ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Geologic Timelines: Reconciling Complexities in the Catastrophist-Uniformitarianist Debate Through Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Paintings

• In Event: The Plural Worlds of Earth Science: Visual, Material, and Institutional Transformations Across Disciplines, Scales, and Territories 2

English Abstract

The rise of geology as a popular science and the geological surveys launched in the nineteenth century that explored the American West led to a broad-scale familiarization of American society, specifically the art community, with the geosciences. Following the introduction of the theory of uniformitarianism by Charles Lyell in 1830, the catastrophist-uniformitarianist debate further heightened the awareness of the public with geologic concepts. The catastrophist-uniformitarianist debate quickly created a bifurcation within the geosciences between different perceptions of time. Catastrophism, which argued for isolated destructive events, or catastrophes, as a primary driver of geologic change, associated more easily with the human, biblical time scale that had been previously assumed. Lyell’s uniformitarianism, however, argued for slow, steady change and linked to a much longer scale of deep time, or geologic time. As the debate evolved over the century and perceptions of time shifted, American landscape artists played with these temporalities, adopting an aesthetic style and visual language informed by geology that carved out an American identity rooted in the landscape, cementing it as nature’s nation. Artists attempted through their paintings to place America within Earth history, grappling with fears concerning the changing landscape and climate, industrialization and extraction, social and cultural hierarchies, and the future of a young America, questions that have since resurfaced surrounding discussions of the Anthropocene. Eventually, what emerged was a cyclical interpretation of geologic time that reconciled the two timelines and resolved these fears, ideas continuing to inform scientific and cultural practice even today.

Author

• Jennifer Weiss, University of Arizona