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Greenland, forest fires and presidential power: history behind the headlines
00:43:15
Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter discuss the history behind the headlines in 2025's first instalment of our monthly series
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- [00:00]
Rana Mitter
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- [00:19]
Hannah Skoda
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- [00:32]
Unknown Host
Hello and welcome to our monthly series, History BEHIND the headlines. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month, I'll be joined by our two regular panelists.
- [00:47]
Hannah Skoda
I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John's College in Oxford.
- [00:53]
Rana Mitter
I'm Rana Mitter. I'm St. Lee Chair in US Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. And I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history.
- [01:01]
Unknown Host
So, Han, Anna and Rana, welcome back to History BEHIND THE Headlines for our first episode of 2025. We're talking right at the end of January and it's been a pretty packed month in terms of news stories. We'll get into some of them over the next 45 minutes or so, starting with President Trump being inaugurated for his second term as US President. We're obviously not going to talk very much about recent developments, but it is an opportunity to get into the history behind some of the discussions that have been going on about constraints on power and the extent to which he seems to trying to remove some of those constraints and what the historical parallels might be. Rana, did you want to lead with this?
- [01:41]
Rana Mitter
Absolutely. And I think we start, as we probably should do with the American presidency on this. I know that Hannah's going to come in later and I'm sure that there'll be an awful lot, for instance, on the monarchy and the medieval era, which in a sense have parallels. And, you know, people have made comments, sometimes joking, perhaps sometimes a bit less joking about whether or not President Trump sees himself as a new kind of Louis XIV or someone who really does have that kind of monarchical sense to him. But I think we need to think about this actually as the, the American presidency, because when George Washington and the founders of the American republic were debating, they did, at least for a very brief period, wonder since they were leaving a monarchy, leaving A kingdom. Maybe they should have a king of their own. And fairly quickly decided, no, it was going to be a president. So the US has decided that the presidential system is the way in which the republican ideal will be expressed. But over the nearly 250 years that the American republic has existed, there's been huge amounts of variance in terms of what kind of power the President has and what kind of power he. Up to this point, it has always been he. He is supposed to have had. And I'm going to mention a book that actually is probably a bit of a historical item in its own right, because it's now just over 50 years old, 52 years, actually, 1973. It's called the Imperial Presidency by Arthur Schlesinger. And Schlesinger, some listeners may know, was the nearest thing you might say to a sort of court historian. Perhaps that's an unfair way to put, but a sort of court historian of President John F. Kennedy. Back in the 60s, he was very close to the Kennedy family and wrote some studies of both John F. Kennedy and indeed the Thousand Days, and also of Robert Kennedy, his brother, the Attorney General, who was also tragically assassinated. But this book in 1973 was a more theoretical one in a sense. It wasn't a biography. It was about the idea that over the 20th century, the presidency had moved from being a relatively weak, understaffed office in the US to being essentially a form of imperial rule, hence the title. And Schlesinger put forward an argument which has been debated, but broadly speaking, you could say, I think most historians would say that you get variations over the past 150 years or so. So the late 19th century following the Civil War. The American Civil war ended in 1865 with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, perhaps one of the most decisive single presidents that you have. And someone who was not afraid to take war power acts into his line of command to make sure that essentially the Union, the American Union, held together. And then you actually have, for various reasons, the succession, maybe 20, 30 years of quite weak presidents. Congress gets to push them around an awful lot more in the late 19th century. And then the 20th century changes things. The state becomes bigger, becomes more powerful. The military becomes more relevant as well. Although don't Forget, until the mid 19th century, the United States actually had a relatively small land army. It really expanded during World War II. But if you're going to put the finger maybe, maybe on one person, let's narrow it down to one person in that presidential succession who chased, changed things to that imperial type. Of presidency. Well, let's go with someone who might be in some ways, the most diametrically opposed figure to the current President Donald Trump, in recent history, and that's Franklin D. Roosevelt, the liberal Democratic president of the mid 20th century, very much seen as a champion of the nearest thing that America had to leftist politics, the New Deal, as opposed to the more conservative politics in some ways that President Trump encompasses. But in some ways, there were similarities. They had huge personal charisma. You know, those who loved them, really loved them. FDR and Donald Trump, those who hated them, really, really hated them, thought they were the worst thing ever. And they both had a strong interest in trying to change the wider form of government in the United States away from the three branches, the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, the judiciary, to give the presidency more. So Franklin D. Roosevelt did this most famously in 1937, just after he'd been reelected, very triumphantly when he tried to basically get more justices on the US Supreme Court so that they would declare more legislation to be constitutional. They kept sort of striking things down, but he didn't want struck down. And in the end, there was a standoff, and he didn't increase the numbers on the Supreme Court. But that attempt to essentially try and change a core institution of American government and make it subject to the presidency, in effect, that was something that got a lot of people very, very angry with Roosevel, some on his own side. And I think right now we're seeing a moment. We're just, you know, we're very much at the beginning of it, in the first few days and weeks as we look at the new Trump presidency, where clearly the aim is to make sure that the presidency and one man in the presidency has a really sweeping range of powers. And the other branches of government, Congress and the Supreme Court, are going to be given essentially, in reality, if not in name, a secondary status. And it will be an absolutely fascinating experiment in the history of the American republic to find out whether or not that attempt actually succeeds. So remember that term imperial presidency. Arthur Schlesinger, 1973 might be a book to go back to, to get a bit of perspective on where we are today.
- [06:55]
Hannah Skoda
Hannah, I'm so struck thinking about this over the much, much longer term from the perspective of someone who looks mostly at premodern history by just how often these questions of constraints on personal power and how much power is acceptable revolve around questions of the relationship between law and politics. I think we spoke in a previous podcast about the deposition of Richard II in the late 14th century. And part of the reasoning there for the deposition is that Richard apparently completely overstepped with regard to law and ignored all the constraints on personal power and said that the laws were in his mouth and in his breast, as though he had the right to give out these laws. And it's a striking theme throughout the Middle Ages and running up to the civil war in England as well, just how far this relationship between law and political power is negotiated. So the most obvious constraint on political power for rulers in the Middle Ages are the legal mechanisms to which they are also supposedly subject. But then, of course, if you're thinking about constraints more generally, one does need to add into that the fact that a lot of these rulers were just in very fragile positions. I was thinking about Edward II in the first part of the 14th century, who comes to an extremely sticky end. And there, as much as anything, it's to do with the very fragile structures of power which have been set up, his dependence on the support of particular factions and the ways in which that then lends momentum to the growth of other factions. So some of this, I think, is to do with the very fragile structures of power which do place constraints on rulers in a pre modern period. The other rather interesting dimension of things in a pre modern period is the role of supranational powers in constraining the ways in which particular political leaders can rule. And of course, in Europe in the Middle Ages, that supranational power is the papacy. And in very practical ways, the papacy does work to constrain what's going on, what's being done by particular political leaders. And the way that's theoretically configured is rather interesting, actually. So in the Middle Ages, they have what's called two swords theory. So you have the spiritual sword, which is spiritual power related to the good of people's souls and the moral landscape of the world, and that's wielded by the Pope. And then you have the temporal sword, which is earthly power managing secular affairs, and that is wielded by secular rulers. And that's quite an interesting way of kind of constraining the sorts of things which secular rulers are supposed to do. Of course, we have various explosive moments in the Middle Ages and beyond where this balance of power really, really doesn't work. So the investiture contest in the late 11th, early 12th century between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry iv, which is essentially a debate about the limits of each of these kinds of power, the spiritual power and the temporal power, and where the limits where the boundaries between the two lie. And then, of course, thinking about this, in the uk, the most cataclysmic example of this, depending on one's perspective, is Henry VIII, 1534. He decides that he is the head of the church. And essentially this is his answer to saying, I will not be constrained by this spiritual power wielded by a supranational body. So it's an interesting sort of theoretical configuration, I think, of the ways in which power can be conceived of and the ways in which these different conceptions of different kinds of power can try to constrain one another.
- [10:35]
Rana Mitter
It's really interesting you make that point, Hannah, because actually, one of the things that I think is so remarkable about, you know, modern system of rule is that it's often assumed that because of, you know, the rise of modern politics and in a sense of secular rule, that actually the idea of a power beyond that of the secular state is no longer relevant. And yet, I think, actually it's worth looking. You know, the United States is one example, but there are plenty of others as well, of how far people do actually still turn to the idea of some kind of wider force as being important. I mean, again, you know, famously, the incumbent Donald Trump has said more than once, actually, in recent weeks and months that he feels that after, you know, a horrific assassination attempt that he was saved by God to become president. And obviously, that's politically controversial statement, depending on which side you stand. But it's interesting he's invoked that in that sense, and it goes back to a longer tradition that although, of course, the US has no established religion, that was essentially why the country was put into motion in the first place. It is the case that having some kind of religious faith, faith is really very, very important. I mean, at the moment, I think it's fair to say that the current British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has, I think, quietly but fairly openly said that he's not a religious person. And that hasn't really created any particular sort of controversy or fuss. I still think that it's highly unlikely that any candidate for any party in the US would be likely to win if they openly stated they didn't have religious faith. So there is a sense in which, you know, that the authority of the Pope, it may not be partly because the United States is a country which by definition has to allow a whole range of religious possibilities, but the idea that religion is outside the public sphere in the very modern era of the 21st century, that's not the case at all.
- [12:24]
Hannah Skoda
I would Say, I think it's very interesting as well to start to unpack this idea of what God given power means as well. So I think, you know, on the face of it, we might sort of assume that a so called secular state, the idea of God given power doesn't mean very much because we have in our minds sort of idea of divine right in the way that that was conceptualized in the 17th century. But of course, actually God given power can mean all kinds of different things and has been conceptualised very differently. So as you say, I think there is quite a strong sense in US politics at the moment that this is a way of thinking about things. It's both justificatory perhaps, might be constraining. The idea of divine right is something rather different, the idea that a king effectively does stand above the law because he has powers directly delegated to him by God. And of course that is the particular sort of point of debate in the 17th century, which leads to catastrophic breakdown and the civil war and the execution of the king claiming that he has this divine right and therefore can act in a way that is defined by others as tyranny because he believes therefore he can stand above the law. In the Middle Ages people don't believe in divine right in that precise sense, that kind of an absolute monarchy which stands somehow above the law. They do believe that they are put in place by God and that there's some God given role that they are fulfilling, but it's not the same as divine right. Then at the other end of the extreme, thinking about a figure like Genghis Khan in the same period who is absolutely hell bent on world domination and pretty much almost achieves it. And Genghis Khan is a really interesting figure in terms of his religious outlook. I'm not sure religious is quite the right word, but he's situating himself in a kind of grand cosmology of the world and the universe, whereby his role in all of that is to lead the entire world. So it's not a God given right, it's not divine right, but again, it is a kind of sacral rite which is somehow embedded in this huge cosmology of the way in which all created things should be ordered.
- [14:37]
Unknown Host
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- [15:07]
Rana Mitter
And it's just worth noting that one particular aspect of the news headlines in the United States around the presidency that's been again, controversial, not just with President Trump, but actually President Biden, who came before him as the rather lavish use of pardons recently for various crimes, both future and past. But also that this is perhaps the one aspect of the American republic which is almost a direct handover from the monarchy, and indeed the idea, I guess, of divine right of kings, that a pardon for any kind of sin or crime can be handed out, you know, regardless, and wipes the slate clean. And that's a really rather religious way of thinking about it, even though I suspect that neither of the last two presidents are necessarily thinking primarily of the historical background when they exercised those. They were probably thinking of things rather more in the present day.
- [15:53]
Hannah Skoda
It's a very religious way of thinking about things, but it's also an intensely powerful way of thinking about things, isn't it? So, you know, superficially looking at it, one might assume that when a ruler is willing to grant a lot of pardons, they're somehow being rather compromising and perhaps a little bit less authoritarian. But in many ways, granting a pardon is saying that as a ruler, you're the one who gets to stand above the letter of the law. And that point has certainly been made with regards to the enormous rise in the number of pardons which are granted by monarchs over the course of the 15th century, that this rise of pardons indicates a very particular way of thinking about royal power, and a way of thinking about royal power which doesn't follow the letter of the law, because kings somehow stand apart from all of that.
- [16:38]
Unknown Host
One very literal boundary over which President Trump is attempting to step is that of the territory of Greenland, which is an autonomous Danish territory, which he says that the US Needs to gain control of for security reasons, which is an idea he floated back in his previous term, between 2016 and 2020. Again, without delving too much into the politics of this, what do you think that tells us about the historical echoes or precedents behind this kind of story?
- [17:07]
Hannah Skoda
So I might start off here just with a little bit of kind of prehistory of what was going on in Greenland in a pre modern period. It is an absolutely fascinating area, partly because of its geographical location. And that location, I think, has really shaped the ways in different peoples were migrating in and out of it over many thousands of years. So my understanding is that the earliest evidence of human habitation on Greenland dates from 2500 BCE. So it is a very, very lengthy history that we're talking about here. The 9th century saw the coming of Norsemen. Erik the Red is one of the particularly famous figures here who came across to Greenland, and we start to find these settlements of norsemen from the 9th century onwards. There's obviously another very important group of people involved here, the Greenlandic Inuit. And there's evidence from about 1200 of these peoples moving from northwest Greenland into other areas of the territories. And then, very weirdly, in the 14th century, evidence of Norsemen really disappears. And it seems as though they left Greenland. And the question is, why did they leave? Are we right that they left? Is it a question of evidence that maybe we're being slightly misled into assuming an abrupt departure where that may not have happened? But to my mind, the most compelling explanation here is a climactic one. So I think it's pretty indisputable now that what we generally think of as the kind of central Middle Ages, up until around the year 1300, were really very warm. And then around 1300, the Little Ice Age kicks in. And there are various amazing dendrochronological studies, ice core sample studies and so on, showing that the temperature dropped by a couple of degrees really pretty suddenly and catastrophically. And in an area like Greenland, where things are cold anyway, the effect of that may well have been simply to make even subsistence farming simply too difficult to survive. I say farming. Of course, these are mostly pastoralist hunting and fishing societies, but the effect of that cold seemed to have been to make it almost impossible to survive, really. Interestingly, though, interest in Greenland, of course, does not disappear, and it doesn't even disappear in the 14th, 15th centuries. I've been very struck to look at the interest of the papacy in Greenland in the 15th century. We have the Pope sending out a decree that he wants a bishopric and that he wants priests sent to Greenland from Iceland, that it's on the Icelanders to sort this out. They need to make sure that there's a bishopric in Greenland. There's absolutely no evidence that this ever happened, but it's very, very striking. I think that in the 15th century, when really settlement by Norsemen in Greenland seems to have vanished, the papacy is still concerned that this is somewhere where the kinds of structures to which Europeans are used to, these kind of ecclesiastical structures, that they should still be in place. It doesn't happen. There's an episode in the 1540s when a European ship finds a single dead Norseman in the snow in Greenland that seems to be pretty much the only piece of sort of isolated evidence of continued habitation until the 17th century, when we start getting Danish Norwegian missionary activity again to Greenland, at which point I think probably Rana might like to pick up the narrative and explore the implications.
- [20:40]
Rana Mitter
Nowadays, I think you said there that that was isolated in Greenland. Hannah, excellent pun. I see what you did there, intended or not. I found myself actually thinking a little bit about Greenland because, of course, it's very much in the news, because President Trump has been putting forward quite forcefully the idea that he wants the United States to acquire, one way or another, Greenland from Denmark, who's its current sort of holding state, if that's the right way to put it. It's an autonomous territory, of course, but it's also been in my mind because actually, I've been working Quick mention here on a new podcast called Face off, which is on a very different topic from history behind the headlines. It's about the US China relationship, and I do that with Jane Perles, who. Who's the former Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times. And we're looking at different areas in which China and the US Are facing off against each other. And it has to be said, the Arctic is absolutely one of those areas. So in a sense, there's nothing new about the fact that the more remote areas of the earth are currently the subject of geopolitical conflict. But as some people have pointed out, the controversy or the conflict over who gets to control Greenland is not by any means new. It didn't just suddenly turn up three or four weeks ago when Donald Trump started talking about it. And, in fact, American presidents, again, have been thinking about this for quite a while. The most notable attempt was during the Cold War. Actually, it started in World War II, when there were fears that the Nazis, because, of course, they had occupied Denmark, might be able to use Greenland as some sort of staging post for an assault on North America. And this didn't, of course, happen. But nonetheless, there was serious discussion in the Allied high command about how dangerous this might be. And when the war was over, when the Nazis had been defeated, President Harry Truman, it appears, was very keen to have that discussion with Denmark about whether or not the United States might make a move actually to purchase or take over control of Greenland. Now, the difference between what's happening now and then is that it was all done very much in secret, undercover. The National Archives of the US have produced an awful lot of evidence in recent years to show what was discussed, but at the time, it really wasn't done in public at all. And the idea essentially was that the Soviet Union, which of course then was the great rising adversary in the Cold War, might use its skills in the Arctic, which of course are undoubted because of the Russian connection and also the geographical proximity of Greenland to North America, to essentially make it a base for Cold War activity, subversion, attacks, whatever. Now, as we know, in practice, the United States did not gain control of Greenland. That didn't happen. But there were some successes, including the setting up of a naval base in Thule, the northern part of Greenland still very much there today. And the idea that Greenland might be the sort of roof of the geopolitical world, the kind of point at which the, in this case, the kind of the Allied powers in World War II and then the Western world in the Cold War might essentially push back against power of the Nazis and then the Soviets, has in a sense been carried over into the present day, where there's now this incipient but very real fear in the Western world that perhaps China is going to get greater control of Greenland, that might be over its mineral resources, which are probably pretty considerable. The geostrategic usefulness of having this huge great island, which of course sits in the Arctic, but also very close to North America. You can certainly see why some of the fears that Harry Truman had back in the 1940s might be echoed amongst geostrategists in the Western world today. But the debate today, of course, is about what's the right way of resolving these questions. And that might be in a very different direction from what happened back in the 1940s. But, Hannah, I mean, this is kind of thing that presumably happened frequently in the medieval era. I mean, disputes over territories and the idea of. Of how power might be exercised, I mean, that's sort of meat and drink, is it not, to medieval rulers who all had control over often fast changing territorial boundaries?
- [24:49]
Hannah Skoda
Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that's particularly striking about late medieval conflict is that much as we might be tempted to sort of revisit something like the Hundred Years War and see it as a great clash between England and France. Most of these conflicts actually aren't straightforward clashes between two well defined parts, polities. Rather, they're clashes between polities which are in the midst of defining themselves. They're about adding this bit of territory on or taking this bit of territory off, or adding this little corridor here. These are very much sort of conglomerations of areas which are in flux. I was teaching earlier today about burgundy in the 15th century. Which is sort of a state, it's certainly not a kingdom, and involved in a whole series of conflicts and complicated negotiations, mostly negotiations with areas around it. And these are emphatically not about great clashes of well defined political units, but attempts to add on a bit of territory here, attempts to close off a corridor of land that runs between two separate bits of Burgundy, attempts to use a series of strategic alliances to add a little bit more very, very useful trading commercial area to some of their territories in the more southern parts of Burgundy. So this sense that it's about a kind of jigsaw of different bits of territory and trying to add them together is very striking, I think. And say Burgundy's a really, really interesting example of this.
- [26:18]
Rana Mitter
Have to ask, Hannah, back in medieval times, was Burgundy as well known for excellent wines as it is in the present day?
- [26:25]
Hannah Skoda
I think the wine there was very good, but I think it was mostly wool and cloth that they were known for.
- [26:30]
Rana Mitter
I'm not as excited about the wool and cloth, I have to say.
- [26:34]
Hannah Skoda
No. And sheep. Everywhere I look in Burgundy in this period, there are sheep being depicted all over the place because they're a symbol of their wealth. So it doesn't have quite the same cache as a lovely bottle of Burgundian wine, does it?
- [26:45]
Unknown Host
One final story to talk about that's been dominating headlines in January is again in the United States, but has historical ramifications across continents and centuries is the devastating wildfires that have been sweeping through the LA region across the past four weeks. This is obviously a story that's continuing. The fires have had a massive impact, both in terms of loss of life and of destruction of property. Are there any historical stories, examples of our relationship with the natural world, that you think offer parallels to this particular situation? Rana, did you want to kick off on this?
- [27:19]
Rana Mitter
Yeah. I think that one of the things it reminds us of is that when thinking about history behind the headlines, which, of course, is what we really concentrate on month by month on this podcast, understanding the way in which the study of history itself has changed gives us insights into the present. And I would say that the rise over the last few decades of environmental history is absolutely central to understanding some of the reasons that this tragic story that's in the headlines about California has come about. And there's a whole broad range of wonderful books over the last few decades that have really got to grips with how the history of the environment has shaped the history of human beings. One is something of a classic that was published over 30 years ago in 1989, and that's the Unquiet woods by the great Indian historian Ramachandra Guha, based in Bangalore in India. And he's the author of a whole variety of fascinating books. But this book remains a classic of environmental history in particular, in which he looks at a particular ethnic group in the northern part of India and the way in which their relationship with forestry and forestry management in the 19th century into the 20th essentially shaped their relationship with the wider environment and also with the state. Because what he shows is that as forestry changes as the state, at that point, of course, the British colonial state, the British imperial state in India starts to try and, you know, exploit the forest, tidy it up, but also create the circumstances in which the natural ecology, environment, environment of the forest stops being productive in the way that it was for the local people. They began to push back as well. And again, one of the most fascinating parts of the story, and one perhaps with a lot of echoes for our own era, is that his story is about men and women. It's about people who are often the most impoverished part of society and they begin to actually push back and try and find ways to resist the growing sense of the state is essentially mismanaging the forest for the purposes of short term economic gain. It is a story about British Imperial India. But I should stress this is not just a story about a foreign empire. Because in the present day, if you look at people who have been working with India's forest peoples, it's still very much the case in independent India that these sort of big statist projects are often there essentially trampling over the environmental practices and the ways of keeping forestry management renewable and sustainable that have often been developed in many, many long standing ways over the centuries in the forests themselves. This is not a book. The Unquiet woods that romanticizes forest peoples as if they were a sort of untouched group that had never met modernity. It's very, very subtle and not remotely like that, but it is a book that does a great deal to actually show how the relationship of humans and the forests either can sustain or help to destroy that very, very long standing, centuries indeed, you know, kind of millennia long environment that emerges. I mean, that question of forestry management. Hannah, and I'm here talking about Guha's book on 19th century India. But actually Europe and the pre modern era really had an awful lot to say and to think about when it came to those issues, didn't they?
- [30:38]
Hannah Skoda
It, yes, it did. And perhaps there's a higher degree of ambivalence regarding these issues in the Middle Ages. Than people might assume as well. So forests are a very, very fraught topic for medieval people, if we think in an English context. In particular, what forest means in medieval England is not necessarily a wooded area, though likely a wooded area, but somewhere which is subject to forest law, which means that ordinary people no longer have rights there, and the forest is. Is directly controlled by the king, who will exercise his own hunting rights there. So it's an example of really extreme exploitation and oppression, you know, ordinary people losing key areas that they need for their subsistence. And in the Middle Ages In England, about 25% of the country is covered in forest, by which we mean is subject to forest law and most likely has trees over it. It's largely something that is brought with the Norman Conquest. One of the more pernicious elements of the Norman Conquest, removing the rites when they establish forest law. And this lasts until the late 17th century. So forests become the site of social conflict, they become a site of oppression, but they also become a site of resistance as well. If we think about figures like Robin Hood in the very earliest Robin Hood stories in the 14th century, these are stories of the forest as an area which symbolises oppression, but also an area where one can be more at one with the natural world and think about pushing back against the corruption of the law. So there's this really, really interesting tension there. There's a fascinating case in 1417 of a guy who we now know to be the parish priest of Lindfield Parish Church, that's in West Sussex. Anyway, he's hauled up before the court for having engaged in really quite extreme poaching and hunting in an area subject to forest law. And when he's brought before the court, he doesn't give his name, he says he's called Friar Tuck. So there we have a nice sense of the ways in which these Robin Hood stories are really taking root. So people actually doing this stuff are referring themselves to these stories, but again, the forester's site of conflict. It's also the case in the Middle Ages that forests, in the sense of trees, are subject to vast clearances. This is called assarting. So this is people cutting down wooded areas to expand the areas which can be cultivated. This process really reaches a peak in the late 13th century. That warm period that I was talking about earlier coincides with a period of cutting down as many trees as they possibly can to expand the area of cultivable land. Of course, the environmental impact of this is catastrophic. The thing that really halts this movement is is the lower temperatures which kick in around 1300, we start to see this woodland clearance sort of slowing down. But really interestingly, there is also a top down sense even at this early stage, that it cannot be a good thing to be cutting down so many trees. Much of the kind of resistance to this comes from royal authorities who don't want to see their wonderful hunting grounds being destroyed. But again and again we have examples of royal legislation saying, saying we've got to stop pushing back these woodlands because the consequences are looking rather terrifying. In France 1279 and then a series of subsequent pieces of legislation against this kind of uncontrolled cutting back of the forest. I might just add, in light of the recent news stories as well, that the early modern period does see a particularly large number of fires. So it may be that for an earlier period they're not so documented, but I think we'd find them in chronicles and that sort of thing. In the early modern period, there is a spate of really terrifying fires, particularly in urban areas, actually. And this sits rather oddly with the claim that this is part of the Little Ice Age. But climate scientists tell us that the Little Ice Age produced these kind of particular aberrant moments as well. So in amongst these centuries of dramatically colder temperatures, you'd then get sudden warm moments which seem to coincide with some of the most dramatic fires. And of course, we know about the Great Fire of London in 1666, but it's one amongst many in this rather terrifying period.
- [35:04]
Unknown Host
Do you think, Hannah, that paying more attention to the history of humanity's relationship with the natural world could help us have better informed conversations about the climate crisis today?
- [35:15]
Hannah Skoda
Yes, I think it's absolutely critical that we think about the history of the relationship between human beings and their environments, as well as the kind of big exogenous shocks like the Little Ice Age that was nothing to do with human agency, but the effects that had on human activity. And to my mind, one of the most useful things we can discover when we look to the past is not just to terrify ourselves by looking at the cataclysmic impact of some of these things, but actually to look at the real sense of ambivalence which seems to have characterised most human societies in terms of their relationship with nature. So in the Middle Ages we see appalling exploitation of the natural world, but alongside that we do find evidence of a pretty pervasive sense that it cannot be okay to go around destroying things like this and people thinking about what the consequences of that might be. And I think for us to start acknowledging that in past periods, people did destroy their environments and they did exploit and they did overuse and exhaust resources, but at the same time worried about this and were anxious about it and were concerned about it. I think that that sort of tension is really, really important for us to think about as we go forward facing the climate challenges that we're currently presented with.
- [36:35]
Unknown Host
As is often the case with the stories we talk about, it's interesting to set headlines back within their wider and their longer context. Hannah and Rana, thank you both so much for your time. We'll be back at the start of March, but for now, thank.