Chaos in the Heavens

The debate on the origins of climate change is often considered a contemporary one, arising out of the present crisis. In Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking and debating on the consequences of our action upon the environment for centuries. This question was raised wherever history was accelerating: by the Conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the 19th century, by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until the Second World War.This book shows that climate change was at the heart of fundamental debates about colonisation, God, the state, nature, and capitalism, and that from these battles emerged some key concepts of contemporary environmental science and policy. For a brief interlude, science and industry instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an impassive climate. But, in the age of global warming, we must, once again, confront the chaos in the heavens.

A truly fabulous book -- surprising, thought-provoking and rich in historical irony. It is a necessary corrective to the narrative which makes the emergence of climate change as a matter of concern relatively recent and incremental. But it is more enlightening, more provocative and more entertaining than any mere necessity would have required. -- Oliver Morton, author of The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World and The Moon: A History for the Future
The upshot of this brilliant book is that historians have been asking the wrong question. For years we've been trying to date the emergence of a consciousness about the impacts of human activities on Earth's climate. But this awareness long predates modern science, as we learn from the authors' pathbreaking research. The real question, the one at the heart of their book, is why this awareness was always ambivalent and why it evaporated at the turn of the twentieth century. If you want to understand the long path to the climate crisis, read this book. -- Deborah Coen, Professor of History & History of Science & Medicine, Yale University
This brilliant book turns upside down the received story of climate science. Fressoz and Locher uncover a rich awareness of climate change in early modern times centered on forests and water. But with the advent of industrial society in the nineteenth century, wealthy Western nations embraced a new indifference to climate. If Fressoz and Locher are right, we need to look to the past to understand why climate mitigation has met with such fierce resistance in the present moment. Behind the climate denial of the oil lobby lies the Victorian faith in the imperturbable sky. -- Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
At once a cry of alarm and a global call to action, Chaos in the Heavens is a pathbreaking book which reveals not only that debates about climate change are centuries-old but also that our current apathy stems primarily from a false story of optimism and capitalist technophilia developed during the 20th century. Perhaps even more important, though, is the warning at the heart of this remarkable book that stories of climate change crises have been used to generate profits and been abused to wield many kinds of power over the most vulnerable on our planet for longer than we realize. -- Diana K. Davis, University of California at Davis, author of The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (2016)

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology, previously at Imperial College London, now based in Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of L’Apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque technologique and The Shock of the Anthropocene (with C. Bonneuil).Fabien Locher is a historian of science, technology and environment at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of Le Savant et la Tempête. Etudier l’atmosphère et prévoir le temps au XIXe siècle.

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