15:30-16:00
Introduction

• Zoltán B. Simon (University of Bielefeld) and Wilko Hardenberg (MPIWG, Berlin): Anthropogenic Change: A Conceptual History

16:00-17:30
Session 1

• Helge Jordheim (University of Oslo): Syncing the Anthropocene: Temporal and Rhetorical Practices

• Sverker Sörlin (KTH, Stockholm): Synchronizing Geo-Anthropology – Environmental Objects and the Temporal Science Politics of the Human-Earth Relationship

18:00-18:45
Session 2

• Adam Wickberg (KTH, Stockholm): Anthropogenic Markers as Environing Media

09:00-10:30
Session 3

• Vinita Damodaran (University of Sussex): Adivasis in the Anthropocene: What an Environmental History of Eastern India Can Tell Us About Global Ecological and Climate Crisis
   
• Ling Zhang (Boston College): Geoengineering an Empire: The Consumptive Mode of Analysis and China’s Medieval Economic Revolution

10:45-11:30
Session 4

• Christoph Rosol (MPIWG, Berlin) & Ricarda Winkelmann (PIK, Potsdam): Anthropogenic Changes Minus the Anthropos

11:30-12:30
Roundtable with all workshop participants

Anthropogenic Change: A Conceptual History
Zoltán B. Simon and Wilko Hardenberg

In our opening talk, we aim to set the stage for the coming discussion by providing a conceptual history of the notion of “anthropogenic change.” We argue that the conceivability of a kind of change that is specifically anthropogenic paved the way for the thinkability of the Earth system science notion of the Anthropocene in more recent times. In other words, while affirming their close links, we also decouple “anthropogenic change” and the “Anthropocene” in locating the emergence of the former notion in the interwar discourse on plant ecology and vegetation change. We argue that “anthropogenic change” became conceivable as soon as a system-view has been developed in the context of scholarly debates on vegetation change with the coining of the notion of “ecosystem” in the 1930s, and go on to sketch its “historical” career through its occurrence in climate change discourse and its contemporary reiteration in the Anthropocene discourse (as distinct from the issue of climate change). Finally, in an open invitation for discussion, we pose the question concerning the possibilities and limitations to study “anthropogenic change” across discipline and across times that address the theme outside the spatiotemporal context in which the notion has emerged.

Syncing the Anthropocene: Temporal and Rhetorical Practices
Helge Jordheim

This short intervention starts from a somewhat simplified assumption: Never has so much time been involved in a periodization as in the case of “the Anthropocene”, from thousand, even millions of years of geochronology to the now-times of politics, from extinction rates to the degradation times of plastic etc. All the more complex is the work to synchronize these times, to align them, and fit them into a shared temporal framework provided by the concept itself. The talk will look more closely at some of these synchronization practices, mainly the so-called “golden spike”, linking geochronological and stratigraphic time, as well as the more politically salient “declarations” of climate crisis and climate emergency. Even though these practices or technologies originate in different societal fields, and operate on different platforms, they have the same implicit aim: to establish a uniform, shared, actionable temporal framework for understanding anthropogenic change.

Synchronizing Geo-Anthropology – Environmental Objects and the Temporal Science Politics of the Human-Earth Relationship
Sverker Sörlin

Concepts from the last few decades such as “Earth system”, “planetary boundaries”, and “the Anthropocene” serve as ontological heuristics for an emerging new human-Earth relationship and its dire predicament. These concepts have helped expand “the environment” to encompass environmental objects, including the Earth itself in its entirety, where profound and severe human omnipresence is now acknowledged. Quantified thresholds or tipping points have been suggested beyond which life conditions become distinctly undesirable. Yet, science-based quantifications and models depicting the directions, rates of change, and boundaries of the global environment keep struggling with the complexity of humans, societies, and technologies as they entangle with the Earth, applying environing technologies to change, terraform, and conceive of the natural world. Operating within the boundaries – i.e. defining how the ‘operational space’ of humanity can and should be used and shared – remains a societal and political challenge and, hence, a relevant subject of knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences. This paper offers approaches that take stock of ongoing theorizations and conceptualizations and suggest ways forward. A key part of the argument is the current emergence of integrative human-earth narratives pursued in tandem by historians and other practitioners of environmental humanities (geo-humanities, climate humanities, and others), and earth system scientists, co-exploring new ways of linking past, present, and future. I call this the synchronizing work of Geo-anthropology. I will argue that such narratives hold the potential of bringing environmental knowledge and data (widely construed) into resonance with societal and historical temporalities and thus offer valuable input to the continued, necessary expansion of environmental and climate governance, offering critical reflexivity of the implications of an ever more environed world.

Anthropogenic Markers as Environing Media
Adam Wickberg

The notion that the environment has changed continuously throughout the history of the Earth is a given in geology, yet the popular understanding of the environment is still one of something stable and unaffected which, however, is under threat from human impacts, a legacy of the postwar environmentalism that took off with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1961. The fact that the environment has been changing throughout the history of Earth does not, however, elide the threat to life on this planet caused by human activities and particularly those of Western industrialized societies. But we are now finding ourselves in a historically new situation where our knowledge about and impact on the environment – and thus its process of change – coalesce in the Anthropocene. This is a dire predicament and one in which responsibility, equity, and justice are essential. But in order to make room for these dimensions, we also need a better understanding of how and why humans change their environment. Finding a geologically qualified set of markers to designate this new epoch of human-driven environmental change is an important step in that process, but it is also an act of human-Earth interaction that itself merits closer scrutiny and should be understood as part of a longer history.

Adivasis in the Anthropocene: What an Environmental History of Eastern India Can Tell Us about Global Ecological and Climate Crisis
Vinita Damodaran

Historians such as Richard Grove have argued for major global turning points in environmental history. In South Asia the onset of rice cultivation allowed valley dwellers to start building hierarchical societies pushing areas of resource control into forested areas. From 1800 the British empire and their resource demands transformed environments including the disease environment creating conditions for periodic mass mortalities during extreme climate events, introducing an element of great instability as well as transition in population terms. It is useful for us as historians to identify these global turning points in history. In this context, this paper highlights the importance of also exploring local thresholds (ecological tipping points) in history by mapping environmental change in Eastern India in the longue durée. The shifts from planetary debates to the local allows us to analyse the impact of what has been termed as the Anthropocene in the locality. It looks particularly at the relationship between environmental change and livelihoods of Adivasi or indigenous communities in the context of famines and food crisis from the eighteenth to the twentieth century primarily in Singhbhum, now Jharkhand and examines the impact of mining in the region as a new ecological tipping point. By documenting the geographies of resistance to these changes by Adivasis it outlines the importance of understanding resistance as synonymous with resilience in the Anthropocene.

Geoengineering an Empire: The Consumptive Mode of Analysis and China’s Medieval Economic Revolution
Ling Zhang

Geoengineering is the deliberate, large-scale intervention of Earth’s geological system by human forces. We tend to associate geoengineering with the modern age, during which we have used technology and machinery to flatten mountains, redirect rivers, extract fossil fuels, and design techno-solutions to combat climate change. I argue that geoengineering is not a modern innovation; rather, it has a lengthy premodern history. To take just one case from China, the imperial state of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) developed colossal projects of land transformation to facilitate its military, financial, and environmental management agendas. As the state became a powerful geological agent, geoengineering served as both a means and an end to the regime’s empire building. 
But geoengineering costs. Large-scale land transformations not only led to complex geological and environmental consequences but also subjugated the imperial state itself. Geoengineering demanded that the state slavishly create a new political economy in which economic relations of different parts of the empire were reconfigured, natural resources, labor, and wealth were redistributed, and regional differences were widened. From the state’s painstaking service to the altered land, an empire-wide market emerged to drive economic growth. Unlike many Chinese historians, who laud the growth of this period as China’s “Medieval Economic Revolution,” I take a more cautious view. I argue that the growth was a regional phenomenon and its success was highly dependent on the state’s political intervention, but that it also derived from tremendous harm inflicted by the state’s geoengineering projects.

Anthropogenic Changes minus the Anthropos
Christoph Rosol and Ricarda Winkelmann

What is the signal that determines that the geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene is indeed anthropogenic? Following the footsteps of recent developments in astrobiology the paper proposes a thought experiment: take modern humans out of the picture, e.g. by considering a similar geological event long before human appearance on Earth, or the existence of a far-away exoplanet, in both cases of which distinctive biogeochemical traces would suggest the existence of an intelligent, energy-harvesting civilization. What exactly is this what we would detect then? How could we distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring event and how could we, as a result, identify a quasi-anthropogenic perturbation of elemental conditions? Could or should we draw boundaries analogous to those between nature and culture or does such a thought experiment rather suggest a more holistic description? Or does, in the end, the evolutionary capacity of the planetary system determine whether a gradual differentiation into spheres like the biosphere or the technosphere is possible? We look very forward to discuss with all of you such open questions that provocatively shimmer between epistemological and ontological domains.