Climate Collections and Photosynthetic, Fossil-Fueled Atmospheres

Abstract

Historical, cultural, and technological collections are routinely put to work to illustrate narratives of progress, history, and identity. They can also convey new stories that articulate how cultural objects might serve as material expressions of climate change embedded in climate processes. This article considers the oldest surviving largely unaltered Boulton and Watt rotative engine, housed in the collection of the Science Museum, London, as an example to examine how objects are at once the material expression of carbon economies and cultures that have generated them and the material archives of the climate histories in which they are enmeshed. It draws on insights from the environmental humanities and the critical posthumanities and augments these with other knowledge practices from the biogeochemical sciences. Specifically, it utilizes stable carbon dating, whose methods provide the opportunity to locate particular cultural objects in relation to the deep time of planetary climate change. In doing so this paper develops the proposition that, articulated as such, these objects are complex climatic ecological compositions, and so understood, they can serve as cultural carbon mitigation strategies that occasion possibilities of new material and climatic attunement that can complement climate mitigation policies and programs. This proposition is trialed in relation to Object No. 1861-46—the Boulton and Watt “Lap” engine.

Heritage collections housed in museums comprise objects that range from the extraordinary—such as the one-thousand-year-old Viking ships Gokstad, Tune, and Oseberg in the Vikingskipshuset (Viking Ship Museum), Oslo—to the everyday, such as the matches, pencils, and toothbrushes found in the eclectic collection of the Museum of Everyday Life, Glover, Vermont.¹ Astonishing or banal, these objects are routinely put to work to invoke cultural memory and affective responses, telling human stories of cultural history, identity, and technological accomplishment. In recent years, technological objects have also been deployed to represent the histories of industrialization and colonialism and their complicity in the destructive planetary forces now associated with the Anthropocene. Emblematic objects of the early Industrial Revolution have been repositioned as avatars of the climate crisis. These objects include, for example, the Boulton and Watt rotative beam engine built in 1786 to pump water and later to grind barley for the Barclay & Perkins Brewery in Southwark, London,² and J. Edward Earnshaw and Co.’s Trestle steam machine (1862), which powered Nuremburg’s Municipal Gasworks.³ Both objects are now viewed as engines of the Anthropocene. The Boulton and Watt Rotative Beam engine is an iconic object permanently exhibited in the National Museum of Scotland. The Trestle steam machine took center stage in the Deutsches Museum exhibition Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (2014–2018). Everyday consumer items have also been curated to illustrate the impact of the climate crisis. For example, objects recovered from the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, held in Museum Victoria’s collection, have memorialized that catastrophe.⁴

Whether it is monumentalizing the engines that inaugurated the Anthropocene or memorializing mundane objects caught in the ensuing environmental disaster, these curations share a common orientation. They put human experiences—whether it be those of “great men,” the inventors and entrepreneurs, or everyday people—at the center of their storytelling.⁵ These approaches go some way toward acknowledging the modes in which the human and nonhuman worlds are profoundly entangled in the climate crisis; however, museum objects, whether they are rearticulated as harbingers of the Anthropocene or as the bearers of loss, predominately function at the discursive or cultural level.⁶ From the advent of a human-made geological era to the personal catastrophe of a wildfire, these curatorial strategies reanimate museum objects in relation to modernity’s “unintended consequences,” particularly the climate crisis. However, there is a materiality to these objects that is beyond the representational, one that inscribes them in a more-than-human world, that goes largely unacknowledged.

Collections can convey new stories that articulate how objects might serve as material expressions of climate change. These do not rely on anthropocentrism for their resonances. Rather new narratives can account for these objects as dynamically and materially embedded in climate change.⁷ Encompassing both the material expressions of carbon economies and cultures that have generated them and the material archives of a climate history, these objects’ very fabric—the organic material of which they are comprised—holds a history of rising fossil fuel emissions and of human carbon-burning activity. It is this materiality that this article brings to the fore.

Drawing on one collection example from the Science Museum, London, we consider how items can be rearticulated to highlight the climate histories that are embedded in the materials of their fabrication. With its foundation in the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Museum was founded in 1857 comprising the Royal Society of Arts collection, surplus items from the Great Exhibition as part of the South Kensington Museum, together with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Its technology and engineering collection became the Museum of Patents in 1858, and the Patent Office Museum in 1863. In 1883 the science collections became the Science Museum.⁸ Its collection of machinery has historically been curated as an exposition of scientific, technical, and industrial progress; the museum is a celebration of modernity and Britain's accomplishment. However, in recent years its collection has come to represent a more ambivalent legacy. It now has other resonances—of extraction, of ecological crisis, of colonial and Indigenous dispossession. Many of the Science Museum’s engineering and technology collection items have histories deeply entangled in a capitalist economy and its extractivist activities and the development of consumer culture, which have supported Great Britain's economic growth and contributed disproportionately to global carbon emissions. They are objects inseparable from the energy used to fuel, manufacture, and use them. They are objects animated by the ignition of fossil fuels and objects implicated in the historical emissions that we now face as climate change. In other words, they are objects with climate histories. Like other science and technology collections internationally, the Science Museum’s collection is already a climate collection. Nevertheless, the objects await to be articulated as such. Not only are these objects icons of the carbon-intensive cultures that produced them, they are also registers of the history of climate change layered into the materials of which they are composed.

Climate Mitigation and Museum Collections: Refiguring Agency

Recent efforts by museums to reduce their publics’ carbon footprint have been based on curatorial strategies directed to the communication of scientific, statistical information on rising greenhouse gas emissions. Frequently complemented by dramatic visualizations of melting ice, rising sea levels, ice core samples, and tree growth rings to bring scientific data into an affective register, these interpretive approaches are used to signal the ecological loss and existential threat of the climate crisis.⁹ Similarly, the testimonies of communities facing climate predicaments are regularly included to foreground that this is an interconnected crisis between the Global North and Global South. These affective and ethical strategies seek to raise awareness of climate change and mobilize personal commitments to reducing emissions.

Such curatorial approaches repeat the anthropocentrism of climate science and policy agendas, positioning individuals and communities as potential commanders and controllers of the atmosphere, as echoed in the subtitle to the Deutsches Museum Anthropocene exhibition (2014–2016), The Earth in Our Hands. Nevertheless, there is an emerging curatorial practice that invokes a more ecological and entangled optic on human-nonhuman relations. For example, the exhibition Human Nature (2019–) at the National Museum of World Cultures, Gothenburg, Sweden seeks to promote the idea of interconnectedness between human consumption practices and multispecies survival.¹⁰ The exhibition We Are Nature: Living in the Anthropocene (2017) at the Carnegie Museum of National History, Pittsburgh, contended, “We are not separate from nature, we are nature, and our decisions affect all life on earth,” and repositioned humans through the lens of ecological science into ecological systems.¹¹ Alongside shifts in practice there is an emerging literature in heritage and museum studies that advances and re-envisions humanist-centered heritage interpretive and curatorial practice.¹²

While these are laudable developments, what is proposed in this article is a deepening of this ecological optic by pressing the questions of materiality further. This builds on Fiona Cameron’s refigurations, in which curating becomes eco-curating, embracing a wider range of entities and processes, whereby collections become dynamic, bonded human-non-human entities, materials, and processes, which are reinterpreted as ecological compositions where the figure of the human—the makers, visitors, and curators—is repositioned as embedded and embodied agencies in distributed planetary processes.¹³ A biochemical analysis of their material fabric is added to the interpretation of cultural objects. This explicates objects as distinct forms of human-nonhuman biochemical relations that occasion possibilities for new forms of material and climatic attunement. To develop this contention this article draws critical insights from the posthumanities that not only decenter the figure of the human but distribute and make relational the collaborating and contesting agencies that have made this figure legible. In the present conjuncture the human is relationally configured as dynamic fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms in movement, folded into the chemical composition of the atmosphere, soils, plants, organic materials, and different forms of material culture, including the built environment and museum collections.¹⁴ The refiguration of humans as an urban species and an embodied agent of atmospheric change highlights the need to reconceive not only the way this species identifies itself as human but also how its members understand their subjectivity. Stacey Alaimo has posited the notion of the “transcorporeal subject” to describe a new figuration of the human after humanism, which is attuned to the relational interdependency and material circumstances of life and, in being so attuned, is a subject who bears a transcorporeal responsibility.¹⁵

For this purpose the transcorporeal subject is constituted through the convergence of embodied human-nonhuman agents that have transformed and are transforming the atmosphere’s biochemical composition and the earthly processes it supports. Our bodies as organic entities are composed of carbon that is stamped with a record of industrially processed carbons.¹⁶ As children of the Anthropocene, we are both subjects of fossil fuel capitalism and embodiments of an emission-enriched biochemical life-form. The fossil-fuel-combusted hydrocarbons pass through and across us as we draw sustenance, carbohydrates, and glucose from the consumption of plants, which in turn fuel us and through the emissions we breathe rebond in tissue, cell reproduction, and the replication of DNA.

In her discussion of multispecies survival and human-nonhuman relations of partial recuperation, Donna Haraway argues in the face of the unfolding ecological crisis that the key question is one of who, how, and in what ways we are bound together.¹⁷ Taking the lead from Haraway, questions of culture, collections, and climate mitigation are inseparable from an understanding of the biochemical agents embodied within collection items and of the curatorial strategies that make them tangible. Importantly, the articulation of these agential relations provides a strategy to rethink the positionality and situatedness of the human in climate history. It serves as an invitation to engage in the work of composing ethical, habitable worlds, ones that proceed in the acknowledgment of the uneven distribution of the drivers and consequences of climate change across populations and seek to redress the injustices of this distribution. Here, the who, how, and in what ways we are bound together in vital biochemical relations of human-nonhuman interconnectedness becomes the key question.¹⁸ It is central to how we understand ourselves, and the ecological relations in which we are now enmeshed. This question, and the understanding of the materiality on which it is contingent, warrants special attention from museums because it provides these institutions with a novel and distinctive way to engage with the predicament of the climate crisis and to build new publics around climate action.

We contend that this approach is contingent on a particular conceptual reconfiguration of heritage objects, that is, as climatic ecological compositions.¹⁹ Using this formulation we aim to highlight the ways in which heritage objects are not simply items of material culture understood as bounded, discrete entities and expressions of human-centric histories. Rather, they are semio-material assemblages that emerge in an alliance of discourses, human bodies, biological systems, earthly processes, and elemental materials and chemicals.²⁰ This mode of analysis folds out and makes visible the vital entanglements and articulations of human and nonhuman convergence embedded in an object’s composition. It seeks to explicate the unminded damage in which heritage collections are implicated and that has led to global heating. This mode of analysis offers the means to probe our proposition that heritage objects are material expressions of the convergence of human and nonhuman agencies in atmospheric relations.

Building on this contention these objects can be used to expand the repertoire of existing climate mitigation strategies as cultural mitigation strategies.²¹ Conventionally understood, carbon mitigators are those instruments and techniques directed at market restructure and behavioral change designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The most well-known are financial instruments, such as carbon credits, used to compensate for carbon emissions through emission trading schemes or carbon offsets programs. These instruments leverage the capacities of trees and soils to provide “ecological services” as sinks to soak up atmospheric carbon.²² While not directly folded into such market mechanisms, heritage objects might be refigured as mitigation strategies. This is not in the sense in which carbon offsetting has been regularly criticized as a practice offering to rekindle capitalism’s promise that we can enjoy consumerism without being too concerned about the ecological crisis. Rather than relieve visitors of responsibility, these demonstrative strategies have potential to activate visitors’ affective and cognitive responses in ways to effect social change and emissions reduction. As registers of anthropogenic carbon emissions linked to a history of atmospheric CO₂ levels, collections items can be pressed into the service of reducing greenhouse gases and preventing more from being produced by expanding and changing world views, attitudes, and practices. That is, by highlighting an accountability to nonhuman worlds and by making visible entangled climate histories, material situations, and consequences. These figurations have the potential to build ecological and communitarian orientations to atmospheric and more broadly planetary processes, signaling the deep bonds shared with all manner of entities—human and nonhuman—as collective polities.²³

Biochemical Convergence: ¹³C Analysis

Objects with wood in their fabrication are ideal candidates for the mode of analysis and forms of curatorial intervention proposed. This is so given the material’s significance as a substrate that records atmospheric climate change through biological CO₂ fixation, its amenability to techniques of stable carbon analysis, and its relative prevalence across collections as a material of manufacture. In taking this orientation, collection items of wooden fabrication become markers of anthropogenic atmospheric biochemical change and how such processes are inventoried across time and space as unequivocal outcomes of human fossil-fuel burning. The concern here is to investigate how these objects register the ways in which human discourse, practices, and bodies are enrolled in carbon-intensive economies and cultures built on the extractive industrial processes.

Atmospheric biochemical processes leave their signature in wooden tissue through the dynamic processes of photosynthesis. Through photosynthetic processes plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and soil, drawing in ¹²C and ¹³C carbon atoms through their leaves. Combining carbon atoms with the sun’s energy in specialist cells, chloroplasts, plants make glucose and carbohydrates to grow and then release oxygen back into the air as the vital biochemical agent that sustains the biosphere.²⁴

The key technique for identifying changing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations in relation to plants is the measurement of the relative ratios between ¹²C and ¹³C carbon atoms, in which the latter decreases over time as it is registered in the composition of wood tissue.²⁵ The biochemical basis of ¹³C analysis is that wood is formed from assimilating all forms of carbon from the atmosphere through a plant’s tissues. Plants prefer processing the lighter and more common ¹²C molecules, leaving heavier and more enriched ¹³C behind in the atmosphere. These ratios are analyzed relative to a geological standard and climate records. Because fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas are made from long dead plants and microorganisms, they are a depleted form of ¹³C. The decline in ¹³C in the atmosphere over time (around 3 percent per year) is consistent with the burning of fossil fuels. The global atmospheric CO₂ concentrations of ¹²C and enriched ¹³C at the time when the plant that produced the wood was alive and processing CO₂ can be calculated with some biological assumptions.²⁶ The method by which these ratios are measured involves taking small samples of wood from selected items, from which CO₂ molecules are combusted, separated, and quantified.²⁷ The isotopes ¹²C, ¹³C, and ¹⁴C exhibit different, distinctive flight registers in mass spectrometry in which ¹³C isotopes can be counted relative to ¹²C with fossil-fuel-based carbon comprising fewer ¹³C molecules.²⁸ A host of scientists including David Ellsworth advanced these techniques in the late 1990s.²⁹

The application of Ellsworth’s techniques to the wooden elements of heritage objects offers a novel approach to locate these items in relation to a trajectory of anthropogenic atmospheric biochemical change. Simulated charts articulate the depletion of ¹³C in oak and eucalypts in values gathered through tree sampling in Staffordshire, the Midlands in the UK, the heartland of the Industrial Revolution from the 1780s and the Driftway, Western Sydney, Australia. These values were expanded using the atmospheric δ¹³C signal through publicly available monthly δ¹³C values from the Mauna Loa observatory, Hawaii, and compiled records of carbon isotopes in atmospheric CO₂ for historical simulations and an annual scaling of those values back to 1780. Using these historical simulations rather than the material sampling of objects themselves, this article cross-references this data with the provenance of specific Boulton and Watt rotative engines and the rise of fossil fuel emissions in the UK and Australia. Building on this conceptual work related to the species from which the objects are manufactured and with reference to their historical contexts, these objects come to provide a distinctive biochemical signature of industrial human-nonhuman relations and signal the unintended climate consequences of lifestyles, economies, and processes of extraction that these objects embody. Such heritage objects bear the hallmark of an anthropogenic biosphere: they are registers of the earthly biogeochemical processes that are decisively shaped by the carbon-intensive economies and cultures of consumerism in which they are implicated. Combining ¹³C analysis with perspectives from the environmental humanities and posthumanities and more-than-human curatorial theory through a series of transdisciplinary and experimental cogenerative dialogues (cogens), we have sought to entangle humans with enriched carbon atmospheric processes, posthuman curatorial practice as it pertains to collections interpretation, and tree ecology.³⁰ If the techniques of ¹³C analysis locate these objects in climate history, it is the protocols of the environmental humanities and posthumanities that describe the agency of carbon isotopes in this conceptual framing and the proposed material samples taken from these objects. This is an emergence that necessarily reconfigures the environmental, technical, and social narratives in which these objects have been historically inscribed as heritage collections. Explicating the climate histories layered into these items in this way greatly enhances their interpretive value and pedagogical worth. This we explore in relation to our selected heritage object.

The Boulton and Watt “Lap” Engine, Object No. 1861-46

The Boulton and Watt “Lap” engine in the Science Museum collection collection is the oldest almost intact machine of its type in existence. Built by Watt in 1788 in Boulton and Watt’s Soho Manufactory in Birmingham, the lapping engine was used to drive forty-three metal polishing machines used for lapping and polishing Boulton’s manufactured articles such as buckles, buttons and silverware and, from 1797, blanking presses for the production of coinage. By the time Boulton and Watt’s partnership ended in 1800, they had built 451 engines, of which 268 examples were rotative.³¹ The 1788 engine was decommissioned in 1858 and was acquired the same year by the Science Museum, where the engine is exhibited as a celebration of the history of modern technological advancement. In recent years this engine’s role in anthropogenic climate change has been acknowledged.

These are some key moments in the object’s complicated history, moments that oscillate between the specificity of this particular object and its materiality and the broader technological, economic, social, and environment processes in which a global and climate history of the engine is implicated and that this particular example of its engineering comes to represent. Below we attend to the contours of this history before returning to questions of its biochemical composition and its implications for this history.

The eighteenth-century Scottish engineer and inventor James Watt, alongside his collaborator, the entrepreneur Matthew Boulton, changed economic and social history and inadvertently the future of the planet’s biogeochemistry.³² They did so, according to conventional historical accounts, with their epoch-making device: the steam-driven, rotative beam engine. Watt’s rotative engines have long been both celebrated as an emblem of the “age of steam” and denigrated as an instrument of labor’s subjection in the factory system. But as a device deeply embedded in an emerging global carbon economy, it is now presented as a harbinger of climate change as much as a symbol of the Industrial Revolution. The year the first Boulton and Watt rotative beam steam engine was built, steamed, and put into production was 1784. It was commissioned by Henry Goodwyn for his London brewery, the Red Lion, and is an early candidate for the date initiating a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.³³

Deploying “the sun and planet gear” method to convert reciprocating motion to rotary motion, it was William Murdoch, an engineer and employee of Boulton and Watt, who developed the machine. Watt patented the design in 1781. Ending an earlier era of renewable energy from wind and water, coal-fueled rotative engines were a more efficient method of mechanical production. Instead of using atmospheric pressure acting on top of the engine’s piston, the innovation of the engine was to use steam to condense above and below the piston.³⁴ The rotative motion the engine generated was applied to numerous industrial processes, where it supplied the means to exploit energy-dense fossil fuels and the labor-power of workers, harnessed to the routines of industrial processes and their machines, more efficiently than previously possible. Thus the engine was to have a major role in the development of rotation devices in the Industrial Revolution, driving not only the machinery of Britain's factory system, including cotton, sugar, flour, paper, and textile factories; iron mills; and breweries and distilleries but also their supporting infrastructures, canals, and waterworks. The newly invented engine incited wonder and awe. People marveled that it could do the work of twenty-four horses, at the level of productivity such an engine could attain, and at how it could incite moral and material improvement for the masses. In a marketing coup for both the brewer and the engine’s manufacturer, King George III and Queen Charlotte visited the Whitbread Brewery on May 24, 1787, adding royal patrons to the list of the engine’s admirers as they looked on at the second engine of its type in operation.³⁵

When the engine was manufactured, it was an aspiration of a human future—one that Boulton and Watt felt entitled to build and shape for themselves and for others that purchased their steam engines. These were imperial, phallocentric futures to be achieved through technological advancement enfolded with fossil-fuel-driven capitalist expansionary ambitions.³⁶ This is evident in the excited responses to demonstrations of rotative engines in the Boulton and Watt’s factory and the sense of urgency on the part of industrialists to procure their own. The first inquiry to Watt came from Henry Goodwyn on April 17, 1784, for a four-horse engine to grind malt in his brewery.³⁷ The second inquiry came from Samuel Whitbread on August 26, 1784.³⁸ He ordered a ten-horsepower engine.³⁹ The correspondence about these machines concerned economies of scale, levels of productivity, and their machine and boiler capacities.⁴⁰ The volume of coal required to drive these machines was of particular concern, because at the time coal was heavily taxed in England. Requests for the machines soon arrived from all corners of the empire.

The Boulton and Watt “Lap” engine is a centerpiece of the Energy Hall, formerly the Watt Hall, at the Science Museum, London, dedicated to Britain's engineering achievements since the Industrial Revolution. The “Lap” engine was first acquired in 1858. It was first opened as the Watt Hall on January 14, 1936, to celebrate the bicentenary of Watt's birth on January 19, 1736. Now named the Energy Hall, it includes three original beam engines, Watt’s original experimental models from 1765 showcasing his work on the separate condenser.⁴¹ The Hall seeks to “trace the remarkable story of steam and how it shaped the world we live in today.” Interpretive labelling articulates the role of fossil-fuel burning technology to generate steam as “the driving force behind British industry for 300 years.”⁴² Another feature of the Watt Hall is the original attic workshop of engineer James Watt, preserved as it was when he died in 1819. This exhibit, titled “James Watt and the World,” venerates Watt’s fossil-fuel driven inventions as remarkable and as one of the “greatest benefactors of the human race.” From steam power to tea services, visitors are invited to “explore the relationship between Watt’s steam engine and a new age of consumption and discover his incredible legacy.”⁴³

The “Lap” engine’s exhibit was framed around its technical function and technological innovation. Its interpretive focus was on the steam engine workings, its technical development and improvement, the physical principles underlying its operation, the personal histories of its principal inventors, the use of models to show its inner workings, and its open display for observing and inspecting the engine. This technical disposition has long accompanied the engine, as is clear in letters between Watt and Whitbread in their negotiations leading up to its commission. This includes details of the engine’s design and engineering, its components and how each of them function together, the different materials used to make each component, and how each operates with respect to the machine’s operation. It was an orientation that the museum in its exhibition of the engine endorsed without reflection. This technicist interpretation of the engine across its life history shares in what Rosi Braidotti calls an anthropocentric mindset, where only human qualities, needs, actions, creativity, technological achievements, and knowledge matters are significant.⁴⁴ Such understandings are at the expense of the object’s historicity and at the same time ignore the forms of violence inscribed in its manufacture and operations.

The history of the “Lap” engine is a history inseparable from that of capitalist extractivism, exploiting not only the energy latent in coal but also that of the human body: the labor-power of a disembedded peasantry and their children, who formed a new urban working class, and that of slaves, whose plantation labor supplied the raw materials for British factories (cotton) and the cheap calories (sugar) that fueled the bodies of factory workers. The engine’s genesis and operation are inseparable from the colonial plantations from which the factory system’s raw materials were derived and capital’s profit extracted.⁴⁵ It was profits from the transatlantic slave trade that provided Britain with capital for its industrialization. Many of the central innovations and entrepreneurial ventures were funded by these profits. The development of these engines was no exception. The William Deacon Bank, an institution that was founded by wealthy plantation owners, supplied the finance. Subsequently, numerous engines were exported to the sugar cane fields of the Caribbean for mills to refine the crop.⁴⁶ The technical and anthropocentric mentalities that have accompanied the engine belie not only the violence of extraction to which it was integral but also the ways in which its enrolment in rising CO₂ emissions and environmental destruction are implicated in what Nigel Clark calls inhuman futures—at odds with human intent and action and human rights, or a sense of justice.⁴⁷

Human-Nonhuman Histories

Supplementing the object’s social and economic histories with a consideration of its implication in biogeochemical processes, the engine becomes an object to think with and act with differently, not one of mastery, but one of ecological embeddedness. The engine has multiple interfaces of atmospheric relations—condenser, boiler, copper and later iron, and the burning of fossilized plants and animals. The engine was also an interface between different expressions of energy—between the inhuman, in its explosive release of the energy stored in coal, and the human—of the various forms of labor-power harnessed to the machine through the factory system and plantation slavery. The engine embodies an array of nonhumans entangled with human designs and forms of labor-power and its exploitation.

The engine is a collection item with the potential to challenge the privileging of human-centered histories, designs, and actions. Most importantly, it can be put to work to “put humans back in their ecological place.”⁴⁸ This refiguring has the potential to bring to the fore our coexistence with the nonhuman world and with earthly, including atmospheric, processes.

The nonhuman world in the standard accounts of the engine acts as a background and a resource for the development of industrial society.⁴⁹ Haraway invites us to think in thick presences with respect to our biological relationships with others and consider who we are enfolded with, and how.⁵⁰ In the case of the engine, the enfolding of human designs with nonhuman forces and entities is central to its operation.⁵¹ It is a more-than-human and a nonhuman creation. It comprises inhuman earthly elements of fire and water. Murdoch and Watt cultured these forces through a new steam condenser, which harnessed water in its steam phase through coal-fueled boiling and released the CO₂ of that which once composed creatures and plants long dead into the atmosphere.⁵² Other nonhumans central to the making and operation of the engine include its timber and metals: deal wood such as conifer⁵³ and oak used in beams for its strength, copper and cast iron for its conducting properties (the latter also for its strength), lead for its noncorrosive properties, brass (a combination of copper and zinc) for its bearings due to its durability. All of these elements and their nonhuman agencies were crafted and therefore cultured by the coppersmiths and blacksmiths who are also embodied in multifarious ways in the engine’s design and operations.

Within the interpretive material accompanying the “Lap” engine, references are made to nonhuman agency as physical principles. These human-nonhuman entanglements are evident in the exhibition through working models and engines, animations, and interactive screens, such as a demonstration of the physics of combustion and the expansive properties of steam and steam pressure as a more-than-human agency. The capacity of water and steam was a central force and cultured innovation that enabled capitalist expansion. Through the use of new materials and modified design features across the life of these engines, multifarious nonhuman agencies are harnessed in service of capitalist accumulation directed toward making the engine more efficient, productive, and powerful.

The Engine as a Climatic Ecological Composition

The engine in its complex semio-materiality can be thought of as a climatic ecological composition. It is composed of the interrelations between: metals belonging to the geological substrates of the planet and their extraction; the fossil-fuel combustion integral to its mechanic function; the rise of capitalist industrial production; the exploitation of the land and of labor; colonial and Indigenous dispossession; and air pollution. In addition, changes to the engines also reveal an emerging climate history embodied in its wooden components as a result of its fossil-fuel combustion and its correlation with increases in CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere, to which its mechanic and combusting functions to generate energy also contributed. The engine’s wooden componentry holds a baseline of rising CO₂ levels from the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The social activation of the “Lap” engine as a climatic ecological composition can be made through, in this case, the analytical cutting into its wooden components and contexts based on its embedded ¹²C and ¹³C ratios and the register of depletion of the latter over time in respect to the photosynthetic sequence and species of tree used in its construction, adjustments made to the engine during its life, and the timbered fabric of its historical contexts. Furthermore, such carbon ratios as a register of biochemical change can be linked to key moments in these engines’ histories: the engines’ commission and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution/Anthropocene.

In thinking of climate change as a specific milieu in which we are all subject, Colebrook explains that sight is lost of the degree that human life is deeply implicated in the climate’s timeframes and rhythms.⁵⁴ Scientifically, the global human fossil-fuel burning populations are configured as radiative forcing agents through the chemical forcing of greenhouse gases—CO₂ primarily, as well as methane, CFCs, ozone, and N₂O. But as climate forcing agents, such populations are positioned outside the climate—it is the chemicals in emissions that force heating. Drawing on Nicolas Shapiro and Eben Kirksey’s invitation to think chemically as a “chemical species,”⁵⁵ we refigure these populations not as forcing agents but as more deeply material, as conjoined fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms in dynamic planetary movement.

Historian Bob Johnson’s notion of fossil-fuel intimacy offers a deeper way of interrogating how fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms might be configured conceptually. He argues that modern subjects like those we propose have erotic attachments to fossil fuels that are profoundly deep and extensively “embodied . . . and rooted in minutia, in the intimate quotidian rituals of the home, workplace, streets and stores.”⁵⁶ As a result these subjects are embedded and embodied in an infrastructure of mineral energy flows that assert themselves in and on the flesh, the psyche, and the horizon of life itself. When the first engine was steamed in 1784, fossil-fuel combustion began what Johnson calls “a trajectory of bodies’ immersion and saturation in the materiality and praxis of modernity’s rituals, conditions of life under the rule of fossil capitalism.”⁵⁷ The engine as an embodiment of these aspirations and as a transfer point for the expansion of capitalism led to the ignition of new fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms, ones in which combustion became a defining element of capital and delineating for its unintended consequences. At the very moment when Goodwyn’s engine was first fired, those who came to admire it were the unwitting witnesses to the birth of more-than-human coconstituted climates. The engine’s complicity in fossil capitalism energetically powered capital growth and the standards of living of many—enrolling these populations as fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms.

Human-Nonhuman Fossil-Fueled Biochemical Climates

The engine registers a trajectory of emerging human-nonhuman climates from the start of the Industrial Revolution through its wooden components and through the events and contexts in which the engine was implicated or became connected. Significant moments in the engine’s history of combustion and its contribution to rising carbon dioxide levels registered as parts per million in the air also catalog the trajectory of the emergence of fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms in dynamic movement. Different types of ecological compositional cuts can be made into and across its material composition and the registers of human history and deep time. What we are interested in here is making visible the combustive traces that historically distinguish humans as a chemical species and mapping their materialities in contemporary biosocial realms. Our data reveal the analytical cuts into the engine’s human-nonhuman biochemical climates or atmospheres and their worlding, using depleted ¹³C values as parts per thousand (permille) in wood as markers of human agency. Significantly, the engine registers the temporalities of the fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms in photosynthesis, in the atmosphere, and in combustion.

The engine’s oak and eucalypt timbers in context connect it through plant history and form a human-nonhuman wooding bond in which CO₂ is gathered and stored to provide energy for the plant’s growth. This photosynthetic process produces a memory of the atmosphere’s composition in the trees’ tissue, which carbon analysis makes legible. The ¹³C data, for example, register the beginning of combusted fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms and their enfolding into the atmosphere as a free gas, as concentrations of carbon dioxide per million molecules of air, and into plants’ biological and chemical bonds: first in oak and as ¹²C values and declining δ¹³C values, and then in the engine through its organic components. Each ratio is an analytical cut into the photosynthetic wood bonding formulated mathematically from live tree samples and historical simulations as human-nonhuman climate changes.

In a letter dated April 27, 1781, John Iddins, a timber merchant in New Street, Birmingham, offered Matthew Boulton several oak trees suitable for making beams.⁵⁸ Until 1798, all rotative engine framing was made of oak, including the working beam, its support, and connecting rod. The cylinder was also mounted on an oak frame. At first these beams were plain oak logs, then beams built up of several logs were introduced; but with the advent of the double-acting engine the repeated reversal of stress to which the beam was subjected made it peculiarly liable to failure.⁵⁹

Ellsworth’s chart developed from oak trees growing in Staffordshire in the West Midlands, the heart of the Industrial Revolution around 38 miles from Boulton and Watt Soho Manufactory in Birmingham. The oak used in the construction of Boulton and Watt’s engines were likely grown and sourced locally. Therefore these simulated charts likely represent a register of carbon emissions in this location from the start of the Industrial Revolution and the scaling up of fossil fuel combustion through industrial development over more than 200 years.

In figure 2, Ellsworth demonstrates the simulated trend in the depletion of δ¹³C values in oak wood. The decline in ¹³C in the atmosphere is consistent with the ¹³C composition of fossil fuels. Burning plant or fossilized plant material, such as fossil fuels, releases into the atmosphere the ¹²C isotopes that plants absorbed through photosynthesis millions of years ago in the form of CO₂ molecules. The added ¹²C isotopes in the atmosphere decrease the overall ¹³C/¹²C ratio.⁶⁰

In Watt’s letter to Samuel Whitbread on December 7, 1784, the process of the engine’s construction and the qualities of the materials from which it was to be made were explained. He detailed that the engine’s timbers were ordered in December 1784. The engine’s working beam was made of English oak, because of its properties as durable, straight grained, and seasoned, as were the cape piece of the frame, which carries one end of the shaft of the flywheel, and the corner of the shaft of the flywheel. The main uprights, the spring beams, and the crossbeams were made from fir from Danzig (present-day Gdansk, Poland), as were the side planks and cistern ends. The plug frame and plug tree was made of wainscot oak.⁶¹

In 1784, the year that the first rotative engine was commissioned and steamed in Goodwyn’s brewery, the expected δ¹³C value was −24.32 permille in its oak structure, beam, and its wooden teeth driving the gear. At the time there were no instruments measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Calculations back-estimated from the wood suggest this value to be indicative of CO₂ levels of about 293 ppm at the start of the Industrial Revolution and the construction of the first rotative beam engine commissioned by Goodwyn.

Likewise, the support structure of the existing, largely unaltered “Lap” engine built in 1788 was made from English oak, held together with wrought iron straps and bolts. The flywheel was 16 feet in diameter and was fitted with 304 wooden gear teeth also made from oak and used to drive a counter-shaft which drove each individual lapping and polishing machine. When the “Lap” engine was commissioned and put into service in 1788, the expected δ¹³C value in its oak components was likely to have been −24.34 permille.

In 1795, the beams in engines were strengthened with oak, and δ¹³C values of oaks in the Midlands, from which the wood was likely sourced, are expected to have registered as −24.35 permille, demonstrating a slight decline in its ¹³C register, signaling the first indication of the emergence of fossil-fueled biochemical life forms and human-non-human atmospheres. By 1800 Boulton and Watt had built 451 engines in which 268 were rotative like the “Lap” engine, although by that time there were also many other manufacturers in the market.⁶² Between 1785 and 1799, twenty-one engines were ordered by foreign buyers and by 1825, eighty-six engines.⁶³ The largest markets for rotative engines were the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, France, and India and as far afield as the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Russia.⁶⁴ Oak beams were used in all engines from 1786 to 1798. From 1798, cast iron was used increasingly more frequently in the construction in the working beam, the connecting rod, the column under the beam, and the gearing due to its superior strength.⁶⁵ Some oak was still used in their construction. Nineteen years later in 1814, condensers were lined with oak⁶⁶ and at that time likely registered −24.42 permille of ¹³C relative to the fossil standard.

In 1858, when the “Lap” engine was decommissioned and acquired by the Science Museum, the oak trees near the Soho Manufactory would have likely registered δ¹³C values of −24.65 permille, demonstrating a greater decline in its ¹³C register. In 1936, the year the Watt Hall at the Science Museum was opened, registered δ¹³C values were likely to be −24.70 permille. This value therefore registered an intensification of emissions and of fossil-fueled lifeforms in the photosynthetic register.

According to Ellsworth's calculations, the decline in δ¹³C values of oaks from this location show a sharp decline after 1950 with δ¹³C of oak wood values of −24.75 permille further declining by 2023 to −26.26 permille in 2022 surrounding the now archaeological remains of the manufactory and the housing estate that exists on the site. The “Lap” engine remains a time capsule of biochemical atmospheric relations embodied in the oak trees that grew in the Midlands at the very beginning of the emergence of photosynthetic fossil-fueled atmospheres.

Figure 3 demonstrates this trend in the depletion of δ¹³C permille values in eucalyptus. In 1788, the year the “Lap” engine was built and put into service, the First Fleet and its human cargo of convicts arrived in New South Wales, the first of eighty thousand transportees drawn from Britain's underclass, many of whom worked in the factories powered by Watt’s steam machines. The likely δ¹³C values in eucalyptus: −25.90 permille on First Nations Darug country, now the area of Western Sydney close to Western Sydney University Hawkesbury campus.

The year the Whitbread engine arrived in Sydney from Birmingham later to become part of the Powerhouse, Sydney collection coincided with the one hundredth anniversary of the European invasion of the Australian continent. By that year, 1888, global surface temperatures had already risen by 0.15 degrees Celsius.⁶⁷ Eucalyptus trees would have likely registered −26.40 and by 1988—Australia’s bicentennial year—registered δ¹³C at −27.31 permille, from the simulation. This translated into a CO₂ concentration of 360 ppm⁶⁸ and a global surface temperature increase of 0.7 degrees Celsius.⁶⁹ The δ¹³C of −28.9 permille embedded in eucalypt timber and corresponding oak timber on the Soho manufactory site equated to CO₂ concentrations of 412 ppm;⁷⁰ and a projected 1.3 degrees Celsius increase in global surface temperature.⁷¹ As curatorial agencies the oaks and eucalypts, whose timber contributed to the fabrication of the engine and its historical contexts, register the emergence of fossil-fuel biochemical life-forms to whose combustive activities the trees’ tissue is testimony.

Conclusion

Multiple fossil-fuel biochemical life-forms are embedded in the engines and in their contexts. Most significantly the refiguration of modern populations who burn fossil fuels is connected to plant agencies and atmospheric histories. Humans are folded into the chemical composition of the atmosphere and declining ¹³C levels, as well as the changes in the carbon biochemical composition of plant tissue, which is remembered in timber and integrated into a museum’s fabrics in its exhibition objects and building structures. The biochemical fossil-fueled life-forms not only become embedded in the technologies and everyday objects; their emergence also provokes new ways of thinking with the nonhuman world, which opens museum collections potentiality to serve as novel cultural carbon mitigation strategies.

Collections as climatic ecological compositions have their beginning in the deep past and geological time and are woven in multiple temporalities and shared histories of the human and the nonhuman. They embody the processes and consequences of Indigenous dispossession; of the Atlantic slave trade; of the social, gender, and economic inequalities of extractive capitalism; and of the destruction of culture and environmental violence. By disassembling and refiguring the engine as an ecological composition, the boundaries that insist on the distinction of the human dissolve, the borders between the humans and the nonhumans blur. Collections become deeply connected to land, air, plants, animals, soil, earth, elements, chemicals, metals. They also become embedded in an expanded cosmos and in the multiple temporal and enfolding processes and scales, including planetary conditions requiring recuperation.⁷² This figuration of collections invokes Haraway’s awareness of the possibilities for thinking in different forms and an ethical commitment to “thinking with”—as opposed to the myth of the hubristic human focused on “think for himself” or, indeed, in the case of the engine, creating and enacting a world of surplus value for an imperial capitalist patriarchy.

As an ecological composition, the “Lap” engine is a provocative register of human-nonhuman atmospheric relations, thick with human-nonhuman climates and diverse temporalities. Through the photosynthetic process, it turns out that plants exercise a curatorial agency as sensors and registers of the emergence of fossil-fueled biochemical life-forms. The many temporalities of the photosynthetic, of molecular bonding, of changing weather, of global heating that are registered in the tissues of trees are made legible as ¹³C depletion. Museum professionals may no longer lament over how to curate cultural collections for climate change because they lack tangible evidence of atmospheric change—these changes are written into the very fabric of collection items.

In provoking new attunements to atmospheric entanglements, the refiguration of the engine opens a new moment in this object’s history and, with it, its potential as a cultural carbon mitigator. The ecological relations exposed in its material analysis afford opportunities for engaging broad publics in a new figuration of posthuman fossil-fueled life-forms, as a lever for provoking what education theorist Karen Malone calls speculative imaginaries of postcarbon worlds.⁷³ Indebted to the curatorial agency of plants, collections refigured as climate collections are loaded with a new potentiality with the capacity to trigger new dispositions of thinking with—as ecological thoughts, as expressions of coexistence, and as forms of storytelling. But they are more than objects that tell stories—they are dense material, semiotic, elemental, technical compositions always composing, distributing, and enfolding multiple temporalities and processes of human and nonhuman times.⁷⁴ In recalling the memory of wood the multiplicities entanglements and temporalities woven into the fabric of museum objects like the engine are now open to new curatorial imaginaries and to future publics invested in the prospect of a world in common.

Acknowledgments

This article was the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between Associate Professor Fiona Cameron, who works on museum collections, more-than and non-human agencies, and posthumanities thinking, and two Western Sydney University colleagues: Professor David Ellsworth, an international expert on trees’ responses to enhanced CO₂ emissions as carbon sinks and carbon-13 analysis; and Dr. Ben Dibley, a museum scholar of the Anthropocene. This work was background research and an incubator for the Australian Research Council–funded Linkage project, Curating Museum Collections for Climate Change Mitigation, with Western Sydney University in partnership with the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, and the New Institute, Rotterdam (2021–2024), project no. LP200100103. The project is led by Associate Professor Fiona Cameron (Chief Investigator and Project Leader) with Chief Investigators Professor David Ellsworth and Professor Karen Malone (Swinburne University of Technology) and Partner Investigators Dr. Deborah Lawler-Dormer (Powerhouse) and Distinguished Professor Rosi Braidotti (New Institute, Rotterdam).

Notes

References