Essay By Eric Worrall
According to Research Associate Flossie Kingsbury, learning how your ancestors exploited the natives and burned lots of coal helps you embrace the idea of climate reparations.
How taking a closer look at your family tree can help you get to grips with climate change
Published: May 19, 2022 12.17am AEST
Flossie Kingsbury
Postdoctoral Research Associate in History, Aberystwyth University…
Put simply, climate change is the result of two processes: industrialisation and colonialism. Industrialisation is when a society’s primary mode of production shifts from manual agricultural labour to machine-aided manufacturing. Colonialism is when one nation occupies and exerts control over another, usually involving violence and exploitation.
…
Let’s look at some examples from my own family. Samuel Polyblank (born around 1816), one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, was a shipwright from London’s East End. The ships he worked on helped to feed demand for international trade, taking goods to and from the colonies. They may even have been used by the East India Company, the world’s first global corporate superpower, and a key player in colonial rule and exploitation in Asia.
Through his work, Samuel Polyblank found himself caught up in, and working to support, a system whose impacts – including widespread deforestation, pollution, soil sterilisation and biodiversity collapse – continue to be felt today.
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One challenge of personally engaging with the climate crisis is learning that your ancestors were complicit in things that you would rather be distanced from. But this isn’t about blaming our ancestors, who may well have been exploited themselves.
Instead, understanding these connections can help encourage us to prioritise climate justice and eco-friendly behaviours in our own lives, from cutting down on meat and unsustainable travel to writing to your elected officials about environmental issues in your community. …
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/how-taking-a-closer-look-at-your-family-tree-can-help-you-get-to-grips-with-climate-change-183167
I don’t get it. Why should I feel any sense of responsibility for what my ancestors did? I had no say over their decisions and actions. I feel gratitude that the world they built allows me to sit on my dry and comfortable armchair typing WUWT articles, while a storm rages outside. I miss those ancestors I knew, who are no longer with us. And whichever non-English ancestor bequeathed me the genetics which let me hang out in the tropical sun without getting sunburned, an especial vote of thanks.
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Will we ever know the End of Snow? Or did I get that backwards. Anyway, it is snowing in Denver and it is past mid May.
Pay no attention, it’s only weather.
In researching my family tree, I have come across many whom I would love to meet – and some I would prefer not to. There are tyrants and rebels. There are rogues and saints. There are people from every level that you can think of, including slaves and concubines. Most were normal people just trying to make a living. I am not responsible for any of them or for anything they did, but I take a bit of pride from the fact that each of them helped contribute to the next generation of the human race. Perhaps the greatest benefit has been finding and meeting nth-cousins whose existence I had been unaware of. (With a high-enough ‘n’, and it really isn’t all that high, we are all nth-cousins, of course)
The family tree roots expand almost as fast as the branches.
Go back 400 years (maybe 14 generations?) and, baring any inbreeding of the nth’s, you get about 30,000 ancestors.
I’ve been lucky enough to conduct detailed research on all 16,384 of mine and I can say objectively say that only 47 of them of them have contributed to the current societal ills, and the coming last great extinction due to climate change.
The remaining 16,337 of them were of stellar character and high moral integrity.
(Curiously enough, all 47 of the baddies were mother-in-laws of some sort).
There is a special place in H311 for people who dishonor their ancestors like little miss flossie.
“Samuel Polyblank (born around 1816), one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, was a shipwright from London’s East End.”
Good grief woman, he was a working class man who labored long hours to feed his family, for which the little witch should be grateful as her existence is contingent on that labor.
In that time and place Mr. Polybank was ridgidly excluded from political power, public opinion, and the course of events. No one like him who worked with his hands and earned his bread by the sweat of his brow was ever admitted to polite society or asked about his opinion.
He is worthy of the greatest respect and admiration. Condemning him for failure to promote the political causes of miss flossie and her demented companions is loathsome.
You bring up a great point. Ancestor worship, or at least deep respect for one’s ancestors, is common in societies throughout the world. People have great interest in their family trees and great respect for their forbears. Once again we see environmental lunatics corrupting normal society.
OMG! I’ve been chuckling quietly to myself over most of the AGW, etc. crap since whenever. I have a unique ability to spot BS right away. This Flossie person fits the bill along with the rest of the overrated prognosticators of eternal doom.
Where do these nutjobs come from? Wow.
IMO this kind of thing is totally pointless…..whether it has to do with colonialism, slavery, industry or whatever in past history. No one can pick their ancestors nor can anyone change the past (though the left seems to enjoy re-writing it!).
When I was a child, my great aunt did the entire family history on my mom’s side. This was long before the internet was even a thing….
Well, one of my ancestors was the infamous train robber and killer Jessie James. So does that mean that I owe the descendants of the people who were victimized by him?
Sorry folks, I wasn’t around back then in order to do anything about it.
The very idea that anyone should be liable for something their ancestors (especially those long dead) did is nuts!
All joking aside, it’s got very little to do with whether your ancestors were exploiters or exploitees; it’s all about playing the victim and race cards to get free money – much more to do with an instant redistribution of wealth and nothing else.
Rich countries started giving money to poorer countries in the 19th century, and by the 1920s and ’30s countries like Germany, France and Britain were providing regular aid to their colonies in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Colonial powers used their money to build infrastructure—ports, roads, railways—and wealthy American industrialists were also involved in development aid through the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Formal government foreign aid programs came into full swing in the 1960s, with billons of dollars being poured into non-aligned (aka, third-world) countries by the East and the West to keep them non-aligned.
By 1984, everyone became involved in ending world hunger with the Feed the World movement. The aid has never stopped. It has now been thirty-eight years. We are currently helping to feed the great grandchildren of the original recipients. Besides food, we have provided huge quantities of medicines, healthcare professionals, cooking and heating devices, agricultural equipment, and disease control materials, like mosquito netting. We have built hospitals, power plants, schools, and water purification facilities, and provided training for all of it..
The former colonies have received much in reparations already. Since they have benefitted greatly from our burning of fossil fuels, there is no debt to pay. To the contrary, it is time to put a sunset law on foreign aid. Decrease it steadily for ten years and tell the countries it is time for them to be independent. As things are now, it is not to their advantage to become self-sufficient.
Monty Python: What have the Romans ever done for us? – YouTube
Colonialism resulted in a civilization that no one who rails against it would trade for anything else.
Certainly the British royal family should be stripped of all its I’ll gotten wealth from colonialism , capitalism , racism and oppression of the masses , made to pay reparations and probably imprisoned . The queen and all her princes are grotesque reminders of a criminal past . There you go Flossie : cut off the head of the snake
Yeah. Keep taking the medication, ok. The current royal family doesn’t go back as far as you appear to think it does.
My ancestors were driven out of the Rift Valley 2,000,000 years ago, they were invaded by Romans 2,000 years ago, Vikings 1,200 years ago, the French 1,000 years ago, and the Germans did their best to destroy my city of birth.
Where’s my cheque?
Sorry Warmunists, my colonial ancestors were most assuredly climate refugees from a freezing cold Europe.
I have the best wishes for low income countries. Spend your scarce dollars on education and research. It is the surest path to wealth. South Korea and Israel are excellent recent examples where the population went from barefoot and hungry to high income during one lifetime.
Handouts in the name of climate – or anything else – are ineffective. Education and R&D make countries rich.