The Anthropocene (climate histories) seminar offers sessions in the related fields of climate history and Anthropocene studies. Meetings are held on Thursdays at 1pm–2pm in Seminar Room 2. All are welcome!
Organised by Fiona Amery, Richard Staley and Amelia Urry.
Lent Term 2026
29 January
George Adamson (King's College London)
'But they hardly ever freeze now': exploring weather-heritage, memory, and change in southeastern England
The concept of 'weather-heritage' suggests that weather is so central to everyday life that it should be considered a form of intangible cultural heritage, and protected through this lens. Weather contributes to sense of place, and it is through perceived changes to normal weather that people experience atmospheric changes caused by greenhouse gas emissions. This study – a collaboration between the Department of Geography and Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King's College London – explores the concept of weather-heritage though the weather memories of mainly older people in southeast England, collected through life history interviews and weather memories uploaded to an online portal. We show how participants build their sense of weather heritage through a combination of their own memories, weather norms such as seasonal patterns, and personal and cultural memories of notable events in the past such as the warm summer of 1976. Whilst our participants were wary of generalisations, many felt that recent changes in what they considered to be normal weather conditions were eroding sense of place, and in some cases, sense of Englishness. We therefore demonstrate the potential of weather-heritage as an entry point to alternative productive engagements with climate change.
12 February
Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan (Yale University)
The physics of entropy and the politics of waste in the 1970s
As debates over 'energy' swelled in the United States during the 1970s, 'entropy' entered the dialogue with it. This nineteenth-century concept from physics, that systems tend towards disorder, had a new lease on life. Physicists sought to use entropy as the basis for new efficiency measures amidst the oil crisis, economists deployed it to put a price on nature, policy advisors learned of thermodynamics for the first time, and popular books hit the press expounding on entropy as a 'new world view'. Social decay and ecological decay were thermodynamic decay, these thinkers argued, as they sought to make commensurable a plurality of midcentury crises – increasing pollution, growing income inequality, stagnating economic growth, and resource limits – through the science of heat. This talk tells the history of these thinkers to show how their use of entropy structured the way many social scientists and politicians came to understand waste. Eschewing theories of pollution or toxicity, these thermodynamic theorists defined waste as disorder or, in the language of physics, that which could not do work. As politicians adopted this framework into their policy measures, entropic waste circumscribed the bounds of energy conservation dialogue and directed debates away from the multitude of material wastes proliferating through the environment.
26 February
Michael Malay (University of Bristol)
Kite-flying in the Anthropocene
This paper is about kites – the craft of kite-making, the joy of kite-flying, and the ways in which kites can attune us to the world and its weathers. It's also about the relationship between 'subjective' and 'objective' understandings of the weather – that is, how we experience the weather in our bodies and what we know of the weather through science – and the capacity of kite-flying to trouble these distinctions in surprising ways. It might be said that meteorology supplies us with 'facts' about the weather, whereas kite-flying offers us a phenomenology of the weather, but is it that simple? And mightn't phenomenology be part of a 'climate science', broadly conceived, even as it diverges from meteorology in crucial respects? This paper will also explore the work of Jorie Graham, particularly her poem 'Sea Change', to think about the role of the body in knowing – as well as failing to come to grips with – a world of changing weather.
5 March
Anna Schrade (Kwansei Gakuin University)
'Give Us Our Blue Skies Back!' Women, science, and environmental justice in Japan's Early Anthropocene (1950–1969)
This paper revisits one of the most extraordinary yet understudied episodes in Japan's environmental history: the Give Us Our Blue Skies Back movement, led by nearly 7,000 housewives in Tobata (Kitakyūshū) between 1950 and 1969. Situated at the heart of Japan's post-war industrial expansion, these women confronted the devastating effects of air pollution emitted by the Yahata Steelworks – then one of Japan's largest companies and a national symbol of economic recovery and technological progress. Without formal education or political experience, they organised one of Japan's earliest and longest-running anti-pollution movements, combining grassroots mobilisation, scientific inquiry, and moral persuasion to demand accountability from industry and government alike.
Their activism was remarkable not only for its scale but also for its epistemic innovation. From the very outset in 1950, the women independently generated empirical data on pollution's impact on human health and the natural environment, later collaborating with sympathetic scientists and physicians to produce knowledge that challenged corporate and state narratives of industrial inevitability. Their successes were unprecedented: they signed Japan's first Pollution Control Agreement in 1964 (a milestone that has been almost entirely overlooked in post-war Japanese history), produced a documentary broadcast nationwide on NHK in 1965, and by 1969 had initiated a region-wide commitment to pollution control.
Drawing on oral histories and local archives, this research situates the Give Us Our Blue Skies Back movement within the temporal and spatial margins of Japan's so-called 'miracle growth'. It reveals how ordinary women in the industrial periphery developed forms of civic cooperation and scientific engagement that both prefigured and transcended later environmentalism. It reconsiders prevailing narratives of Japan's environmental history by shifting the analytical lens from men to women, from highly educated elites to grassroots actors, from the political centre to the periphery, and from the conventional focus on the 1970s and 1980s to the formative activism of the 1950s and 1960s.
By foregrounding these women's collective labour, this paper reframes the Anthropocene not as a universal human condition but as a differentiated historical experience, unevenly distributed across gender, class, and geography. I will argue that the activism of Tobata's women constitutes an early form of Anthropocene agency – an assertion of environmental justice, epistemic authority, and democratic participation from below. Their story invites us to reconsider the origins of ecological consciousness and the place of citizen science in negotiating life within industrial modernity.