Enlightenment Science and Nature GT26

Glacken 1967

Frames the 3 founding geoscience questions: how does nature work, how has it changed, how do humans + nature interact. Ancient times through enlightenment

Lisbon Earthquake 1755, Captain Cook Voyages 1768-79

2 events that destabilised traditional Western (religous) beliefs

Hutton + Playfair 1788

Theory of the Earth. "Deep time" - "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end". Geology breaks Christian time and reconciles observation with religion

Smith 1815

First geological map of England. Surveyor turned proto-stratigrapher. Working class hidden figure - mapping the rocks for canals

Humboldt 1858

Cosmos. Polymath, "founding father" of geosciences. Global vision of nature as interconnected patterns. Isothermal lines, plant geography, magnetic field. Travelled w/ Bonpland in S. America 1799

Wulf 2015

Humboldt as proto-environmentalist - "his concept of nature as one of global patterns underpins our thinking". Fame based on breadth and ‘worldview’ not single factual discovery

Bowler 2002

Climb Chimborazo and See the World. Humboldt's vertical zonation diagram = paradigm for thinking about climate and biodiversity together

Deliniated isothermal lines, mapped plant geography as shaped by phyical conditions

2 things Humboldt discovered (among lots of other stuff)

Pausas + Bond 2019

Time to move beyond Humboldt's "certainties". Forests aren't peak of biodiversity, climate isn't the master variable. Don't worship founding fathers

Jackson 2019

Pro-Humboldt in the Anthropocene - his generalisable theories + collaborative practice are still useful

Mackay et al 2019

"Straight-washing ecological legacies". Bonpland + others written out. Hidden figures by class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity

Eckstein + Schwarz 2019

Tupaia's Map. Polynesian navigator's knowledge essential to Cook's voyages but credited to Cook. Non-European epistemologies systematically erased

Inkpen 2008

Explaining the Past in the Geosciences. Geosciences are complex historical sciences - causes, effects, laws all uncertain. Founded on empiricism but always provisional

Stoddart 1980

RGS and the "New Geography" - 19th C scientific society professionalised the discipline through expedition + publication

Barnett 1998

Africanist discourse of the RGS. Geographical knowledge demanded a "racially unmarked subject-position". Native testimony reduced to "hearsay". "Discursive dispossession"

Driver 2001

Geography Militant. Exploration was constitutive of geography's professionalisation. Term from Joseph Conrad essay

Brantlinger 1985

"Africa grew dark as Victorian explorers, missionaries and Scientists flooded it with light". The "dark continent" as discursive construction

Mitchell 1991

Enframing - geography as a regime of order that imposes frames, designates inside/outside, creates the "observer" position. Distance + objectivity = colonialist moves

Sundberg 2014

Eurocentrism = "contingent apparatus that frames Europe as the primary architect of world history and bearer of universal values, reason, and theory"

Latour 1993

Critique’s enlightenment project as an example of sharp purification between nature and culture. Reframes E.S as the inaugeration of a paticularly consequential epistemological myhtology.

Smith 1999

Enlightenments claim to universal objective knowledge was ideological cover under which non-european knowledges were systematically appropriated and erased