Consolations of the Earth

Bibliographic Data

ID3914224
AuthorsJerome Whitington (New York University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume15
Issue3
Pages251-265
Publication date2023-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-10746123
OpenAlexW4389727224
LanguageEN
References cited18

This article looks toward nineteenth-century earth sciences with attention to their humanistic themes. In the early decades of the century, multiple lines of evidence concretized a humanistic experience of man as a finite being with a contingent and accidental planetary existence. Geological humanism refers to the way that themes of earthly existence routinely influenced the status and meaning of being human, culturally and within the sciences, with the collapse of Enlightenment aesthetics of symmetry, purpose, and order in the late eighteenth century. While earth sciences recast humanistic themes in empirical terms, by the latter half of the nineteenth century scientists also regularly articulated prophecies of secular extinction or demise that were resolved, but only partly, both with reference to a long-standing racial schema and through routine consolations that a planet modified by human activity would be a better earth. Coal played a particular role in mediating between earth and atmosphere, mineral and life, and matter and energy. This article details several of these secular consolations offered to popular audiences by prominent climate scientists to show that the earth was far from being understood as a stable domain of nature that could be taken for granted

Aesthetics · Atmosphere (unit · Demise · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Geography · Humanism · Political science · Schema (genetic algorithms · Theology · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research · History · History of Science and Natural History · Law · Philosophy · Science and Climate Studies