Umweltprojektionen. Klimas, Infrastrukturen, Risiken

Workshop: Umweltprojektionen. Klimas, Infrastrukturen, Risiken Organisation: Frédéric Graber (CMB), Judith Rainhorn (Maison Française d’Oxford) Simultanübersetzung Deutsch/Französisch Kontakt: fgraber@ehess.fr, judith.rainhorn@history.ox.ac.uk Anmeldung: anmeldung@cmb.hu-berlin.de The environment is nowadays, par excellence, the object of projections into the future. Whether it is climate change, the evolution of biodiversity or the future of resources, the environment is the subject of scholarly anticipations and lay predictions, which aim both to assess future developments and to imagine, and sometimes undertake, actions. These actions may envisage the future in the form of a destiny for which it is necessary to prepare or adapt, or in the form of a project, whereby technical and societal interventions can reshape environments and their futures. While contemporary challenges in this area are clearly exceptional, these issues are not new: environments have been recurrent objects of projection and anticipation throughout history. From the early modern period onwards, the main form of environmental projection has certainly been that of the improvement project, which aims to develop resources, enhance and exploit environments considered to be poorly or under-exploited, justifying significant changes in their modes of ownership and uses. However, environmental projections cannot be reduced to the Western gesture of putting nature to work, and past societies have had to deal with less Promethean perspectives. Thus, risks and pollutions caused by human activities have gradually become fields of projection in their own right, as have epidemics, the recurrence of which has led to the implementation of often illusory health measures. In all these fields, awareness of vulnerability has invited actors to envisage further corrective, preventive, adaptive or restorative actions on their environments. This conference intends to question the way in which modern societies perceive, construct and attempt to transform their environments by projecting their perceptions and contemporary knowledge onto imaginable or foreseeable futures.