The dramatic drop in the international price of oil recently has led to all sorts of speculation about its economic and geopolitical fallout. However, what is perhaps not getting enough attention are the environmental implications of cheaper oil. In an interview with Weekend Review, Gaia Vince, the first woman to win the Royal Society Winto Prize — the UK’s most prestigious science book award — last year, talks about her views on the fluctuating oil prices.
“These are all short-term things,” says Vince, a broadcaster and journalist who specialises in science and the environment. “Traditionally when oil prices fall, people spend a lot more and buy more oil. That is not very good. On the other hand, if we are going to go into a global recession, that is also not so great in some ways. But in other ways, environmentally it is quite good.”
She talks about the need to find alternative energy sources. “These shifts [in prices] are temporary — oil goes up, oil goes down. We need to look towards a long-term situation where we move to different types of energy.”
My interview with Vince was arranged to discuss her book, “Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet we Made”. Anthropocene “means the age of humanity,” she says. “The age of humans. It describes the change that humans have caused to the planet and the fact that we are pushing it out now from the Holocene, the geological epoch we are supposed to be in. We have changed the Earth so much that we are now in a different age.” We are in a café inside a leisure centre near Vince’s home in Lewisham, South London. On one side of the café beyond a glass screen is a children’s swimming pool. We are about to start the interview when Vince points to a fully dressed man in the pool. Maybe he’s there to help someone, she surmises.
There is a lot of chatter nearby and the noise of children running and shouting in the foyer. Sometimes I have to speak a little louder to get heard.
Vince’s book is the result of more than two years of travelling to different parts of the world to observe the dramatic changes humans are making to the planet. What made Vince quit her job as an editor and go on this mission?
“I was working for a science journal called Nature,” she says. “I was getting lots of papers across my desk — scientific papers showing all sorts of changes to our planet ... atmospheric temperature is going up, oceans are becoming more acidic, species are going extinct, we are creating new species through breeding or genetic engineering, rivers are changing, sediment flows are altering, new islands are being created, glaciers are melting. I realised the one thing that connected all this was us. Humans were having this effect, so I wanted to go out and find what it was like for people in the forefront of these changes.”
“I thought I will try it for six months and see if I can make it work,” she says. “I was funding it through my writing and radio broadcast and [I wanted to] see if I can make enough money doing that, that I can keep going. If not, I will come back. And I ended up doing it for two and a half years.”
There’s the story of villagers in Peru who have painted mountains white. Their logic is since black rocks of the mountains tend to absorb more heat from the Sun, painting them white will reflect sunlight, thereby reducing their temperature. “The glaciers there melted, and the villages depend on water from the ice for their pastures,” says Vince. “They thought they would try something new.”
Vince also visited a man who has built an island out of garbage. “This was in the Caribbean, in Belize. It was a fisherman. He wanted somewhere to live but didn’t have much money. A lot of poor people there can’t afford a piece of land, and a lot of land is disappearing because of erosion. He had this idea of creating his own island out of garbage.”
In the countries she has visited in the Global South, how is public discourse on environmental issues different than that in London or Europe? “[It is] a lot more urgent. Most people have seen the effects of climate change ... and they are very worried about it. It is discussed much more there. It is a much bigger problem there.” There are a number of reasons for the falling oil prices. Analysts link one of these to increased production of shale oil through fracking in the US. However, some environmentalists have raised concerns about fracking. I ask Vince her opinion on it. “Fracking is just a technique of getting gas, oil or anything out of the ground. It literally is just a matter of shattering the rocks with water so you can access deposits that you couldn’t have before. In terms of the actual technology fracking, you know it is no better or worse than [any] other technology,” she says.
“But if we are talking about getting more fossil fuels out of the ground, that is not a great thing, is it? We have got many alternatives. We have got the technology to do it. We should be moving towards renewables rather than existing fossil fuels because we are trying to reduce the amount of carbon we are putting into the atmosphere, not add to it.”
Did anything during her travels surprise Vince or make her change her views? “In some places, things were a lot worse than I had understood, and in some places a lot better,” she says. “The thing is you only get a tiny window of perspective on any issue from here. Once you go there you see it with your own eyes and you talk to people. It is a much more complex situation, of course, from this one little window. So everything changes. There is no substitute for going and talking to people, actually experiencing things.”
Was she surprised to win the UK’s top science book award? “Very surprised. I didn’t think I was going to win at all. It is a very strong shortlist of really good books, and all brilliant books. Massive privilege.”
It took 28 years for a woman to win the prize. Are there not enough women writers in science or is it a problem of recognition? “A problem of recognition. There are a lot of women writing in science, writing very well in science.” Nonetheless her win is a cause for optimism. “I think things are changing, slowly, ” she says, laughing.
Despite the gravity of its subject, her book tries not to paint a doom-and-gloom scenario. Vince interlaces her exploration of the worrying changes to the planet with some hope. “It is a very hopeful book,” she says.
Some environmentalists are sending out a very fearsome message about how human activity is destroying the planet. Did Vince receive any negative feedback for being an optimist? “Yeah, I did. I have had people saying it is unnecessarily positive, and a lot of things such as I am trivialising really serious things. I am too cheerful about it. But to me, there is no point in being negative or being hopeless. If you are human, if you want to see a future, you have to see a future that is hopeful. You have to work towards that. And I am optimistic. I think we are very resilient, we are very adaptable. We are very ingenious as a species and hopefully we will get through it,” she says.
Syed Hamad Ali is a writer based in London.
