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- Isberg, Erik, 1994-
(författare)
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Planetary Timemaking : Paleoclimatology and the Temporalities of Environmental Knowledge, 1945-1990
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis concerns the history of paleoclimatology in the postwar period. It follows the trajectory of two climate proxy records – ice cores and deep-sea cores – in the North Atlantic region, from their emergence as scientific objects in the 1940s to their incorporation into Earth System Science in the 1980s. In doing so, the thesis highlights how scientists have used these records to produce time and how this has affected the temporalities of the environment as a scientific and political concept. As anthropogenic impact on the planet arose as a political problem, the vast timescales of paleoclimatology became increasingly interwoven with climate modeling and environmental policy. Often, the records were understood as “natural archives”, providing unmediated access to past environmental conditions. This thesis shows how the times of ice- and deep-sea cores were, on the contrary, constantly re-shaped by scientific practices, institutional frameworks andcompeting temporal sensibilities in different scientific fields.With the rise of the Anthropocene concept in the last two decades, historians have begun to question the division between historical and natural times. Scientifically produced times, such as those made by ice- and deep-sea core drilling, have permeated discussions about the properties of historical time in the twenty-first century. Yet, the origins of thesetimes often remain out of view. This thesis argues that environmental historians and historians of science can contribute to these discussions by treating environmental times as objects of historical inquiry. Looking beyond planetary-scale models and following environmental times in situ, as they emerge, form and travel, can open up for more multi facettedapproaches to historical time in the proposed new geological epoch. The history of postwar paleoclimatology is therefore both a history of how scientists have produced environmental times and how planetary pasts enter the political present.
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| 2. |
- Westermann, Andrea, et al.
(författare)
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Writing History in the Anthropocene : Scaling, Accountability, and Accumulation
- 2020
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Ingår i: Geschichte und Gesellschaft. - Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. - 0340-613X .- 2196-9000. ; 46:4, s. 579-605
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We introduce three topics that characterize research in and of the Anthropocene: terrestrial scales (temporal, systemic, and spatial); accountability within and beyond the social, cultural, and political realms of human interaction; and the unprecedented accumulation and redistribution of earth matter. Historians are well equipped to both explain social change and expose the historicity of concepts, institutions, individual or collective routines, and experiences. Considering this double interest, along with the methodological renewals of their discipline, historians are able to historicize the terrestrial environment and expose geological and ecological causalities across all scales without losing sight of human dimensions and responsibilities.
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| 3. |
- Höhler, Sabine, 1966-
(författare)
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Sara B. Pritchard and Carl A. Zimring, Technology and the Environment in History. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press 2020.
- 2021
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Ingår i: Social history of medicine. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0951-631X .- 1477-4666.
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Recension (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- On the occasion of Envirotech’s 20th anniversary in 2020, Sara Pritchard and Carl Zimring offer an accessible, affordable and applicable entry into the work that has been carried out to historicise technical and natural environments and to investigate how their delimitations shifted—in order to rework them into more sustainable relations. The book is lucidly written and compact. Its 253 pages include some 160 pages of text plus a short endnote apparatus, an encompassing bibliography, and teaching resources with recommended readings, weblinks and films. The book programmatically moves beyond text-based media and works with historical images to provide visual arguments for how technology and environment have co-developed.
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| 4. |
- Höhler, Sabine, 1966-
(författare)
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Local Disruption or Global Condition? : El Niño as Weather and as Climate Phenomenon
- 2017
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Ingår i: GEO Geography and Environment. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 2054-4049. ; 4:1, s. 1-11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- El Niño denotes a periodical warm water stream in the Pacific Ocean. But who knew about this phenomenon, where and how? El Niño ‘the boy’ emerged as a fabric of local experiences and stories of extreme weather events: tropical winter storms, floods, droughts and famines in the coastal states of South America, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In the Northern Hemisphere this rich cultural history went largely unnoticed. Only in the 1980s and 1990s did El Niño acquire global recognition as an effect of the oceanic and atmospheric currents in the tropical Pacific region. As the oceans moved from a marginal to a central position in the discourse on the Earth’s climate cycles, ENSO – the ‘El Niño Southern Oscillation’ – became part of a global climate pattern. This paper explores El Niño ‘the boy’ and ENSO El Niño Southern Oscillation as juxtaposed and superposed environmental perceptions. While El Niño the boy conveyed horrific weather experiences on the human scale, ENSO became known through terrific scientific views of Earth from space. Earth observation by remote sensing satellites collected vast arrays of local measurements into new data fabrics. Studying the case of the US–French orbital satellite mission of TOPEX/Poseidon, this paper examines both the imagery from satellite data and the forecasting effortspreceding the strong El Niño winter of 1997–8. From the data and image sets of remote sensing satellites, recurring local disruptions emerged as a periodic global climate condition. Local experiences of El Niño and scientific perceptions of ENSO as a global climate cycle did not translate easily into each other. The paper discusses some of the epistemological tensions across spatial scales. While El Niño’s shift from exception to regularity fed into the framing of ‘climate change’ as a global disaster, the emerging ENSO regime obscured disaster locally.
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| 9. |
- Höhler, Sabine, 1966-
(författare)
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"Total Life Support" : Systems Stability and Visions of Sustainability in Space
- 2014
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the Cold War era of extremes, systems stability and equilibrium became key concepts. Visions of politically and ecologically balanced worlds stimulated high hopes in works of science and in works of science fiction. Particularly prominent was the vision to create a self-sustaining system, on the small scale of closed artificial life support systems and ultimately on the scale of an entire planet. Space research provided the experimental setup to link these scales. The space capsule, a high-tech minimized and an optimized vehicle, brought together subsistence-based and innovation-based solutions. The space capsule merged sufficiency and efficiency visions of environmental sustainability.This paper explores the intersections of space technology and ecological research by studying three projects of experimentalizing the earth’s life cycles in the form of self-contained and self-maintained metabolic systems to be operated on earth and beyond. The first project is the experiment of terraforming Mars described in the film Red Planet (2000). The second is the BIOS (USSR, 1960s-1970s) project that conceptualized human life as biotic mass. In a closed habitat human elements and algae entered a symbiotic relationship to maintain a viable atmosphere. Finally, the project of Biosphere 2 (USA, 1980s-1990s) technologically recreated the major biospheric cycles of the earth on a miniature scale, complete with cycles of soil, air, mineral, water and waste. All these projects inserted humans into short-circuited supply systems for long-range survival. They reconsidered humans’ place in nature in different but related ways, as part of the earth’s life cycles and as top of and in control of its food chains.
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| 10. |
- Höhler, Sabine, 1966-
(författare)
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Die Umwelt wirkt auf uns zurück
- 2022
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Ingår i: NZZ Geschichte. - Zurich. - 2297-2722. ; 40, s. 26-41
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Tidskriftsartikel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Was verbindet einen Vulkanausbruch in Indonesien mit einer Hungersnot in Europa? Was hat die Wasserhygiene mit der Ausbreitung von Seuchen zu tun? Umwelt bedeutet, in Zusammenhängen zu denken.
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