How technological advances and colonial fears inspired utopian
geoengineering projects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries
From the 1870s to the mid-twentieth century, European explorers,
climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested
in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate.
Uncovering this history, Desert Edens looks at how arid environments
and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped
this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering. From notions about the
transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the
climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate
change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context,
and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate
crisis.
Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects
to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts
for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made
Sahara Sea. In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed
damming the Mediterranean in order to geoengineer an Afro-European
continent called "Atlantropa," which would fit the needs of European
settlers. Nazi designs were formulated to counteract the desertification
of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Despite ideological and technical
differences, these projects all incorporated and developed climate
change theories and vocabulary. They also combined expressions of an
extreme environmental pessimism with a powerful technological optimism
that continue to shape the contemporary moment.
Focusing on the intellectual roots, intended effects, and impact of
early measures to modify the climate, Desert Edens investigates how
the technological imagination can be inspired by pressing fears about
the environment and civilization.
