After many hesitations and detours about my research topic, I have finally settled on a study of the diffusion of climate anxieties and the establishment of environmentalist practices in the French colonial empire at the end of the 18th century. The question now arises as to how to conduct the project.
We are taught in my geography classes that space is constructed. Socially, politically, but above all mentally. This is why I was pleased to see Pierre-Yves Saunier cite, in his chapter ‘On Methodology’, John Agnew’s concept of the Territorial Trap, referring to a way of imagining the national space as bounded, with a clear distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’. While I am used to see this concept applied in the analysis of present-day politics, I had never thought about applying it to historians: at this point I am not teaching anyone anything, but historians, too, are too often trapped in logics of separations between territories and scales.
Luckily for me, environmental history lends itself quite easily to cross-border analyses. I have noticed, however, that the field of imperial environmental history, in which I have done most of my research for now, suffers from its own kinds of territorial traps. Firstly, it tends to study separately different imperial regions: the Atlantic world, the Indian world, Australasia, … Secondly, although acknowledgment is made about their connections, the colonies and continental Europe (in the case of France, the “metropole”) are treated as two distinct poles. Escaping the territorial trap would therefore mean for me integrating imperial regions together and/or colonies with the metropole through the prism of climate anxiety.
Here are some thoughts on how I could practically proceed.
A first step could consist in answering the question ‘WHERE were climate anxieties and environmentalism?’. Inspired by Saunier’s comment on maps being gates into an argument rather than simple “supportive tools” (p.126), it would be interesting to map the dispersion of some influential books on climate theory and environmentalism across the empire. Botanical gardens could also serve as good proxies for environmentalism as they often were places of scientific experimentation on environmental conservation. This mapping would reveal both the spatial dispersion of environmentalist ideas and practices but also its evolution in time and would hopefully provide some hints about the modalities of circulation.
Reading Saunier’s chapter also made me aware of the powerful potential of translocality as a way to “stretch our spatial imagination” (p.118). Indeed, it enables both to open a dialogue between the local embeddedness of an idea and its circulation and to move beyond the traditional hierarchies of spatial scales. In the case of my project, I am thinking of focusing on two or three locals (Paris and colonial islands) and to analyse their connections and specificities in terms of environmentalism. I will also try to connect the global climatic consequences of El Nino events directly to local impacts, bypassing the national level.
Lastly, taking a biographical route, that is, reconstituting the lifeworld of key individuals, seems promising. Just like some places, we could qualify some individuals as ‘hubs’: through the multiple functions they occupy in multiple spheres, they provide key entrance points into various networks and unveil connections that would have been invisible had the analysis been conducted at another scale. For my project, I have in mind individuals such as Pierre Poivre, naturalist, Jesuit missionary and King’s steward on the Isle de France, or Phillibert Commerson, a naturalist who embarked on Bougainville’s circumnavigation and who subsequently played a major role in the environmental conservation programmes on the Isle de France. Poivre and Commerson are fairly well-known examples, but I am sure I can find many more.
These are my thoughts at the moment, the work continues.