By Bryan Zandberg
In some ways, Professor Tina Loo wants to be the Al Gore of the history department.
“He’s a masterful teacher,” says Loo, who saw the former U.S. vice-president deliver his history-making slideshow in Calgary in 2007. “It’s not everybody who can speak for two-and-a-half hours about a bunch of really boring atmospheric science and make it seem interesting and be full of passion,” she adds.
Loo was impressed by how Gore handled a tough crowd: an auditorium filled with oil barons and top politicians in a province quickly becoming Canada’s biggest carbon producer.
Both Al Gore and his award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) figure in a first-year course on global warming that Loo, an environmental history expert, will teach this fall from the Dept. of History. Called “History 105: The Global Environment,” the course explores, among other things, why Gore received a standing ovation at the end of his Calgary presentation — a surprising finale for many. “Environmental issues are really shaping political engagement,” says Loo, who believes the current climate change debate is politicizing people beyond the existing categories of left and right.
By exploring that shift with students, Loo hopes to “get beyond the paralysis of that all of us seem to feel on the issue” of global warming.
That approach to a troubling topic echoes her work on other themes. As the Canada Research Chair in Environmental History, Loo studies how government policies and social discourses impacted the environment in 19 and 20th century Canada.
Loo specializes in uncovering how past rationales have led to modern environmental dilemmas. Her research has focused the era of mega-projects and hydroelectric dams in BC, as well as Canada’s history of wildlife management, both subjects on which she has authored numerous books and articles. In her work on state power projects, for example, she explored how governments banked on public optimism and confidence in the state in the 1950s through 1970s. The belief that damming rivers for electricity could result in a better society for everyone helped shape the provincial landscape we know today, she says.
“That was a very particular historical moment that to a certain extent has passed,” she explains, adding that she thinks people now are quite cynical of the ability of government and suspicious of the notion of experts. “Partly because expertise has got us into a lot of trouble,” she says. “Science has not necessarily resulted in the better world that people hoped for.”
Loo’s work with First Nations has tried to show how emotional and anecdotal experiences of environmental change are just as important as the official research carried out by government scientists.
If there’s one thing she’s gleaned from her work digging through archives — which she likens to “an Indiana Jones experience” — it’s that individuals and local groups can impact outcomes, including global warming.
“I think that history tells you that things aren’t inevitable, and they could have been different,” she says
