How does this theme play a role in your work? 

My scholarly and curatorial interests cover a wide spectrum whose common denominator might be labelled as Anthropocene humanities. I want to make a contribution to the profound realization that we live in a moment of fundamental geohistorical disruption and that we should act in accordance to it. My specific expertise lies in the history of the geosciences and its imminent connection to the history of scientific technologies and media. The study of Earth systems such as the atmosphere, the biosphere or the hydrosphere is, by its very nature, one that relies on international but also interdisciplinary collaboration. It posits, sometimes in a rather naïve way, a planetary whole above where there is fraction: political, cultural, and even academic. 

History shows that clearly and in sometimes perplexing and contradictory ways. Earth system science is a child of the Cold War, after all. These contradictions are in many ways defining also the present. The potency of novel technologies is seen both as cause and generic fix for many of today’s problems: unemployment, polarization, the climate going over the cliff. The technosphere is seen as cancer and its cure. I want to study how modern societies arrived at this Promethean bind and what kind of decisions, alternatives and shifting attitudes have dotted its way. 

What project(s) will you be working on during your fellowship at the Forum Basiliense? 

In my project I want to revisit the early days of Earth system research around the 1950s as a peculiar moment—and epistemic mode—to transcend geopolitical conflict. It is not without reason that the mid-20th century is considered an epochal threshold and the beginning of a new planetarity. Earth system science, as a study concerned with the identification of the drivers of global climate, weather systems, ocean currents, and the circulation of geochemical elements, is a “deterritorialized” science per se. At the same time, it is part of the emergence of a new planetary-territorial order under the conditions of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles, but also global information, trade, and migration. Scientific-technical developments and the world wars they sparked established a new supranational vista in which the entirety of the atmosphere, oceans, and continents became the terrain of interaction and, literally, the “sphere” of influence both for the coming conflicts and for global cooperation, as can be seen by the example of the International Geophysical Year 1957/58. 

I am particularly interested in two aspects: the epistemic-technological conditions that have formed this new, deterritorialized understanding of Earth as a system and the way in which such a systems view has already played with, or is even based on, specific forms of intervention and engineering. Weather modification and climate engineering have featured big in the 1950s, a time that dwelled on unlimited trust granted to technological progress—similarly, but also different, to today’s techno solutionism. Studying global cooperation from the vantage point of an “interventionist” attitude into the Earth system might reveal lessons for today’s renaissance of geoengineering, not least in its particularly Swiss pigmentation.