Desert Edens: Colonial Climate Engineering in the Age of Anxiety

Abstract

Philipp Lehmann's Desert Edens explores how European scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood the effects of climate and the role of human design in ecological change. By the late nineteenth century, European scientists had a long tradition of what we would today call “climate science.” Lehmann, however, situates his work in a distinct moment of departure when European climate engineers sought to bring the full force of industrial design to bear on issues of climate and ecology. Moving from an early-century focus on individual regions or microclimates, European scientists developed a global vision of climate and ecology by the 1880s. Combining this broader vision with an ascendant “declensionist narrative” that sought to explain the perceived decline of North African ecological and “civilizational” landscapes, these scientists devised large-scale environmental projects intended to interrupt what they saw as negative climate developments as well as the supposedly backward cultural and social processes that drove this decline. The quintessential symbol in these contemporary debates was the desert, and more specifically the desert in colonial or militarily occupied space.While these projects were almost never realized, the surrounding intellectual and political debates offer a window into European modes of thinking at a time when European scientists were “moving from a telluric, or earth-bound, understanding of climate, based on observation and description, toward a physics-based conception of climate” (26). Desert Edens provides a clear view of this complicated period of change that preceded the twentieth-century focus on atmospheric phenomena as the prime indicator of climate activity.The book is divided into eight chapters that focus largely on the careers and intellectual contexts of three French and German scientists: François Roudaire, who, beginning in the 1870s, sought to halt the spread of North African desertification by creating vast bodies of water in the Sahara desert; Herman Sörgel, who planned to dam the Mediterranean Sea at Gibraltar as a way to stimulate European settlement and cultural expansion in North Africa in the 1920s; and Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann, who envisioned creating a “Germanized” environmental landscape in occupied eastern Europe during World War II. While the book is best understood as an intellectual history, it offers important insights into “environmental imaginaries,” following the work of Diana Davis, Alan Mikhail, and others. By embedding the careers of scientists in a wider social and intellectual context, Lehmann takes seriously the ways in which Europeans imagined overseas and eastern European ecologies and the alleged links among climate, culture, and “civilization.” He demonstrates convincingly the ways in which European scientists struggled to balance a deep environmental and cultural fin de siècle pessimism with an otherwise wildly optimistic faith in industrial technology and its ability to remap the cultural and environmental landscape of colonized lands.The desert played multiple roles in the contemporary imagination, as it was considered both “a powerful threat to be contained and as an inviting playground for the modern engineer's ambition” (4). The desert's protean, malleable image allowed early climate scientists and engineers to participate in wide-ranging debates over the feasibility (and desirability) of human interventions into global climate regimes and the possible social, economic, and cultural consequences of such change on both colonized and colonizing societies. These debates clearly bear out the interdependence of climate science and climate engineering, neither of which was ever clearly divorced from colonial politics and discourses of racial fitness, cultural decline, and rebirth.Each chapter in Desert Edens builds on and overlaps with material from previous chapters yet can be read independently. It is beyond the scope of this review to provide a tidy summary of each chapter's contributions; indeed, no short review could encapsulate the motley cast of scientists, politicians, explorers, Orientalists, generals, and philosophers who play supporting roles in this story—roles that Lehmann details with verve and wit. Lehmann admits in the epilogue that “it is difficult to identify an organic conclusion” to these overlapping histories of early climate science and dreams of climate engineering. This reviewer agrees that the book does not present an easily identifiable, general conclusion, but in many ways that is one of the book's strengths. The twists and turns in the development of what we today generally call climate science resulted in a fractured, nonlinear story, one that reflects the interplay of environmental anxiety and industrial triumphalism. This balance is complicated at every turn by unexpected developments in adjacent realms of politics, military expansion, internecine disputes among scientists, and the material realities of empire. In short, the details matter, and Lehmann's monograph stays true to that complexity by avoiding facile conclusions.If the book has one shortcoming, it is the scant attention paid to the circularity of scientific and cultural exchange between the colonies and the respective metropoles. Lehmann acknowledges in the introduction that “the colonial encounter with deserts was never a one-way street,” yet the book does not explore the ways in which colonial encounters shaped metropolitan outlooks in overseas lands (6). The source material is drawn exclusively from European archives while Indigenous actors and their ecological worldviews are largely removed from the European conversation. In Lehmann's telling, “the colonial encounter with deserts” is, in fact, a largely one-way street. That caveat aside, Desert Edens is an important contribution to the growing field of environmental history and its overlapping concerns with intellectual, political, and social change.

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