Writing History in and of the Anthropocene

New Earth Histories, UNSW

Masterclass on 'Earth-attuned' research and writing history in the Anthropocene hosted by New Earth Histories and Science and Society, UNSW

UNSW Sydney

This workshop, hosted by Dr Andrea Westermann and UNSW, offers a close reading of historical source material and research threads that went into the making of her article “Enrichment and Dilution in the Atacama Mining Desert”. In the second part of the event, we will look at the structure and arguments of this essay. We will also take the text as a starting point to discuss possible ways to become more “earth-attuned” in our own research projects. The guiding question will be: How to write history in and of the Anthropocene? Historians have only just started to study the archive of the terrestrial. Even historians of geology – focused on Earth and aware of its omnipresence in textual, oral, institutional and material repositories – have for a long time been overly selective. Only recently has the field begun to turn away from a long-prevailing cultural history approach, of which Martin Rudwick is arguably the most eminent practitioner. His seminal studies Bursting the Limits of Time (2005) and Worlds before Adam (2008) describe how early nineteenth-century scholars furnished Earth with not only a past but a contingent, unique history. Rudwick’s books emphasise how important geologists’ separation of geohistory from history – their sharp division between nature and culture – was to establishing the historical discipline as a humanist science. His work thus offered the profession a well-argued platform for critical self-reflection. Moreover, his attention to the practical circumstances of knowledge-making has allowed historians of all stripes to better grasp geology’s outstanding political and economic meanings. Yet, as a result, historians were put in a position to notice and assess the lacunae and perspectives Rudwick chose not to pursue. Coalescing with the rise of global and postcolonial history, this realisation has decidedly informed the trend towards political histories of geology. This trend equally has to do with certain themes falling in and out of fashion in scholarly research – for geology, of course, has been political from its very beginnings. And it is not only recently that ‘Earth science became social science,’ as Naomi Oreskes neatly put it when addressing experts in climate science and earthquake mitigation in regard to the societal expectations around their disciplines. Geology originated as a state (or cameralist) science, one contracted to survey and manage a territory’s mineral resources, including fossil fuels and monetary metals. The political character of mining helped establish and reshape the disciplinary field of (nation-states’) social history in the 1970s, when miners and their labour unions took the spotlight as powerful actors in the making not only of an industrialised economy but also the modern welfare state or democratic principles. Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil stands on the shoulders of these findings. Today’s new wave of case studies on mining and extraction encompass imperial ‘resource frontiers’, thereby, again, analysing and underscoring geology’s genuinely political dimensions. In addition to an uptick in mining historians eager to unearth the unequally distributed benefits and costs (health, wealth, environmental) of resource extraction, some scholars have turned their attention to making history tout court a more Earth-attuned endeavour, as I want to call it. S﻿CHEDULE: 1﻿0.00-10.10 - Welcome and Introductions10.10-11.30 - Sources and Resources 1﻿1.30-12.30 - Discussion: 'Enrichment and Dilution in the Atacama Mining Desert' (pre-circulated)1﻿2.30-13.00 - Lunch (provided) 1﻿3.00-14.00 - Applications and New Directions A﻿SSIGNED READING: A﻿ndrea Westermann, 'Enrichment and Dilution in the Atacama Mining Desert: Writing History from an Earth-Centered Perspective,' Geschicte und Gesellschaft 46 (2020): 634-661.

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