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

Abstract

Abstract Some scholars and scientists identify the eighteenth century as an inflection point in the Anthropocene, a geologic age in which humans act as a planetary force. This article suggests that this inflection point was characterized not only by new means and scales of environmental manipulation, but also by the development of climate politics. Where forests have been the focus of considerable scholarship on eighteenth-century environmental policy, this article turns to hydrology as a theater of material and discursive engagement with the era’s most palpable climatic threat: deluge. Catastrophic floods, like that which followed the eruption of Iceland’s Eldeyjar and Lakagígar volcanos in 1783/84, show how climate took its place in the enlightenment “culture of disaster,” which shifted responsibility from divine to terrestrial authority. Under the rubric of terrestrial enlightenment, I propose a framework for understanding the broad assemblage of artifacts, environments, and imaginaries that constituted late-eighteenth-century climate politics. Encompassing natural resources, infrastructure, and even ruins, terrestrial enlightenment integrates a corresponding range of naturalists, chroniclers, engineers, scholars, artists, and politicians. The naturalist Georg Forster provides an especially rich archive of 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 materialized political power.