UNEARTHED: SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT ACROSS MINERAL FRONTIERS

Unearthed tells the story of earth and atmospheric sciences assembled across world mineral frontiers. It demarcates a critical juncture in the long durée of climate breakdown: a nineteenth-century moment of extraordinary intensification in the scale and violence of schemes to govern large swathes of the planet, particularly in the Americas and across Eurasia. This was also a moment of corresponding intensification in combined sciences of earth and air, which then took on a planetary character. The physique du monde or “global physics” pursued by Prussian savant Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is iconic. A program of vast data collection and artful conjecture, physique du monde spanned empires and hemispheres in search of general laws of earth and environmental systems. The same claim to generality made global physics a key resource for aggressive European and settler states as they, in turn, sought to enclose frontiers from the trans-Mississippi west to the trans-Caspian east.

Humboldt’s itineraries, first through Prussian provinces then across Spanish and Russian empires, trace an information order that linked far-flung industrial sites and frontier stations. He himself moved through the circuits of Saxon miners, Mexican cartographers, and Siberian surveyors, among other itinerant Germans who mobilized the labor and resources of widespread mining operations for world surveys of earth and air. Accordingly, Unearthed ranges along the vertical axis, from mines to mountains and ore veins to isotherms. It opens a connected history of underground and atmospheric sciences co-produced with diverse agencies of war, empire, and global capital. Those sciences both measured and made modern natures, by turns documenting highly disturbed ecologies and directing their exploitation. Rooted in the fiscal-military states of Central Europe and coordinated across empires east and west, sciences of the mineral frontier laid the groundwork for carbon-intensive economics and crafted a logic of unending extraction.

 Image Source: Plan for the new method of working the mines, by Gaspar Sabugo, 1790. AGI, MP-PERU_CHILE, 121.