From Ignorance to Denial to Disaster: 60 Years of Living With Climate Change — Part Two: The 1980s

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This is the second of what will be four articles looking at how awareness of the climate crisis has developed, and been supported, ignored or resisted, over the last 60 years. I’m writing these articles to reflect on my 60th birthday, which somehow ambushed me at the end of February. The first part, covering the 1960s and 1970s, is here.

When the 1980s began, I was in a good place personally. 16 going on 17, freed from the bullying, insecure tribalism of the mid-teenage years, and also freed from the plate-spinning requirements of the ‘O’ level syllabus, which, then as now, essentially required everyone to demonstrate competence in maths, science, languages and the humanities, I was free to specialise for my ‘A’ levels — in English, History and French — which I took to with enthusiasm, helped by some genuinely inspiring teachers, not least my English teacher, Mr. King, who took us on theatre trips across the country, which, in particular, vividly brought Shakespeare to life.

I also started going to gigs, in those fascinating years of post-punk experimentalism and the rise of Two-Tone, got a girlfriend, published a fanzine, became a singer in a band, began watching arthouse films, and generally found life full of fascinating possibilities.

Politically, the situation was far different. The rise of Margaret Thatcher cast a cloud over life in general, as she began her malignant mission of de-industrialising the nation to break the power of the unions, and privatising everything in sight.

Environmentally, the climate crisis was still largely invisible, although ecological concerns were obliquely manifested in the rise of CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in response to fears of nuclear annihilation, in which government propaganda played a major part. In 1980, the government published a booklet, ‘Protect and Survive’, delivered to every home, which presented ridiculous suggestions for how to survive a nuclear attack, but which, amplified by the mainstream media, made nuclear war seem almost inevitable. I vividly recall being at school one day when illustration were published in a newspaper showing the radius of devastation from a nuclear attack, and not being alone in being alarmed by the description of people being vaporised.

As a result, CND held vast national protests in London attracting hundreds of thousands of people in 1981 and 1983, and, in 1982, an extraordinarily influential Women’s Peace Camp was established at Greenham Common in Berkshire, the intended site of US-controlled cruise missiles, which lasted throughout the 1980s.

In 1981, having successfully secured three ‘A’ grades in my ‘A’ levels, I was prevailed upon to apply to Oxford University to study English, and secured a place at New College, which forever changed my life, although not in any manner that I could have anticipated.

Oxford, it turned out, was largely a finishing school for the elites — mainly British, but also global — where the UK’s cultural, political and scientific establishment sustained itself in a self-reinforcing narrative that its acolytes, for the most part, bought into, although it took me some time to realise that. It was also a place where genuine boffins could thrive, but as I was neither a boffin nor part of the establishment, I gravitated to other outsiders, on a counter-cultural journey that involved a ‘60s and ‘70s back catalogue of artists like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and, eventually, the revelatory sounds of roots reggae and dub music, whose spiritual and politically militant messages I took to heart thoroughly as I embraced the extraordinary sonic soundscapes conjured up by Lee Perry and King Tubby.

Eco-visions and the Stonehenge Free Festival

In June 1983, a transformational event in this counter-cultural journey took place when my friends and I received a summons from a friend’s brother at the LSE, who told us that we had to visit the Stonehenge Free Festival, an extraordinary gathering of the tribes in the fields opposite Britain’s most celebrated ancient monument.

At the festival, my sympathy for outsiders, my fascination with the counter-culture of the 1960s, and my craving for a political counter-narrative to Margaret Thatcher’s vision of a new capitalist order was wonderfully affirmed in the festival’s ramshackle streets of tents and benders, of old coaches and repurposed old commercial vehicles, and of stages shared by the acid rock hippies of the free festival generation, and younger denizens of the punk and post-punk scene. The festival had started in 1974, during a heady time for free festivals, but had started growing in size  significantly in the Thatcher years, as more and more people, unable to find work as the unemployment rate grew, took to the roads in old vehicles and became part of a growing season of free festivals that took place across the country, from May to September.

An exercise in practical anarchy, the Stonehenge festival was also a glimpse of another way of living — one that was small-scale in consumption, and close to the earth in a way that was at odds with the growing materialism of Thatcher’s Britain, firmly located in the radical politics of the ‘60s and the early ‘70s, before the personal was separated from the political, and the quest for self-knowledge began its inexorable and diminished mutation into the all-pervading culture of self-entitlement (ruthlessly promoted by the advertising industry) that plagues us to this day, and that has done so much to ruin the notion of human solidarity in the face of rampant capitalism.

Inspired by visions of a greener world, I avidly devoured relevant books — James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, first published in 1979, in which the British scientist first reached a wide audience with his Gaia hypothesis, suggesting that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system, and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, first published in 1973, in which the German-born economist warned that the capitalist model, involving the exploitation of natural resources as though they were not finite, was unsustainable, and urged governments to focus instead on sustainable development.

Schumacher’s focus was also spiritual, of course, as he sought to persuade the modern world to return to a more balanced relationship with nature, and as I became more involved in environmental politics I worked for a while, in the summer of 1984, as a volunteer on an organic farm in Ireland, as part of the WWOOF scheme (Willing Workers On Organic Farms).

Earlier that summer, I also revisited the Stonehenge Free Festival, in what would be its last incarnation. Bigger than ever, with estimates that it received at least 50,000 visitors throughout its by now month-long occupation of the fields opposite Stonehenge, it reflected the darkness of the times, as Thatcher declared war on the miners, and throughout the rest of the year the core travellers of the free festival circuit began to be subjected to the same para-militarised police violence as the miners. In February 1985, a second peace camp at Molesworth, in Cambridgeshire, was evicted by the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, paving the way for the violent suppression of travellers seeking to set up what would have been the 12th Stonehenge Free Festival, who were prevented from doing so, on June 1, 1985, at what has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield, when over 400 travellers — families, as well as individuals — were brutally “decommissioned” by 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD.

At the time, I was taking my final exams at Oxford, but as I emerged into the real world, in the summer of 1985, and decided to move to London, my green awakening was largely sidelined by the reality of embarking on a precarious inner city existence in Brixton (which I was drawn to by my love of reggae music, and my increasing appreciation of the Clash), a neighbourhood that had twice, in recent memory, been rocked by riots — in 1981, and again in 1984.

Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation frenzy

Swallowed up by the city, and with no idea of what I wanted to do with my life (beyond getting drunk, learning to play the guitar, and writing and singing songs), I spent the second half of the 1980s largely immersed in a thoroughly urban life of drinking, going to gigs, buying records and comics, playing in a band and struggling to cope with the relentless social devastation inflicted on the country by Margaret Thatcher.

I hadn’t lost my interest in environmental issues, but it was definitely harder to maintain contact with green issues in an urban environment in which survival so often seemed to take precedence.

As Thatcher’s assault on those identified as the ‘enemies within ‘ — the miners (in 1984), the travellers (in 1985), and the newspaper print unions (in 1986) — passed, leaving widespread trauma in its wake, the country then became focused on a privatisation frenzy (the selling-off of BT, British Gas, and the electricity and water companies, to name just the most prominent examples) that appalled me, while London itself — whose socialist council, the GLC (Greater London Council), was spitefully dissolved by Thatcher in 1986 — became the crucible for a turbo-charged deregulated banking sector, most visible in the creation of Canary Wharf, in the former West India Docks, as part of a massive ‘regeneration’ of London’s former docklands through a quango, the London Docklands Development Corporation, essentially a privatised development agency supported by government (i.e. taxpayers’) money.

Thatcher also, notoriously, began selling off council housing to tenants, precipitating a decline in the provision of secure and genuinely affordable rented homes that continues to blight housing provision in the UK to this day. Against the odds, I managed to secure a hard-to-let council flat in Lambeth, only to have it designated as one of six areas subjected to a privatisation plan known as Housing Action Trusts (HATs), whose intention was to persuade tenants to vote for the transfer of their properties to the private sector. That struggle, in particular, dominated my life in 1988, and although the resistance to the plans was ultimately successful in Lambeth, it was almost immediately followed by the proposed implementation of the Poll Tax (the so-called Community Charge), which replaced the domestic rates system used to fund local government through a single tax on every adult that was the same, regardless of income.

The resistance to the Poll Tax will be discussed in Part Three of this series of articles, but as a result of the relentless assaults by Thatcher on the public sector and on the poorer members of society (as well as her assault on single mothers, on gay and lesbian equality, through the notorious Section 28, and through her support for South Africa’s apartheid regime, which became a focal point for protest at the time), the developing science around climate change largely passed me by, as, I’m sure, was the case with countless other people who were caught up resisting wave after wave of Thatcher’s injustices.

Climate change in the 1980s

When climate change managed to secure public attention in the 1980s, it was largely through the efforts of the atmospheric physicist James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, as well as through the discovery by British scientists of a hole above Antarctica in the ozone layer, which absorbs most of the Sun’s ultra-violet radiation.

The research of Hansen and his team, as a helpful timeline produced by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) explains, meant that, in 1981, “the greenhouse effect made page one of the New York Times” for the first time, when the paper’s long-serving science writer, Walter Sullivan, persuaded his editors to respond to a paper written by Hansen that was about to be published in the magazine Science. In the front-page story, as the AIP article described it, “Sullivan threatened the world with global warming of ‘almost unprecedented magnitude’, disrupting agriculture and possibly causing a disastrous rise of sea level.” The Times “followed up with an editorial, declaring that while the greenhouse effect was ‘still too uncertain to warrant total alteration of energy policy’, it was ‘no longer unimaginable’ that a radical policy change might become necessary.”

As the AIP also noted, however, the fossil fuel industries and “political conservatives” were sufficiently alarmed that they began pushing back against what they portrayed as “eco-radicalism”, and ”developed everything from elaborate studies to punchy advertisements, aiming to persuade the public that there was nothing to worry about.” Nevertheless, while their efforts were undoubtedly successful to some extent (and their hypocrisy has only recently been exposed, via revelations that they knew all about the dangers of greenhouse gases, through studies they themselves commissioned and then suppressed, as examined, for example, in the BBC’s recent and excellent three-part series, Big Oil v. the World), they were unable to prevent disturbing aspects of the climate change story from registering with the public.

Of particular relevance was the discovery in 1985 of the hole in the ozone layer, caused by CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), which were ”banned from American spray cans but still widely produced around the world for a variety of other uses.” Although the relevant industries “automatically denied that any of their products could be hazardous”, that argument was soon lost, and the widespread fears of increased skin cancers and environmental damage caused by the depletion of the planet’s protective ozone layer was such that, as the AIP explained, “The outcome was an international agreement, forged in Montreal in 1987, to gradually halt production of ozone-destroying substances.”

That UN-led agreement, the Montreal Protocol, signed on September 16,1987, followed on from an earlier UN-led agreement, the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, signed on March 22, 1985, marking the first international treaties related to climate change, and paving the way for the subsequent creation of the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). While the ozone treaties were largely successful, however, the IPCC, as anyone paying attention to climate change will know, and as will be discussed in subsequent articles, has faced an uphill struggle for the last three decades to persuade governments to rein in the fossil fuel industry, to secure the continued existence of a climate that is conducive to human existence.

At the same time as these developments were taking place, as the AIP also described it, ”A new breed of interdisciplinary studies was showing that even a few degrees of warming might have harsh consequences for fragile natural ecosystems as well as agricultural systems and human health itself.” Again, the most visible publicist of these growing fears was James Hansen, who, as the AIP put it, “created a minor stir among those alert to the issue when he testified before a Congressional committee” in 1986 and 1987, “insist[ing] that global warming was no vague and distant possibility, but something that would become apparent within a decade or so.” As the AIP proceeded to explain, “His group of climate modelers claimed that they could ‘confidently state that major greenhouse climate changes are a certainty’”, and that, in particular, “the global warming predicted in the next 20 years will make the Earth warmer than it has been in the past 100,000 years.”

Hansen’s great breakthrough, however, occurred in the summer of 1988, after “heat waves and drought had become a severe problem, drawing public attention to the climate.” Timing a meeting for June 23, he had pointed out to the staff of Senator Timothy Wirth, the Colorado Democrat who had arranged the hearings, that the previous year’s hearings, which took place in November, “might have been more effective in hot weather.”

As the AIP described it, “Their luck was good. Outside the room, the temperature that day reached a record high. Inside, the audience sweated as Hansen said ‘with 99% confidence’ that a long-term warming trend was underway, and that he strongly suspected the greenhouse effect was the cause. By the early 2000s, he predicted (correctly), the average global temperature would be markedly higher. Relying not only on his computer work but also on elementary physical arguments, he warned that global warming was liable to bring more frequent storms and floods as well as life-threatening heat waves.” Afterwards he told reporters that it was time to “stop waffling so much, and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

The End of Nature

In London, despite my persistent struggles with Thatcher’s malignant efforts to destroy all vestiges of socialism, and to transform the UK into a bastion of neo-liberalism, I still somehow managed to retain enough of a connection with environmental issues to pick up on the significance of the publication, in 1989, of The End of Nature, by the American environmentalist Bill McKibben.

Published by Penguin in the UK with an ominous black cover, The End of Nature has been accurately described as “the first book for a general audience about climate change.” In clear language, McKibben spelled out the significance of what human activity had been doing to the climate with increasing severity, in the years since the Industrial Revolution began.

I lost my copy of The End of Nature many years ago, but it was serialised first in the New Yorker, and as I re-read the 80-page article of the same name that was published in September 1989 and is available online, I was struck by how eloquently, and persuasively, McKibben summed up the crisis.

Take the following, for example:

For the moment … forget about the higher temperatures and the dead trees and the other effects.The physical consequences of increasing the level of carbon dioxide will be staggering, but no more staggering than the simple fact of what have already done. Carbon dioxide levels have gone up significantly, and globally. Elevated levels can be measured far from industry and miles above the ground. And the changes are irrevocable. They are not possibilities. They cannot be wished away, and they cannot be legislated away. To prevent them, we would have had to clean up our collective act many decades ago. We have done this ourselves — by driving our cars, running our factories, clearing our forests, growing our rice, turning on our air-conditioners. In the years since the Civil War, and especially the years since the Second World War, we have changed the atmosphere — changed it enough so that the climate will change dramatically. Most of the major events of human history gradually lose their meaning; wars that seemed at the time all-important are now a series of dates that schoolchildren don’t even try to remember; great feats of engineering crumble in the desert. But now the way of life of one part of the world in one half century is altering every inch and every hour of the planet.

Explaining the fundamental changes to the climate wrought by mankind’s activities, McKibben wrote about a heatwave in London, which those who lived through last summer’s 40°C may well recognise as a premonition come true:

[I]f, in July, there’s a heat wave in London, it won’t be a natural phenomenon. It will be a man-made phenomenon — an amplification of what nature intended, or a total invention. or it might be a man-made phenomenon, which amounts to the same thing. The storm that could have snapped the hot spell may never form, or may veer off in some other direction — not by the laws of nature but by the laws of nature as rewritten by man. If the sun feels sweet on the back of your neck, well, that’s fine, but it isn’t nature. What has happened is the extinction of summer and its replacement with something else that will be called “summer.” This new summer will retain some the season’s relative characteristics — it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and it will be the time of year when crops grow — but it will not be summer, just as the best prosthesis is not a leg. Those “record highs” and “record lows” that the weathermen are always talking about are meaningless now. They imply a connection between the past and the present which doesn’t exist.

Reading The End of Nature had a profound effect on me. Deeply felt and thoroughly convincing, it nevertheless hurled me into something of an existential crisis; a kind of depression, even. Whatever McKibben’s hopes — that we might, as he put it, “limit ourselves voluntarily, choose to remain God’s creatures instead of making ourselves gods” — the shock of his revelations made me feel profoundly powerless.

What should have happened, of course, is that those with power should also have woken up to the realities of what McKibben was describing with such eloquence and persuasiveness, but this was 1989. The Berlin Wall was about to fall, turbo-charging the West’s relief that capitalism had “won”, and empowering the cheerleaders for its most virulent manifestation — neo-liberalism — and those of us who understood the severity of the crisis were left hoping that the newly-formed IPCC might have some clout, or engaged in skirmishes with the machinery of polluting big business, and corrupt governments, that might shift the narrative.

All of that is to come in Part Three, dealing with the 1990s, but for now, as I look back to my 26-year old self, in 1989, and Bill McKibben, just two years older than me, who continues to fight to save a habitable world (as does James Hansen, now 82 years old), it’s hard not to reflect on how, 34 years later, we have still not managed to persuade enough people to rise up to destroy the capitalist system that has continued to erase the natural world with reckless contempt, and that is still heating the atmosphere at a truly alarming rate.

In 1989, McKibben wrote that, in the preceding 30 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased from about 315 parts per million to 350 parts per million. It now stands at 422.88 parts per million, and is still rising, as are the concentrations of other deadly greenhouse gases — methane, nitrous oxide and sulphur hexafluoride. As McKibben explained so poignantly at the time, “the changes are irrevocable. They are not possibilities. They cannot be wished away, and they cannot be legislated away.” And yet still we behave, collectively, as though we are not confronted, for the first time in our history, with a problem of our own creation that we cannot ignore.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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