Another climate crisis at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution

Marked on 22 April each year, Earth Day is a reminder to celebrate the natural environment and to pat ourselves on the back for our efforts to protect it. Alongside the usual recycling, composting and picking up other people’s litter, I spent it admiring the early blooms in our garden wildflower meadows and the newts swimming in our pond (even though they seem to have gobbled up all the tadpoles).

I was also trying to re-familiarise myself with Haydn’s The Creation ready for a choral workshop in a few days’ time. While inspired by The Book of Genesis, you don’t need to be a theist to appreciate this joyful oratorio.

Haydn composed his masterpiece at the end of the eighteenth century, when many audiences would have taken the Bible stories literally. But they might not have realised that the ‘new created world’ of the libretto was already under threat; the Industrial Revolution being the genesis of our current climate crisis.

In my novel-in-progress set a couple of decades later, I wanted to acknowledge the pollution caused by the steam-powered factories and concomitant social inequalities often omitted from romanticised depictions of the Regency era. It wasn’t until I’d mapped out the plot that I realised I’d also be mentioning a climate catastrophe.

In April 1815, a volcano’s eruption in present-day Indonesia was to have devastating consequences throughout the world. The ash from Mount Tambora led to global cooling with floods in Europe and drought in North America. Across the northern hemisphere the following year’s crop failures brought famine and social unrest. This ‘year without a summer’ also inspired the vivid colours of William Turner’s sunsets and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, dreamed up in a cold and rainy Italy. Unlike us, people at the time were unaware of the cause of the unseasonable weather: it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the link to the volcano was discovered.

I don’t recall how aware I was of this history before I read The Year without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd in 2020, but that novel certainly enhanced my understanding. I can highly recommend it. If you’d like to know more, you can read my review here:

Survival skills for wintry weather: The Year without Summer & Snow, Dog, Foot