Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Bio: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is an academic researcher from University of Chicago. The author has contributed to research in topics: Anthropocene & Cornucopian. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 16 publications receiving 243 citations.

Enlightenment's Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism

Abstract: Enlightenment's Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism.

The Industrial Revolution in the Anthropocene

Abstract: Recent historians of the Industrial Revolution, like the rest of us, have the peculiar fortune of living through the early years of the Anthropocene. Will Steffen, John McNeill, and Paul Crutzen define this new geological epoch as the era when human beings for the first time have become a “global geophysical force.” Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have started a process of rapid climate change. Without mitigation, the average temperature on the planet may increase as much as three to five degrees Celsius in this century, according to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sea levels are expected to rise between one and three feet by the year 2100. Social effects are likely to be severe, especially in the poorest parts of the planet. Even in wealthy nations, the external costs presently imposed by coal simply dwarf the benefit of the fuel. The Chicago geophysicist David Archer stresses that these perverse effects of modern energy consumption will linger for tens of thousands of years, far longer than the entire scope of recorded human history. Meanwhile, a coalition of skeptics and denialists questions the scientific reality of climate change, choosing

Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the Natural Historians

Abstract: This essay explores how the defense of global commerce pioneered in the Enlightenment was tied to the improvement of the natural order Two rival ecologies, one made by natural historians and the other developed by Adam Smith and his liberal successors, vied for intellectual precedence as well as for practical application in the metropole and the colonies Together they constitute the beginnings of an ongoing quarrel over the environmental foundation of capitalism

The Origins of Cornucopianism: A Preliminary Genealogy

Abstract: The threat of accelerating climate change has revived a long-standing debate over the environmental limits to economic development. Can the biosphere sustain exponential economic growth over the long run? This article explores the historical origins and logic of cornucopianism as an ideology. I take issue with Timothy Mitchell’s recent argument that the postwar oil economy gave rise to dreams of endless growth. Instead of a single technical or conceptual breakthrough, we appear to be dealing with overlapping myths of abundance and exploitation, shaped in great part by the promise of available technology and its environmental limits. Natural philosophy, frontier expansion, and manufacturing development gave rise to alternating objects of cornucopia. Each of these visions of abundance proved unstable and temporary. Indeed, cornucopianism and environmental anxieties have been closely intertwined in theory and practice from the eighteenth century onward.

Defining the Anthropocene

Abstract: Time is divided by geologists according to marked shifts in Earth's state. Recent global environmental changes suggest that Earth may have entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Here we review the historical genesis of the idea and assess anthropogenic signatures in the geological record against the formal requirements for the recognition of a new epoch. The evidence suggests that of the various proposed dates two do appear to conform to the criteria to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene: 1610 and 1964. The formal establishment of an Anthropocene Epoch would mark a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and the Earth system.

A Complete Bibliography of Publications in Isis, 2000{2009

Abstract: accademiche [38]. Ada [45]. Adrian [45]. African [56]. Age [39, 49, 61]. Al [23]. Al-Rawi [23]. Aldous [68]. Alex [15]. Allure [46]. America [60, 66]. American [49, 69, 61, 52]. ancienne [25]. Andreas [28]. Angela [42]. Animals [16]. Ann [26]. Anna [19, 47]. Annotated [46]. Annotations [28]. Anti [37]. Anti-Copernican [37]. Antibiotic [64]. Anxiety [51]. Apocalyptic [61]. Archaeology [26]. Ark [36]. Artisan [32]. Asylum [48]. Atri [54]. Audra [65]. Australia [41]. Authorship [15]. Axelle [29].

The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

Abstract: This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow hist...

Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere

Abstract: Human populations and their use of land have transformed most of the terrestrial biosphere into anthropogenic biomes (anthromes), causing a variety of novel ecological patterns and processes to emerge. To assess whether human populations and their use of land have directly altered the terrestrial biosphere sufficiently to indicate that the Earth system has entered a new geological epoch, spatially explicit global estimates of human populations and their use of land were analysed across the Holocene for their potential to induce irreversible novel transformation of the terrestrial biosphere. Human alteration of the terrestrial biosphere has been significant for more than 8000 years. However, only in the past century has the majority of the terrestrial biosphere been transformed into intensively used anthromes with predominantly novel anthropogenic ecological processes. At present, even were human populations to decline substantially or use of land become far more efficient, the current global extent, duration, type and intensity of human transformation of ecosystems have already irreversibly altered the terrestrial biosphere at levels sufficient to leave an unambiguous geological record differing substantially from that of the Holocene or any prior epoch. It remains to be seen whether the anthropogenic biosphere will be sustained and continue to evolve.