Every so often societies experience a dramatic shift � a swerve � in ideas about fundamentals. Just consider how once "respectable" views of slavery, eugenics, or environmental exploitation were eventually rejected as unacceptable. An interesting article in The New York Times a few days ago suggests a similar swerve may be underway regarding climate change � as evident in agreement that the earth is warming, that we are responsible, and that there will be serious consequences.
But this article also stresses that "The first thing to say about this swerve is that we are far from clear about just what it is and how it might work". And it seems to me that we could probably say the same thing about the history of environmentalism. While there have been numerous historical studies of environmentalism, including its origins we remain a long way from understanding where it came from, and why.
A change in attitude can have many sources: changes in values and emotional identities, shifts in rules of thumb and other ways of reasoning, accumulated empirical evidence (whether through everyday experience or science), shifting economic interests, the influence of organizations, and so on. But simply enumerating these influences leaves us far from understanding, say, why attitude change has tended to be more prevalent during some periods than others, or how attitude change drives practical action (or often fails to).
Environmental swerves deserve more systematic attention from historians. Who knows: it could even be a way of demonstrating the practical value of environmental history. Translating climate knowledge into action remains our great unsolved problem. Could the study of past swerves help us understand how to encourage this necessary future swerve?
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