New Earth Histories

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Based on work from the forthcoming collection 'New Earth Histories,' this roundtable aims to open a new discussion about the origins and emergence of Earth cosmologies, both past and present, and consider how environmental histories can approach the study of science on a global scale. We reexamine the history of the geosciences from a cosmopolitan perspective, broadening our frame of reference thematically, temporally, spatially, and epistemologically, in order to consider what new ways of looking at the Earth's history might emerge. We also suggest that these ways of thinking about the Earth via cosmologies, theologies, temporalities, and ancestral entities are not mere remnants of a premodern and more enchanted world; instead, they continue to shape earthly cosmologies in the present day. The geological and environmental sciences emerged from cosmopolitan exchanges and colonial encounters that created new ways of knowing the Earth and its history, and they carry the signatures of these theologically, theoretically, and geographically diverse origins. Far from the story of modern geosciences being one of gradual and continuous disenchantment in the service of capital, extractivism, and disciplinarity, we show that these forces have always coexisted in tension with many other ways of knowing and interpreting the Earth, and that the modern geosciences have been enchanted all along.

In this roundtable, presenters will discuss the overarching New Earth Histories program and research goals and consider these questions in light of a range of environmental, intellectual, and political contexts. We show how cosmologies emerge in and from the extractivist geographies of the Hunter Valley in Australia, the subterranean territory of the Australian continental artesian basins where "fossil waters" flow, and in laboratories and conference rooms where geochronologists debate the boundaries of the Holocene epoch in a fraught effort to geologically historicize (or historically geologize) universal "human time."

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Moderator

• Lukas Rieppel, Brown University

Presenters

• Emily M Kern, University of Chicago

• Jarrod Hore, UNSW

• Ruth Morgan, Australian National University

• Perrin Selcer, University of Michigan