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Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences of our actions upon the environment for centuries. The subject was raised wherever history accelerated: by the conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the nineteenth century, by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until the Second World War.
Climate change was at the heart of fundamental debates about colonisation, God, the state, nature, and capitalism. From these intellectual and political battles emerged key concepts of contemporary environmental science and policy. For a brief interlude, science and industry instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an impassive climate. But, in the age of global warming, we must, once again, confront the chaos in the heavens.
Originally published in French in 2020 as Les Révoltes du Ciel: Une Histoire du Changement Climatique XVe-XXe Siècle by Seuil.
Introduction: Ten Theses on Climate Change
1 Christopher Columbus's True Discovery
'The trees produce clouds and rain'
The sacred tree of El Hierro
Slavery in a temperate zone
2 Improving the World?
Colonial propaganda
'Cosmical suspicions'
The sacred tree and the global water cycle
3 The Climate of History
Why did the Romans decline?
The climatic history of the European peoples
Ranking Nations
Countering the encroaching cold
4 The Birth of Historical Climatology
Meteorologists tackle the past
The pitfalls of historical thermometry
The sources of historical climatology
5 An Arsenal in the Indian Ocean
A nature for war
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, or an unconditional eulogy of trees
An energy crisis
6 The Climate of the Revolution
'Repairing the climate'
'Compelling the weather to release its prey'
'The forestry security'
'Stop, stop that lethal axe'
Napoleon and the water cycle
7 Climate Patriotism
The climate of independence
The climate of improvement
8 In the Shadow of the Volcano
A planetary catastrophe
A providential debacle
Reassuring glaciers
A climate of laissez-faire
9 Should the National Forests be Sold?
Forests, debt, and climate
'The torch of reason in our sacred woods'
The Revolution's environmental legacy
10 The Crusades of Francois-Antoine Rauch
Rauch's vision: a material, global and divine harmony
Babylon, or the ruins of the future
The bad business of the climate
11 Circular no. 18: An Inquiry into Climate Change from Two
The Ministry of the Interior and of Climate
Deciphering change
Pointers, evidence, and testimony
Scales of change
The forests and climates of the globe
Forgetting the inquiry
12 The Power of Forests
An affront to property
Forestry externalities
Playing on uncertainty
Return to Tacarigua
13 The Horizon Clears
Repairing France: from the sky to the ground
The slow eclipse of the forestry issue
The end of the agricultural ancien regime
14 The Enigmas of the Climatic Past
The labyrinth of change
The new climate sciences
The furnace of the Carboniferous
Entering the Holocene
15 Restoring the World, Governing Empires
The Arab and the climate
Threats to the Raj
The frontier climate
From the Sahara to the Namib
A planet of deserts
16 The Innocent Carbon of the Nineteenth Century
The theology of carbon
Regulatory mechanisms
Precursors of their time
Conclusion
Afterword
Index
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology, previously at Imperial College London, now based in Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of Happy Apocalypse and The Shock of the Anthropocene (with C. Bonneuil).
Fabien Locher is a historian of science, technology and environment at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of Le Savant et la Tempete. Etudier l'Atmosphere et Prevoir le Temps au XIXe Siecle.
"A truly fabulous book – surprising, thought-provoking and rich in historical irony. It is a necessary corrective to the narrative which makes the emergence of climate change as a matter of concern relatively recent and incremental. But it is more enlightening, more provocative and more entertaining than any mere necessity would have required."
– Oliver Morton, author of The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World and The Moon: A History for the Future
"The upshot of this brilliant book is that historians have been asking the wrong question. For years we've been trying to date the emergence of a consciousness about the impacts of human activities on Earth's climate. But this awareness long predates modern science, as we learn from the authors' pathbreaking research. The real question, the one at the heart of their book, is why this awareness was always ambivalent and why it evaporated at the turn of the twentieth century. If you want to understand the long path to the climate crisis, read this book."
– Deborah Coen, Professor of History & History of Science & Medicine, Yale University
"This brilliant book turns upside down the received story of climate science. Fressoz and Locher uncover a rich awareness of climate change in early modern times centered on forests and water. But with the advent of industrial society in the nineteenth century, wealthy Western nations embraced a new indifference to climate. If Fressoz and Locher are right, we need to look to the past to understand why climate mitigation has met with such fierce resistance in the present moment. Behind the climate denial of the oil lobby lies the Victorian faith in the imperturbable sky."
– Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
"At once a cry of alarm and a global call to action, Chaos in the Heavens is a pathbreaking book which reveals not only that debates about climate change are centuries-old but also that our current apathy stems primarily from a false story of optimism and capitalist technophilia developed during the 20th century. Perhaps even more important, though, is the warning at the heart of this remarkable book that stories of climate change crises have been used to generate profits and been abused to wield many kinds of power over the most vulnerable on our planet for longer than we realize."
– Diana K. Davis, University of California at Davis, author of The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge
