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“The world will be violent … the world will be in a worse state than it is now … Everyone will only care about themselves … The governments are going to be corrupt … There will be no greenery left … Everyone will be sad.  There will be no love.” (Belinda)

“There will be more street fighting… bigger gangs, more street deaths.  Life will be three times more dangerous than it is now … Hoping it won’t happen, but it will.” (Ann)

“The city is full of skyscraper buildings and police officers with helmets on and riot gear … The streets are packed with people … It has become like the Bronx, survival of the fittest.” (Anthony)

If you had asked me at the age of sixteen, I may well have given similar views to these three respondents.  Although rather extreme, their responses were representative of around eighty per cent of nearly 650 Australian upper secondary school students, from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, surveyed by Francis Hutchinson.  Asking students what they think the world will be like in the future is a common activity for those of us who are involved in education for sustainable development, and these apocalyptic scenarios are not uncommon.

The twist is that these quotations are from 1992, when not only were the respondents sixteen years old, but so was I.  I unearthed them during research into visions of the future held by young people.  And I am conflicted about what these now historic testimonies tell us.

Biased towards the worst case scenario?

Do they tell us that most teenagers will always be biased towards worst case scenarios?  Perhaps.  After all, many of the worries of those teenagers have not come to pass to the extent that they feared.

More violent?  But deaths from conflict and terrorism have stayed steady since the early 1990s at around 1 per 100,000 deaths.  More corrupt governments?  But the number of democracies around the world – granted, they are not always a hallmark of anti-corruption – has held steady at around 40%.  Survival of the fittest? But global life expectancy has risen from 64 in 1992 to 71 today.  No greenery left?  The history of deforestation is a tragic one, but temperate regions have had a net gain in forest since 1990, and whilst tropical deforestation is still occurring at a deplorable rate, this rate is slowing, and 31% of the world’s surface is forested, compared to 32% in 1992.

More at stake for teenagers

And yet the more sensitive part of my character empathises with those young people, and, by extension, with the young people of today.  They are willing to question the world more deeply than many adults, particularly those of us who are fortunate enough to be well insulated from economic and environmental challenges.  There is a greater deal at stake for teenagers, because they have many more decades ahead of them to live, and perhaps even to thrive, in this world.  And some might say that if we don’t worry about the future, then we won’t act to ensure that we thrive in it.

How we react to this piece of historic research is to a large extent academic.  But current research on the concerns of young people deserves more of our attention.  Surveys show that eco-anxiety is on the rise: a report published in 2021 by Caroline Hickman and colleagues reported that over 50% of young people surveyed felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless and guilty about the future.

Reassure and listen

Again, part of me wants to reassure them, to point to hopeful trends – to development indicators which show that poverty and hunger have decreased, that discrimination of all kinds has declined, and that we are beginning to turn a corner in terms of our attitudes towards the environment.  This is the same part of me wants to say that every generation has its worries, and that ‘Generation Z’ is no different.

But then a more empathetic, caring, part of me wants to listen more carefully to their concerns, to fully admit to the harms that mine and other recent generations have wrought on the world, and to join them in a movement which really does challenge the status quo.

Perhaps Rebecca Solnit strikes the right tone on this front – she writes that “We have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have, many times before.”

Young people will always be uncertain about the future.  But this is all the more reason why adults should be open to having open and honest conversations about it.  After all, our children will be spending longer on this planet than we will.

This was first published in the Yorkshire Post, 17 August 2023

Progress, industry, humanity.

Bradford Council’s motto had passed me by until recently.  Then I saw it adorning the scaffolding of the city’s old Odeon building, which is soon to be reborn as the city’s biggest indoor music and entertainment venue, Bradford Live.

In some respects, the motto seems to hark from a different era – perhaps the Victorian age, in the boom times for ‘wool city’?  Or maybe it would have been more apt in Edwardian times, when the city hosted a Great Exhibition in Lister Park, attracting 2.4 million guests, and whose star attraction was a vast Industrial Hall?

But no – the words were adopted as recently as 1976.

The motto summarises what Bradford stood for then, and it was retained when the crest was updated just five years ago, when the council stated that it “still chimes with our priorities”[1].  But reading it on such a flagship development made me think: what relevance might the concepts of progress, industry and humanity have today?

A hardworking and welcoming city

Whether it is taken to mean manufacturing, or hard work, the term ‘industry’ sums up both the heritage and grit which many see as characterising the city.  Whilst a more competitive global environment, a move towards synthetic materials, and a change in government priorities led to deindustrialisation, Bradford hosts the national and regional headquarters of several large companies in both the manufacturing and service sector, so its inclusion is relatively uncontroversial.

Similarly, few would argue against the place of ‘humanity’ in the city’s motto.  Bradford is a diverse city which has welcomed outsiders throughout its history, and especially so since the 1950s.  This has been cemented by it being awarded City of Sanctuary status in 2010, recognising the role that it has played in providing a place of safety for people who have fled dangerous circumstances.  Whilst the city, like many dynamic places, has experienced challenges, its diversity is also a source of its strength and vibrancy.  Moreover, with a quarter of its population being under 18, and with an average age of 37, recognising and investing in Bradford’s humanity is crucial.

That leaves ‘progress’.

A place of progress?

From around the sixteenth century until just a few decades ago, the concept of ‘progress’ was rarely questioned in the western world, outside of the realms of certain branches of philosophy and literature.  Victorian Britons had a particular fondness for the idea that there was an inexorable drive towards ever advancing material, social and moral conditions, and that there was great pride to be had in promoting its cause.  Ideas of progress went hand in hand with those of ‘civilisation’, and, driven by the Industrial Revolution and a widespread increase in living standards during the nineteenth and twentieth century, it is no surprise that the authorities in Bradford embraced the term in the 1970s and continue to do so today.

The dark side of progress

However, progress, does, of course, have its dark side.  Domestically, the Industrial Revolution drew many millions of people into cities across Britain, and whilst conditions eventually improved, squalor and pollution led to disease and premature death for many.  Notions of progress would have rung hollow to those working long hours in ‘dark satanic mills’, let alone the men, women and children who toiled underground in the early days of mining, as I was reminded of in a recent trip to the Welsh museum of mining at Big Pit, Blaenavon.  Rural life was no bucolic idyll, but for many, the move to the city must have seemed like a step backwards rather than a step forwards.

Environmentally, not only did ‘progress’ turn many parts of cities into dirty, smog-ridden, Dickensian hellholes, but its voracious appetite for raw materials led to the denudation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, and the industrialisation of farming.  Fossil fuel-led economic development has resulted in climate change, and colonisation, enslavement, and the oppression of indigenous peoples and cultures can also be linked to western notions of ‘progress’.  Such concerns reverberate today, and the very concept has fallen into disuse.

So, in this era of recognising historical wrongdoings, should we campaign to expunge the word ‘progress’ from the council’s motto?

A reformed notion of progress

No.  Instead, we should rally around a reformed notion of progress.  Yes, we must recognise that many ‘steps forward’ have hidden costs which may not fully manifest themselves for decades.  And yes, the framework of ‘sustainable development’, as adopted by the United Nations, is useful, but does it stir up the passions needed to meet the challenges of the future with energy, hope, and action?

Believing in ‘progress’ and the capacity of humankind to improve our lot has helped most of humankind to become wealthier, healthier, more educated, and, believe it or not, more peaceful, over recent centuries.  But whilst many of us in more affluent countries have met our material needs, many both at home and abroad have not, and we shouldn’t give up on ideas of progress whilst such inequalities remain.

Humans thrive on having goals to aim for, and starting conversations about what our shared ideas of progress might involve will foster an atmosphere in which we can share such goals and work towards meeting them.

[1] https://bradfordmdc.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/updating-the-bradford-council-logo/

Images of people on the move, destroyed hospitals and victims of war have appalled me.  But whenever I see footage of a child’s palm on one side of a departing train’s window and their father’s palm on the other, it hits home, it hits hard, and I well up: that could be me and that could be my child.

Faced with this and other heart-breaking scenes from Ukraine, as with other crises both at home and abroad, many of us will feel helpless.  Students will also be reacting to the war in schools across the country; many of them will be feeling increasingly uncertain and anxious as the situation develops.  Teachers have been impelled to respond, and some of these responses are also worth considering by parents and others with concerns about the welfare of our young people.

The role of schools

School leaders and form tutors alike have been preparing and delivering assemblies and activities to help young people navigate the crisis, and these have been shared on social and traditional media alike.  In the short term, we can also point to the highly valued role which pastoral and counselling teams play as students seek emotional guidance and support.  And it is easy to forget the crucial role played by the mere fact of attending school, which gives our students a well justified sense of security.

The war will also be used as a contemporary reference point by teachers of history: parallels and connections with previous European and world conflicts are already being drawn.  Moreover, the powerful media content emanating from Ukraine will sharpen our senses and remind us of the self-destructive capacity of certain members of our species.

Politics teachers will be able to help their students understand the contemporary context of the conflict, whilst war poetry written over a century ago will, in the expert hands of English teachers, have renewed power and poignancy.

It’s also about time that geography teachers – and I write as one – become more forthright about the value of their subject in understanding energy security and geopolitics.  And how many people realise that superpowers and international governance is an integral part of A Level Geography?

Belief in humanity

But all of us – inside and outside the world of formal education – can respond more profoundly too.  We are all exposed to a daily barrage of stories about the world.  We live in an era of 24-hour media access and rolling news, but how many of us are equipping our young people to survive, let alone thrive, in such a context?  The concept of ‘doomscrolling’ – working through a depressing stream of bad news on a smartphone – was first used in the age of Trump, Brexit, and the pandemic, but it can now be applied to news about Ukraine, and our students will be at risk from the despair it engenders.

To counterbalance the sense of doom, we should encourage young people to take a ‘big picture’ of the world, both in terms of long-term trends and a global context.  Whilst it is imperative that we consider some of the responses to the Ukraine crisis outlined above, it is also crucial that we draw young people’s attention to the better side of humanity: the side that, in recent decades, has led to a huge rise in global life expectancy, a massive reduction in infant mortality, a fall in malnutrition and levels of extreme poverty, the eradication of smallpox, and the near eradication of polio.

It’s also the collaborative and co-operative side of humanity that has given us a largely peaceful world since the end of the Second World War.  Young people should be told that the rash actions of one dictator and his cronies must not undermine their faith in human nature that we will eventually overcome this challenge, just as we have overcome challenges in the past.

The power of education

In the longer term, we should remind ourselves just how powerful education can be: teachers and other citizens alike should continually be asking what should we teach, and more importantly, why are we teaching it?  Over the last decade there has been a growing concern with what Gert Biesta calls the ‘learnification’ of education.  He argues that education has primarily become a system of knowledge transmission, rather than as a way of preparing our students for roles as critically thinking, democratically informed, and active citizens in a changing world.

A reformed educational purpose may involve engaging young people in discussions about conflict escalation and resolution and involving them in opportunities for deliberative democracy.  Teachers should have the courage to move away from being just facilitators of learning, into preparing our students to live in and shape a better – and more peaceful – world in the future.

None of us can change the world straight away, but whilst robust shorter-term responses attempt to disempower Putin and steer the crisis away from becoming a global catastrophe, we should harness the power of education to lay the foundations for the world we’d like to see.

How can we express a hopeful worldview without raising the heckles of the unconvinced?

Optimism breeds complacency.

This thought disturbs me, because I suspect that in many cases, it’s true.

As I encourage students and educationalists – and, let’s be honest, pretty much everyone I meet – to adopt a more hopeful worldview, I repeatedly emphasise that social progress* does not come naturally, and that we shouldn’t just sit back and wait for things to get better.  Social progress is hard-fought and I believe that we all need to play a part in such a fight.

Sometimes, however, this nuance is lost, and some people will hear what they want to hear, which is a passive sense of ‘things are fine, and they are going to be OK’.

Nevertheless, I have convinced myself that so long as most of my audience takes away the message that only active hope – “a verb with its sleeves rolled up” as David Orr puts it – can lead to a brighter future, then this will somehow outweigh the minority who might walk away with a sense of complacency.

But it’s not just a fear of instilling complacency that stops me going full throttle on the Hopeful Education journey.

It’s also a fear of being labelled arrogant and insensitive.

Solnit and Pinker 

Who would you rather have a chat with – Rebecca Solnit or Steven Pinker?

Solnit is an American author, columnist, activist and cultural historian, whose book ‘Hope in the Dark’ has inspired me and which I recommend to anyone interested in the journey towards a more hopeful education.

Pinker is a Canadian-American author, university professor and public intellectual, whose books ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’ and ‘Enlightenment Now’ have also informed my hopeful worldview.

Both writers espouse hope for the future, but the former has managed to do so in a way that powerfully energises the reader into action which might go some way to the realisation of that hope, whilst the latter strikes a tone which can come across as overbearing, even to readers who might be sympathetic to his optimistic outlook.

It’s not that most of the evidential basis of Pinker’s work is shoddy (although some appears to be rather selectively included).  He shares Solnit’s celebration of, for example, the decline of war and overt discrimination, and long-term improvements in human rights, health and living conditions for most people in most parts of the world.  It’s something else.

Nathan Robinson is one of Pinker’s most outspoken critics, but even he gracefully states that “I actually agree with perhaps 80 percent or more of what is contained in Enlightenment Now, insofar as it is simply presenting statistics showing that crime has dropped and we are not presently in a world war, or making arguments for secular humanism and democracy.”  He also acknowledges that Pinker includes plenty of caveats in his work (such as stating that progress is unevenly distributed between places and sometimes proceeds haltingly).

So, what is it about Pinker, and some other members of the so-called ‘new optimists’, which rankles with Robinson and so many others who may be characterised as coming from the left? 

Robinson (2019) puts it thus:

“[Pinker] (1) staunchly defends the inequality produced by free-market capitalism, (2) is irrationally dismissive of the scale of the risks facing humankind, (3) trivializes present-day human pain and suffering, (4) whitewashes U.S. crimes and minimizes the dangers of U.S. military aggression, (5) repeats right-wing smears about anti-racist and feminist ideas, and (6) has a colossal ignorance about the workings of politics and the struggle necessary to achieve further human progress.”

In short, Pinker is politically naïve (or wilfully ignorant) and emotionally insensitive. 

I have been enthused by many of Pinker’s writings, and I subscribe to his broad argument that, by and large, humanity has thrived in recent decades.  However, his way of communicating is often prickly and patronising.   Take, for example, his belief that “Everything is amazing… none of us are as happy as we ought to be, given how amazing our world has become” (pp283-4).

Mike Freiheit’s cartoon highlights the perils of promoting an optimistic message in complex social contexts:

Facts and stories

Tone is one thing.  Content is another.  And both need to be well judged in order to encourage the adoption of a more hopeful worldview.

If we can’t measure how trends in say, infant mortality, change over time, then we are intellectually hobbled, and we end up discussing matters without adequate evidence. As Solnit says:

“When you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change” (Solinit, p.xvii)

Of course, we should be critical of gaps and biases in data, and aware of statistical blind spots and wilful misreporting or misreading of data.  But without data, we cannot build a powerful case for a more hopeful future.  Pinker, along with many other sources such as Our World in Data, and Gapminder, provide us with plenty of data with which to do so.

Nevertheless, stories are usually more persuasive than cold, hard, quantitative data, and they should also be part of the hopeful educator’s armoury.  The anecdotes which feature in Solnit’s work are moving, affirmative and serve to foster a sense of empathy in the reader.  Solnit recognises this:

“The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden” (p26).  Solnit also recognises that “Stories move faster in our time” (p28) and that we need stories to retell previous victories:

“We need litanies or recitations or monuments to those victories, so that they are landmarks in everyone’s mind.  More broadly, shifts in, say, the status of women are easily overlooked by people who don’t remember that, a few decades ago, reproductive rights were not yet a concept, and there was no recourse for exclusion, discrimination, workplace sexual harassment, most forms of rape, and other crimes against women the legal system did not recognize or even countenanced… People adjust without assessing the changes” (p.xix).

How to win friends and influence people

Nathan Robinson points to another flaw of Pinker’s approach: his patronising nature. He says that Pinker is not alone: like many other commentators, “They all want to explain before they’ve empathized, irrationally diagnose others’ irrationality, insist that their ideology isn’t an ideology while ours is.”

Battles of ideas are usually won on the basis of emboldening your allies and persuading the undecided, uninitiated, or indifferent.  Pinker arguably fails on the second count.  Rather than cultivating a broad church of optimists, he manages to insult and demean many people who could have been allies.  This might be thanks to statements such as “People will complain about anything” (p60), or it might be thanks to more targeted assaults.

Take, for example, the broad church of thinkers who could be labelled ‘progressives’.  Pinker loves to rile them: “Intellectuals hate progress.  Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressives’ really hate progress” (p39; emphasis in original).  Pinker also embarks upon this anti-‘progressive’ tirade in his otherwise thought-provoking TED talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting_better_or_worse_a_look_at_the_numbers

In contrast, Solnit seeks to broaden and embolden the hopeful coalition: she outlines

“this vast, inchoate, nameless movement – not a political movement but a global restlessness, a pervasive shift of imagination and desire – that has recently appeared in almost every part of the world.  This, I think, has only just begun, and though it has achieved countless small-scale victories around the world, what its creativity and power will achieve is yet unimaginable” (p109)

Where does this leave hopeful education?

Both Pinker and Solnit offer valuable insights which may feed a more hopeful education.

As educators, we must make careful decisions not only in terms of what we teach about ‘progress’ and the future, but also in terms of the ways in which we deliver such content.  Young people – like people of all ages – are sensitive and emotional, and they will respond better to messages of hope if the curriculum is designed and delivered in ways which respect this.

A carefully delivered hopeful curriculum must acknowledge the risks of complacency, arrogance and insensitivity, and meet them head-on.  Infused with a humbler sense of hope, our young people will then be able to approach the challenges of local and global citizenship confidently and collaboratively.

* Of course, what constitutes ‘social progress’ is contested, and such discussions are beyond the scope of this blog post.

References:

Pinker, S. (2019) Enlightenment Now London: Penguin

Robinson, N. (2019) The world’s most annoying man – https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/05/the-worlds-most-annoying-man (accessed 10 December 2021)

Solnit, R. (2016) Hope in the Dark (3^rd edition) Edinburgh: Canongate Books

Leaving school is simultaneously an exciting and worrying time for students. I was asked to deliver an assembly to our Year 13s on their last day in school to try to foster a sense of hope and positivity in them, and I decided to do this by:

• Showing them how far the world had come in terms of access to education and some other metrics of ‘social progress’ in the past 200 years
• Asking them to consider how far the world has yet to go on this journey
• Encouraging them to play their part in a co-operative and socially beneficial future for the world

This was no small task in 20 minutes, but it was worth a shot. In an added twist, I took the assembly outside, using a megaphone, student volunteers, hazard tape, clothes pegs, and a fence!

The following is as near as possible to the script I delivered!

Good morning everyone!  It’s time for a quiz.  You are in a privileged position.  You are about to leave school with good qualifications, and you are about to enter the next stage of your life, whether that be higher education, apprenticeships, or jobs.  This morning, I’d like us to go global…

1. How many people in the world have attained a basic, primary, education?

My three volunteers are holding signs: 17%, 49% and 86%.  Stand next to the volunteer who is showing the answer you think is correct.

[About half of those present chose 49%, and most of the rest chose 17%.]

• Next, how many adults in the world do you think are able to read, to about the standard which would enable them to take a full role in society?  Move places now if you wish to change.

[Most students stayed in the same place.]

• Finally, the average 30-year-old man on this planet has spent ten years in education.  How long has an average 30-year-old woman spent?  Five, seven, or nine years?

[Over half of the students chose seven, with only a few choosing nine.]

Thank you volunteers and thanks to the rest of you for moving around.

It’s time for the answers.

Those who said 17% of people in the world had attained a basic, primary, education – well, you would have been right – if it was 1820.  Those who said 49% – you would have been right, if it was 1950.  The actual answer was 86%, and this also applies to the literacy question too.

And you can probably guess from those two questions that 30-year-old women have spent nine years in school, as opposed to ten for men.

Which direction is the world heading in?

These answers are not perfect – in an ideal world, we’d hope that all children would be educated to at least a primary level, and that all adults would be able to read.   We’d also hope that there would be gender parity in terms of educational access.  But the world has been moving in the right direction in terms of education.  Not quickly – in fact, you might say, not quickly enough – but we do appear to be getting there.

Let’s at two more changes that have happened that may give you more faith in humanity as you go into the wider world.

Could I have three more volunteers?

[Three volunteers come up and stand in front of a tall fence, which has been turned into a large line graph; 0%, 50% and 100% labels have been affixed on the y-axis up to 2m height, and 1820, 1920 and 2020 labels have been affixed up to 4m across the x-axis.]

Let’s turn to poverty.  Extreme poverty, in fact.  Living on less than $1.90 a day, adjusted to allow for inflation.  That’s less than is necessary to enable us to do much more than just survival.  Could my three volunteers decide what they think this level was in 1820? [Volunteers discuss, then attach a long strip of red and white barrier tape on the fence with a peg at the % they think it was in 1820.]

It was 84%.  So you’ll need to move it to 84%.  Now how about 1920? [Let them decide, attaching the tape with pegs.] It had only dropped to 70%. [Move the tape if necessary.] 1950?  [Ditto.]  It had only fallen to 65%.  And finally, 2018?  [Ditto; my volunteers chose about 20%].  It had fallen to just 9%.

The UN has set a goal to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030.  The pandemic and entrenched inequalities mean that this date is now unlikely to be met, but it should be doable in the following decade.  I’ll say it again – it’s not good enough – but again, looking how far we have come can give us scope for hope.

Please give a round of applause for our volunteers.

Finally, can I have three more volunteers.  We’ll now look at child mortality – the number of children dying before their fifth birthday.  An immensely sad statistic.  [Repeat the exercise: the figures are 1820: 43%, 1920: 30%, 1950: 20% and 2019: 4%; my volunteers were closer this time.]  Again, this isn’t where we could be by a long way, but looking at what we have achieved can give us hope.

Thank you again to our volunteers.

Faith in humanity

I hope you found that interesting.  Here’s one more thing I’d like you to think about and respond to.

How many of you sometimes despair of humanity?  Hands up… [I put mine up too.]

And how many of you take time out to celebrate humanity?  Hands up… [fewer hands will probably go up!]

Why do we tend to celebrate humanity less often than we despair of it?

You may well have thought of this – and my geographers have certainly been involved in these discussions.  It’s a mixture of the media – mainstream and social, your psychological biases, and perhaps even your education.

So could – and should – you start to celebrate what humanity has achieved?

Well, you may want to think about how you can measure its achievements.  What should be our metrics?  Should we measure achievements in terms of more people becoming healthy, wealthy and wise?  In terms of liberte, fraternite and egalite? Or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  This is worth thinking about.

Let’s not kid ourselves – there are huge challenges facing the world, from climate change, inequality, and various forms of discrimination.

But this is where you come in.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

As you step out into the wider world, could – and should – you think about what role you can play in helping humanity to flourish, without sacrificing the planet we live on?

Firstly, it is worth recognising, as Isaac Newton did in a 1675 letter to Robert Hooke, that “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.  Think of the giants – your predecessors – who have helped to achieve the huge leaps forward shown by today’s figures and graphs.  Could you help humanity see further?

Then, consider what Walt Whitman wrote in ‘O Me! O Life!’: bear in mind…

“That you are here – that life exists, and identity.  /  That the powerful play goes on, and you many contribute a verse”.

So, the world is big, the future is daunting, and you will want to carve out your own path, to do what’s right for you and your loved ones.  But you also have a role to play in a wider world, where you can help to continue these trends, and to carve out a more hopeful path for the world: to manage climate change, reduce racial discrimination, and to narrow the obscene inequality gap.

Can you do it?  Are these just empty words?

No.  they are not just empty words.

If I had stood here 400 years ago, and I asked my students to play their role in ending slavery, there would have been incredulity.

If I had stood here 130 years ago, asking you to play your role in gaining women’s right to vote, own property and vote, there would have been disbelief that these things could happen.

If I had stood here 40 years ago, saying that the Berlin Wall would fall, and that apartheid would collapse in South Africa – and these things seemed unlikely when I was still at school – would you have believed me?

How about 30 years ago, and I described the Internet?

Or five years ago, if I had said that polio – a disease which killed or injured millions of people a year – would now only be found in one country, what would have been your response?

These changes didn’t come about automatically.  Through a complex mixture of processes, people made them. People like you.

Shaping a hopeful future

I’ll be issuing you with future timeline cards later, as a reminder that the future has not yet been made, and that you can shape a more hopeful, rather than a more fearful, future.  You may want to keep it, to remind you of this.

So, your path may be varied or linear, it may be in business or healthcare, in development, politics or volunteering.  You may well take your place in a civil society by voting, reading, and making informed decisions.  But you can stand on the shoulders of giants, and you can contribute a verse.

Thank you, and Hoc Age!  Just do it!

Feedback during the assembly and afterwards was positive; I hope you will be inspired to try this out, or at least to critique it!

Best wishes for summer to anyone who got this far in the post! David

Co-authored with Harvey Logan (@harv_logan / www.theairplanesblog.wordpress.com)

Welcome back, and we trust you have refuelled and are ready for another journey through the geographies of the air! Part one of this two-part series, where we explored air’s importance in creating a sense of place, air as a medium, and some cultural geographies of air, can be found here.

In the post below, we explore the militarisation of airspace and aerial intensification, we discuss how much attention air might deserve in the future, and we take a brief look at whether there is room in the school curriculum for a deeper consideration of the geographies of air.

Militarised airspace

Militarised air power, much like air pollution, often disrespects borders. The shooting down of commercial airliners is one obvious example. PS752 and IR655 in Iran, MH17 in Ukraine, KAL007 in Russia. This list is not exhaustive. It is important to remember that it is not only rebel groups or insurgent governments who shoot down airliners – IR655 was downed by the US Navy.

Battles in the air are rarely fought over territory. They are strategic endeavours or shows of power and involve a significant amount of what could be construed as ‘willy waving’. Long-range missions by Russian aircraft venture close to the airspace boundaries of the USA or its NATO allies, and elicit a response from fast jets like those in the RAF’s QRA squadron. American ‘spy planes’ regularly undertake 30+ hour sorties from US the East Coast to the Baltic and back again, supported by aerial refuelling tankers, essentially just to show they can. Airspace in the Alaskan region has seen a lot of this type of military activity recently, with clear geopolitical links to both nations’ ambitions in the Arctic.

Concerns have been raised for decades about militarised urbanism (see, for example, Mike Davis’s City of Quartz), but these have risen in more popular consciousness recently with the targeted use of military resources in urban environments becoming more commonplace. Low-flying helicopters, operated in a manner incompatible with accepted safe procedures, were used this year to disperse BLM protesters in New York City and Washington DC, as shown in this video: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/watch-helicopters-hover-low-over-protesters-in-washington-84223557542.

Drones

The military applications of unmanned drones (UAV’s) can be criticised for encouraging a lack of restraint in combat as there are no ‘lives on the line’. People living in conflict zones have reported feeling a state of fear when skies are blue, as they know drones will be flying.

Equally though, drone technology has contributed to beneficial and humanitarian developments. The inclusion of UAV’s in medical supply chains can be life changing in rural areas. Drones can revolutionise the delivery of blood, medicines and vaccines to remote health facilities where land-based transport is hard to come by (see Fig.1 and https://www.doveair.org). For some countries, especially where roads are scarce and of poor quality, UAV’s may be the only way to deliver a refrigerated COVID-19 vaccine to rural and isolated areas before it thaws.

UAV’s can also be used for GIS or mapping, assisting in the creation of high-quality maps and 3D models which can be used to assist with humanitarian disaster response or climate science, amongst other things (http://www.sensefly.com/industries/case-studies).

Aerial intensification

The increasing usage of drones for deliveries may herald a new ‘aerial intensification’, bringing into play considerations of aerial congestion, noise pollution, collisions, and risks to other animate and inanimate objects.  These issues will be even more important to contemplate when humans are brought into the mix: ‘urban air mobility’ (UAM) and the concept of the ‘flying car’ have prompted social concerns relating to airspace. With UAM, this includes the ability to use aerial transport to opt-out of shared public space – see, for example: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2020/05/28/481148/flying-cars-will-undermine-democracy-environment/

The development of UAM will move urban airspace into the regulatory lens of urban planning. Decisions around land use will incorporate airspace as an important aspect of the city and its transport network rather than simply as empty space.

And it is not just flying vehicles using the air for transport. There is a growing number of urban cable cars around the world. See here: https://www.londonreconnections.com/2020/the-incredible-lightness-of-being-cable-cars-a-legitimate-urban-transport-mode-but-not-in-the-uk/

A declining concern?

Aside from pollution and climate change, understanding the ways that humans interact with the air may in the near future be a declining concern, as environmental regulations, moral concerns (such as voluntary scaling back and ‘flight shaming’), and the growth of high speed rail lines, especially in emerging economies, may stymie the growth of flights.

Some commentators suggest that hyperloops (see Fig. 2) (or perhaps maglevs and vactrains, for those of us who approve of the technology but not of Musk’s assessment that “Individualised mass transit is the future”) may reduce intra- and even inter-continental travel by air. The massive drop in air traffic thanks to covid-19 related restrictions and fears may accelerate this decline.  This downturn may be a temporary one, but will we see a shift away from more ‘superfluous’ flights such as for meetings and job interviews?  Conference calling capabilities have improved and have become commonplace.  Also, an increase in virtual reality technology could mean that such remote meetings might begin to feel more visceral.

On the other hand, airspace may retain its importance, as a greater focus on airspace management (including next-generation air traffic control and restricting contrails) is one of the best tools to reduce aviation emissions in the medium-term. Along with drones and urban air mobility, this will require us to start changing how we use airspace. In these respects, airspace is not a declining concern.

Moreover, continuing economic development in emerging and developing countries will almost certainly lead to an increase in flights; see, for example, the growth of the China-Africa airlink, which will override the ‘first world’ trends of flying less.  And although it could be a long time away, the widespread adoption of more environmentally friendly forms of aviation may also lead to a busier aerospace.

Air and outer space

Although ‘air’ is not synonymous with ‘outer space’, there is a continuum between the two, and geographers should note that  control of outer space has risen up the geopolitical and business agenda – here, one thinks of Space X, the renaissance of missions to Mars, the United States Space Force and an emboldened China, whose most recent mission, Chang’e 5, has reinvigorated debate about lunar missions. There is an overlap here with next-generation airspace management, as satellite-based aircraft tracking has enabled this.

Air in the curriculum

The Key Stage 3 national curriculum programme of study for geography explicitly focuses  on “the location of globally significant places – both terrestrial and marine” (Department for Education, 2013: 1) but there is no mention of the air.  And whilst contested maritime boundaries feature in all A Level specifications, only limited attention is given to geographies of the air that are not specifically physical.  One exception is Edexcel’s mention of air power in its Superpower unit, and even then, it is only made explicit in the context of the costs of maintaining such power:

“7.9 Existing superpowers face ongoing economic restructuring, which challenges their power … b. The economic costs of maintaining global military power (naval, nuclear, air power, intelligence services) and space exploration are questioned in some existing superpowers.” (Edexcel, 2016: 53)

Stretching the definition of air (a mixture of gases that surround a planet) to include the gaps between planets and the definition of geography (study of the earth) to embrace considerations of interactions between humans and outer space has led to an increased range of areas for geographical study, for example the governance of space as a contested ‘commons’ does feature in some resources aimed at A Level students.

Of course, the geography curriculum, especially at secondary school level, is already crowded… so can it afford to take it on?

Conclusion

We feel that geographers should spend some time contemplating how the issues that we discuss above are interdependent and how we might conceive of a more robust and wide-ranging geography of the air that takes it beyond its home in physical geography and meteorology.

In an age of a globally prevalent virus which cannot be seen by the naked eye, it is time for an increased awareness that the invisible is crucial in geography.  The air is a neglected aspect of our discipline which is ‘hiding in plain sight’.

David Alcock (@DavidAlcock1 and www.alcock.blog)

Harvey Logan (@harv_logan and www.theairplanesblog.wordpress.com)

December 2020

References

(Most references are hyperlinked)

Department for Education (2013) Geography programmes of study for England: key stage 3: National Curriculum – Geography key stages 3 and 4 (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Edexcel (2016) GCE A level Geography specification issue 5: https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/A%20Level/Geography/2016/specification-and-sample-assessments/Pearson-Edexcel-GCE-A-level-Geography-specification-issue-5-FINAL.pdf

Co-authored with Harvey Logan (@harv_logan / www.theairplanesblog.wordpress.com)

London Underground by Pavel Culek

“Strategy and international politics are influenced strongly by geography”

This is the tantalising and prescient first sentence of Stefan Possony and Leslie Rosenzweig’s article ‘The Geography of the Air’ (1955: 1).  However, within a few lines, it becomes clear that the promise of an examination of the complex relationships between power and aerial geographies is snuffed out, and the remainder of the piece concerns itself with a narrow conception of the geography of air:

“The geography of the air… is the study of the physical differences of the air in various locations and altitudes” (p.1)

This definition, whilst concerning itself with a worthy and longstanding field of study within physical and environmental geography, is, ironically, claustrophobic and airless in its failure to conceive of a wider geography of air.

Below, we sketch out some of the contours of the existing  geographies of air and ponder the extent to which human geography has neglected the potentialities of exploring this theme.  We do not pretend to have carried out an exhaustive study of pre-existing materials or to have employed academic rigour; we merely offer this up as a ‘think piece’, and we welcome feedback!

The human scale – air, odours, and place

“There’s something surreal about plunging into the bowels of the earth to catch a train. It’s a little world of its own down there, with its own strange winds and weather systems, its own eerie noises and oily smells” (Bryson, 1995)

In this vivid description of the London Underground, Bill Bryson takes the reader’s mind’s eye (or is it their mind’s nose?) to an anonymous platform, where they can easily imagine themselves contemplating the history and complexity of the capital’s underbelly.

This snippet also illustrates how a place can be represented multi-dimensionally.  We understand why vision might be the sense that geographers first rely on when trying to understand a place, but sound and smell, let alone the physical sensation of moving air on the skin, deserve more of a look-in, if you excuse the pun.  Mustiness and mildew can indicate that a place is uncared-for, abandoned, and past its prime.  The stench of human and animal excreta can build on this impression.  Smells and noises can be interesting, evocative, and even exciting too.

Indeed, there has been a growing trend to document and explore sensory landscapes in the early years of the 21^st Century: psychogeography has experienced somewhat of a renaissance, for example through the writings of Will Self, Iain Sinclair, and Robert MacFarlane.  Reflecting on the positionality of these and other writers, there have also been interesting and crucial discussions about dominant ‘gazes’ in an era in which Geography is finally beginning to open itself up to an authorship more representative of humanity.

Nevertheless, researchers, urbanists, artists and writers have woken up and smelt the coffee: lived realities are not just about dry statistics and about what is seen, but they are also about the fuller sensory experience of a place, including odours and sounds.  A lovely discussion of ‘The sensory landscape of the city’ took place on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed in January 2018 and is available here.

Smellscaping has risen in prominence as a fieldwork tool in recent years: see, for example, http://goodcitylife.org/smellymaps/ and https://www.geography-fieldwork.org/a-level/place/placemaking/method/#sensory – and as shown in Figure 1, below.  Soundscapes have also recently experienced a similar trajectory.

Figure 1: Aroma Wheel by Kate McLean

Source: Field Studies Council

Air as a medium

It should also be remembered that visual and aural impressions of a place are also transmitted through the medium of air.  Accusations that this is stretching the importance of the air too far are easily countered by pointing out that these impressions are affected by atmospheric conditions – for example, if an observer waits for the cloud to clear before taking a photograph of a Lakeland mountain, then they will be misrepresenting the reality of the place when it was shrouded in fog.  How often do geographers wait until rain, fog, or wind has passed before recording what a place ‘looks’ like?

The role of air as a medium has of course been crucial in the covid-19 pandemic, and beyond the devastating medical and economic impacts of the virus and attempts to combat it, it also opens several research avenues for geographers, from the impact of ‘social distancing’ on hospitality venues and desire lines in parks to the way it has focused attentions on conceptions of ‘fresh air’.

The economic and cultural, and environmental value of air

Geographers are aware of the importance of views and sight lines in both urban and rural areas.  Aesthetics and place attachment are both tied up in these considerations.  Recent consideration of ecosystem services has heightened the importance of views, especially as monetary value is placed upon what can be seen from workplaces, homes, sites of leisure and consumption, and in the journeys in between such places.  A pleasant view, for example, of greenery, can boost property values.  A consideration of the geographies of air must also pay attention to air pollution; such pollution, even more so than water pollution, does not respect borders.

Cultural Geographies of flight

The ability to see the earth from the air was undoubtedly a feat which re-oriented understandings of world Geography.  With the modern ease of accessibility to satellite imagery, the ‘view from above’ is something to which people have become all too accustomed.  In the not too distant past, this new perspective on the planet revolutionised how people understood the world and their place in it.

The lyrical writings of Frenchman Antoine de Saint Exupéry, a pilot for Aéropostale in the early 1900’s, tend towards awe when describing the experience of flight and the viewpoint it afforded on landscapes passing below.  They offer valuable insights into how flying changed our conception of the world:

“Even if a road does venture across a desert, it twists and turns to enjoy the oases […] Flight has brought us knowledge of the straight line.” (Saint Exupéry, 1939, p.33).

The enduring influence of Saint Exupéry’s work highlights how the air has taken on a role as the location in which cultural works are situated.

Alongside wonderment though, geographers ought to consider the extent to which aviation in this period contributed to enshrining colonial ideologies and mindsets.  Flying was an activity reserved for colonial elites and being up in the air was assumed as a position of superiority; their subjects (both the human and natural) could be surveilled below.  Airline advertisements of the time, like the following (Figure 2), reflected this.

Figure 2: 1919 advertisement for Latécoère (the predecessor to Aéropostale) – regarded as the world’s first airline route map. Moroccans are pictured almost worshiping the arrival of an aircraft resplendent in French insignia

Source: Ovenden and Roberts, 2019

This paper by Lucy Budd considers how the ‘view from the air’ has developed and constructed our understanding of landscapes throughout the history of flight: https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/The_view_from_the_air_the_cultural_geographies_of_flight/9457370

That’s enough hot air for now…

In Part 2, we will mull over aerial militarisation and intensification.  We will also consider what is taught, and what might be taught, about the geographies of air, before asking you to contemplate the ‘place’ of geographies of the air in geographical imaginations and curricula.

David Alcock and Harvey Logan

December 2020

References

Bryson, B (1995) Notes from a Small Island (HarperCollins)

Ovenden, M and Roberts, M (2019). Airline Maps: A Century of Art and Design. (Penguin)

Possony, S T and Rosenzweig, L (1955) The Geography of the Air in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 299, pp1-11

Saint Exupéry, A (1939; Translated 1991). Wind, Sand and Stars. (Penguin)