ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Tracing Chaos Theory in the Contemporary Environmental Imagination

• In Event: Histories of Climate and Environment 2: Knowing

English Abstract

This exploratory paper will consider the intersection of chaos theory and the modern environmental movement in contemporary narratives, from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) to Richard McGuire’s Here (2014). I will discuss how chaos and the theorisation of unpredictable natural events emerged as mathematical and biological models (Lorenz, 1972; Odum brothers, 1953) where changes and oscillations encompass the orderly and the disorderly. This paper will read the introduction of chaos theory into ecological narratives through the description of complex biological process in the work of H. G Wells et al. alongside modern fiction, which facilitated an artistic line of approach to philosophical indeterminacy that eventually reached the public imaginary in the 60s and the 70s. Biological, mathematical and physics methodologies, such as the butterfly effect, inspired discussions in literature on the complex dynamics that emerge when considering environmental changes. As Timothy Clark (2012) has shown, in ‘scale effects’ time is the source for environmental contingence. In drawing upon a selection of contemporary narratives, this paper deconstructs the distinction between nature and culture having in mind the inherent interconnectedness of our contemporary global world.

Author

• Gemma Curto, University of Liverpool