Journal for the History of Environment and Society

Natural disasters nearly always catch societies by surprise, even though in hindsight historians invariably conclude that being caught off-guard in this way was in fact unfounded as both the existence of the natural hazard which caused the disaster, and the societal conditions making communities vulnerable to the hazard, were clearly present before the event. Both experts and the general public also, again in hindsight, suddenly discover that similar hazards and disasters had previously occurred in the past. In many cases, however, the memory of these precursors had faded or seemed irrelevant because the context had changed so dramatically. When future historians come to write the history of the COVID-19 pandemic currently unfolding, therefore, it will probably resemble the history of other major natural, socio-natural or socio-techno-natural disasters - whether pandemics, earthquakes, tsunamis or nuclear catastrophes (Van Bavel et al. 2020). In retrospect, COVID-19 will become a subject which seems quite familiar to environmental historians used to unravelling the complex and hazardous entanglements of society and nature. What can environmental history offer at this moment, however, when the disaster - crisis or hazard - is still unfolding?

COVID-19 gives a fresh urgency to research trajectories around climate and environment in historical research. We use examples from African, Japanese, and medieval European environmental history to chart new ways to mobilise collaborative research into the planetary past in academic and public discussions. Our main points are, first, that COVID-19 has underlined the entanglements between human and planetary life, which historians must better account for. Secondly, it is pertinent to decentre knowledge production. COVID-19 and climate crisis are both global phenomena. Yet patterns of knowledge production that propose ‘universal’ frameworks and solutions obscure highly unequal power relations. We call for more plural histories - in time, space, and species - to confront the complex crises of our times.

This contribution investigates the possibilities of identifying Covid-19-like, highly infectious epidemics with low mortality rates in the premodern era. In its discussion of the chances and limits of such an endeavour, the essay focuses on a case study from 1323, when an epidemic that caused high fevers but relatively few deaths affected large parts of Europe, including Italy. The indications available in the historical records are examined in light of criteria that have been developed from modern influenza pandemics research. Finally, the essay examines the possible zoonotic origins of the 1323 epidemic and proposes broader lessons that could be drawn from researching premodern pandemics.

Engaging the concepts of flow, circulation and blockage can help us to understand the trajectories of pandemics and the social responses to them. Central to the analysis is the concept of obligatory passage points through which networks must pass. Attempts by various actors to control the movement through them, be they government authorities, health experts and caregivers, economic producers or consumers, can create social tensions. Such tensions were duly recognised during the recurring outbreaks of the plague in the Second Plague Pandemic between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Analysing historical plague ordinances allows us to expose the power mechanisms impacting networks as they move through spaces, and to remain critical of how circulation is controlled and moralised. We argue that historians can contribute to reviewing these mechanisms behind the spread of epidemics and the responses to them from the perspective of movement and blockage.

One of the recurring themes in the public perception of containment policies during the current COVID-19 pandemic are the supposedly uneven and everchanging measures taken up by international, national and local authorities. This is especially the case in countries with a federal structure, like Germany. Not surprisingly, historical containment policies and strategies of coping with epidemics have been varied too and were also discussed intensely. This short essay will analyse the communication between farmers, artisans, merchants, physicians and local as well as higher level administration during outbreaks of cattle plague in eighteenth century Northern Germany / Denmark. The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, geographically located between the Baltic and the North Sea, are especially well suited for such a study because of their characteristically distinct regional differences in geomorphology and the varied economic practices, property rights and political organisation which directly or indirectly resulted from one another. Environmental factors clearly influenced administrative measures as well as public responses or demands regarding these policies.

Ecologists and environmentalists have tried to interfere in the debate about the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim of transcending the approaches of virologists and epidemiologists. While the views of virologists and epidemiologists are often limited to the virus as an isolated organic element, those of ecologists and environmentalists mostly connect it to environmental issues such as the destruction of wild life habitats. This is valuable, but a broader view is also necessary with regard to how the virus is received and dealt with. This essay will frame the scientific and political responses to SARS-CoV-2 within a long-term perspective, not by simply pointing at the historical precedents of the quarantine and hygienic measures, but by historicizing and denaturalizing the scientific and political rationales behind them. As this inevitably includes the way in which science and politics interact, I will have recourse to the work of both Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault, which enables the conceptual and analytical framing of the virus and the rationalities of governance related to it to be unpacked. While Latour’s ideas help explain why the virus is framed as an isolated natural organism which threatens to invade the human body from the outside, Foucauldian concepts reveal the specific forms of governance and political subjectivity involved - which are predicated on discourses of danger and ‘security dispositives’. Jointly these views explain why, in contrast to the ideas of climatologists, the models of virologists and epidemiologists are followed almost unconditionally.

Long-term European experience with the plague and other epidemics has established a set of governance practices to limit the spread of disease, such as quarantine, lock-down of public life and reduction of economic activities etc. They have now returned during the COVID-19 crisis. However, it seems that the memory of European confrontations with pandemics has been lost among a majority of citizens. This has opened a door for social myths and conspiracy theories to enter the debate. Doubts about the legitimacy of restrictions on free movement (travel, social distancing) and individual choice (the wearing of masks) have been nourished particularly by the political right. Reviving our knowledge of past experiences with disease may be useful in this context. Tracing the history of the plague in Europe not only unveils a remarkable story of learning how to control the spread of a disease before its etiology was fully understood; it also reveals a co-evolutionary relationship between state power and disease, which is driven by the expansion of executive power into the area of public health. Returning to the present COVID-19 crisis, one can observe not only how the state of emergency is being used by autocrats and right-wing populists to undermine democratic institutions. One can also observe fatal government failure in countries like the United States, where trust in state power has been undermined by various groups in the recent past.

Political reactions to the COVID-19 crisis in the USA, Brazil and elsewhere have revealed the power of a proto-ideology which articulates environmental destruction with the sacrifice of human health to preserve a segregationist project of modernity. This essay suggests that this political trend which denies ecological connections and promotes a carbon intensive society could correspond to the notion of ´carbofascism´, coined by the environmental historian J.-B. Fressoz. It addresses this trend in a historical perspective to discuss its ideological filiation with past fascisms and provide a hypothesis for the causes of its emergence. Carbofascism is possibly a product of the deep historical entwinement of modern democratic regimes with anthropocentric principles and the growth of fossil fuels. The coronavirus pandemic represents a turning point in which the integrity of human and non-human life is tested against the lingering toxicity of our patterns of energy dependency, making the transformation of carbon democracy into ecodemocracy urgent.

A city’s materiality creates health and illness. We both write about air - its movement and its temperature - as it affects human bodies. We offer two topics as case studies, heat and ventilation, and how they exacerbate the effects of each other, to illustrate the long history of seemingly new challenges posed by the novel coronavirus. The environmental inequalities of heat exposure and access to fresh air underscore that cities can only be considered ‘low impact’ on the environment from a top-down, large-scale approach. In writing about air and heat, we direct attention to the feel and the bodily impacts of unseen but persistent problems in housing. Centuries of building inequalities into the urban environment are coming to bear on our present debates about indoor space, ventilation, and viral spread as cities encounter the COVID-19 crisis.

As a way of approaching the multiple ways a pandemic affects urban life, the authors suggest the notion of porosity. Through this, the article revisits the Danish capital during the cholera an typhus attacks, noticing how porosity is mobilized around contagious materials and bodies. Relating this to the COVID-19 outbreak, the article goes on to note how the porosity also can be seen in a temporal sense, stretching out from the fragile present to the promise of a new normality for the city and its metabolism.

Future historians writing about the COVID-19 crisis will need to pay more attention to the atmosphere and its role in the current crisis, for the atmosphere is connected to the current pandemic in multiple ways: the atmosphere transports aerosols; it changes as a consequence of the social crisis; air pollution and COVID-19 deaths seem to be connected; there is a triple crisis of ‘oxygen-depriving politics’; and air travel has a large effect on the transmission of the disease. Increasingly, atmosphere scientists are contributing to the science of COVID-19. Dealing with the atmosphere is useful for another reason too: in the current age, atmosphere physicists and chemists have become key architects of the Anthropocene concept, and the meteorological sciences are increasingly claiming a stake in the environmental humanities. Environmental historians who attribute a larger role to the atmosphere should follow recent trends in the larger ‘geohumanities’, a new field that has exported the meteorologists’ atmosphere into the humanities. At the same time, environmental historians could also benefit from engaging with the history of knowledge about air, not just late modern meteorology, but also early modern physics and chemistry, and the pre-nineteenth century medical sciences that were less hesitant about dealing with the air. Historians should acquire what I call an ‘atmospheric sensibility’ by looking at the sensibility of atmosphere scientists of the past. Obtaining this sensibility entails observing the way in which meteorological experts have used this knowledge to expand their discipline, in both the scientific and public realm. This knowledge can then be put to use to both create and strengthen specific themes in the environmental history of health. Areas of research could include, among many other possibilities, the difference between indoor and open-air work, or the importance of respiration, physiology and lung medicine in history. First acquiring and then deepening our atmospheric sensibility will provide a better understanding of the environmental history of health and pandemics in the current geological epoch.

In recent decades, the West has appeared almost ‘invincible’ when faced with the threat of exogenous environmental or biological shocks. In accordance with traditional modernity narratives, infectious diseases particularly seemed to belong to either the premodern world or a contemporary ‘underdeveloped’ world. Now that the West is in the full grip of a pandemic, however, it has become increasingly difficult to uphold the same modern/non-modern dichotomy. Moreover, the arrival of COVID-19 in Western countries has been characterised as a consequence of institutional failure or at least an omen of future structural institutional change. These institutions, however, are known to have been designed for perpetuating the ‘status quo’ rather than protecting the societies they govern against environmental shocks. Accordingly, we argue that modern institutions should not be seen as smooth, hermetically sealed, protective systems, but rather as inherently uneven, imperfect structures whose imperfections come to the surface in times of crisis. That is to say that institutional systems may ultimately prove capable of withstanding environmental shocks, yet social groups and ecological systems may still remain vulnerable, raising questions with regard to theoretical frameworks and methodologies used by historians on this topic.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the explosive emergence of environmentalism accompanied by increasingly influential scientific, regulative and managerial roles for the environmental sciences. Since then, there has been a comprehensive increase of awareness and understanding of a whole spectrum of global to local environmental and socio-cultural dilemmas. Environmentalism has experienced a complicated set of tendentious relations with the various forms of capitalism. We argue here that any transformation to truly sustainable futures requires either a transformative integration of green growth within a modified capitalism, or a progressive shift to radically new ways of experiencing and living around sustainable localism. The pandemic has brought the world extraordinarily almost to a halt. It has offered a unique opportunity to consider, debate, and possibly implement sustainable livelihoods in myriads of different cultural and political settings via progressive social, political and economic reforms. By reconceptualising historical ideas of environmentalism into a new set of global to local arrangements post-pandemic, we can begin to shape and to live into sustainability, ideally across the whole planet. It is vital to progress with hope and through the yearnings of young people, and not with despair and through degeneration by clinging onto the old ways.