Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talks

Jeremy Zallen, Assistant Professor history at Lafayette College (USA), discussed his new book American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 in our Greenhouse environmental humanities online book talk series on Monday, 6 April at 15:00 CET. The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor–those American lucifers–as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.

We continue our online environmental humanities book talks for our second episode with Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History, University of Stavanger, Norway, presenting her book Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (MIT Press, 2019) on Monday, 30 March 2020.

This groundbreaking book brings together environmental history and the history of emotions to examine the motivations behind species conservation actions. In Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age, Dolly Jørgensen uses the environmental histories of reintroduction, rewilding, and resurrection to view the modern conservation paradigm of the recovery of nature as an emotionally charged practice. Jørgensen argues that the recovery of nature—identifying that something is lost and then going out to find it and bring it back—is a nostalgic practice that looks to a historical past and relies on the concept of belonging to justify future-oriented action. The recovery impulse depends on emotional responses to what is lost, particularly a longing for recovery that manifests itself in such emotions as guilt, hope, fear, and grief. Jørgensen explains why emotional frameworks matter deeply—both for how people understand nature theoretically and how they interact with it physically. The identification of what belongs (the lost nature) and our longing (the emotional attachment to it) in the present will affect how environmental restoration practices are carried out in the future. A sustainable future will depend on questioning how and why belonging and longing factor into the choices we make about what to recover.

During the COVID days of digital communication and physical distancing, we decided to support environmental humanities scholarship that has been temporarily effected. To this end, we launched a new series of online book talks by authors of environmental humanities books. We will have talks every Monday afternoon that are online. Everyone is welcome to join the event to hear and ask questions. In our very first book talk on 23 March 2020, hosts Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen, co-directors of the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger (Norway) talked with David Farrier, Professor of Literature and the Environment at University of Edinburgh (UK) about his new book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. In Footprints, David Farrier explores what traces we will leave for the very deep future. From long-lived materials like plastic and nuclear waste, to the 50 million kilometres of roads spanning the planet, in modern times we have created numerous objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time. Our carbon could linger in the atmosphere for 100,000 years, and the remains of our cities will still exist millions of years from now as a layer in the rock. These future fossils have the potential to tell remarkable stories about how we lived in the twenty-first century. Through literature, art, and science, Footprints invites us to think about how we will be remembered in the myths, stories, and languages of our distant descendants. Travelling from the Baltic Sea to the Great Barrier Reef, and from an ice core laboratory in Tasmania to Shanghai, one of the world’s biggest cities, David Farrier tells a story of a world that is changing rapidly, and with long-term consequences. Footprints will not only alter how you think about the future, it will change how you see the world today.