Writing History Showed Me a New Way to View Climate Change

Two new books, a U. K. paperback and a world first edition, were delivered to my door on the same day last week. I put the books side by side on the table. The first, suggestive of dark happenings in the past,  was The Lion House: The Rise of Suleyman the Magnificent. The second book’s cover had shrubbery winding around an airplane window, the sky beyond stamped with the words, Flying Green: On the Frontiers of New Aviation; book about technology, manufacture and solutions to the crisis of our lives.

Looking at them on the table, I felt mild surprise that these two such different books were written by the same person: me.

Much has been made of the necessity of knowing the past in order to understand the present and anticipate the future. But that is to undersell history, or certainly the kind of narrative history that I have tried to write in the Lion House. The art of the historian is to create a temporary effect in which behavior that is pretty peculiar seems normal, and to use this effect to bridge the gap between the present and the past.

The blurbs call it “immersive” because it makes you forget that the people you’re reading about were guided by beliefs radically different from your own, living lives that were also very different—and that are, with each passing year, each acceleration of our already out-of-control human civilization, becoming more different still.

The Lion House is about the early years of a sixteenth-century Ottoman sultan, perhaps the greatest of them all. In the course of the action, Suleyman’s men build a pyramid of skulls to greet him when he awakes from a nap. He receives a crown whose cost is comparable to the annual budget of Egypt.

These are experiences outside my ambit and likely to remain so. But I sympathize with this young person as he tries to figure out who his friends are, and that, ultimately, is what The Lion House is about.

Inevitably reporters—I was one for many years—wonder about the historical background of the contemporary situations they report on. This is called context and in time you realize the context is as interesting as the situation. My early books of history were about things that happened quite recently, proximate history whose effects are discernible and the subject of live debate.

The Lion House is my first book of “far” history, if I can call it that. The significance of Suleyman to our present shouldn’t be exaggerated. The lessons he holds for us about contemporary Turkey, or statecraft, are far from clear. What I have discovered is that writing about the past becomes really rewarding when you stop regarding it as a preamble to the present and start looking at the more fundamental commonalities that bind us to our forebears.

And it turns out that behind the pyramid of skulls there’s a man whose experience of being alive, of wanting to do right by the memory of his father, of wanting to please his spouse and avoid conflict between his children, are—allowing for a certain difference of emphasis, a certain different of scale—our own. And this is the at times painfully moving solace of the historian: the recognition of a shared humanity across the ages. They weren’t so peculiar after all.

Now I ask myself, whilst living in this world, within comfortingly circumscribed walls thrown up by the fact that the events I am describing are over, and no longer have the power to wrongfoot me, why I should willingly step out of it and into the terrifying incompleteness of climate change. A couple of years ago, when I started to think about Flying Green, I would have answered with a phrase about wanting to look my children in the eye, or about the importance of not spending my every working hour in the past. But now that the book is done and I am contemplating other subjects related to climate change, I realize that more factors were involved.

That climate change should have prompted a technological flowering of unprecedented scope, invention, and size will be discovered by the historians who arrive on earth and pick over the remains of human civilization, and evidence for its breakdown, in the millennia to come. That this flowering came just a few decades too late to save us will be cited as the crowning irony of humankind’s brief hegemony over the earth.

Right now, in every field of human endeavor, some of the world’s cleverest, most inventive people hurry and bustle about their extraordinary business, prodded by the thought, “we’re running out of time.” It was to rub shoulders with people engaged in making jet fuel out of thin air, running planes on pure hydrogen and propelling passengers across the sky using batteries alone, that I entered the field of green aviation.

And I had—have—complicated feelings of love and hate for the mode itself. We all know what it’s like to be pinned, listless and dehydrated, to a seat of Lilliputian proportions, unable to move, fed a diet of synthetic entertainment and alleged food while being tossed around in a cigar tube at 35,000 feet. And yet, as I wrote in the introduction to Flying Green, “even now, like a dim memory of drawing water from a Neolithic pool, when we look out of the window and see the sun come up over the bowl of the earth and our flying machine is suspended in pure motion, we feel free.”

It’s the freedom the Wrights had over Kitty Hawk, that Lindbergh had while dropping down to Le Bourget, and that the cumbersome, needy, petulant, change-averse behemoth that is the modern aviation industry needs desperately to recapture. Only then does it stand a chance of winning the battle-within-the-war that is its own decarbonization.

In the 1520s and 1530s there were almost annual calls for men across the Ottoman Empire, and the men turned up. They fought for the intangible: their love for the sultan, Islam, and the respect of their villages and elders. And they fought for the tangible: the slaves and booty they would bring home. I’m reminded of this willingness to march off to war and risk one’s life for immediate gains whenever someone worthy demands that we treat climate change as an enemy and that society be placed on a war footing—and nothing happens.

The call is wrong. The enemy isn’t out there—it’s us. Defeat is neither imminent nor markable, just as the first inkling of victory, even supposing we discover new resolve and actions to match, won’t be felt in our lifetime. The delayed causality that is the secret weapon of climate change places a strain on the human psyche that most of us—those who have signally failed to align our rising panic at the crisis with our own damaging behavior—have chosen not to assume.

And this with a cynical smile, a historian’s smile, on our faces. We fight wars in order to enjoy peace and prosperity and then peace and prosperity turn out to be more damaging than all the wars that were ever fought.

We see the lights of the express train coming towards us, they get brighter and brighter, as we stroll unconcernedly into the tunnel. Yes, we’re behaving pretty peculiarly right now.

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Flying Green by Christopher de Bellaigue is available via Columbia Global Reports.