The Birth of Geoengineering. Large-scale Building Projects in the Early Stage of the Anthropocene (1850-1950)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Helmuth Trischler, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289864306

The debate about the Anthropocene has gone beyond the scope of the geological discourse and meanwhile become a widely discussed concept in the cultural and social sciences that poses the challenge to rethink the relation of environment and society and the blurring boarders between nature and culture. Even though first attempts of the productive implementation of the concept in historical scholarship are on hand by now, its heuristic and analytical potential is scarcely sounded out. How does the Anthropocene perspective change the temporal narratives of historical writing and how do the different discussed proposals for a periodization of the Anthropocene retroact to the concepts of environmental history, history of science and technology, and global history? One of the most recent discourses closely connected with the Anthropocene debates are those about Geoengineering. Even though the visions of forming the world are much older, the possibility to shape parts of the earth systems, and thereby also the climate system, started in the early stage of the Anthropocene (1850-1950), when millions of years old natural formations were pierced by large-scale engineering projects; this is where the awareness of the tremendous human agency becomes visible for the first time. These early projects also fueled the reflections and histories of control over nature, the hope of cheap energy for everyone, but also of failed investments, and deadly catastrophes, which today provide an important basis for a critical debate about Climate Engineering. Based on a wider definition of Geoengineering as large-scale human transformation of parts of the geosphere, in this project a global selection of large-scale engineering projects will serve as a lense to uncover the birth of Geoengineering, its preconditions, impacts, and perceptions. Geoengineering projects like the piercing of large mountain ranges through railway tunnels, the construction of sea canals, and huge dam constructions were the early flagship ventures of humankind's attempts to change the geomorphological appearance of the earth. A global selection of these enterprises will be used as case studies to shed light on the historical structures of the early stage of the Anthropocene. The project, which oscillates along environmental history, history of science and technology, and global history tries to illuminate the heuristic and analytical potential of the Anthropocene and to align the framework in which the historization and periodization of the concept takes place.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Wolfram Mauser