With the current crisis, climate is now seen as a relevant actor in History

We are currently experiencing an urgent climate concern. In Brazil, intense drought, devastating fires in several biomes and disasters such as the rains that hit the south of the country this year. In the world, floods in the Sahara and in many other countries, rising temperatures and sea levels. For the field of history, although today studies dealing with climate change are more topical than ever, this is not a new subject, since many authors in the 18th and 19th centuries were already thinking about health and disease based on their relationship with the environment and climate. This is what reflects André Felipe Cândido da Silva, a researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz House (COC/Fiocruz).

Image taken by researcher Harald Sioli of a fire in the Amazon in the 1970s (photo: Betty Meggers and Clifford Evans Papers)

In recent years, the researcher has dedicated himself to environmental issues and the ecological transformations that characterize the so-called Anthropocene, a term that designates a new geological epoch defined by man's impact on the Earth. Among others, he leads research such as that on the work of the German limnologist Harald Sioli and the German-Brazilian scientific network dedicated to studying the ecological dynamics of the Amazon basin between 1939 and 2004.

André Felipe also coordinates the research project A Amazônia como microcosmo do Antropoceno: a história das pesquisas transnacionais em ecologia amazônica e os impactos ambientais da Grande Aceleração [The Amazon as a microcosm of the Anthropocene: the history of transnational research into Amazonian ecology and the environmental impacts of the Great Acceleration], which aims to analyze different aspects of the Amazon between 1952 and 2002. Among the perspectives covered are scientific networks dedicated to the forest's role in climate and hydrological regulation, biodiversity studies, as well as resource exploitation projects and the process of political globalization that has made it an icon of the international environmental movement.

Climate change and health: Not a new knowledge

André Felipe talks about how the relationship between climate and health has been perceived throughout history. According to the researcher, climate change affects health by influencing the spread of vectors – such as mosquitoes that transmit diseases – the quality of water and air, the physiology of organisms and food production. He emphasized that, for Fiocruz, it is very important to think about climate change as part of an agenda that looks at recent pandemics, and points out that infectious diseases such as leishmaniasis, malaria, dengue and other arboviruses are particularly sensitive to these changes.

André Felipe has published two papers on the relationship between COVID-19 and the ecological transformations understood as the Anthropocene. At the very beginning of the pandemic, he wrote an article on the subject with the then post-doctoral researcher Gabriel Lopes. In another study, presented in 2023 at the 5th Luso-Brazilian Congress on the History of Tropical Medicine, at the New University of Lisbon, in Portugal, he examines how the new coronavirus and the Anthropocene challenge historical writing, specifically the history of diseases:

"These papers were a compilation of discussions and debates on how pandemics of zoonotic origin and infectious diseases are affected by climate change, which is not only an important issue for contemporary public health, but also interferes with the way we look at the past, inviting new ways of writing the history of diseases."

For the researcher, COVID-19 has brought up the discussion about the pandemic as part of a systemic crisis, which has occurred not only among scientists and historians of disease and medicine, but also in the public sphere, in the mainstream media and on social networks. "During the pandemic, in the press, on social media, we heard phrases like 'this is an expression of the ecological crisis', 'humanity is the virus'. And this is not a new issue".

He said that there were currents in the 18th and 19th centuries that thought of health in a comprehensive way, integrated with the environment. For him, this is quite clear in the 19th century, because the very way of conceiving the interrelationships between disease, body and environment was based on the ideas of neo-hypocratism, that bodies need to be in balance with the environment and that imbalance causes disease.

André Felipe also gave examples of studies carried out in this area by students from the Graduate Program in Sciences and Health (PPGHCS). Among the studies cited is Elder Sidney Saggioro's research on malaria in São Paulo countryside, which aims to think about these epidemics by connecting them to the dynamics of the Tietê:

"Malaria is a disease that is very dependent on ecological factors, closely linked to climatic issues and water regimes. It invites us to think about the history of disease not only as a public health campaign narrative focused on vaccines and antibiotics; this is a history that further involves actors who thought about disease and health in a way that integrates biological relationships, relationships with the environment and the climate.”

In addition to the relationship between climate change and infectious diseases, the researcher drew attention to the issue of toxic contamination of landscapes, which is an important issue for his research group.

"It is almost a truism to say that it is important to conserve the Amazon because of its role in regulating climate, rainfall and the water cycle", says André Felipe (photo: COC/Fiocruz)

Focus on the Amazon and the transnational nature of research

COC/Fiocruz has a strong tradition of research on the Amazon, which can be seen in many studies on the subject – for example, in the works of Dominichi Miranda de Sá, Marcos Chor Maio, Rômulo de Paula Andrade, Magali Romero Sá, Jaime Benchimol and Lorelai Kury – and special issues of the journal História Ciências Saúde - Manguinhos. The reason for this, according to André Felipe Cândido da Silva, is due to "the unavoidable importance that the Amazon has in scientific studies and public health and the very density of the research that will be carried out beginning on the second half of the 20th century". He also said that the biome can be seen as a representation of the global processes and impacts that characterize the Anthropocene, reflecting the interactions and tensions between humans and nature in a specific area.

"It is almost a truism to say that it is important to conserve the Amazon because of its role in regulating climate, rainfall and the water cycle. The Amazon is a vital region for the balance of climate, biodiversity and natural resources, representing many of the global challenges faced in terms of environmental conservation and human impact."

The transnational nature of the subject – whether due to the international interest in the Amazon or the cross-border nature of climate change and the post-World War II organization of sciences – is reflected in the research. At the same time, there is also a concern to shed light on the Brazilian perspective and consider the interactions with the knowledge of those who live in the forest: "some authors call this a connected history. In other words, the construction of knowledge about the ecology and climate of the Amazon requires historical processes to be thought of from the point of view of interconnected flows, the circulation of knowledge, people and technologies."

The researcher also highlighted the transnational nature of the Amazon itself, which stretches across nine countries (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, French Guiana, Peru, Venezuela and Suriname), adding that the biome transcends political borders and that environmental history in itself problematizes the idea of a national history, since rivers, biomes and landscapes cross-cut territories. Additionally, there have always been major projects in the region funded by international and multilateral institutions. André Felipe also pointed out that there is a perspective in the writing of history of thinking of the Amazon globally since colonial times.

"There are historical studies that show this, for example, those involving the so-called 'drugs of the sertão', and indicate that several of these products were part of a global circuit of circulation of goods, of commodities. This trend continued in subsequent centuries. In more recent periods, rubber is the most emblematic case, illustrating how the Amazon has historically been seen as a source of natural resources for global extractive chains."

Analyzing the way history has dealt with climate, André Felipe says that for a long time the social sciences were closely linked to the subject, but often in a deterministic way, even justifying colonialism: "Ideas about climate in many cases involved a racist view based on the thought that peoples, climate and environment had their respective places. This was a framework for the scientific legitimization of the concept of race. In other words, just as plants and animals are linked to specific environments, the same would happen with the human races. So, for a long time, the question of climate, of the environment, was very much linked to this deterministic view, which had damaging consequences by serving as support for racism and colonialism."

For him, however, today, with the emergence of the issue of contemporary climate change, the climate is being reclaimed as a "participant in history" and no longer from the idea that the climate determines history and the character of society. "It is no longer possible to think about climate processes without thinking about their entanglement with human agency, social organizations and political processes."