In last week’s post, in response to the Paris Climate Change Conference, I looked at some of the historic origins for our environmental troubles—basically, why humanity has spent so much of its time not caring about the environment. Before I move onto another topic, I feel I should balance it out with the other side of the coin: If we’ve cared so little for the environment for so long, where do we find the motivation for conferences like Paris—times when our nations’ governments come together and actually think they can do something about the environment? Surely there can’t be that much hot air in the world, or else the greenhouse effect would already be far more progressed.

Many, including CNN apparently, seem to believe the environmental movement began in the 60s. To be fair, if you click on that article, it opens with the story of a river so polluted it literally catches fire. That sticks out in your memory.

Others, such as the illustrious Encyclopaedia Britannica, are willing to trace modern environmentalism back to the Industrial Revolution.¹ People who are choking to death under the pollution from the factories they’re working in wanting to clean things up a little? That seems pretty accurate and intuitive to me.

So instead, I’d like to talk about a much lesser known influence on environmentalism—colonialism.

Now, one of the hallmarks of modern environmentalism—that the state has an important role to play in protecting the environment via regulation and legislation—is literally ancient. Rome, for instance, had laws around the protection of water sources that were so elaborate that apparently we’re still discussing their finer legal ramifications today. Though this seems a little redundant, as they managed to pollute the Tiber River to the point where it was undrinkable. These were relatively piecemeal however, not even conceiving of the environment as a whole, let alone attempting to tackle environmental degradation holistically or systematically.

Richard Grove places large importance on the early colonial experience of tropical islands.² He talks quite romantically about the experiences of the tropical paradises and the differences between utopias, edens, etc.. I’d explain the difference, but to be honest I skipped over it. His main argument, however, is basically this: as Western powers colonised tropical islands and exploited their resources, they devastated the local environment. Hardly controversial. Grove’s novel insight is that due to a variety of factors, most prominently that said islands were seen as self-contained paradises (or edens, or utopias—I lose track), colonial authorities, particularly those of a scientific bent, were suddenly able to imagine this devastation on a worldwide scale (or a quater-of-the-worldwide scale, in the case of the English). In fact, due to the widespread belief at the time that trees encouraged rainfall, this forms one what seems to be one of the earliest antecedents for modern conceptions of climate change, certainly on a global scale.

In response, according to Grove, the wide-ranging practice of forestry was established. Mauritius is the example he uses, as it’s where the “early environmental debate reached its most comprehensive form” and where local authorities displayed “the kind of rigorous scientific empiricism associated with mid-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment botany” (p. 9). Which is big surprise, as early-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment botany is renowned for its slap-dash scientific empiricism. Nevertheless, credit where credit’s due, local authorities did introduce a level of planning around land use hitherto unseen, with very specific restrictions on how much land could be felled and where.

At a time when a new scientific understanding of the world was expected to sweep-away old superstitious beliefs and usher in an age of Enlightenment, the idea that these great (white, middle-aged, wealthy) men could exert supreme control over their environment and in doing so save the civilised world held an understandably strong appeal (for white, middle-aged, wealthy men). Subsequently, via rather indirect routes, this trend of practising forestry and conservation spread to colonial authorities in India, where one of the largest-scale programs of forest conservation was undertaken. Truly, the amount of area set aside for this was phenomenal. According to Barton, in 1936 the British Empire covered a quarter of the land surface of the world, and a quarter of the Empire was set aside as forest reserves (the word “forest” here is fairly all-encompassing). I question his maths, but he finally offers us the figure of 8% of the world’s land surface being theoretically protected by the British Empire alone.

In this way, colonialism forms an important, if unacknowledged, precedent for the modern environmental movement in the role it gave the state in creating “scientifically sound” plans around land and environmental use to preserve the environment and avoid catastrophic environmental disasters and even climate change (please do remember we’re talking about 18th century science, so “scientifically sound” is definitely a relative term in this context). Now, if only we could somehow gloss over the way colonial authorities used this somewhat noble ideal for oppression and social control…

Academic Sources
Barton, GA 2002. Empire forestry and the origins of environmentalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Grove, RH 1996. Green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600-1860, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Guha, R & Gadgil M 1989. “State forestry and social conflict in British India”, Past & Present, no. 123, pp. 141-177.

Hughes, JD 1997. “Rome’s decline and fall: ecological mistakes?”, Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 121-125.

Wacke, A 2000. “Protection of the environment in Roman law”, Fundamina, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 1-24.