“The world is sick”, was a phrase used by the American ecologist William Vogt already in 1948 in a book, Road to Survival, where he essentially coined the concept of ‘the environment’ in its now well-established understanding as that thing we humans pollute and put under dangerous stress. A few generations later, this is still true, but the human-earth relationship has changed even further. What we now also find are that the earthly elements – air, waters, ice, snow, forests, the living world, and indeed the soils and sands of the earth itself – are moving faster. The environment is not inert. Its elemental forces are increasingly coming alive and gaining added, often dangerous, sometimes catastrophic, agency. These elemental forces are central to the acceleration of Earth System processes, but indirectly also of social, economic and political perturbations and the multiplicity of crises challenging our contemporary world. To account for this accelerating change, and to understand its causes and consequences in human societies we need a kind of history, and a historiography, that can explore its roots and forces and explore the full range of the human agency that ultimately drives it. This is now becoming an ‘Anthropocene History’, proposing to make sense of a world where humanity is the single largest force of change on the planetary and geological scale. It is a modern history that does not start in 1950, although the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the Anthropocene does. It rather assumes a broader take on the rise of an emerging new Weltanschauung and of a profoundly transformed human-earth relationship, which is multi-centennial and inherently global.
Sverker Sörlin is professor of Environmental History at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He was a co-founder of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in 2012 and is also a member of the Center for Anthropocene History in the Division of History of Science, Technology at KTH. His book with Eric Paglia, Stockholm and the Rise of Global Environmental Governance: The Human Environment will appear in November 2024 with Cambridge University Press.
The lecture is scheduled for 5:00 PM in WZU Room 101.