Climate, Knowledge and Politics in the 18-20th Centuries

Global climate change is one of the most pressing questions of our time. It enrolls states, markets and civil society in a complex process mingling political deliberations, scientific expertise, ethics of the future, and government technologies. The recognition of a global climate threat is part of a growing environmental awareness that extends to issues of biodiversity, resources exhaustion, and pollution. This increasingly acute awareness is often described as a radical break from “modernity” and from its restrictive conception of the environmental consequences of human activities, and their “boomerang effects” on human life.
This international colloquium aims at replacing the contemporary linkages
between Climate, Knowledge and Politics in a broader historical perspective
encompassing the 18th through 20th Centuries:

• Was climate a category of modern political thought, and did it inform concrete forms of government since the eighteenth century?
• Did the emerging human sciences participate in contemporary debates and thinking about the climate?
• Was climate part of the environmental awareness of the past?
• What were the terms of debates about human-induced climate change?

To answer these questions we start from two assumptions:

• First, historical discourse needs to reject the ‘vulgar historicism’ that reduces past climate fears to an old tune, without trying to understand the deep logic at work.

• Second, great philosophical narratives about the supposed 'exit of modernity', by creating a straw man past, tend to blur our understanding of the historical dynamics and of the contemporary situation.

Information:
http://climatehistories.innerasiaresearch.org/?p=1298