‘Environmentalists should use humour — not grimness — like the civil rights movement did’

Aaron Sachs is Professor of History at Cornell University. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke , Sachs — whose cats curled up on his shoulders through the conversation — discussed environmental justice, Donald Trump — and having a laugh:What is the core of your research?The most consistent issue I’ve focused on is environmental justice. I look at the overlap through a long span of history between environmental exploitation and social injustice. I also try to develop a positive outlook by focusing on how social justice and sustainability have often been thought of together.You say comedy matters in people’s attempts to mitigate climate change now — why?The first reason is the morale of people working in climate activism. The problem of environmental damage is so overwhelming that many can get demoralised — comedy can boost spirits. Secondly, as a historian who also looks at all sorts of cultural production, I’ve found comedy has a very long and interesting history. Dark comedy particularly has played a very powerful role in hard times — in my book ‘Stay Cool’, I describe many examples. One is how there was a lot of humour which helped sufferers cope through World War II and the Holocaust — some people find this shocking but often, those imprisoned in concentration camps organised little circuses and told each other jokes, to remind themselves of their shared humanity and get some distance from the horror around them. We can use such strategies today.Given the extremely serious data they are dealing with though, how could the environmental movement lighten up?My suggestion is for environmentalists to have a sense of humour about themselves. Research suggests some of the difficulty environmentalists have had over the years in getting their message out is how they come across as being self-righteous, if not grim — when you say ‘environmentalist’ to many Americans, the first words they associate have often been ‘doom and gloom’. I think it’s useful to make fun of yourself a bit, showing your own vulnerability, which helps get your message across.A good strategy to use here is satire. The civil rights movement in the United States was very good at this — it made fun of racists, white nationalists, segregationists, people who defended discrimination as an honourable way of being in the world. There was a governor of Alabama called George Wallace, who was a champion of segregation and racism — he attracted many jokes from the civil rights movement, highlighting what a stooge he was.Returning to one of the most severe times in human history, during World War II, Jewish groups often made jokes about Hitler and how ridiculous he was. There is documentation of prisoners in concentration camps making fun of their Nazi guards and the SS forces. In the film ‘Life Is Beautiful’, Roberto Benigni famously made fun of goose-stepping Nazi soldiers to make his little son laugh in a truly horrible situation.Environmentalism predicts an existential threat to life on Earth — where would the humour be?I’m glad you used the word ‘existential’ because the American civil rights campaign was also influenced by the existentialist movement, especially in World War II France. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, two of the most formative existentialist thinkers, were part of the French Resistance as well. Their philosophy inspired many civil rights activists in the US because it brilliantly confronted darkness, despair and dread about the world. Existential philosophy looked at reality in the face and said, ‘We need to remain dauntless and stay in the struggle.’ With climate activism, it’s a matter of treating the situation with some distance and perspective. There are legitimately funny aspects here.Comedy today often gets co-opted though into practically an industrial system and can end up normalising the unacceptable — isn’t that quite a risk for the green movement?Yes. It is a risk — but there are always risks, no matter what. Many environmental approaches have already been co-opted — think of the category ‘green capitalism’, which, in some ways, makes very little sense. I am alright with people making profits on, say, solar power because the technology is a huge tool against climate change. So, if some of the comedy people in the environmental movement use gets co-opted by the capitalist marketplace, that’s alright. It will only help to spread these messages more. This is an inherently risky tactic — but the most interesting strategies are. And we need as many strategies as possible to build solidarity and common purpose today.Of course, I’d add comedy must always be deployed sensitively. There are situations where it is too soon or inappropriate to make jokes. You cannot have humour over people suffering. That noted, for me, the dark political situation we face in the US today means it’s even more important to keep up our morale. Although the Trump administration has been truly terrible on the progress America was making in climate mitigation, we should not be daunted and stop making jokes about it — satire is a great weapon against people in power.Can you tell us about your new work ‘The Earth Is Ours, Not Mine’?This is a history of the idea of environmental justice — in the United States, this is seen as a social movement that started in the 1980s, stemming as a radical branch of the mainstream environmental movement. It tried to combine social justice with ecological perspectives. As a historian, I felt this has a much longer history. Looking into that could help the movement define a more positive vision of what they are fighting for. Earlier, the environmental justice movement used to be seen almost in negative terms as in, for example, thinking, ‘We must block this unjust, hazardous waste disposal site that would go into a poor minority community’ — but then, the question is, what happens to that threatening waste facility? Won’t it just go somewhere else? Perhaps to an even more vulnerable community? I have been studying what it means to have a society that values social justice and ecology equally. There are potential solutions in history, over at least the last 500 years in the Euro-American world, and my new writing explores some of those. The book is meant to be positive, hopeful and constructive — all of which have been hard to sustain over the last few months in America, I have to admit.