![]() I understand the history of geoengineering as being wider than the history of climate engineering: the history of the alteration of the upper lithosphere is connected to reflections and narratives of controlling nature, a hope for cheaper energy, and failed investments and deadly catastrophes that laid the foundation for critical debate surrounding climate geoengineering today.Ī set of approaches from environmental history and the history of science and technology will serve as a lens to uncover different histories of geoengineering. Since the 1850s, these projects increased in number and magnitude and challenged existing balances of nature and culture and its perceptions. From a historical perspective, megascale engineering projects, such as the excavation of the Alps for railway tunnels, the construction of sea canals like that of the Panama Canal, and huge dam constructions, were flagship ventures of humankind’s attempts to change the appearance of earth. McNeill might have called it, I derived the framework of what later became my PhD project with the aim of exploring and reconstructing the “birth” of geoengineering. Here, in the former “mosquito empire” as John R. I lived there during four months of research, finally bringing together my multiple trains of thought. San Telmo, an old quarter in the Argentinian capital, was hit by a heavy yellow fever epidemic in 1871. View into the so-called “Devil’s Throat,” Iguazú, 2014. When entering the Americas for the first time, traveling through sparsely populated regions, as a European I experienced new dimensions of the powerful and sublime natural world, and ideas of space and time began to shift. The region of Misiones had just been hit by a flood, and a viewing platform had been dragged into the depths of the waterfalls the wild waters were colored brown by the sediments they carried with them. Two years later I made a 19-hour bus journey from Buenos Aires to Iguazú, in the north of Argentina. ![]() Five-level ship lock at the Three Gorges Dam, Yichang, 2012. This was my personal “ Welcome to the Anthropocene” moment. Despite the early morning fog, the scale of how far humans are altering the planet became increasingly visible to me. After a five-day trip on a rusty steamer on the Yangtze and a bus tour along the river I reached one of the most tremendous and controversial large-scale engineering projects of the last decades: the Three Gorges Dam. ![]() My travels in China and Argentina have been pertinent to my study. Large-Scale Engineering Projects in the Early Stage of the Anthropocene (1850–1950).” Here at the Rachel Carson Center, through daily interdisciplinary exchange with fieldworkers in geography and social anthropology, I found myself trying to trace back the role of these moments of spatial observation and imagination in the formation of my research interests that finally led to my PhD topic “The Birth of Engineering. In his book Im Raume Lesen wir die Zeit ( In Space We Read the Time), the German historian Karl Schlögel encourages historians, who for a long time were said to be experts of time, towards a closer observation of space: Hinab vom Hochsitz der Lektüre! ( Down from the Raised Blind of Reading!), come out of the archives and libraries and start working with your eyes, learn to read topographical structures, mental maps, and places of events. ![]() Martin presents his prize-winning research poster at ESEH. In his poster he presented his dissertation project on “The Birth of Geoengineering: Large-scale Engineering Projects in the Early Stage of the Anthropocene (1850–1950)”-here, he tells us more about his inspiration and path to the RCC. Congratulations to RCC doctoral program member Martin Meiske, who received the prize for the best poster at the 2015 ESEH conference in Versailles. ![]()
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