Consolations of the Earth: Geological Humanisms of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article looks toward nineteenth-century earth sciences with attention to their humanistic themes. In the early decades of the century, multiple lines of evidence concretized a humanistic experience of man as a finite being with a contingent and accidental planetary existence. Geological humanism refers to the way that themes of earthly existence routinely influenced the status and meaning of being human, culturally and within the sciences, with the collapse of Enlightenment aesthetics of symmetry, purpose, and order in the late eighteenth century. While earth sciences recast humanistic themes in empirical terms, by the latter half of the nineteenth century scientists also regularly articulated prophecies of secular extinction or demise that were resolved, but only partly, both with reference to a long-standing racial schema and through routine consolations that a planet modified by human activity would be a better earth. Coal played a particular role in mediating between earth and atmosphere, mineral and life, and matter and energy. This article details several of these secular consolations offered to popular audiences by prominent climate scientists to show that the earth was far from being understood as a stable domain of nature that could be taken for granted.

This article offers a reading of nineteenth-century earth sciences with attention to their humanistic themes. Multiple fields of science emerged in the early decades of the century, across Europe and in many colonial settings, that undermined Enlightenment universalism and concretized a humanistic experience of man as a finite being with a contingent and accidental planetary existence. While earth sciences recast humanistic themes in empirical terms, by the latter half of the nineteenth century scientists also regularly articulated prophecies of secular extinction or demise that were resolved, but only partly, both with reference to a long-standing racial schema and through routine consolations that a planet modified by human activity would be a better earth. Themes of earthly existence routinely influenced the status and meaning of being human, culturally and within the sciences, with particular transformations around the early nineteenth century. If this geological humanism was an emergent “formation of subjectivity within a geologic horizon,” it was constituted in a novel experience of the earth among Europeans whose own humanity was at stake.¹ This domain of planetary social thought revises common understandings of humanistic thought that sometimes presume the earth was taken for granted prior to the emergence of climatic discourses, or that the planetary has only recently become unheimlich—uncanny or inhospitable.²

I investigate this geological humanism through scientists whose research laid the groundwork for modern climate science. I take “the geologic,” following Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, not as a class of objects defined by the scope of the science but as “a type of connection between things,” broadly emphasizing the interrelations among orogenic, glacial, climatic, and mineralogical processes.³ By geological humanism, I refer to the persistent evocation of a problematization of human existence on a finite, rocky, and contingent earth in the early nineteenth century.⁴ Nineteenth-century earth scientists mediated an increasingly secular experience of an indifferent universe. I bear in mind Kathryn Yusoff’s observation that humanist projects were also inhumanist in the manner in which dislocations between human and animal, and between animate beings and inanimate matter, were crucial for devastating political projects such as Indigenous genocide and the transatlantic slave trade.⁵ At an epistemic level, geological contingencies contrasted sharply with classical Enlightenment images of the planetary as an idealized sphere with an underlying premise of perfection. The earth as a matter of humanistic significance was linked to heavily clichéd racializations that, as Immanuel Kant suggested in his 1755 treatise on the formation of planets, positioned Europeans in contrast to “the Greenlander and the Hottentot.” On the one hand, when the human was evoked, it often had an empty, transcendental quality; on the other hand, a racial schema was usually not far behind.

Following Gayatri Spivak’s evocation of planetarity under the sign of poiesis rather than istoria, I trace rhetorical figures across earth sciences that repeatedly raised troubling questions about the nature of earthly existence for privileged European and settler American observers of the planetary.⁶ There is an especially marked contrast between eighteenth-century geotheory marked by commitments to purpose and symmetry, and the emerging sense of the earth as a jumble of decay devoid of reason, as Goethe put it, such that “there can be no geology for reason has no role here.”⁷ The rhetorical figures include periodic references to racial order, prophecies of extinction, and consolation offered to lay audiences who were being asked to confront the fragility of human or European existence in the face of an indifferent universe. This geological decentering of the human prefigured important aspects of current Anthropocene debates.⁸ Rather than reduce this plurality to a singular Enlightenment project, I emphasize a distinction between those projects that revel in earthly existence and those that display a certain contempt for the earth.

In what follows, I first characterize the challenges to Enlightenment reason at the end of the eighteenth century insofar as they applied to the emergence of the earth sciences, and I associate that with a shifting aesthetics of knowledge—from heavenly spheres to the chaotic lithosphere. I then step back briefly to situate that within the conjoined programs of the mine and conquest amid Europe’s intellectual milieu. Earth sciences emerged around the proliferation of generative questions that formed a new horizon of earthly existence. Prophecies of planetary demise and extinction in popular science were coupled with a genre of consolation, which I trace through the work of several scientists who played important roles in the emergence of climatology. I conclude by discussing the implications of geological humanism for earth politics today.

The Cracked Sphere

Samuel Langley, a self-trained atmospheric scientist and astronomer, played a crucial role in nineteenth-century climate science by measuring the effects of the atmosphere in trapping solar radiation in order to quantify the amount of energy that Earth receives from the sun. As director of the Alleghany Observatory in Pittsburgh and then Secretary of the Smithsonian, his work embodied the post–Civil War drive to institutionalize science in the service of nation-building, among other things developing standardized astronomical time services that enabled the expansion of railroads across the American West. Yet he also offered a wide-ranging humanistic and popular interpretation of the significance in what he called the “new astronomy”—astronomy in the service of understanding Earth itself. In his 1880s text, the cracked globe (fig. 1) stands out as an especially poetic image that illustrates the geology of living and dead celestial bodies.

Langley used the image of the cracked sphere to describe the structure of the moon’s topography, arguing that “the moon was once a liquid sphere over which a hard crust formed, and . . . in subsequent time the expansion of the interior before solidification cracked the shell as we see.”⁹ The cracks in the surface of the moon, which seem to radiate out from the lunar pole in a similar manner, could be used to explain orogenesis, the formation of its mountain ridges.

However, the cracked sphere of the moon was offered as an image of death. Langley thought he could see the three stages of the life and death of astronomical bodies in the sun, planets, and moon. The sun’s life was apparent not only in its life-sustaining heat but in the details of its roiling surface, periodically demonstrating massive solar storms many times larger than the earth. The sun’s energy was woven into the composition of the totality of life: “Since, then, we are the children of the sun, and our bodies a product of its rays, as much as the ephemeral insects that its heat hatches from the soil, it is a worthy problem to learn how things earthly depend upon this material ruler of our days.”¹⁰ The life of our own Earth was evident in the power of volcanic activity, which was not the case of the lifeless moon. “The moon, then, is dead,” he concluded. “And if it ever was the home of a race like ours, that race is dead too.”¹¹

For at least some earth scientists, life’s total dependency on the earth was bound up with a view of the inhuman powers of the earth, and indeed the cosmos more broadly, that were far from the lifeless and inert. Yet where did the idea or image of the cracked sphere come from?

The cracked sphere frames the idea of a molten planetary body that becomes buckled and furrowed, shrinking as it cools in a process that results in orogeny, the formation of mountain ridges, in a structured radial pattern. It supposes a process of planetary formation that is linear and directional, endowing astronomical bodies with a history. The idea derives from what is now known as the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis, a version of which was articulated by Immanuel Kant in 1755 in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.¹² Kant argued that in the formation of the solar system, matter was spun out from the rotating mass of the sun, with lighter matter traveling farther from the central gravitational pull of the sun. It helped explain the relative density of planets closer to the sun and the apparent fact that planets all rotate in the same direction. The French polymath Simon-Pierre Laplace developed the theory’s implications more fully in his 1796 Exposition du systême du monde as an effort to apply Newtonian mechanics to the formation of the solar system. Both were motivated by claims to universal knowledge offered by classical mechanics, with its emphasis on mechanistic harmony, perpetual motion, and symmetry.

However, neither Kant nor Laplace was concerned with explaining the details of surface contingencies, nor were they motivated by the contingencies of a rocky earth, and nowhere in their work is the idea of the cracked sphere to be found. The idea of the cracked sphere was only articulated belatedly in the 1820s by Élie de Beaumont, whose dynamic theory of mountain formation directly challenged Charles Lyell’s gradualism. These debates were starkly different from those pertaining to overarching theories of the earth. In Rudwick’s terms, they focused on contingent geohistory rather than geotheory, on the details of geological processes rather than the theorization of earth as a totality.¹³ “The orogenies were the main events of geological history,” as Philip Lawrence describes de Beaumont’s conclusions.¹⁴ Geology, according to Lawrence, had become “the science par excellence in the first half of the nineteenth century.”¹⁵

The post-Copernican significance of the sphere as a Platonic form implied perfection and reason in the Enlightenment tradition. As geometric form amenable to logical proof, it associated Earth with heavenly bodies in general and has frequently been discussed in relation to elevating the possibility of earthly existence to that of the same order as the divine stuff of the stars. It stood against a prior conception of Earth as “the filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom story of the house.”¹⁶ Do perfect spheres exist? Perhaps only mathematically, in the heavens, or briefly in bubbles, but they formed a powerful metaphor linking Earth to the heavenly bodies.¹⁷ Spheres also underscore that the knowledge of the spherical earth, through cartography, astronomy, exploration, and conquest, was essential to the underlying premises of European humanism. Yet the perfection of the sphere is very distant from the ways the earth was being discussed by most nineteenth-century earth scientists, and indeed many in the arts and humanities, who were concerned with earthly contingency, decay, and disorder in view of the immense age of the earth.¹⁸ Langley’s glass globe is cracked; the sphere is invoked not as the paradigm of perfection but as an explanation for messy, contingent geological structures. The purposiveness of a well-ordered universe was directly called into question by the premise of mere earthly existence. But this was not only a concern for natural philosophers.

Becoming Geological

It is striking the extent to which geology was part of the intellectual milieu of European modernity. The manifestation of what Yusoff has called white geology is evident in the opening lines of the inaugural volume of the French Journal des Mines:¹⁹ “Liberty lends new strengths as well as new virtues to the Peoples who fight for it. The need to conquer which has tempered the character of the French reveals to them unknown resources every day. If we take better advantage of the gifts of nature; if we rely more on our soil and on our industry, it is in a state of war that we must.”²⁰ Liberty is to be found in conquest and in the appropriation of the earth’s mineral powers. This announcement of the Programme of mining arts and geology, written by Charles Coquebert, was published in September, year 3 (1794), the first sentences of what would become the Anneles de Mines, published continuously since that time. This moment seems to mark an end to an Enlightenment aesthetics of knowledge, however messy its practice, critical for the emergence of geology proper.²¹ If, following Dipesh Chakrabarty, we define the planetary in terms of an intimate engagement with earth processes in their details rather than the geometrical figure of the globe, then it was the mine, the coal seam, the anomaly of glacial deposits, and marine fossils high above sea level that afforded new possibilities for thinking planetary existence.²²

The geological was also cultural to no small degree. Groves argues that “the mine has been identified as a primary institution of German romanticism,” calling particular attention to the “geological unconscious,” which would associate depth of feeling with the deep time of geology, both premised on a profound sense of the unknown.²³ Geology tracked humanistic concerns in multiple dimensions, especially among the Victorians and German Romantics. Victorian art critic John Ruskin would famously lecture to art students on the principles of geology, on the grounds that landscape painting should attend to the truth of subterranean processes just as Renaissance figure painting required detailed knowledge of anatomy.²⁴ Coal was especially relevant as a real intellectual problem for many—linking the atmosphere to life and minerality, and linking energy to the geological carbon cycle and to the inherent dependency on the sun. For example, Langley calculated that all the known coal on earth would fuel the sun “for less time than man has been on earth,” by way of arguing that there is no known explanation for what powers the sun.²⁵

Geological works such as those of Lyell or Georges Cuvier, informed by detailed observations of a great many natural historians on both sides of the Atlantic and in the East, opened the planetary as a domain that evoked deep-seated and disconcerting recognition of the contingencies of the earth. Whereas Newtonian physics relied on an image of profound harmony and, as it were, insights into the thoughts of God, the earth sciences seemingly introduced only more and more perplexing questions. Kant, after all, thought he was explaining the “constitution and the mechanical origin of the entire structure of the universe based on Newtonian principles.”²⁶ Yet what, indeed, determined the temperatures of the earth? How is it that the sun had not long since burned through its uncanny fuel? How frequently and how rapidly could coastal landmasses rise and fall? How many species and even civilizations had come and gone beneath our feet? And if this thin atmosphere protects us from the “absolute cold” of interplanetary space, can there be any confidence in the continued habitability of Europe’s tenuous climate? The conditions of earthly existence were systematically called into question.

Becoming geological as a conceptual term can be used to describe how mineralogical, atmospheric, or other earthly powers come to permeate and restructure the social, such as the ways fossil energy reorganized labor relations in the 1830s in England. But it can also describe how “the unequivocally inhuman reaches of the earth and cosmos” can thrust into relevance whole new domains of questions that remain powerful and disconcerting in the absence of convincing answers.²⁷ Earth’s powers within this cultural and scientific horizon were a function of how little was understood—the simmering potentiality of a real planet, not simply an accumulation of consolidated facts. If the planetary earth had become unsettling, one way this became apparent was in the emergence of a genre of prophecy and consolation that evoked the planetary and the human in the same gesture.

Consolations of the Earth

The view of a contingent and difficult-to-explain planetary existence prompted some earth scientists to offer consolation to their readers in a prophetic mode. Despite the optimistic heroism of industrial-scientific progress, the temporality and affect of geological discourses of the nineteenth century maintained a decidedly darker tone, one in which the contingencies of planetary existence were frequently linked to Europeans’ racial anxieties. In his 1755 treatise, Kant had already offered a consolation that alluded to European superiority amid a variety of racial types, each of which were capable of perfection according to the capacities of their type. It again operated according to the logic of symmetry and order.²⁸ But by the early nineteenth century, geology and its implicit anthropology were often linked to prophecies of earthly decay or extinction, and the underlying anxiety was regularly inscribed within the logic of race.²⁹ As Yusoff has shown, Charles Lyell identified a version of this anxiety in a discussion of enslaved African Americans: “Neither in their new country, nor in that of their origin, whether in a condition of slavery or freedom, have they as yet exhibited such superior qualities as to make us anxious.”³⁰ Lyell’s monogenesis was in direct contrast with Louis Agassiz’s polygenesis, which held that the races had fundamentally different origins—different in kind, not only in degree. Agassiz and Lyell were arguably the United States’ and Britain’s most prominent scientists. Versions of this anxiety reverberated through the earth sciences.

The industrial geology and atmospherics of coal were frequently near at hand. I trace several instances from nineteenth-century climate sciences, which were well aware of the contingencies of turning geological strata into energy and vapor.

In the history of climate change science, the Swedish chemist (and controversial Nobel laureate) Svante Arrhenius is often hailed as producing the first global mathematical climate model, published in 1896 and partly based on Langley’s detailed research. He formulated the statement of the problem of atmospheric temperature in a way that remains relevant in the twenty-first century, namely, What would be the change in the earth’s temperature if CO₂ levels were doubled, or cut in half? His scientific problem was to explain the cause of the ice ages, and his premise was that a new ice age was on the horizon.

Predicting a secular trend of planetary cooling, Arrhenius offered consolation in the benefits of industrial coal pollution:

The anxiety appears in the form of the specter of Africa as harbinger of Europe’s future. Unlike Lyell, however, he offers consolation not in terms of a defense of racial superiority but in terms that today might be called the idea of a good Anthropocene: that is, the ongoing human modification of earth’s climate in the active creation of “more equable and better climes.” Unlike Promethean visions of earth mastery that today link Anthropocene ideology to programs of planetary management, the mood of Arrhenius’s consolation evokes a sense of humanity making do, as it were, amid the threat of forced migration and impending uninhabitability. Industrial carbon emissions forestall a progressively colder and less welcoming earth and promise more abundant crops and a rapidly propagating humanity. Nonetheless, while the planetary terms of the discussion are constantly posed in evolving scientific terms, the schema to which they are applied recapitulates the ordering of race and earthly habitability.

Appearing in their popular writings, these consolations of the earth are a genre of public speech that serves to mitigate the threat to European exceptionalism posed by a contingent planetary existence. When the human appears in conjunction with the planetary, it is always already racialized, as a “philosophical material formation,” a mode of scientific humanism, or what Foucault has called the empirical-transcendental doublet of man, the man of the human sciences.³² This quality of performative public speech was especially pronounced in the 1856 public lectures of Corneille Jean Koene, a Belgian chemist who seems to have first articulated the idea that earth’s atmospheric chemistry was an effect of biological processes, as evident in the fact that coal was a biogenic mineral.³³ Essentially unknown today, Koene was a critical influence both on Arrhenius and on the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, to whom Paul Crutzen attributed fundamental ideas underpinning the concept of the Anthropocene.

Koene’s lectures demonstrate lavish grandstanding, especially his pronouncement of impending human extinction. Indicating their prominent status, they were recorded by a stenographer for the Belgium Legislative Chamber, including moments of audience laughter and applause. In addition to his claims regarding coal and its implications for humanity, Koene devoted much of his lectures to defending acid pollution from an important factory. Strikingly, he offered a backhand defensive account of this environmental conflict over industrial pollution—to the applause of his audience—and finally proposed his own Anthropocenic consolation: he claimed that industrial acid pollution is good for the ills of the modern city.

In building his argument around the ontology of coal as organic mineral, Koene traced carbon’s transmutation from atmosphere to biological substance to mineral substance, the suture of life and nonlife. Koene argued that newer layers of coal contained less carbon than older layers; this was evidence of a downward trend in atmospheric carbon, essential to plant life. Koene coupled the downward trend in carbon dioxide directly to a biological theory of superior mentalism. “Man is indeed a being who, by virtue of the complexity and perfection of his organs, requires more care and better nutrition than usual. He needs more oxygen, less carbon dioxide. He needs to be protected against inclement weather and to be sheltered. He suffers when humidity is high, and is almost stifled when a warm rain falls during warm weather.”³⁴ The delicate constitution of this version of man is a function of a cooler atmosphere with more oxygen and less carbon dioxide.

Koene’s effort to rescript earth science into a story about European superiority also formed the basis of his prophecy and consolation. His prophecy entailed a perpetual drop in the earth’s temperature that would lead to the eventual extinction of all life. “Eventually man, despite his pretensions, will succumb to the inevitable extinction of his species” due to decreasing atmospheric carbon, a trend that will eventually make plant life impossible.³⁵ “This drop in temperature will continue from century to century, and will force people to migrate to the Equator. During this time, vegetation will languish for want of a sufficient quantity of carbon dioxide. In cold and in hunger, all life will perish!”³⁶

Koene’s racial anthropology was less subtle than Arrhenius’s vague fear of Africa: “Constant cooling will eventually bring the extinction of the human species. . . . The French people are considered today to be the happiest in the world. In their turn, the Spaniards and the Turks will exceed this reputation, when the French will have become serious like the inhabitants of the North; these, in turn, will end up becoming brutes like the Hottentots, when the latter no longer exist.”³⁷ If the question here concerns the conditions of possibility for planetary discourse, then perhaps better than others Koene shows what kinds of things can be said to repeated rounds of applause from his audience of some three hundred people in an authorized public setting.

His prophecy and climatological anthropology were delivered effortlessly and without much need for logical rigor in the first lecture. The consolation comes over the remaining lectures as he develops a complex justification for why acid factories are a crucial part of the national-industrial patrimony and their pollution salutary despite the protests of nearby peasants. This anthropogenic modification of the atmosphere will lead to an overwhelming benefit, since acids neutralize and disinfect putrefying miasmas, whatever their effects on the livelihoods of nearby farmers. “Can you believe it that some [farmers] still, after two years, speak of damages caused by the factory? Unhappily for them, I have arranged it so that the proprietor is to pay no indemnities without my authorization” (he held a minor political office at the time).³⁸ All of it is quite a stretch, yet the audience seems to appreciate it. “This slender silk thread suspends it all. If sulfuric acid disappears, everything else will suddenly collapse.”³⁹ Amid these prophecies of decay and demise, invocations of the human routinely evoke race, and premises of extinction take refuge in an earth modified by human intervention.

Somewhat differently, Samuel Langley, the American astronomer who offered the image of the moon as a cracked sphere, also speculated on the eventual death of the earth. The sun, with its inevitably finite fuel, eventually would become extinguished. Langley, who consistently turned to the sun as the giver of life, anticipated that the earth, even with its volcanic energy, would become cold and desolate. Far from being inert, the liveliness of the earth was an essential feature of its habitability, even if it suggested a future demise. Langley’s humanism is quite explicit:

Yet the consolation of the human that Langley offers is neither a commitment to universal reason nor an anxious justification of racial difference; rather, it is a kind of elemental kinship with the substance of the universe. “We have literally within our own bodies samples of the most important elements of which the great universe without is composed; and you and I are not only like each other, and brothers in humanity, but children of the sun and stars in a more literal sense, having bodies actually made in large part of the same things that make Sirius and Aldebaran. They and we are near relatives.”⁴¹ While he extends some consolation in anticipation of a lifeless universe, the message for his readers is rather more of an “insolation”—a vision of earthly existence enveloped by the sun’s life-giving rays, and hearkening to a kind of curiosity that is less prophecy and more fascination, less indifference of the universe and perhaps more habitation.

Geological Humanism

The humanistic stakes of the earth sciences are apparent in these five consolations and five invocations of the human, from Kant to Lyell, from Koene to Langley and Arrhenius. Of the planetary thought I have discussed, only Kant’s does not evoke a temporal prophecy of earthly demise, and only Kant is committed to some image of perfection. Meanwhile, only Langley does not invoke or allude to a racial schema, even while his work extended the program to violently and permanently settle the American West. With the exception of Koene, these are not minor intellectual figures, and even Koene was significant in Belgium, with his puffed-up industrial nationalism directed toward France and England. In the arts and humanities, they could be compared with figures such as Balzac, Goethe, Poe, or Ruskin, all of whom were influenced by geological sciences to varying degrees. Geology, race, and the question of the human were closely linked in nineteenth-century Western thought, resting precisely on the contingencies of planetary existence.

I call this emergent field of reflexive thought geological humanism to mark the extent to which humanistic concerns were reframed or appropriated as problems for earth sciences, even while the scientific understanding of the earth saturated humanistic discourses. Earth sciences reposed questions of moral and metaphysical existence, leading to frequent evocation of humanistic themes within scientific writings and their popular presentation. This process reformulated problems of human earthly existence within Euro-American thought, which continued and intensified themes related to global exploration and conquest extant since the fifteenth century. Yet that movement also naturalized human existence within the boundaries of earthly finitude, against a horizon of prophesized extinction and intensified racial hierarchy. Geological humanism is especially evident today when the stakes of ecological transformation routinely invoke a wide range of popular, techno-managerial, and spiritual debates about the status of the human, shot through with anxieties about what it means to live on earth.

The geologic in geological humanism refers not to the narrow scope of the science but to the kinds of connection among things, including the formation of subjectivity within a planetary horizon, to draw from Ellsworth and Kruse, and Yusoff, respectively.⁴² Geological humanism is a mode of becoming geological: that is, one of the manifold ways that geological relations have differentially constituted human ways of being. The affective dimensions I have identified include the racial logic but also the despiritualized sense of an accidental earthly existence and the threat of climatic dislocation. I have also emphasized the vitality of deep-seated questions that continually arose in the context of colonial conquest and the profusion of mineralogical relations, especially regarding the ambiguous status of coal. Elizabeth Grosz reminds us that becomings are not voluntary; rather, they involve the terms of subjection and transformation within a nondetermining material and philosophical formation.⁴³ As with any becoming that involves not only a trajectory but also specific intensities, reversals, speeds, affects, and sensations, these geopowers become the terms of both creation and creativity: geos refers not to rocks but to the earth as such, as the home of humans and indeed of all known life.⁴⁴ The fact that becomings are involuntary does not mean they are not directed, cultivated, denied, sidelined, or conscripted into efforts to maintain or transform a status quo. In whatever case, however, becomings function by putting at risk existing formations through the explosive potential of disintegration that cuts across embodied psychosocial and material relations. In the collapse of universal ideals of purposiveness and perfection, clichéd attempts to hold onto some sort of spiritual ascendancy took the form of an a priori racial axiomatic.

European philosophical thought has long narrated its own biography as a series of progressive displacements of the human, and the origin story of secular modernity begins with the displacement of the earth. It is no wonder that metaphysical and empirical knowledge of the planet inevitably bears on the status of the human, and that the earth itself has an empirical-transcendental status similar to how Foucault described the figure of man.⁴⁵ Because this genealogy of critical thought is part of the Anthropocene’s intellectual inheritance, it may be relevant to question the premise of a hostile and indifferent earth that is a long-standing feature of European planetary reason. Similarly, Stephanie Wakefield has called attention to the role of antihumanism in maintaining exhausting “apocalyptic and hateful images being forced on us by . . . the rigid modes of discourse that now portray life in the Anthropocene as survival amid entangled ruins of a broken world.”⁴⁶ Can we affirm a mode of becoming geological today that does not begin from the premise of an uninhabitable or indifferent earth?

Against the fear of the earthly multitudes often expressed in planetary discourses, what seems distinctive about Samuel Langley’s scientific intuition is that it was motivated by and enamored with earth’s all-too-evident habitability. Langley might suggest that there is an important sense in which the earth is not at all indifferent to human existence but, rather, is creative of the existence of life in general. What is so astonishing about the earth is how resoundingly hospitable it is, and its wildly manifold capacities for emanating life are surely some of its most remarkable powers, damaged today though they may be. Affirming a politics that smells of the earth is perhaps essential for the ongoing project of becoming human within our contemporary planetary predicament.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank several anonymous peer reviewers and the New York City History of Science Workshop. All errors remain my own.

Notes

References