The terrestrial envelope: Joseph Fourier’s geological speculation

Today, faced with an environmental crisis of unprecedented proportions, we may be tempted to think that the long history of past environmental attitudes has nothing left to teach us. Why should we look back, rather than ahead? Aside from mere historical interest, what is the value of studying the environmental awareness of centuries when modern disciplines such as ecology and climatology did not yet exist, the study of natural phenomena was still entangled with astrology and other “pseudo-sciences,” and the very terms “environment” and “climate” had quite different meanings from the ones we generally attribute to them today?

In this essay we show that the notion of anthropogenic climate change is not novel. Concerns over transformations of the Earth's climate by human activities have been expressed since the 18 th century Enlightenment and earlier. It Is reasonable, therefore, to speak of a "history of anthropogenic climate changes". Most of the instances were not "real". But all cases were associated with the perception of significant discontinuities and in most instances the perceived change was seen as a threat to society. We briefly discuss the possible implications of this "history" for the functioning of the scientific community in the present debate.

Course Outline: Climate change has garnered extraordinary attention in sciences and humanities alike. It has defied traditional disciplinary analyses and challenged conventional problem solving by highlighting socio-environmental conditions characterized by unprecedented levels of risks for which world governments do not have ready or convenient solutions. Using historical and contemporary sources, this course aims to understand recent developments in the context of a larger historical and cultural background in which 'climate' and 'climate change' have played a foundational role in shaping traditional and moderns societies. The course aims to explore climate change as a phenomenon inextricably linked to what societies want, think and do and how such wants, ideas and practices inform the contemporary climatological citizenship. Students will explore the cultural and socio-political histories of climate and climate change during the last two centuries. They will learn how to contextualize past representations of climate and examine human dimensions of climate risks in relation to anthropogenic drivers and policy responses to global warming as it gets hold in the politics of contemporary carbon democracies. The course will examine how climate has been perceived, known and understood by contemporary and past societies; how it became socially and culturally constituted as a hazard (or a resource); what weather and climate have mean to different individuals, groups and institutions, and how these meanings influenced the ways in which people individually and collectively respond to the climate change problem today. Using a multidisciplinary approach, we comprehensively explore the uses of 'climate' from colonialism to racism, from mercantilism to globalism and from climatic determinism to climate engineering. This 8-week lesson plan is intended toward upper-level undergraduates or graduate students. The content and learning outcomes will be relevant to students in human, geographical, political and environmental sciences keen to develop a contextual understanding of climate issues and apply it to their field of academic interest and professional career. Assigned readings and discussion questions are included to provide an understanding of the ideas to be discussed in class.

2010

In the 18th and 19th century western thinkers spend enormous intellectual energy to argue about the climatic determinants of the civilizational peculiarities of entire nations. There was an endless number of writers who ascribe supreme efficacy to climate. Nearly all aspects and processes of human life were tied to climatic causes In the face of climate change this historically discredited doctrine of climatic determinism has experienced a renaissance. Scholarly literature, media coverage and public discourse of climate change tend to portray it as a single, independent phenomenon or set of phenomena that directly causes other events to happen and is therefore thematically and methodically related to historical climatic determinism. This essay argues that this mode of thought builds on problematic assumption of the relationship between climate and society. Drawing on numerous examples it examines the roots and contemporary forms, as well as the theoretical and political presumptions of climatic determinism, paying particular attention to the development of academic geography.

Geography and Environment, 2015

Geographers and Geography has long been acquainted with the idea of climate. For much of the last century, climatology was one of the canonical sub-fields of physical geography and interactions between climate and the human world have proved fruitful sites of geographical inquiry. Although much contemporary scholarship and applied science is concerned with the idea of climate change, I believe there is important work still to be done on enriching the idea of climate. The argument put forward in this essay is that climate -- as it is imagined and acted upon -- needs to be understood, first and foremost, culturally. Rather than framing climate as an interconnected global physical system or as a statistical artefact of weather measurements, climate should be understood equally as an idea that takes shape in cultures and can therefore be changed by cultures. Climate has a cultural history, which is interwoven with its physical history. It is a history which forms the substrate out of which today’s beliefs, claims and disputes about climate-change emerge. This essay develops two core arguments. First, climate can be understood culturally, as an idea that humans use to stabilise relationships between weather and their patterned lives. In its various manifestations around the world, the idea of climate enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural resources, practices, artefacts and rituals. Second, I argue that such a cultural understanding of climate alters the way the contemporary idea of climate-change should be conceived; not primarily as a physical process which must be stopped, but as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate.

Extrapolation, 2018

The paper argues that contemporary climate fiction is a subgenre of sf rather than a distinct and separate genre for two main reasons: first, because its texts and practitioners relate primarily to the sf "selective tradition"; and, second, because its texts and practitioners articulate a "structure of feeling" that accords centrality to science and technology, in this case normally climate science. Not only is "cli-fi" best understood as sf, it also has a much longer history than is commonly allowed, one that arguably stretches back to antiquity. The paper distinguishes between texts in which extreme climate change is represented as anthropogenic and those where it is represented as theogenic, geogenic, or xenogenic; it also provides a brief sketch of the (pre-)history of stories of anthropogenic, xenogenic, and geogenic extreme climate change.

This special issue includes three studies on climatological ideas in early modern France, plus a preface and an afterword that situate early modern "climate theories" in a longer genalogy of environmental ideas in order to investigate their relevance for current environmental thinking. TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. Sara Miglietti, "Introduction: The Past and Present of Climate Theories" 2. Dorine Rouiller, "Théorie des climats et cosmopolitisme dans la Sagesse de Pierre Charron" 3. Jean-Olivier Richard, "The Jesuit Who Wanted to Control the Climate: Père Castel and the Religious Roots of the Anthropocene" 4. Jean-Patrice Courtois, "The Climate of the Philosophes during the Enlightenment" 5. Phillip John Usher, "Afterword"

Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union

diacritics, 2019

At the very outset of the so-called Anthropocene, through the lens of a social theory since relegated to the “utopian” margins of critical thought, the visionary socialist Charles Fourier diagnosed a problem that mainstream modern science would spend much of the twentieth-century structurally unable to see: anthropogenic climate disruption and its etiology in the “progress” of European industry, slavery and colonial empire. This essay explores the heterodox naturalism that enabled such a prescient diagnosis, as well as the subversive image of “terraformation” that Fourier projected as a cure. For in contrast to today’s advocates of geo-engineering (but in concert with critics working to decolonize Anthropocene ecology), Fourier percieved that those who believe they know how to control the earth’s climate are the least capable agents of its emancipatory re-creation. He advanced, instead, the heretical proposition that nonhuman natures, no less than human ones, answer to justice and pleasure, rather than necessity and force. His dissident eco-social science thus aimed not to enable his Enlightened compatriots to engineer, but to disable them from thwarting the dazzling terrestrial futures that the earth’s other constituents were literally dying to create. Fourier’s techno-pastoral prophecies of orchestrated planetary transformation, then, beckon outside the familiar alternative between technofuturist hubris and ecological precaution, offering visions of multispecies luxury predicated on the abandonment of coercive labor and the adoption of a technics co-invented with human and non-human Others of Man. Next to the insane faith that our flourishing can still be founded on the earth’s domination (if only we do it right this time), Fourier’s outlandish prophecies, as Walter Benjamin once observed, “prove surprisingly sound.”

Weathered: Cultures of Climate opens up the many ways in which the idea of climate is given meaning in different human cultures and how it is used; how climates are historicised, known, changed, lived with, blamed, feared, represented, predicted, governed and, at least putatively, redesigned. These actions performed on or with the idea of climate emerge from the diverse cultural interpretations of humans’ sensory experience of the atmosphere’s restless weather. Weathered develops a case for understanding climate as an enduring, yet malleable, idea which humans use to stabilise cultural relationships with their weather. The discursive phenomenon of climate-change should therefore be understood as a ubiquitous trope through which the material, psychological and cultural agency of climate is exercised in today’s world. In this sense the phenomenon of climate-change is not a decisive break from the past. Neither is it a unique outcome of modernity. Climate-change should rather be seen as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate, an idea which enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural and material artefacts, practices, rituals and symbols.