The Dear Green Place? Glasgow’s Millennium of Global Environmental Impact

The Dear Green Place? Glasgow’s Millennium of Global Environmental Impact

In the thousand years since its emergence as an important settlement, Glasgow has had a profound influence on the environments with which it has interacted. In this talk, we shall explore the key elements of that influence at home and abroad, from the processes of woodland clearance and agricultural expansion over the surrounding districts, which its medieval growth entailed, to the ecological impact of the Caribbean and East Coast American sugar and tobacco plantations of the late 17^th and 18^th centuries. We shall consider how the city has triggered profound environmental change locally and globally, first through its people’s need to feed, clothe and house themselves, and then through their ambitions as merchants and manufacturers at the heart of international trading empires. Fresh and more profound impacts came with Glasgow’s rapid expansion in the first Industrial Revolution, with the coal, iron/steel and shipbuilding industries of the lower Clyde valley forming one of the world’s most extensive industrial complexes by the middle of the 19^th century, but at huge environmental and ecological cost to its hinterland of mines, quarries and processing sites. The effluent of industry and settlement, discharged into the Clyde and its tributaries, or into the air, brought physical harm and disease to the city’s people of all classes, triggering the flight of those who could to the cleaner air and water of the suburbs or emerging commuter towns. The quest for dependable, clean drinking-water led to the engineering marvels of Glasgow’s reservoir system extending into the Trossachs, but at the cost of flooded valleys and cleared woodland. Although its heavy manufacturing heyday was over by the 1950s, government schemes to create and retain employment continued the legacy of environmental degradation, while efforts to modernise and open up the city to fast travel and communication by road brought new consequences through vehicle emissions and the carbon legacies of cement production for the motorway system. Alongside this, the city also saw the positive fruits of the decline in manufacturing and conscious efforts to reverse past environmental impacts, from the revival of the Clyde as a living river to the maintenance and improvement of green spaces in and around Glasgow. But every action or change has a consequence, and this talk will finish with a brief reflection on how a globally-integrated 21^st-century city continues to affect the environment of far-distant places.

Richard Oram is Professor of Medieval and Environmental History at the University of Stirling, and a former Director of the Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy. A member of the North Atlantic Bio-cultural Organisation (NABO) and the Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA), he is a participant in research projects exploring the sustainability and resilience of human populations around the North Atlantic rim from the Norse diasporas of the 9^th and 10^th centuries to the present. He has published extensively on the environmental history of Scotland and the North Atlantic region, with particular research interests in climate change impacts, resource conflicts, energy transitions, and epidemic and epizootic disease. He is currently writing An Environmental History of Scotland: From the Roman Occupation to COP26, which is due for publication in early 2023.