Faculty Spotlight - Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson's influential work on Early Modern Europe and environmental history has shaped discussions about the history of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch that articulates the outsized impact human activity has on the planet. The inauguration of the Anthropocene era is debated, but Albritton Jonsson argues that it began with the Second Industrial Revolution. His most recent book, co-written with Carl Wennerlind, Scarcity: Economy and Nature in the Age of Capitalism, argues that “through a pattern of overconsumption, a minority of the world’s population is producing an excess of waste and pollution which are undermining the Holocene climate and biodiversity, along with other crucial aspects of the earth system.” 

1. Your work on Early Modern Europe and environmental history has been influential as has your approach to the Anthropocene. How has your research project developed over the course of your career?

I came to Chicago as a graduate student in 1998 after a stint at the University of Cambridge where I trained with the historian of science Simon Schaffer. At that point, I had in mind I was going to write a dissertation about the Enlightenment and the history of technology. I was especially fascinated with automata: eighteenth century attempts to mimic human and animal movement with clockwork mechanisms. 

At Chicago my intellectual interests widened to include not just history of science and technology but also political economy and environmental history. By a stroke of good fortune, the leading historian of eighteenth century Britain, John Brewer, arrived at Chicago just as I was gearing up to propose a dissertation project. Under John’s supervision, I became interested in the dark side of the Scottish Enlightenment – how ideas of improvement were carried into practice on the Highland periphery, often with disastrous consequences for its Gaelic speaking people. I spent a year in Edinburgh rummaging through the archives to understand how the Highlands became a laboratory for Enlightenment projects that were often wildly optimistic about the possibility of transforming the regional climate and local soils. I noticed that the arc of Highland development followed a two-part sequence. At first, improvers envisioned a new commercial and urban order in the north. Through the promotion of free trade and local industry, they hoped that great new cities would spring up in the wilderness. Yet by the end of the Enlightenment, a more pessimistic view of the natural order gained prominence. 

In this reversal, we glimpse one of the recurring themes of modern environmental thought. On the eve of the nineteenth century, experts and landlords came to believe that there were physical limits to growth which could not be transcended and that high rates of population growth in the region were a curse rather than a blessing. The Highland laboratory now seemed to offer a practical illustration of Malthus’s dismal political economy. Why did cornucopian expectations for growth so quickly turn into anxieties about the stationary state? How did these events in the Highlands contribute towards the development of a new kind of environmental sensibility?

I am still thinking about these questions twenty years later. All of my books so far have explored the dialectic of growth and its physical limits in different times and places. I wish this was a purely antiquarian problem, but I fear that we are now living through a kind of planetary version of the Highland case. The cornucopian hopes of endless growth that drive the capitalist economy have unleashed a process of profound disruption and destabilization in the earth system. Although the defenders of fossil growth deny the existence of physical limits, the planet itself is now moving towards a new state which will make human flourishing more difficult. For some time, earth system scientists have warned that there are physical boundaries to the human economy beyond which we cannot pass without grave risk.

2. In your recent book with Carl Wennerlind, Scarcity: from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, you write, “While historians often point out that knowing history prevents us from repeating it, we believe, more ambitiously, that historical knowledge not only allows us to avoid repetition but provides us with a shared understanding that can help us construct a better future.” How does this view fit into your overarching conception of historical study and its value? 

Carl and I wrote the book for our undergraduate students. Indeed, many of the basic argument in Scarcity were first tested in classrooms at Chicago and Columbia. We both believe strongly in the power of historical knowledge to expand the social and political imagination. We think of the past as a kind of storehouse of lost ideas and forgotten social movements. While the past can never be fully restored, we can recover enough fragments to show the radical contingency of what we take for granted as natural, inevitable, and universal. To quote my favorite novelist Ursula Le Guin: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."[1]

3. If I am reading accurately, you argue that the historical concept(s) of scarcity provides a fruitful avenue for achieving a better understanding of the Anthropocene—characterized by economic growth and the ensuant dramatic shift in planetary climate—and a pattern for more sustainable approaches. Can you elaborate on your central argument and the significance of thinking in terms of scarcity?

What we hope to show in the book is that the dominant notion of scarcity today—the axiom of infinite wants and finite means, a foundational idea that underpins modern economics—is actually quite recent in origin. While economists like to think of their definition of scarcity as eternal and universal, we contest this argument by demonstrating that there have been many other ways of imagining scarcity in the last five hundred years. We also suggest that the world view of neoclassical economics—which assumes that humans can master the natural world through technology and markets—has unleashed a planetary-wide process of environmental degradation and destabilization which now threatens human flourishing. The world is slowly waking up to a new reality which we call planetary scarcity. Through a pattern of overconsumption, a minority of the world’s population is producing an excess of waste and pollution which are undermining the Holocene climate and biodiversity, along with other crucial aspects of the earth system. 

4. The concept of the Anthropocene is fraught. I would be fascinated to hear your expert opinion its consequence, both as a tool for thinking about the impact of human activity and the real effects of the era on humanity and the planet.

Last year, the attempt to validate the Anthropocene as a geological epoch suffered a serious setback. A commission of geologists voted down the proposal to date the start of the Anthropocene to the start of the 1950s. Crucially, the opponents did not object to the basic argument that we have entered a new unstable planetary condition, only to the stratigraphic definition of the epoch linking it to new materials in the postwar sediments.

I see this failure of the geologists as an opportunity for other kinds of scholars to intervene and offer an alternative understanding of planetary change that targets historical causes rather than stratigraphic boundaries. While the Anthropocene is usually linked to the growth of consumer societies in the West after 1950, I prefer to locate the beginnings of earth system change in the Second Industrial Revolution and the age of high imperialism. This is the moment when the fossil economy became a global force, disrupting the relative stability of the carbon cycle in the Holocene. It is also a critical rift in the history of biodiversity and soil health when synthetic fertilizers together with industrial agriculture began to transform ecosystems around the world.

5. In addition to your research, you are a dedicated instructor and advisor. What do you find most consequential in these aspects of your professional life? How do teaching, advising, and research intersect?

Teaching at Chicago has been a source of great joy and excitement since I was a graduate student. My most basic principle as a dissertation advisor is to foster intellectual autonomy in my students. I encourage them to find their own topic of research and to be bold in how they conceive it. I also strongly encourage historical scholarship that borrows ideas and methods from the natural sciences and environmental humanities. In a difficult job market, I have found that such interdisciplinary approaches can open many doors. 

The same principle also carries into my undergraduate teaching. With my colleague Liz Chatterjee, I have designed a new college sequence called Energy in World Civilizations which explores how energy systems change over time. We have found that students from the natural sciences hunger for historical frameworks that help them understand the technical subjects they study in ecology, molecular engineering, and physics from a holistic perspective. 

[1] Ursula K. Le Guin, « Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distiguished Contribution to American Letters” https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal