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Winner of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize and the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies Warren-Brooks Award. 

In this book, Tobias Menely develops a materialist ecocriticism, tracking the imprint of the planetary across a long literary history of poetic rewritings and critical readings which continually engage with the climate as a condition of human world making. Menely’s central archive is English poetry written between John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” (1807)—a momentous century and a half during which Britain, emerging from a crisis intensified by the Little Ice Age, established the largest empire in world history and instigated the Industrial Revolution. Incorporating new sciences into ancient literary genres, these ambitious poems aspired to encompass what the eighteenth-century author James Thomson called the “system . . . entire.” Thus they offer a unique record of geohistory, Britain’s epochal transition from an agrarian society, buffeted by climate shocks, to a modern coal-powered nation. Climate and the Making of Worlds is a bracing and sophisticated contribution to ecocriticism, the energy humanities, and the prehistory of the Anthropocene.

How twentieth-century scientists used proxies to understand historic climates, shaping scientific analyses of the past and the future.

Unlike our daily reckoning with the weather, our experience of climate must be mediated through methods that measure the ebb and flow of climate, such as computer models, instruments like thermometers, and organic and inorganic remains known as “proxies.” Climate by Proxy by Melissa Charenko explores how scientists read the record of past climates and how their readings have engendered particular understandings of climate. Charenko focuses on the twentieth century, a period when scientists in Europe and North America began to believe that climate had a dynamic history worth studying. Scientists in this period developed several techniques to infer past climate from fossil pollen, tree rings, pieces of vegetation, and other organic remains imprinted upon by former climates. Climate by Proxy examines how these techniques helped shape notions of climate itself.
 
Charenko also shows how these varied interpretations of climate played an outsized role in explanations of human history and destiny. Geologists, botanists, ecologists, and other scientists interested in climate over long timescales routinely discussed how climate influenced plants, animals, and, notably, people. By following the scientists who reconstructed climate using natural archives, Climate by Proxy demonstrates how material objects worked with scientists’ perceptions of human groups to compel, constrain, and reinforce their understandings of climate, history, and the future.

The contiguous river basins that flowed in Tlaxcala and San Juan Teotihuacan formed part of the agricultural heart of central Mexico. As the colonial project rose to a crescendo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Indigenous farmers of central Mexico faced long-term problems standard historical treatments had attributed to drought and soil degradation set off by Old World agriculture. Instead, Bradley Skopyk argues that a global climate event called the Little Ice Age brought cold temperatures and elevated rainfall to the watersheds of Tlaxcala and Teotihuacan. With the climatic shift came cataclysmic changes: great floods, human adaptations to these deluges, and then silted wetlands and massive soil erosion.

This book chases water and soil across the colonial Mexican landscape, through the fields and towns of New Spain’s Native subjects, and in and out of some of the strongest climate anomalies of the last thousand or more years. The pursuit identifies and explains the making of two unique ecological crises, the product of the interplay between climatic and anthropogenic processes. It charts how Native farmers responded to the challenges posed by these ecological rifts with creative use of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds, environmental engineering, and conflict within and beyond the courts. With a new reading of the colonial climate and by paying close attention to land, water, and agrarian ecologies forged by farmers, Skopyk argues that colonial cataclysms—forged during a critical conjuncture of truly unprecedented proportions, a crucible of human and natural forces—unhinged the customary ways in which humans organized, thought about, and used the Mexican environment.

This book inserts climate, earth, water, and ecology as significant forces shaping colonial affairs and challenges us to rethink both the environmental consequences of Spanish imperialism and the role of Indigenous peoples in shaping them.

As scientists call for widespread climate action, there has been an alarming rise in climate doomism, the belief that it is too late to do anything about climate change. Many people who struggle to imagine the solutions and social order that would be needed to support more sustainable outcomes instead look away and do nothing, immobilized by defeatist thinking. Yet every fraction of a degree of warming avoided means saving lives and livelihoods in the future.

Drawing from climate science, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, Rejecting Climate Doomism outlines the reasons to instead choose action grounded in active hope. It examines how global warming could be effectively limited through specific policy proposals. Despite the many obstacles to achieving some of the policies discussed in this book, they are still possible and worth pursuing. By outlining a positive vision of the far-reaching changes that can be used to minimize warming, the book encourages readers to advocate for the social and economic changes necessary to forge the best path for people and the planet.