Why science alone can’t solve the climate crisis with Conor Brennan

Although there has been scientific consensus on the climate crisis for decades, humans have been slow to respond to its urgency. Environmental humanities researcher Conor Brennan joins me to talk about: 

• What is environmental humanities?
• How can evironmental humanities help to solve the climate crisis?
• The role of popular culture in communicating the climate crisis
• The problems that arise when we take arts and humanities out of the equations 
• How art convinces people to change their behaviour about the climate crisis
• How has the climate crisis affected literature and aesthetic experiments?
• Why climate activism should include humanities teaching in schools/universities

Read "The Humanities in the UK Today" report by the Higher Education Policy Institute
Other sources discussed:

• Edward Said, "Jane Austen and Empire", Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)
• Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (2020)
• Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)

Find Bryony @BF_Armstrong
Find the pod @wtppod_
Find Conor

Artwork: Riduwan Molla https://www.canva.com/p/riduwanmolla/
Music: Madaan Mansij https://www.pond5.com/artist/mansij_tubescreamer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Transcript

Bryony Armstrong: 0:04

Hello and welcome to What's the Point, the podcast where we discuss the need for arts and humanities today. I'm your host, Bryony Armstrong. We're living in a time when the arts and humanities are under threat, and I know this firsthand, having studied both English and maths at university and now doing a PhD in English. Each week, I'll be joined by a guest to talk about what arts and humanities do for the world. If you've ever wondered, what's the point of the arts and humanities, then this is the podcast for you. Hello, and welcome back again to What's the Point! I'm joined today by Conor Brennan to talk about the relationship between the arts and humanities and the climate crisis and what's going on in the field that is called Environmental Humanities. Conor has just finished his PhD in the Department of Germanic studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he's been researching aesthetic responses to the Anthropocene. That is the unofficial geological period that dates from the beginning of significant human impact on the earth. Let's get into the episode. So can you start off by explaining to those of us not familiar with this concept, what does Environmental Humanities mean?

Conor Brennan: 1:27

Sure, so I'd say the Environmental Humanities is kind of an umbrella term for all the ways in which we can use humanities approaches to think about, like, the nonhuman world, our relationship to it, including, of course, you know, thinking about the climate and biodiversity crisis that we're faced with at the moment. So that will include work in philosophy, literary studies, history is very big, languages, and the creative arts. So it'll be everything from, kind of, analyzing the climate's role in human history, to sort of philosophical discussions of ethics, or thinking about how to mourn the loss of specific species and landscapes. So in a way, you know, the Environmental Humanities engage closely with scientific insights about ecology and the climate. But we, sort of, pay attention to everything that isn't accounted for in that scientific data, or sort of in the science alone. So you know, I'd say, kind of, the the main, kind of, crucial contributions that the Environmental Humanities can make to this discussion, and to sort of engaging with the climate emergency with humans' place in the world, are, sort of, first of all, emphasizing historical understanding of these problems. So the idea would be that you, kind of, can't solve this problem unless you understand and engage with the root causes. A lot of those are to do with colonial history and with, sort of, global inequality. So there's a strong element of, you know, the idea of justice...kind of, ideas of environmental and climate justice. Secondly, I'd say, you know, one thing that the humanities and the creative arts are very good at that, you know, that science can't always produce in the same way is just creating meaning. So telling us why we should care about particular animals, particular places. And that's kind of because we're not really just rational creatures who respond to data and to facts. And we see this if we look at, you know...we've had this information about global warming, as it was originally called, or climate change, or, to kind of give it the more appropriate urgency, to climate emergency or the climate crisis. We've known about this for decades, there's kind of been scientific consensus on it since probably the 1980s. And I'm sure you've experienced this, and...and we all, every day, if you look at your phone, if you look at the news, we're kind of bombarded with information about this. So clearly, what we're lacking is not information. What we're lacking in some way is a way of relating to it that changes how we behave. And I think that this idea of creating meaning plays a part in that. So, kind of, stories and even words, you know, particular names for things in different languages. And a lot of the time that's to do with Indigenous language and culture as well. And then lastly, maybe, by kind of imagining different futures and alternative ways of life. You know, this is such a, kind of, big, all encompassing problem, that I think we can end up with a sense of resignation, we kind of can't seem to break out of the status quo very easily. We're kind of paralyzed by information a lot of the time. And I think that the humanities, and especially the creative arts, does have or can have this kind of countercultural power in that regard, and it's good at kind of thinking through the big ideas and imagining quite radical alternatives. So those are some of the ways that Environmental Humanities can kind of contribute to this discussion that maybe aren't always possible, just in the realm of scientific inquiry.

Bryony Armstrong: 5:12

Yeah. And I was totally thinking while you were talking there about that change from calling it...what did it change from? From global warming to climate change? Was it that, to make it seem less urgent? And it's like, actually, this whole issue in a way is really one of messaging in the way that's wrapped up in words. And that's literally exactly what humanities looks at sometimes.

Conor Brennan: 5:35

Yeah, for sure. And even I think the idea of, you know, you go from global warming, and even global heating, and just to kind of make it sound less appealing to the climate crisis, and the climate emergency, like, kind of...the terms lose their...they're usually, we usually come up with them to renew the sense of urgency, and then quickly, they become, you know...you say crisis every day for years. And it kind of loses its reality in a way, which I think is part of what, you know, this concept of the Anthropocene that is part of this discourse. The point of that concept, I think, which...which suggests that we're now in a new geological epoch where, you know, humans are geological agents whose changes to the planet could be read in the fossil record. The idea of that is meant to sort of shock us with how radical and how new this is compared to, you know, if you think that all of human history previous to this has been in the Holocene, and now we're in the Anthropocene. It's meant to have that effect, the kind of shock of the new as you might say inmodernism. But it kind of very quickly doesn't, and you find, you know, like, the people keep coming up with new terms, they get impatient with them. They get impatient with using the same words, because somehow it's not landing.

Bryony Armstrong: 7:01

That's interesting. And actually, I guess, I think about, sort of the ways, I guess climate change has been...or I should say the climate crisis...has been communicated to me, in my experience in a way that shocks and like I was thinking before recording this that I think that movie, it's terrible movie, but The Day After Tomorrow came out when I was about eight or something. And I remember that kind of being my first experience of thinking about the climate crisis in any way. And I guess it's designed to shock but like, that, that definitely, to me was sort of a way of like communicating it that really had nothing to do with scientific communication. I mean, I wasn't reading scientific papers or a newspaper at that point. But it was like a movie that did that

Conor Brennan: 7:45

Yeah, for sure. I think, popular culture in

Bryony Armstrong: 7:45

Definitely. And like, what kind of problems for me. particular gives us these very salient images of what climate breakdown might look like. It's sort of funny that they're always...they're almost always like disaster films, like it has to happen very suddenly, in a way that kind of, probably is not how things would unfold. And it is...I've always wondered whether that is part of a kind of fatalism or something like we're very interested in seeing depictions of our own end. But it's much harder to, kind of, come up with these sort of alternatives, as I was saying, But you're right, exactly like we, we as...and that's one of the sort of strange things about the Environmental Humanities is that the whole, the term itself contains a sort of attention, where really, a lot of what we're trying to do is draw attention away from humans, away from a human centric view of the world. You know, to kind of give their proper due to, in as far as it's possible, the perspectives and the experiences of other species, the you know, the value everything outside of human experience. But at the same time, we are kind of stuck in our own perspective, we can only relate to that as the creatures that we are. And I think that it's very clear that we're not creatures who think in exclusively rational ways...that we do like images and words and kind of creative ways of engaging with the world land with us much more than data do. do you think, arise if we were to take the arts and humanities out of the equation when it comes to looking at the climate crisis as a whole?

Conor Brennan: 9:34

Pretty big problems, I think! The Environmental Humanities, I would say...I would be curious to hear your take on this, you know, on the kind of whole two cultures debate given the setup of this podcast. I think that the Environmental Humanities is not in any way about...it's obviously not about in any way denying scientific insight or scientific knowledge about these problems. In fact, you know, it kind of works very closely and engages very closely with this...with this type of knowledge. But I mean, clearly, as you say, we're giving this example of The Day After Tomorrow, like part of the problem here...and I think The Day After Tomorrow also features, as many of these, you know, literary works and films do, features a scientist character who is not listened to. That happens all the time, or even don't...I didn't watch Don't Look Up, but I've heard that's the premise of it as well, kind of, you know, it's in that case, an asteroid, but clearly the parallel could very easily be climate change. Clearly, a huge issue is about communicating the realities that we we know of, but they're just not, kind of...we're not engaging with them on anything like the appropriate timescale or with anything like the appropriate seriousness. So I think that sense of, you know, that issue of how to communicate these insights is an important one. But also, if there's one thing that ideas like the Anthropocene or the climate crisis...if there's one thing that they've kind of taught us, it's a sort of a rebuke to pure rationality or rebuke to kind of ideas of human supremacy over the natural world. So you kind of, you know, if we look at the not so distant history of science, a lot of forms of science have actually helped to cause these problems, have kind of helped to cause sort of...they've upheld colonial exploitation. They've upheld kind of extractivist mindsets and kind of monocultures. You know, there's, I think the idea of a monoculture is very interesting, when you...when you come to this problem of how to approach the climate crisis, you know, it's...we've seen that if we just try to shape the world in a way that directly benefits also, there are all sorts of...there are all sorts of unintended...unintended consequences that...that kind of come back to bite us. And I think that there's a similar...the idea of just doing STEM or STEAM and leaving out the humanities is a similar type of a monoculture. When you think about, you know...it's kind of...I mean, it doesn't even have to be Environmental Humanities. I find it a strange idea in general, even the question, the title question of this podcast, what's the point? You know, I think you'll meet very few humanities researchers who would ever ask, what's the point of science, but the other way around, that kind of, you know, is surprisingly common. And then what would be the end? If you think that through logically what would be the end result of that? Is that a world where just everyone is an engineer, or molecular biologist or something? And, you know, is that not exactly the type of utilitarian monoculture that we've learned is our problem, you know, with this...with the crisis that we're faced with now. So I think that the Environmental Humanities can draw attention to...I think it's come up on this podcast and other episodes before...forms of diversity. You know, this very idea of biodiversity should actually be a very useful analogy for thinking about things like cultural and linguistic diversity. And I mean, also just historical understanding. I think that if we...if we were to take only a scientific approach to the climate crisis, you've got an issue of sort of treating the symptom, but not the cause. Because obviously, this is a huge challenge in and of itself, it's a huge global intractable problem. But if you were suddenly to wave, some kind of technoscientific wand and the climate crisis were solved, you still wouldn't have addressed root causes, that it's drawn our attention to...kind of root injustices and inequalities. To begin with, I don't think that it's possible to wave that technoscientific wand. I think that really, the only way to a better future is through sort of understanding the past and understanding how we've gotten to this point. So yeah, I think really it would be a very bad idea, scientists, to leave us out of the discussion. If any of you are listening.

Bryony Armstrong: 14:22

Yeah, if there are any scientists out there listening to this podcast about arts and humanities. That is fascinating. I've never thought of it that way, thinking about symptom not cause because yeah, it is...this is a human caused issue. And there are so many, like, political human factors that are going into why we're creating a climate crisis. And yeah, to answer kind of your question about that, like two cultures debate and you put that so well, is that, totally, like that...I think what keeps coming up time and time again on this podcast is like, this is not about saying STEM is less worthy or arts and humanities are less worthy, but that both have...both have a place in the world and in many ways have like a symbiotic relationship and have to work together when it comes to some of the biggest issues that we're facing, for example, the climate crisis. There was recently a really great report that came out by the Higher Education Policy Institute. It's called The Humanities in the UK Today, I can leave it in the show notes below. But it really eloquently makes the point that like, if we want to solve a huge issue, then we need, kind of, like, multiple lenses to look at it through. You can't solve an issue in...you have to solve it in a multifaceted way. You can't solve it in...through a singular lens. And STEM...often what STEM does is kind of...people become trained to solve things in a particular way. Like in a computer science degree, you learn how to code in a particular way, or you learn how to solve a particular problem. But as things evolve, you need to have that critical thinking lens, and maybe less of a vocational training, I suppose. And if everybody, like you say, if everyone becomes an engineer and learns how to do something one way, then we're going to lose that kind of macro lens. And it will be much harder to solve bigger problems that need, kind of, a different take, like multiple different takes on things. I think the Environmental Humanities is such a good example of that.

Conor Brennan: 16:27

Yeah, no, for sure, like, we need kind of...for a problem like this, I think we need the broadest possible coalition. And that includes the molecular biologists, of course, but also includes historians and philosophers and poets. Yeah, for sure. And I think you see that a lot in debates around how to respond to the climate crisis. You end up with a lot of discussions that kind of present things as either or. So for instance, thinking on sort of a systems level versus an individual level. I think you kind of get buffeted about a lot between the kind of, Oh, nothing you as an individual do matters, you know, everything is kind of global corporations and governments, that's the only thing that could solve this. And then they're kind of...all the things you're doing in your day to day life from kind of taking a flight to how long you shower for, what you eat, you know, all those things where you kind of feel personally responsible, or the they kind of feel like the places where you yourself can make a difference. And I...this type of question occurs to me a lot, because obviously, you know, on the other hand, while I think that the Environmental Humanities have so much to offer this discussion, at the same time, I do spend a lot of my days just sitting with a pile of books, and pen and paper, writing down...reading something and writing down my thoughts about it. And you kind of...you know, I do find myself asking, Well, what am I really accomplishing here, you know? We sort of know that probably the most effective thing a person can do to help the environmental movement is to convince, you know, multiple other people more than any single thing you could do yourself. It's just, you know, convincing, say, three or four other people to change their behavior slightly. So, kind of, any type of activism will always be more effective than what I do, for instance, but at the same time, I think there's no reason why we can't value all sorts of different approaches, and, you know, use all these different strategies. So for me, the thing that has changed my own personal behavior the most is reading books, like, that's kind of...it sounds, you know, often for people that would be like their direct experiences of...of a landscape or a place, or, you know, some other person they know, or someone they talk to. But on the other hand, if you spend, you know, a few weeks really closely engaging with a book, often that does change your thinking. This kind of idea of empathy that comes into the humanities a lot is one of the things that I think is a kind of a beneficial byproduct of what we do. I think that that has a big effect. And I think that while the Environmental Humanities could always, of course, be seen as taking place kind of largely within the, quote unquote, Ivory Tower, or as being kind of too esoteric in approach to something that obviously needs big policy changes, that needs, you know, checks on the power of corporations, all that type of thing. Nonetheless, we are kind of...it is valuable to spend a long time paying attention to things and to pay attention to them in as many different ways as possible. So I don't know, maybe I'm coming down too hard on this analogy of biodiversity versus a monoculture. But I think that, to me, that makes sense as a conclusion to draw from what we now know about the climate crisis...is just that we need the greatest possible diversity of approaches.

Bryony Armstrong: 19:57

Yeah, no, no, it's a great analogy and this idea of empathy just comes up time and time again as well. I think there seems to be such a consensus that that is something that humanities fosters. I mean, I interviewed, one of...maybe Episode Two I interviewed Will Tullet about smell, and he was talking about how you can't...it's difficult to convince a policymaker to change something unless they really are forced into empathy. And one way to do that is to make them for example, smell the smell of pollutants that they're exporting to the global South. If you can...if you're immediately hit with a sensory experience or reading something like a book, then you are more likely to engage with a problem than maybe if you just read a paper. I mean, maybe for some people, like, reading papers really helps. But for me definitely, and for a lot of people, it is that kind of like empathetic, more visceral response, I think, that you get from art or from the senses think, well, I guess those two are kind of one in the same. And you look at aesthetic responses...I think that's the term that you use in your research...to the environment. So like, What do you mean by aesthetic responses, generally? And like, Do you have any kind of examples you can share with us of particular aesthetic responses that you look at when it comes to the climate crisis?

Conor Brennan: 21:21

Sure. So yeah, I think this ties in with what we've just been talking about in that, you know, as I've said, we all encounter just endless information every day about, you know, what we're doing to the biosphere. And we encounter it as information and it doesn't really land. So one simple way of thinking about the aesthetic that I think, you know, I think my teacher would have told me in school apparently is thinking about the aesthetic as the opposite of the anesthetic. So kind of what you've just been saying...making us feel things, making us pay attention with our senses, or in some other way than with rationality. I think that, you know, art in general, and literary fiction, which is what I study, is really good at that, and making us kinds of feel the reality of the climate crisis, rather than just trying to know it in our heads. But I'm also interested in...some of the first things that I read when I started approaching this topic, would have been books like The Overstory by Richard Powers, which was kind of a big, you know, nominated for lots of prizes in 2018, and would have...people would have seen on the bookshelves, or The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, which was kind of promoted by Barack Obama and stuff like that. They're types of novels that people know are about environmentalism or about the climate crisis. But I was very unsatisfied reading them, because they're very, kind of...the approach that they take is extremely didactic, that you have this feeling reading them that you don't really know why this should happen in the form of a novel. A lot of it is just sort of shoehorning in lots and lots of information. So they have prominent scientist characters as well, who kind of discusses one another's...lots of exposition. That's just, it's kind of like taking you by the hand and teaching you about what's going on. But sort of trying to give you a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down or something, you know? They're fictional characters, but nonetheless, you're essentially reading the newspaper article. That's a bit, you know, a bit polemical, that's a bit unfair. But nonetheless, that's sort of how I felt that the...the novels weren't doing anything interesting, even though the problem itself is so huge. And so it sounds, you know, it sounds kind of inappropriate to say, but it is, it throws up all sorts of interesting philosophical questions. And I kind of thought that compared to, you know...you work on modernism, compared to what we've seen in the past with, say, like the big historical shocks of the 20th century, normally, you'd think that that would cause artists and writers to come up with...to kind of experiment and to kind of seek new ways of representing what seems to be unrepresentable. So part of my research has been, rather than only looking at how the creative arts can kind of communicate the appropriate messages about climate change, also sort of asking what climate...the climate crisis is doing to how writers write. You know, whether it's producing any interesting aesthetic experiments and stuff like that. So um, so I look at things like the role of humor, which you kind of wouldn't expect, you know, this sort of...in many ways, literature and art are a space for...to think really honestly about the kind of messiness and the complexity and the absurdity, as well, of what's happening. So I look at things like the role of humor. There's a Polish writer called Olga Tokarczuk who listeners may have heard of who's written a few books that are considered kind of ecological in content. She has this sort of eco murder mystery called Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I highly recommend if there's one kind of reading tip from this. I think that's a good one. But it's also very funny, you know, and she's a very funny writer. And she kind of when I talk about imagining alternatives, she does things like imagining a world where we create plastic eating bacteria that, you know, solves the problem of plastic pollution but gets completely out of hand and, like, sends civilization back. So yeah, that's the sort of stuff that I'd be looking at in talking about aesthetic responses to the climate crisis.

Bryony Armstrong: 25:41

So some people might scoff at the idea of looking at the environment in literature and art. I guess they would ask, like, is that really going to help solve the climate crisis and why? So I wondered if you just wanted to end by kind of touching on that a bit?

Conor Brennan: 25:57

Yeah, sure. I mean, that's kind of the the ultimate...I'm not gonna say million dollar question,that seems a bit to extractivist a way of putting it. But yeah, I mean, first of all, I do think that this kind of...one of the main things we've been talking about the whole episode, this idea of a broad coalition is really important. So I, like...there was a newspaper headline last year that kind of caught my attention, or actually sorry, it was 2021. But there was a...there's a football club in Dublin, Bohemians, Bohs, who appointed a climate justice officer for their football club. And this sort of made...the Bohs are like, you know, a really popular local club in Dublin. But this made headlines around the world, just from the idea of a football club having a climate justice officer. And I think that's kind of really exemplary of what we need. We need to build this type of thinking in to everything we're doing across, you know, the broadest possible portion of society. And of course, that includes academia and things like literary scholarship. I think that, as I've said, you know, while the university isn't the same as, you know, activism or something, nonetheless, there's a reason that these debates around things like the curriculum and the canon are, you know, raging on and are such a kind of touch point of dissent. Like people realize that actually, that is...what you carve out a space for within an institution like university actually says a lot about what you value as a society. And so if you're, you know, if you give students a certain book to read and dedicate classroom discussion time to a certain topic, that is showing that it's important, and that does reach, you know...while it's not broader public activism, you do reach a lot of people teaching universities, you know. Students are very...are at an age when they're really thinking deeply about the world and where they're probably more open than any other time in their lives to new ideas. And I think including this as part of university syllabi is extremely important in that way. I also think that, you know, I would like to emphasize that the literary ecocriticism, or the, you know, in my case, is not just about asking what literature can do for the environmental movement, you know, it's kind of...I'm also interested in the other way around, like how what we know about the climate crisis helps us to read literature better and to kind of enrich our understanding of what's going on in literary texts. So I always think about this, you know, one of the kind of mindblowing moments for me on my own English degree was Said's reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, paying attention to kind of...there are just like a couple of very brief mentions of where our characters money comes from are these strips to, you know, to sort of colonial outposts, and Said reads all of Mansfield Park through that kind of colonial relation, and all of a sudden, once you see a text that way, you kind of can't unsee it. It really changes your reading and completely enriches your view of it. And I think that similar things happen when you start to read texts through an ecocritical lens. There are all sorts of things you pick up on about how animals appear, how plants appear, and, kind of, the relationship between humans and the natural world, the relationship between natural history and human history. These things strike you and then you can't unsee them, and they're another facet that you can bring to reading texts. And I think that has value in its own right. But yeah, as I said, I think you know, changing people's minds is extremely difficult. And, you know, nothing proves that better than the climate crisis. People are...the debate around it can be so entrenched even when the scientific consensus is so clear. And, you know, while other forms of activism are also extremely effective and are also needed, I do know from my own experience that, you know, reading a novel about something can change your thinking about it very profoundly. I've seen that in my own life. And, you know, why we need to think on a collective scale, caring about these things on an individual level is also important and is, kind of, where it all starts from. So yeah, I think for those who scoff at this idea, I say, pah!

Bryony Armstrong: 30:32

Exactly! That is the perfect sentiment to end on. Thank you so much, Conor, for coming on What's the Point and sharing your insights with us.

Conor Brennan: 30:40

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Bryony Armstrong: 30:44

Thank you for listening to What's the Point. If you enjoyed this podcast don't forget to subscribe. You can also find us on Twitter at wtppod underscore and send us a DM if you want to get in touch. We'll see you next time with a brand new episode.