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, Alexis Rider and Richard Staley.
Lent Term 2025
30 January
Samuel Grinsell (University College London)
The southern North Sea in modernity and the Anthropocene: fishing, space, and journeys in transdisciplinarity
Histories of modernity have often centred the nation or the empire. When they have turned to transnational matters these have often been studied at oceanic or global scales. This project, instead, starts from a smaller transnational body of water: the southern North Sea, and its Dutch, English and Flemish coasts. It traces how histories of slavery, docks, fishing, migration and infrastructure reshaped the southern North Sea in the long nineteenth century, and the marks left behind in the cities and landscapes of the region today. In this talk I will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment, and argue for a more transdisciplinary approach to history that can think simultaneously about processes of making historical space and contemporary experience of space. This will involve considering how infrastructural changes in the nineteenth century expanded fishing into a system of extraction from seas to land, and examining how this leaves its mark in the built environment, with a particular focus on Grimsby and its place in infrastructures of modernity. I will suggest that the Anthropocene creates an urgent need for histories that can not only enliven our sense of the past but also position our present as a moment of open contestation where the past is enlisted in support of rival visions of the future.
13 February
Semih Celik (University of Exeter)
To conserve or not to conserve? Anthropocenic conflict and competition in Marmara Lake wetlands from late Ottoman times to the present (1850–2025)
During the late 19th century hydrographic instability led to increasing levels of deterioration and desiccation of inland wetlands across the Ottoman Empire, drawing the attention of various previously unheard-of actors. These actors used the new ecological and legal regimes to reclaim vast swathes of desiccated wetland basins. Similarly, Marmara Lake – a wetland ecosystem over 8000 years old, located in the hinterland of one of the most vibrant port cities of the eastern Mediterranean – became the focus of intense scrutiny. Debates over its biodiverse ecosystem and natural history accompanied economic evaluations and reclamation plans.
Whereas dozens of wetland reclamation projects with varying success rates were implemented across the empire from the 1880s to the 1920s, the Marmara Lake wetlands were spared and conserved due to a unique constellation of actors and their interpretations of these wetlands' natural history and of their legal status. The Marmara Lake wetlands endured until 2019, when consecutive dry seasons and the mismanagement of nearby dams, as well as illegal cultivation on their basin led to their desiccation. The ensuing conflict gave rise to what has been called the first climate mitigation lawsuit against the Turkish state, triggering yet another significant episode in the history of the wetlands and the Anthropocene in this region.
This talk examines the developments surrounding the Marmara Lake wetlands over the last century to complicate the history of the Anthropocene in West Asia from its early decades marked by dramatic shifts in perception of and management of the environment to the present day, highlighting the non-linear trajectories that have come to define the Anthropocene.
27 February
Marianna Dudley (University of Bristol)
Electric wind: renewable energy history in the Anthropocene
This paper will explore the role of energy history in shaping understandings of the Anthropocene, and consider how wind energy – widely seen as a solution to climate-change inducing carbon emissions – has historically been intertwined with fossil fuels. It will argue that different wind energy imaginaries reflected wider environmental, political and social concerns in modern Britain. Can this history enrich current thinking, and future energy planning?
13 March
José Luis Granados Mateo (University of the Basque Country and University of Cambridge)
Intellectual histories of the Anthropocene: a plea for presentist historiography and pluralist geology
In this seminar, I will explore the intellectual histories of the Anthropocene, focusing specifically on its scientific conceptualisation – both as a change in the Earth System and as a (rejected) proposed new formal unit of geological time. Since the term began to gain prominence within the Global Change community around 2000, its scientific framework has been accompanied by historical narratives, often written by the scientists themselves. These narratives have led to the development of historiographies that are anachronistic, teleological, and lack a thorough critical engagement with the implicit assumptions embedded in the discourse.
The project of formalising the Anthropocene as a geological epoch later involved professional historians of science, with significant contributions from the Anthropocene Curriculum project, initiated by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG). However, I will argue that much of the work conducted so far has promoted an uncritical vision of the Anthropocene concept itself.
An alternative historiography is both possible and necessary. I will illustrate this through the case of the Anthropozoic Era, proposed by the geologist Antonio Stoppani around 1873. Rather than dismissing it as a 'precursor' or a 'mistaken forerunner', I will argue that it could have been considered a concept with sufficient stratigraphic merit to warrant consideration for formalisation. Drawing on Hasok Chang's proposals, I will advocate for the History and Philosophy of Science to conduct science through alternative means, recovering past theories that remain pertinent to the present, challenging accepted orthodoxy, and fostering a more pluralistic approach to science.