It has been about a week since I last terrorised (read bored) my flatmates with talk of a historical volcano. The last culprit was the 1815 eruption of Mt Tambora, recently connected to the ‘year without a summer’ phenomena by paleo-geologists, paleo-dendrologists and historians.
My casual interest in Tambora meant that the prospect of delving beyond popular history, tree rings and sulphur deposits to engage with some more juicy politico-academic writing on climatic events and volcanos in particular was a prospect that I was very excited for. Particularly the article about how Global Warming was rooted in the British empire (much ballyhooed by Dr Banerjee). I did enjoy the articles, but when considering how I could write something vaguely interesting or nuanced in this blog, I decided to stay away from vulcanology and focus on where my own interests lie in relation to this, international environmental law.
Now, lawyers and volcanos at face value have some noticeable differences. One is a source of massive displacement, the pollution of the atmosphere, destruction of resources and a terrifying loss of human life, the other is a volcano. Yes, I know, a cheap joke, but it highlights a more serious point about how both global warming and transnational environmental catastrophes are treated by international law, both historically and in the present day.
I note, firstly, the role of international law as a facilitator of colonial treaties, capitalism and violence. Unequal resource extraction treaties, from those which Britain imposed on China and India, to the Bell Trade Act in the modern Philippines facilitated the aggressive extraction of resources and mass production which are responsible for man-made global warming. Additionally, local resistance movements and colonial rivalries over resource security led to territorial contestation, this, combined with the exploitation of humans in the name of resource extraction, created a destructive force, (arguably) every bit as great as a volcano.
The second idea which I would like to discuss briefly, in the spirit of Moore’s ‘radical politics of sustainability’ relates to modern disaster relief in contrast to large scale sustainability initiatives. Individuals and states seem far more willing to expend their own capital to relieve localised ‘others’ when they suffer from a sudden shock event such as a volcano or tsunami than they do to address large scale systemic climatic damage. Perhaps the transnational nature of large-scale global warming leads to ‘bandwaggoning’, perhaps realpolitikal concerns lead to a reluctance to spend capital which could assist a ‘rival’? Whatever the reason, I think the distinction between human reactions in the face of these two forms of environmental catastrophe would be a productive topic for intellectual historians to examine. Even more important, any attempt to re-imagine capitalism with a sustainability rubric will have to work both with and against international law if it wants any chance of success. As such, environmental historians should follow their activist counterparts within international relations in taking international law seriously, and historians of international law may be well served by taking a break from treaties on ‘war’ and focussing instead on those which govern administration and resource regulation.