The fragile climate of modernity
The notion of climate, equally essential for understanding the reflexivity of modern societies, is closely bound up with that of circumfusa. In the seventeenth century, climate was already understood on a global scale. Natural theology conceived the Earth as a perfect system on which the great masses of matter were balanced. Water in particular circulated permanently from the equator to the poles, following a divine plan that ensured the fertility of temperate zones.
European colonial expansion played a key role in the emergence of reflection on anthropic climate change. It raised right away the question of the considerable differences in temperature and precipitation between territories situated on the same line of latitude at either side of the Atlantic. In line with neo-Hippocratic medicine, climate thus acquired a certain plasticity. If it remained partly determined by position on the globe, natural philosophers were increasingly interested in its local variations, its transformations, and the role of human action in its improvement or deterioration. And as climate maintained its ability to determine human and political constitutions, it became the epistemic site where the consequences of technological action on the environment were conceived. What determined social health and organization was no longer simply position on the globe, but everyday things (the atmosphere, forests, the forms of cities) on which it was possible to act for good or ill.13
Figure 13: Thomas Burnet, ‘Ideas of Different Stages in the Formation of the Earth’ from Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1690
Take for example Buffon’s Epochs of Nature (1778). This magnificent text, a culminating point of modern rhetoric, presents the historical conditions for a reversal. The seventh and final epoch of the planet’s history corresponds to the advent of man as global force: ‘the entire face of the Earth today bears the imprint of human power’, Buffon tells us. Humanity has transformed plants and animals, brought new breeds into being, acclimatized and improved. For Buffon, this role is completely positive: Europe’s ‘civilized nature’ is more productive than the ‘raw’ and hostile nature left abandoned by ‘the savage little nations of America’. But if human work is not guided by science, if people act short-sightedly, the consequences may be disastrous:
The most contemptible condition of the human species is not that of the savage, but that of those nations, a quarter civilized, that have always been the real plagues of nature … They ravaged the land … these nations simply weigh on the globe without relieving the land, starve it without making it fertile, destroy without building, use everything up without renewing anything.14
Buffon’s utopia was a climatic one: united by a universal peace, humanity would rationally transform the planet. By foresting and deforesting judiciously, it would be able to ‘modify the influences of the climate it inhabits and set the temperature, so to speak, to the point that suits it’.15
By placing climate within human reach in this way, the modernist project of controlling nature created the conditions for superseding it. From the 1770s, European societies underwent a great debate on the climatic consequences of deforestation. Meteorologists referred to the works of Stephen Hales on the physiology of plants and their gaseous exchanges with the atmosphere (Vegetable Staticks, 1727) to blame climate disturbances (cold, drought, storms and rain) on the destruction of vegetation: trees, by the relationship they maintained with the atmosphere, dried out wet land and moistened dry land; they also warded off storms, erosion and floods. Deforestation was conceived as a rupture in the natural and providential order that balanced cycles of matter between Earth and atmosphere.16
Climatic disasters, therefore, became politicized. In France in the 1820s, for example, after a series of bad harvests, blame was put on the revolution, the division of communal lands, the sale of national forests and their short-term exploitation by a new bourgeoisie. In England, the question of enclosures was discussed in terms of climate: the proliferation of hedges and pasture allegedly made the English climate still wetter and colder.
Two remarks may be made here. First of all, from the early nineteenth century onwards, we clearly see climate knowledge and discourse establishing global climatic connections. According to the engineers François-Antoine Rauch and Jean-Baptiste Rougier de la Bergerie, for example, or Joseph Banks, secretary of the Royal Society, deforestation in the United States and Europe increased humidity in the atmosphere, which condensed at the poles, expanding the ice caps and causing bad weather in Europe. Secondly, climate change was conceived as an irreversible phenomenon that challenged the very direction of civilization. Deforestation transformed the climate and undermined the forest’s very conditions of existence. From the 1820s on, a powerful discourse of what could be called ‘climatic orientalism’ warned the European states against deforestation and climate change by recalling the ruins of brilliant civilizations now surrounded by desert.17
The economy of nature
Historians of scientific ecology have identified the concept of ‘economy of nature’ as the starting point of the contemporary notion of ecosystems and shown its centrality in the natural philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.18 This concept constitutes a third grammar of reflexivity in the face of environmental destruction.
From Carl Linnaeus to Thoreau, naturalists marvelled at the systemic relations among living things. One of the aims of natural history was to discover interdependencies and thus show the symphonic precision of nature. The natural theology that underlay this research rested on the religious conviction that every living thing has a function in the natural order. In Linnaeus’s words:
If even a single [species of] earthworm were missing, stagnant water would damage the soil and the moisture would rot everything. If a single important function were lacking in the animal world, we could fear for a very great disaster in the universe. If all the sparrows perished in our lands, our crops would fall prey to crickets and other insects.19
Gilbert White wrote in a similar vein in The Natural History of Selborne (1789): ‘The most insignificant insects and reptiles are of much more consequence, and have much more influence, in the economy of nature, than the incurious are aware of.’20
In this nature pervaded by connections, chains of dependence and reciprocities, catastrophe always threatened. In the words of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: ‘The harmony of this globe would be partly destroyed, if not entirely, were one to suppress even the smallest species of plant.’21
This view of an infinitely connected nature may have been guided either by a theology that postulated ‘the wise disposition of beings by the Creator’ (Linnaeus) or by a mechanistic view of material exchanges, but in both cases it gave rise to modesty and awe in the face of the world’s infinite complexity. According to Jean-Baptiste Robinet, in 1766: ‘We [humans] and the other large animals are no more than parasites on that greater animal that we call the Earth.’22
It was on the basis of this economy of nature that scientists started to take a systematic interest in the extinctions of species caused by what the clergyman and zoologist John Fleming called in 1824 the ‘destructive warfare’ waged against them by humans.23 The geologist and priest Antonio Stoppani, herald of the Anthropozoic age in 1873, rejoiced to see an old nature give way to a ‘new nature’ in which humans had completely recast the distribution of species between continents.24
On reading such texts, the question arises as to how the economy of nature fitted into the concrete management of environments. What knowledge of relationships structured the uses of nature? Major topics of historiography such as the question of the commons could be revisited with greater attention to this knowledge and the concerns expressed in the theoretical grammar of the economy of nature.
In Normandy, for example, when a controversy broke out in the 1770s on the management of foreshore resources, the fishermen’s guild complained about the stripping of wrack (seaweed that was burned for ash used in producing soda for glass-works) precisely by appeal to its role in the survival of yo
ung fish and the natural economy of the marine world. In a memoir sent to the Academy of Sciences, they explained that fish came to spawn in the wrack, as the seaweed held the fish eggs together, protecting them from tides and currents and increasing their density and chances of fertilization. Such popular knowledge of environments, despite being little formalized and thus generally invisible to historians, was very important as the basis of the communal management of resources.25
In the second half of the eighteenth century, fear of an exhaustion of fish stocks was general.26 The medic Tiphaigne de la Roche described the seas as ‘exhausted’, ‘now only providing fish on a scale that leads us to regret their former fecundity’.27 He particularly accused drag-nets that destroyed the marine environment: ‘What is the consequence of tearing plants out of the sea? A considerable damage, very likely … They are the retreat of large fish and many small ones, and food for the majority of them.’28 In 1769, the famous naturalist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau ended the first volume of his Traité des pêches29 with a ‘dissertation on what can have led to the scarcity of fish, particularly in the sea’. He reviewed several hypotheses: a cyclical phenomenon without tangible cause; an epidemic disease attacking fish; too great a consumption of fish and too large a number of fishermen. But he particularly blamed drag-nets that destroyed the natural economy.
In the same way, from the late eighteenth century to the 1830s, it was by basing themselves on the idea of natural harmony that French agronomists and foresters undertook a great crusade against deforestation. In March 1792, for example, attacking a law that proposed the sale of national forests, the civil engineer François-Antoine Rauch recalled that
forests have a visible influence on the harmony of the elements, in terms of the weather that they enliven … the animals that they shelter and preserve, the clouds that they attract, the springs that they nourish and the rivers that they feed.30
The economy of nature played a key role in the nascent political economy. In the mid eighteenth century, the aim of this science was to study the interface between human societies and nature. The project of the physiocrats was to extend the laws of natural economy into positive laws governing human organization. According to François Quesnay, the latter were simply ‘laws of maintenance in relation to the natural order’.31 The same was true of Carl Linnaeus, a great champion of political economy in Sweden, for whom the study of nature had to be the basis of this discipline. It was important above all else to analyse natural economy in order to learn how to derive wealth from it for the national good. Linnaeus’s great project of acclimatization of tropical plants in Scandinavia represented the summit of political economy.
The notion of economy of nature also led to a renewal of the organicist view of the Earth. Carolyn Merchant has shown how during antiquity, the Renaissance and up to the scientific revolution, our planet was conceived as a living being with its veins and fluids, its palpitations and sickness. Earth was a nourishing mother that it was important to respect.32 According to her, the scientific revolution and the emergence of capitalism led to an inexorable decline in organicist theories. Nature became a great mechanism that had to be explained, exploited and transformed.
By way of the economy of nature, in fact, the view of the Earth as a living being persisted well after the scientific revolution. In 1795, the philosopher Félix Nogaret published a popular essay with the title La Terre est un animal,33 in which he systematically compared the phenomena of terrestrial physics with their physiological and corporal counterparts. Major geologists such as Eugène Patrin and Philippe Bertrand criticized such analogies as overly simplistic (according to Patrin, the Earth was ‘very likely an organized body, but with an organization that is neither that of an animal nor of a vegetable; it is that of a world’), but argued nonetheless for the introduction of organicist interpretations into their discipline, since viewing Earth as a living being made it easier to grasp ‘the intimate connectedness of all phenomena on the globe’.34
It was in this vein, in 1821, that Charles Fourier diagnosed a ‘decline in the health of the globe’. He called for a new science, a planetary medicine or ‘sidereal anatomy’, based on an analogy between the human body and the planetary body. In Fourier’s writing, volcanoes are equivalent to the planet’s boils, earthquakes its shivers, magnetic fluid its blood and (more curiously) the aurora borealis the planet’s nocturnal emissions, ‘tormented by the need to copulate’. Flooding and silting up of rivers, pollution of springs, erosion and deforestation were so many epidermal symptoms.35 Under Fourier’s inspiration, Eugène Huzar similarly elaborated the image of a planet as living and fragile superorganism. Man, by his industry, believed he could scratch the Earth without heed that such scratches, according to the law of small causes and large effects, could very well cause its death.36
The history of systemic reflexivity is all the more complex, given that the notion of nature’s economy was profoundly reconfigured by the development of the natural sciences and the emergence of Darwinism in particular. For Darwin, a great opponent of natural theology, it was clear that living beings no longer had their function in a natural order defined by God. Nonetheless, the laws of evolution (and co-evolution) of living beings, and the Malthusian law of the geometrical progression of populations, produced a nature that was intensely connected and completely filled, a continuous world in which species exploited all possible resources: ‘The face of nature may be compared with a friable surface on which ten thousand sharp wedges are pressing, impelled by incessant blows.’37 In an early draft of The Origin of Species, Darwin added that the ‘jar and shock’ of these blows could be ‘often transmitted very far to other wedges in many lines of direction’.38
Thus the term ‘ecology’ (ökologie), proposed by Ernst Haeckel in 1867, did not indicate a terra incognita but renamed and reorganized established traditions of thought.39 By coining this word, Haeckel had two main objectives in mind: on the one hand, to suggest that living beings made up a home, an oikos, which despite being conflictual, as Darwin had shown, also benefited from symbiosis and mutual aid; on the other hand, he sought to integrate the study of interactions between organisms and their environments into a single discipline that would include both the physical conditions of existence (climate, soil … again the idea of circumfusa) and biological conditions, i.e., interactions with all other organisms. The rather long time that it took for the term ‘ecology’ to become accepted (the contemporary spelling was first used at the International Botanical Congress of 1893) does not mean that it was hard for the natural sciences to grasp the systemic aspect of nature, rather that the concept of nature’s economy was still quite persistent until the late nineteenth century.
Cycles and metabolisms: the chemistry of nature–society relations
Chemistry, with its concern for the exchange of matter and energy between human society and nature, was a fourth grammar of environmental reflexivity. These exchanges of matter, Lavoisier wrote, ensured ‘a marvellous circulation between the three realms’, vegetable, animal and mineral, on a planetary scale:
Vegetables draw water from the atmosphere, and the materials needed for their organization from the mineral realm. Animals feed either on vegetables or other animals that themselves feed on vegetables … Finally, fermentation, putrefaction and combustion constantly return to the air and the mineral realm the principles that vegetables and animals have borrowed from them.40
Drawing on the discoveries of chemistry, the nineteenth century was marked by very strong worries about the metabolic rupture between town and country. Urbanization, in other words the concentration of humans and their excrement, prevented mineral substances indispensable to fertility from being returned to the land. All the major materialist thinkers, from Liebig to Marx, warned against both urban pollution and the exhaustion of soil, as did agronomists, public health officials and chemists. In the third volume of Capital, Marx criticized the environmental consequences of capitalist agriculture’s great spaces em
pty of people, which broke the material circulation between society and nature. According to Marx, there could be no getting away from nature: whatever the mode of production, society would remain dependent on a historically determined metabolic regime; what was particular about capitalist metabolism was its unsustainable character.41
From the late eighteenth century to the mid twentieth with its generalized use of artificial fertilizer, a reflexive tradition persisted that was bound up with a chemical and bookkeeping view of agriculture, the principle of which was that each harvest reduced the fertility of the soil, so that the durability of production rested on the ability of the farmer to replace these nutritive chemical elements. Arthur Young in his Rural Economy (1770) sought to establish by experiment the correct relationship between pasture and tillage and discover the best ways of circulating matter between animals and plants. The stakes were immense, since ‘if one of these proportions is broken’, Young wrote, ‘the whole chain will be affected’.42
The development of chemical agronomy in the nineteenth century, with Liebig, Boussingault and Dumas, increased the complexity of this system in a way that gave rise to increased concern. Liebig’s famous ‘law of the minimum’ expressed a far more pessimistic view of the fate of the soil, as its fertility was now seen as determined by whatever chemical element (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulphur, iron, etc.) was least present. For Liebig, urbanization and the lack of recycling were leading the European societies to suicide. Analysis of agricultural metabolism, for Liebig, was the basis for a general critique of capitalism and globalization. In a passage of his Organic Chemistry he compared Britain, a great importer of guano and mineral fertilizer, to a vampire: ‘Great Britain seizes from other countries their conditions of their own fertility … Vampire-like, it clings to the throat of Europe, one could even say of the whole world, sucking its best blood.’43
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