In Australia, the mining sector was predictably quick to defend its ‘clean’ coal. So too were sections of the media and the federal government. The IPCC report did not ‘provide recommendations to Australia’, Prime Minister Scott Morrison pointed out, as if Australia inhabited some other planet. Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the government would not be ‘distracted’ by the report (‘by the laws of physics’, wrote Tim Stephens, a professor of environmental law, on Twitter) in its crucial mission of keeping power bills down until the next election.

Appearing on ABC’s AM program, the newly appointed minister for the environment, Melissa Price, promised that her office would read the report in full, as any ‘responsible government’ would (a phrase she deployed three times). But she brushed aside the ‘opinion’ of the ninety-one scientists and six thousand peer-reviewed papers drawn on by the report. She was comfortable with Australia’s progress towards Paris targets and its carbon policies, she said, although she could not identify them. What she could say was that coal was crucial in the Australian ‘energy mix’, and could not conscionably be phased out by 2050. This would would be ‘irresponsible’. Host Sabra Lane used familiar words to end the interview, but they seemed to hold some new, bleak significance: ‘Environment Minister Melissa Price’.

How could an urgent warning of obvious consequence to governments and citizens everywhere simply raise eyebrows, in Australia, as a ‘long bow’ (Melissa Price) or worse, draw fire as a ‘hysteric missive’ (Miranda Devine) and ‘emotional blackmail’ (Terry McCrann)? What exactly is it that Melissa Price is minister for?

The northern edge of the giant iceberg, B-15A, in the Ross Sea, Antarctica, 2001 (Photograph by Josh Landis/NSF via Wikimedia Commons)

A new book offers a simple but profound explanation: the ‘environment’ is not something beyond us, comprised of stones, soil, rivers, and trees, but an idea, constituted by scientific knowledge and modelling. The Environment: A history of the idea, by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, demonstrates the power of history to speak into the present. Its authors are too modest to call the environment ‘one of the great concepts of our time’. A signal achievement of twentieth-century science, it has become the organising concept for the future of our species.

The word ‘environment’ has always referred to our surroundings, but our geography has changed dramatically. Grafted from French into English by Thomas Carlyle, the word was popularised by Herbert Spencer, who used it for the factors influencing individual psychology (1855) and then social evolution (1876). The environment, write the authors, was ‘that part of the exterior world that became interiorized’. For the majority of humans through history, this was the soil, plant life, and waterways that surrounded them. As the industrial revolution and the march of capitalism progressed, this context expanded from community to empire, nation, and globe, but as it stretched, the non-human elements receded from view. With the discovery of whale oil, coal, and crude petroleum, we began to assume that our parameters were theoretical.

The scientific concept of the environment emerged under fire, after World War II, which world leaders saw had been in part a resource war. Postwar reconstruction, too, came down to the global allocation of resources, and it became clear that the total available resources were finite. At the same time, a handful of prophets – Aldo Leopold, William Vogt, and William Osborn – wrote eloquent jeremiads: the ‘road to survival’ on a ‘plundered planet’ required humans to look to its ‘carrying capacity’. The very tangible limits to human activities could be seen in the destruction of other species and of the future.

Over the next decade, committees and conferences, mostly in the United States and Europe, saw the mingling of disciplines and helped consolidate a new consciousness of ‘man’s role in changing the face of the earth’. It was a blend of hubris and penitence, and marked the substitution of a biological and historical drama for a divine one. The idea of the environment displaced the idea of creation, a universe of mysterious qualities conjured ex nihilo and given by God to the human species. Most religious traditions came to view the earth as a pleasant backdrop to their affairs.

If the environment is knit together of figures and theories, it seems appropriate that Warde, Robin, and Sörlin offer not so much a chronological narrative as a storied model. The environment, they argue, is built from four components: the capacity to scale from soil up to the stratosphere; scientific expertise; the use of numbers for modelling and prophetic purposes; and an orientation towards the future. It is a wonderfully succinct, compelling, and revealing piece of writing.

It is a story of science, and especially of the ‘science of perspective’, ecology. Attention to the interaction and transferral of energy between species in defined ecosystems led eventually to the realisation that the planet was a defined space – the biosphere – in which all humans, other species, matter, and energy interact. Systems theory and computer modelling helped generate and interpret data, and a range of disciplines leaned toward the environment – the environmental and climate scientists – revealing, at last, a planet of complex interlocking systems reaching down into the crust and out towards space. The environment becomes ever more intricately woven.

The planet, of course, maintained a biological, chemical, and physical existence that was far from theoretical. The Industrial Revolution, that flirting with the infinite, began to compromise those planetary systems. The great irony of the environment is that our awareness of it tracked almost along the same steep curve as our destruction of it, during the postwar ‘great acceleration’ in human terraforming.

On 24 October 2018, twenty-two leading health scientists declared their dismay at the government’s response to the IPCC report in The Lancet. They pointed again to the literature demonstrating Australia’s significant contribution to anthropogenic climate change and its particular vulnerability in the face of it. They were reasserting their expertise. The environment as a concept is oriented towards a vulnerable future, but this requires the capacity to look back, an awareness of the contingency of the present. Its lucidity offers an anchor in the wild currents of contemporary politics and a model of the ‘expertise for the future’ that emerges, clearly, from the humanities as well as from the sciences.