Underlands, Empires, Atmospheres: Extractive Histories of Environmental Science

UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room (H.204)
Nov 7, 4:00 pm

Dr Patrick Anthony (UCD) will deliver the second seminar in our Methodologies concerning Extractivism series on Tuesday 7 November at 4pm. The seminar will be held in the UCD Humanities Institute Seminar Room (H.204)

Abstract:
This talk pursues an archaeology of environmental sciences assembled through mining industries that linked central Europe to empires in the Americas and northern Eurasia in the earlier nineteenth century. Mining sites from high Mexico to the Siberian Altai formed a world-infrastructure of natural inquiry, critical for the establishment of apparently novel systems of geological and atmospheric surveillance. Those programs were in fact deeply entrenched in a variety of underground practices and nomenclatures and routed into removal policies and forced migrations of captive labor. In this way, the making of modern environmental sciences marks a critical episode in vertical geopolitics: for the zoning of nature from ore veins to isothermal charts emerged through the enclosure of land, resources, and labor by European and settler agents. It also marks a decisive moment in the longue durée of the climate crisis, understood by leading activists today as the intensification of invasive regimes of colonial terraforming and global capitalism. In grappling with this history, I’ll argue for a vertical plane of analysis that critically links extractive histories to atmospheric afterlives and which situates mines alongside plantations as violent models of Western domination over land and labor.

Dr Patrick Anthony
is a social historian of science and environment in central Europe and the World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His research ranges from German mining and working-class families in natural history to transimperial networks of earth and atmospheric science that linked Central Europe to commodity frontiers in the Americas and northern Eurasia. He is currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin, pursuing a project called ‘Anthropocene Frontiers: The climate of Conflict in Siberia and the Steppe’. Dr Anthony’s forthcoming book , Unearthed: Science and Environment Across Mineral Frontiers, is an archaeology of environmental sciences assembled through mining industries that linked central Europe to empires in the Americas and northern Eurasia.