THE CLIMATOLOGY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

LRB : Oliver Cussen

Affluence and Freedom: 

An Environmental History of Political Ideas 

by  Pierre Charbonnier, translated by Andrew Brown.

Polity, 327 pp., £19.99, July 2021, 

By the middle​ of the 18th century, the French colonists of Quebec were convinced that the climate was getting warmer. The winters that had shocked earlier settlers now seemed less harsh: frosts arrived a little later in the year, snows thawed a little earlier, and harvests were more abundant. Quebec soon became an improbable cause célèbre of Enlightenment climatology. 

The French naturalist Buffon... saw in the changing weather the possibility of not just continental but planetary improvement:developments in the New World showed that a new geological ‘age of mankind’ was underway, with the spread of civilisation from Europe reversing the otherwise inevitable cooling of the Earth. By cutting trees, draining marshes and tilling the soil, European colonists had inaugurated an era of global warming that would save the planet. 

Buffon was probably alone among his contemporaries in anticipating the Anthropocene.  But theories of man-made climate change were widespread in the 18th century... The Harvard minister Samuel Williams went round New England collecting plant specimens, plunging thermometers into deep-water wells and tracking the migratory patterns of birds, in order to confirm his theory that the arrival of Christianity and industry on the continent had induced a more temperate climate – a view shared by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. 

Gibbon read meteorological reports from the colonies and drew a parallel between 18th-century Canada and ancient Germany, where, before the bogs were drained, forests cleared and the soil exposed to the warming effects of the sun, the climate had been equally unforgiving... Edward Long envisaged an agroindustrial ecotopia where the climate would be warmed by the ‘fires and smoke of ten thousand crowded cities hereafter to be built, and by a general subjection of the soil to agriculture, carried on to the Arctic circle’.

... not every Enlightenment thinker believed that the climate was changing, or changing for the better. Some subscribed to Buffon’s theory that the planet was losing heat without sharing his faith that the process could be delayed, still less prevented, by the spread of civilisation; for them the apparent creep of glaciers down the valleys of Chamonix and Grindelwald portended the apocalypse."