Terrestrial Enlightenment: Ruin and Revolution in an Eighteenth-Century Climate Crisis

Some scholars and scientists identify the Enlightenment as an inflection point in the Anthropocene, a geological age in which humans act as a planetary force. My talk suggests that this inflection point was characterized not only by new means and scales of environmental exploitation, but also by the emergence of climate politics. The naturalist Georg Forster provides a helpful itinerary through this time, from his study of Saxon hydraulics in the wake of the flood of 1784 to his death in Paris during the Terror of 1794. On either side of the Rhine, resource management and disaster mitigation constituted political power.