Apocalyptic Anthologies of the Past, Present, and Future:
A Comparison of Climate Crises
by Raven Gray (M25)

Introduction

Climate change is no longer a future threat—it is here, and it is now. If we don’t act, the United Nations expects worse storms, extinctions, and resource insecurity (frequency and severity) as the globe warms. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the population does not recognize the issue’s urgency, with some denying the effect altogether. Scientists have urged the public to listen to the evidence (with half of the monitored factors already reaching record extremes) with limited success. Perhaps the issue is not their claim but the evidence they use to support it, with empirical studies trusted by scholars but potentially abstract to the public. Hence, I propose comparing climate crises by drawing on the arts and humanities.

Of course, there are some disciplinary norms that will impair rather than enhance our analysis. First, the humanities, like most academic departments, are frequently segmented according to their content and approach. While this specialization helps expand our collective knowledge, it impedes the engagement of diverse audiences, so I will apply concepts interdisciplinarily. That said, this project is distinctly historical. This presents two additional concerns. First, the study of history is often anthropocentric, centering human agency and relying on archival sources (usually written evidence) to substantiate one’s claims. Second, Chicago formatting’s lengthy papers and dense citations can be inaccessible to the public, limiting the knowledge’s applicability. Since I am seeking funds from a historic society (namely the Prehistoric Society for Tomorrow), I’ve elected to conform to the discipline’s standards for most of this proposal, though this remains intentionally imperfect. Nonetheless, I will request the committee’s permission to adapt a more generous interface for public engagement.

Drawing on the applicable eccentricism of imperfect analogies but recognizing the value of historical comparisons’ inherent similarity, I have selected three subjects that push the bounds of academic history while maintaining an explicitly temporal approach to climate change: namely, the past, present, and future. The “present” will be represented by anthropogenic climate change, discussed earlier and the prevention of which encapsulates this project’s purpose. The “past” will be represented by the Great Oxygenation Event, nearly two and a half billion years ago in which cyanobacteria evolved to photosynthesize, thus oxygenating Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to the point of toxicity for many anaerobic life forms and some cyanobacteria. The “future” will be represented by cli-fi through Pixar’s WALL-E, an artistic foreshadowing of the year 2,805 in which wasteful consumerism destroyed life on Earth and pushed the few remaining humans into space until the titular trash-compacting robot finds botanical hope. These examples will help reveal the role of agency and structure in climate crises, thus suggesting actions people might take to address our current catastrophe.

While this endeavor is comparative, it might not seem historically comparative. To cement the discipline’s centrality to an interdisciplinary examination, I will draw on a range of historical theories and approaches. For example, I embrace Kocka’s descriptive and paradigmatic functions but perhaps controversially disregard Levine’s warning against hierarchically comparing “to” a particular subject rather than “of” each other. The present can use the past (and in this case, the future) to make informed decisions, so given my goal of addressing climate change, it seems justified to center the subject. This will further reduce the analyses’ complexity (two “to” vs. three “of”), though I will still evaluate the subjects equitably when morally relevant. That said, I must also consider their interdependence (be it connective or relatively genealogical), for while the subjects are theoretically separated by time, interpretations of the past and future are heavily reliant on the present. I will still draw on approaches from other disciplines (e.g. philosophy, art, social and natural sciences), but my comparisons will ultimately be framed in a historical perspective.

By expanding beyond academic history’s disciplinary norms, this project will explore how agents can either accept or confront their role in an unsustainable global structure during impending crises by comparing the past (Great Oxygenation Event) and the future (WALL-E’s Cli-Fi) to the present (Anthropogenic Climate Change) in the hopes that public and scholarly audiences alike take action against climate change.

Literature Review

The Present: Anthropogenic Climate Change

While climate change is now commonly accepted as 1) happening 2) because of human activity 3) with harmful effects, the event was historically contested. This section overviews the debates (scientists on climate and historians on scientists) as new evidence is uncovered, shifting authors’ arguments and analytical frameworks.

Global temperatures are often studied longitudinally, beginning shortly after the thermometer’s invention but proliferating in the late 1800s. In 1938, Callendar systematically reviewed station records to evidence a 0.3°C fifty-year increase and suggested the role of industrial emissions, citing the greenhouse effect identified by Arrhenius forty years earlier. Many scientists rejected Callendar’s causal mechanism for the implausibility of humans’ system-level impact, often remaining skeptical even with Keeling’s 1958 study of industrial impact on atmospheric composition and Lorius and Petit’s 1985/99 temperature-carbon dioxide correlation using ice core bubbles.

Scholars and policymakers began reevaluating their position after catastrophic environmental foreshadowing, including Mercer’s 1968 sea level rise from melting ice caps, Farman’s 1985 hole in the ozone layer, Smith and Buddemeier’s 1992 coral bleaching from ocean acidification, and Stott’s 2004 extreme weather. For example, while the UN’s 1990 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supported some claims, the National Academy of Sciences and American Meteorological Society questioned the models’ evidence until the early 2000s. Still, enough scientists counter the consensus that public denial persists. Interestingly, historical analyses of climate change were most prevalent in the early 2000s, accompanying the academic shift, before sharply declining (aside from policy evaluations, e.g. the IPCC’s impact on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and 2015 Paris Agreement). While the evidence for an anthropogenic climate crisis grows with governmental research, including analyses on irreversible biodiversity loss, subsequent sustainable collective action remains limited.

This debate became polarized partly from contributors’ biases. For example, individually, researchers may anchor to their prior beliefs and deny new evidence, with some even confirming their expectations through their research. This is worsened by incentives, like fossil fuel funding of the NIPCC to deny their relationship with climate change. Deniers may also feel dissonance from the dystopian predictions and seek normalcy under a false consensus, while supporters may seek the certainty of scientific authority. Collectively, the term “global warming” suggested “consistently warming weather”, so “climate change” is a better colloquial script for motivating sustainability. People may also imagine themselves as inherently different from “others”, as reinforced by the narratives around scientist advocates and contrarian deniers. Historians’ recency bias may have also contributed to the early 2000s research spike.

The Past: Great Oxygenation Event

2.4 billion years ago, the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen concentration increased rapidly, as captured within the crust’s chemical composition. Many geochemists theorize the role of ancient cyanobacteria (“blue-green algae”) evolving the ability to photosynthesize carbon dioxide (CO2) into oxygen (O2). Prior to this Event, the planet’s consumption of oxygen was greater than its production due to continental weathering, in which minerals react with water (H2O) to release hydrogen that reacts with oxygen. The weathering caused sediment to bury pyrite (a water/oxygen reactant) and release phosphorus for adenosine triphosphate (ATP) energy storage, a necessary condition for the Event. That said, the weatherings’ spatial/temporal inconsistency caused oxygen levels to oscillate, enabling multiple cases of local genetic mutations that supported the phylum’s collective survival and global impact. The increase in oxygen levels killed most anaerobic organisms (and harmed cyanobacteria) and may have reacted with methane to reduce greenhouse gas levels and cause an ice age (“snowball Earth”), though it was essential for aerobic organisms’ evolution.

I will draw my primary sources from the Earth itself, examining the geologic records captured in Olejarz et al. unless given the resources to conduct field research. For example, the Banded Iron Formation (2,500-2,460 Ma) in the Hamersley Group of Earth’s Western Australia archive has large layers of black sedimentary rock separated by red-orange, while the Red Bed (~1,450 Ma) in the Belt Supergroup of Earth’s US Montana archive has thin, clumped layers of red-orange rock separated by tan. The black reflects ferrous oxide (FeO) while the red-orange reflects ferric oxide (Fe2O3); the latter results from more aerobic conditions than the former, evidencing the Event given the sources’ temporal separation. This is within my knowledge’s scope, though I might collaborate with environmental scientists to validate Olejarz’s complexer claims.

While many historians define “agency” anthropocentrically and individualistically relative to “structures”, some recognize the concepts’ inherent interactions in complex systems. This enables robust studies but can invalidate the moral status of non-human subjects when ascribing their “structural” role in our society. Such categorization biases our interpretation, so I propose treating the concepts on socially-constructed and non-dichotomous continuums. We might regard the cyanobacteria as simultaneously an agent and structure across multiple levels: structurally, individuals’ biologic constraints reinforce the collective’s oxygen production; agentially, individuals’ rational self-interest reinforces the collective’s ascent then decline. This framing illuminates parallels to anthropogenic climate change, swapping “biological constraints” for “institutional conformity” and “oxygen production” for “carbon emissions”, with the former’s shift from structural resource to schema indicating humans’ potentially greater agency.

The Future: Pollution Production in Cli-Fi

Climate change fiction (“cli-fi”) is an increasingly popular multimodal genre for expressing one’s thoughts and feelings about anthropogenic climate change. Artists often build elaborate worlds to reflect their concerns with humanity’s progress, posing utopic or dystopic narratives that model real-life complexity without unnecessary creative constraints. This enables them to imagine and share their vision of the future, thus increasing their audience’s awareness, empathy, and likelihood of sustainable action. That said, the stories can also decrease action if muddling the distinction between fact and fiction or suggesting our helplessness.

It is, of course, difficult to conduct a comparative historical analysis with works of fiction. For one, they never happened and likely never will. They are also inextricably linked to their creation context (so genealogical that the latter literally determines the former). While seemingly unideal, their boundless creativity can incite questions one never realizes to ask, drawing on imperfect analogies to serve both paradigmatic and heuristic functions, albeit with more inherent similarities. The connectivity between fictional futures and their present artists would also support interviews and ethnographies to gather primary evidence on the fiction’s context.

Consider the case of WALL-E, in which the titular robot and partner EVE help humanity return to Earth after corporate antagonist BnL (embodied in “Auto” pilot) made the planet inhospitable and accepted their fate. The film’s climate change analogy is unmistakable, reflecting its early 2000s release alongside academic anthropogenic acceptance, though its depiction of structure and agency are particularly interesting. Its two agent types, humans and robots, reiterate the question of anthropocentrism but confront the norm by depicting most robots as more complex than their counterparts. That said, the spaceship’s structure restricts each through its institutions (schemas, e.g. corporate norms) and technological enforcement (resources, e.g. algorithmic lines). Nearly every voiced character learns from WALL-E to embrace contrarianism, illustrating their reality’s social construction, as emblemized by Mary’s first encounter with her non-digital surroundings. This parallels the role of industrial capitalists establishing norms to justify resource depletion (e.g. economic growth, environmental ignorance), though their entanglement is difficult to confront. Nonetheless, the use of a non-conformist hero in climate-themed film might inspire their viewers to confront oppressive norms. This may work better than the Ice Age franchise, which neglects the complex agent-structure interactions and produces a temporal disconnect.

Project Outline

The research paper will be organized in a similar way to the above sections. I debated whether to organize it chronologically or thematically, as the former seems obvious for my subject selection of the past, present, and future. That said, people are more familiar with the present crisis, and the remaining subjects will be compared “to” it, so it makes sense to do it first. Hence, I elected to follow a more thematic narrative, using parallel structures within the subject sections to support the comparisons. I’ve added an outline and explanation below, though this will change as I learn more.

Introduction (introduces and contextualizes climate change, emphasizing the importance of action despite public denial and misprioritization).
Across Time: Climate Crises (introduces the units and justifies their selection relative to academic history’s disciplinary norms and the analogy debate).
The Present: Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Context (reviews common knowledge and adds details relevant to later comparisons; e.g. humans emitting greenhouse gasses).
Criticism (critically examines sources, subject selection, and subsequent conclusions; e.g. evaluating bias of climate scientists and corporations).

The Past: Great Oxygenation Event.

Context (overviews subject and adds details relevant to later comparisons; e.g. cyanobacteria photosynthesizing oxygen).
Comparison (draws on historical, ethical, and scientific theories to assess relevance to the present; e.g. treating as both agent and structure).
Criticism (repeated; e.g. primary data from secondary sources).
Conclusion (synthesizes context, comparison, and criticism for take away).

The Future: Pollution Production in WALL-E.

Context (repeated; e.g. robots cleaning the pollution humans produced).
Comparison (repeated, artistic replaces scientific; e.g. connectivity of present artists’ futures).
Criticism (repeated; e.g. temporal setting of WALL-E vs. Ice Age franchise).
Conclusion (repeated).

All at Once: Agents and Structures (synthesizes the above on being both agents and structures, noting the role of ascribed identity on perception of in/action).
Conclusion (emphasizes impact of avowed identity on agency within structured environment, posing recommendations for action based on subjects’ crises).
Bibliography (using Chicago if asked nicely, otherwise journal-specific).

Detailed Research Plan

Unfortunately yet unsurprisingly, there is one more historical norm we must confront: the distinction between primary and secondary evidence. Anything can be treated as a primary source so long as the who and when aligns with the context of your investigation, though some courses require the “past” be at least twenty years older than the “present” despite the two existing on a continuum. I propose eliminating the twenty year requirement and (much like agents and structures) allowing evidence to be both primary and secondary depending on how you interpret it. I further suggest allowing secondary sources to respond to, build on, and challenge one another on historical subjects outside of the academic discipline. Hence, I will analyze several historical sources that might not usually qualify.

First, confronting the “past” norm (terrifyingly by only four years!), I analyze Pixar’s WALL-E in the Academy Award® Winners collection of the Disney+ archive. I use this to understand the “future”, though I embrace its complex connectivity with the “present”. This helps characterize our collective conception of humanity’s capitalist structures while reiterating the question of non-human agency. That said, it might not reveal present predictions of the future as much as more recent films in the Ice Age franchise, though their projections onto the past would complicate the analysis.

Second, exemplifying both primary and secondary evidence, I analyze empirical studies on the Great Oxygenation Event, including Banded Iron Formation and Red Beds by Olejarz et al. While their field research gathers primary data through environmental observation, I must rely on “translators” when I lack the expertise to interpret it, leading the source to exhibit secondary traits. Since my pre-Minerva background is chemistry, I can confirm their analysis even if not start it; hence, my interpretation is not exclusively primary nor secondary, and the claim’s strength is somewhere between.

Third, adapting ahistorical historical debates, I analyze academic articles on climate change from the late 1800s onward. While I could treat these as primary sources, I opt to regard their authors as pseudo-historians evaluating and discussing an event. This approach is complicated by its recency, as not only can their interpretations change but the event itself evolves, though this appears analogous to uncovering new historical evidence. Such extrapolation requires I balance history as an interpretive art and methodological science lest I lose my analysis’ historiographic roots.

While I idealize producing new research, it won’t be possible without funding. For example, assuming the physics in Back to the Future mirror reality, I would require five billion dollars to create a time machine (up to ten with R&D), allowing me to interview the cyanobacteria and robots to evaluate their agency, or at least assess the subjects’ context. Alternatively, for forty dollars per hour, I could hire an environmental scientist to validate claims on the Great Oxygenation Event, perhaps even conducting a oral history on climate change or gathering field research of our own. I could also interview or conduct ethnographies around WALL-E, seeking diverse subjects to confront social sciences’ WEIRDness and compensating their time. If those seem unfeasible, then I kindly request a living wage for the semester I develop this paper.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

“Banded Iron Formation.” Olejarz et al., 2500-2460 Ma. Hamersley Group. Western Australia.

Martino, Steve, Michael Thurmeier, Michael Berg, Jason Fuchs, and Lori Forte. Ice Age: Continental Drift. Pixar, 2012. Ice Age. Disney+.

“Red Bed.” Olejarz et al., ca. Ma 1450. Belt Supergroup. Montana, U.S.

Stanton, Andrew, Pete Docter, and Jim Reardon. WALL-E. Pixar, 2008. Academy Award® Winners. Disney+.

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