Our Biggest Experiment – an interview with climate activist Alice Bell

In a change from her regular column, Claire Thirlwall interviews author and climate activist Alice Bell, who works at climate action group Possible, about her new book “Our Biggest Emergency – a history of the climate crisis.”

Claire Thirlwall

Thirlwall Associates

In your opening chapter, you make the point that “one of the slippery things about the climate crisis is that is doesn’t hit people with a clearly identifiable thud.” From your research for the book and your work as a climate campaigner, do you have any techniques to persuade clients and colleagues of the urgency of taking action?

I think the trick to engaging people with climate change is to give them an opportunity to take meaningful action. It’s all too easy to look at the impacts of climate change and – even when they hit at their most horrifying (sometimes precisely then) – avoid looking it in the eye. If people feel they can be part of the solution though, that’s where long-term activism (and action) can be built. You feel like you have somewhere to take all that pain and fear and turn it into something productive, so it’s easier to let yourself really feel it and appreciate the problem. That’s the basis of everything we do at Possible), finding new opportunities for everyday people to be part of action on climate change.

Having read your book, it strikes me that most of the actions that have led to the climate crisis are due to the decisions of a relatively small group of influential and wellconnected individuals. Do you think that we now might have to rely on a similar group of individuals to find the solutions?

We need to throw everything at the climate crisis. I think democratising our energy systems will be key to decarbonising – we need to offer people more of a stake in energy changes for them to support them at the sort of speed and scale of change we need.

One of the things that really hit home researching the book is that the oil industry didn’t suddenly become the baddies in the 1980s when they started promoting languages of climate scepticism and delay. There were already problems with how the oil industry worked, and some of their approaches to pushing back on climate action were based on PR strategies that date back decades to earlier fights about air pollution. And maybe if we’d built the oil industry differently, they’d have reacted to climate change in a different way. With that in mind, I think it makes sense to try to change some of the structural issues with our energy industry, otherwise we’re arguably just setting up new problems for ourselves.

British politicians love to talk about how we need a new “green industrial revolution”, but I’m really not sure that the Industrial Revolution is the model of technological change we should be working from. As well as all the pollution and unintended consequences it produced, so much of it was based on slave labour. Surely, we can aim for something better with our vision for a new green future.

The antagonists in the story of the climate crisis use a variety of techniques to encourage investors and the public to support their innovations. Are there any ideas that you think we could now use to counter their actions?

One of the things it was a joy to reread when researching this book was Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s essay on how the refrigerator got its hum, the history of the fight between electric versus gas fridges (which electric, humming fridges won) and in particular how much of that was a PR battle. You don’t win a tech fight simply by having the most efficient, cleanest or cleverest ideas (or the most moral ones), it’s about persuasion. The pioneers of the fossil fuel industry persuaded us to do something as ludicrous as setting fire to long-dead beetles and bits of old plants to power not only factories but cars and planes. As we think about how we need to sell the idea of green futures to people, we need to be better at PR, and appreciate how much work it involves. It’s easy to think about PR as a bit of spray-on glitz at the end of a project, but really helping people build relationships with new tech is hard work, and it’s a big part of the puzzle when it comes to rapid decarbonisation. For me, the heroes of the book are the individuals who doggedly recorded data, such as CO 2 levels and temperature, and fought to create the data sets that now prove the changes in climate and CO 2 levels. Who are your heroes from the book?

It’s interesting you say that because I really think we owe a lot to those data collectors too! I loved learning about Ida Tarbell, whose journalism took down John D Rockefeller and led to the break up of Big Oil back at the start of the 20th century. That said, I’m not sure I had too many heroes. When I set out to write the book, I said it wasn’t going to be a simple story with evil exploitative fossil-fuel baddies on one side and the goodies of renewable energy, environmentalism, and climate science on the other, simply because it’s more complex (and interesting!) than that. And I think I pretty much kept to that. Even people like Marcus Samuel who founded Shell. He’s really quite terrible in all sorts of ways, but there’s also something sympathetic and amazing about him too. Or on the other side, I had a lot of admiration for scientists like Roger Revelle, but there were times I think he slipped up too or framed climate science in a way that didn’t necessarily turn out for the best, and there were times I found myself kind of angry with him. A book that focuses on the characters, actions and events that led to the climate crisis may not seem an obvious choice for landscape architects, but I feel that the greater our understanding of the history and context, the greater our chance of understanding the impacts and finding solutions.

“Our Biggest Experiment – a history of the climate crisis” was published by Bloomsbury Sigma in July 2021.

Claire Thirlwall is a director of Oxfordshire based landscape practice Thirlwall Associates. Her book “From Idea to Site: a project guide to creating better landscapes” for RIBA Books was published in January 2020.