The Birth of Geoengineering. Large-scale Building Projects in the Early Stage of the Anthropocene (1850-1950)

关于人类世的争论已经超出了地质学论述的范围，同时成为文化和社会科学中广泛讨论的概念，它对重新思考环境与社会的关系以及自然与文化之间模糊的界限提出了挑战。尽管到目前为止，这一概念在历史学术中已经有了第一次富有成效的实践尝试，但它的启发式和分析潜力却几乎没有被挖掘出来。人类世的观点如何改变历史写作的时间叙述？关于人类世分期的不同讨论建议如何回溯到环境史、科学技术史和全球史的概念？最近与人类世争论密切相关的演讲之一是关于地球工程的。尽管形成世界的愿景要古老得多，但在人类世（1850-1950）的早期阶段，就有可能塑造地球系统的一部分，从而也可能塑造气候系统，当时数百万年前的自然构造被大型工程项目刺穿；这是人们第一次意识到人类的巨大力量。这些早期的项目也推动了对自然控制的反思和历史，为每个人提供廉价能源的希望，但也为失败的投资和致命的灾难提供了重要的基础，这些都为今天关于气候工程的批评性辩论提供了重要的基础。基于对地球工程更广泛的定义，即人类对部分地气圈的大规模改造，在本项目中，全球范围内的大型工程项目选择将作为揭示地球工程诞生、其先决条件、影响和看法的镜头。地球工程项目，如通过铁路隧道凿穿大山脉、建造海洋运河和建造巨大的水坝，是人类试图改变地球地貌面貌的早期旗舰冒险。这些企业的全球选择将被用作案例研究，以阐明人类世早期阶段的历史结构。该项目沿着环境史、科学技术史和全球史进行震荡，试图阐明人类世的启发式和分析潜力，并使概念的历史化和分期化的框架保持一致。

The debate about the Anthropocene has gone beyond the scope of the geological discourse and meanwhile become a widely discussed concept in the cultural and social sciences that poses the challenge to rethink the relation of environment and society and the blurring boarders between nature and culture. Even though first attempts of the productive implementation of the concept in historical scholarship are on hand by now, its heuristic and analytical potential is scarcely sounded out. How does the Anthropocene perspective change the temporal narratives of historical writing and how do the different discussed proposals for a periodization of the Anthropocene retroact to the concepts of environmental history, history of science and technology, and global history? One of the most recent discourses closely connected with the Anthropocene debates are those about Geoengineering. Even though the visions of forming the world are much older, the possibility to shape parts of the earth systems, and thereby also the climate system, started in the early stage of the Anthropocene (1850-1950), when millions of years old natural formations were pierced by large-scale engineering projects; this is where the awareness of the tremendous human agency becomes visible for the first time. These early projects also fueled the reflections and histories of control over nature, the hope of cheap energy for everyone, but also of failed investments, and deadly catastrophes, which today provide an important basis for a critical debate about Climate Engineering. Based on a wider definition of Geoengineering as large-scale human transformation of parts of the geosphere, in this project a global selection of large-scale engineering projects will serve as a lense to uncover the birth of Geoengineering, its preconditions, impacts, and perceptions. Geoengineering projects like the piercing of large mountain ranges through railway tunnels, the construction of sea canals, and huge dam constructions were the early flagship ventures of humankind's attempts to change the geomorphological appearance of the earth. A global selection of these enterprises will be used as case studies to shed light on the historical structures of the early stage of the Anthropocene. The project, which oscillates along environmental history, history of science and technology, and global history tries to illuminate the heuristic and analytical potential of the Anthropocene and to align the framework in which the historization and periodization of the concept takes place.