I’m doing a bit of a reading series on the future at the moment. I reviewed Designing Hope last week, with more to come. The Green Ages is part of that too, despite being a book on history. Written by German historian Annette Kehnel and translated by Geshe Ipsen, it’s written with an eye on the past so that we can apply lessons for the future: “The aim of this book is to help increase our scope for action. I hope that it will spark your curiosity, dispel some fears and whet your appetite for the future.”
Capitalism has led humanity down a cul-de-sac of pollution, inequality and wasteful excess. It can’t go on. Here in the overdeveloped countries of the west, we need to reshape our lifestyles, politics, industry and economics to take the natural world into account, to find our footing before it’s too late. And while the technologies change, the basic ideas are all modeled for us in the past. We don’t have to invent the idea of sustainability.
Kehnel looks at four themes in the book: sharing, recycling, microfinance and minimalism. All four offer a historical rebuke to the way we do things today. We’re told that private ownership is the best way to manage resources and that commons end in tragedy. How come there are so many vivid examples that contradict that dictum? From the monasteries to the forest councils of Germany to the community management of fish stocks, people in the past knew how to look after shared resources. Put Garett Hardin in the bin and let’s build the commons.
In the past, all economies were circular. The book has a fascinating extended section on paper making. I didn’t know this, but the notion that you could make paper out of wood was once laughable. Paper was made from rags in medieval times and there were established networks to gather up scrap cloth to serve the industry. That all fell by the wayside once wood-based paper arrived on the scene, but the paper industry became extractive in the process, leading to deforestation on one side and a mountain of discarded cloth on the other.
Kehnel chooses depth over breadth. There’s more that she could have covered (all energy was renewable in the past too), but by picking just four topics we’re able to explore them in detail. I rather enjoyed the deep dive into papermaking, how St Francis and his order pioneered minimalism, or the lifestyles of Pyrenean shepherds and how they collectively managed grasslands. Kehnel writes with enthusiasm and energy about her subject, and I found myself drawn into topics that I wouldn’t necessarily have predicted that I would find interesting. I also appreciated the witty asides, such as how tally sticks were “the bitcoin of the Middle Ages” or the gentle takedowns of those who misread history in service of capitalism – Steven Pinker’s take on medieval life is described as “a colourful summer salad of pseudo-knowledge”.
What The Green Ages makes clear is that we live in an anomalous time. My grandparents weren’t raised in a throwaway culture, and hopefully neither will my grandchildren. There’s a historical break, particularly from the 1950s onwards, where we forgot some very common sense things. We forgot them so comprehensively that we don’t know they existed – Kehnel cites the Nobel Prize given to Muhammed Yunus for inventing microfinance, when microfinance was commonplace across medieval Europe. Why do historians not know this?
Kehnel suggests that because we view history as progress, historians are primed to look for the moment that things change. If people do something for thousands of years and it just works, it’s too mundance to draw their attention. And if it does change, it must be because something better came along that represented progress. This bias leads us to discount the past and the lessons it has for us, but “as we look back at the diversity of economies we once knew, we might just discover new strategies for the future”
- The Green Ages is available from Earthbound Books.
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