This essay charts a conceptual history of “planetary health,” which holds that population health and the continuity of human civilization depend on the integrity—the health—of the Earth’s life-support systems. It seeks to identify settler colonial and imperial genealogies of this distinctly ecological approach to human population health and flourishing, an assemblage of systems theory and planetary thinking as well as developments in environmental sciences and theories of sustainable development. Planetary health may be seen as a “third wave” of disease ecology, (...) an emergent resource for more complex, naturalistic, and scaled-up modeling in epidemiology—the latest installment in the search for multifactorial, relational, and integrated explanations of patterns of disease. The approach required a new planetary imaginary—emerging from a series of Earth-encompassing crises, such as global heating—which enlarged and systematized ecological configurations of human health and illness. In tracing and critically situating this conceptual history, the authors offer a partial perspective on what may yet become planetary health, drawing attention to some other conceptual routes that may be taken. (shrink)

This article examines how geologists, botanists, and ecologists used pollen as a proxy for past climates in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on a particular challenge of measuring climate with pollen: pollen’s mobility. As scientists came to learn, pollen from some vegetation is more mobile than others. Pollen’s differential mobility challenged regional climatic conclusions because of the potential mixing of pollen from various locations. To minimize the effects of this problem, pollen analysts sought to decrease the (...) noise produced by highly local or foreign pollen. Yet, many ground-truthing and calibration methods were not available to pollen analysts because of the temporal separation between the observer and the object of interest. Instead, pollen analysts had to make spatial meaning out of fossil pollen using empirical studies of modern pollen, inferences from macrofossils and successional history, and applying statistical theories to fossil pollen data. Many of these corrections factors relied on pollen analysts’ knowledge of place, including elements like the location’s topography, prevailing winds, and plant cover. These elements were a natural part of vegetation-pollen-climate interactions. Scientists needed to account for them to turn pollen into a proxy for climate. Pollen’s movement was equally natural, but scientists decided to eliminate some pollen to augment the regional climate signal. These selective eliminations of place suggest that not all elements of place are equally important. Scientists had to omit some elements of place to make sense of the complexities of the natural world. (shrink)

In 2000, when atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and limnologist Eugene F. Stoermer proposed to introduce a new geological era, the Anthropocene, they could not have foreseen the remarkable career of the new term. Within a few years, the geological community began to investigate the scientific evidence for the concept and established the Anthropocene Working Group. While the Working Group has started to examine possible markers and periodizations of the new epoch, scholars from numerous other disciplines have taken up the (...) Anthropocene as a cultural concept. In addition, the media have developed a deep interest in the Anthropocene’s broader societal ramifications. The article sheds light on the controversial debate about the Anthropocene and discusses its inextricably linked dual careers, first as a geological term and second as a cultural term. Third, it argues that the debate about the “Age of Humans” is a timely opportunity both to rethink the nature-culture relation and to re-assess the narratives that historians of science, technology, and the environment have written until now. Specifically, it examines both the heuristic and analytical power of the concept. It discusses new histories, new ideas to understand historical change, and new temporalities shaped by scholars who have taken up the challenge of the Anthropocene as a cultural concept that has the ability to question established stories and narratives. Fourth, it ends by stressing the potential of the Anthropocene concept to blur established epistemological boundaries and to stimulate cross-disciplinary collaborations between the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)