pave easily for what we need to do to make the low carbon transition and meet the international climate targets, make our homes more comfortable and more pleasant places to live in, our cities more pleasant places to live in, make it easier to get around and give us healthier lives. Now, what's not to like about

that? What other historical examples do you look to? Well, I think there's some interesting examples too about where you can learn about how we've done things the wrong way round. One of the other things, many of the problems that we live with today are incredibly recent. Aviation is something which is taken for granted, a very highly polluting form of transport. That's a very recent thing. It's only really in the last generation that people have taken cheap flights for granted. And if you look at the arrival of plastics, plastics as being such a ubiquitous thing, and now we've come to the

terms that single-use plastics are no longer acceptable. Plastics were the result of oversupply in the oil industry. It was a product in search of a market. So a lot of the early use of plastics, and yes, it's a very clever material and it can do lots of things, but its sheer ubiquity is a very recent accident. And even the car culture itself. In North America, which we think of as being as synonymous with car culture, before the car came along, and there was a period of about just three decades when about 47,000 miles of interstate highway were laid to lock America into car use. But that didn't just happen, because cities up to that time had had much cleaner and more efficient mass transit systems, the trolley cars, the tram systems. Those systems

were actively undermined, destabilized and pulled apart through lobbying by the emergent car industry. So we can look at mistakes we've made and learn from those, unpick those, and in the same way understand that we can put the replacements in just as quickly. I love that. Yeah, because I'm fascinated. LA, everyone thinks is a city set out for cars, but it's not. It was a city designed around mass public transport. It's spread out because of the trolley car. I mean, so few cities were designed for the car.

I mean, any city of any age was not designed for the car. It's also kind of ironic. I mean, electric cars are going to be an improvement, but they still take up a lot of land. You still get particulate pollution from the tyres. One of the things which people know little about is the way in which a lot of the microplastic pollution, one of the predominant

sources of it, is from car tyres. The big wind, I mean, there's an estimate of something like 50 square kilometres of Greater London is given over just to car parking space. Just imagine what you could do with that space if we didn't have all those cars. But, you know, these are problems that we have all the capacity, the wherewithal and the knowledge to deal with. Take a city like Oslo. This year, its city centre is going entirely car-free. Take another city like Copenhagen. About 84% of the journeys in its centre are not by car already. People are rolling back. We're seeing better ways of doing things. And history, to some degree, is being our guide on this.

Well, I'm very glad to hear it. It's useful. It's exciting to hear that you guys think, in the environmental movement, that history is like a tool that you're using. There's an old gnomic expression which I think you have to kind of take on the chin. There's a Russian medievalist called Vladimir Klucheski who said that history teaches us nothing but punishes us for not learning its lessons. Well, now, actually, I think we are in a situation where we can learn lessons about rapid transitions from history because the climate is changing

faster than we are. And we desperately need to speed up. We need to look at what has worked, where and how, and where those lessons are transferable. We need to take the best practices and apply them where we can. And I think the more we get to know about these kind of examples, and we'd be really enthusiastic to hear from people about other new examples, we can pull together almost like a living guide to rapid transition from what has worked before. I mean, there will always be caveats. There will always be things that didn't work and things we want to do differently.

But if we don't learn from history, we might not make it to a future we want to live in. The flip side of this conversation is probably looking at history to not just inspire us, but also to warn us, because people often think the present is kind of inevitable and also immutable. But it's not. Sea levels have risen and

fallen quite remarkably, even during a period of recorded history. That's right. And one of the big problems at the moment, and why the world we live in today is so different to before, is that a lot of our infrastructure, great concentrations of our populations are in the areas which are particularly vulnerable to increasingly volatile and extreme weather events. We live along coastlines. We live along rivers. We concentrate where the hydrological cycle, which is what global heating and climate breakdown will most disrupt, it's where it will have its big impacts. And our infrastructures are built only to a certain level of tolerance. And what we're seeing is records being broken on a regular basis. So we're going to need to rework our infrastructure so that we can survive that amount of climate disturbance, which is already built

into the system, whilst at the same time shifting to lower carbon ways of doing things. Now, the good news about that is that because of the things, some of the things we've talked about, different ways of eating, different ways of traveling, different ways of getting power, because making these changes also makes for better quality of life. And also, it should be said, creates a whole load of jobs. The so-called green collar economy is massively job rich because in many circumstances we'd also be replacing people, putting hands back to use again as well. So we can make a better, cleaner, more convivial world in which there's lots of opportunities for employment. And we can do it in a way which can make the world a better place

if we act fast and hard now. Well, you know, you convinced me, buddy. So thank you very much. How can people find out more about the work you're doing and keep in touch with you personally? Well, we have an organisation called the Rapid Transition Alliance. It's an international group. And if, for example, someone was a member of an organisation

that is interested in this area, they can go onto our website, rapidtransition.org, and they can apply to sign up. But also, we're really interested to hear of other examples and case studies. They could be very small ones, they could be distant in history, they could be things which are happening somewhere in the world now, where you can see the dynamics of people addressing a problem and doing it quickly, and doing it in such a way which is socially progressive, but also getting us off the treadmill of overconsumption

and heavy reliance upon fossil fuels. It might be just to do with how you get around. It might be to do with how you grow food. It might be to do with how you build buildings. It might be to do with how you involve people in making decisions. All kinds of ways in which we want to learn from absolutely the best way of doing things. And the more there can be a shared understanding of that, the quicker we can

get to a point where these changes stop being spoken about, about things we might do in a decade or two, and start being things that happen now. one child one teacher one book and one pen can change the world i hope you enjoyed the podcast everyone just a massive favor to ask if you could go to itunes wherever you get your podcasts give it a rating five stars obviously and then leave a glowing review that'd be great my mum is getting overwhelmed by the amount of different email accounts she's set up to leave good reviews for me so you're gonna have to do some of the heavy lifting thank you