EIHS Lecture: A Life in Planetary History (Perrin Selcer, University of Michigan), February 15, 2024

Inspired by Earth System scientists’ models of global environmental catastrophe, luminaries of “planetary history” proclaim the collapse of the divide separating natural and human history and, simultaneously, define the planetary scale as incommensurable with experience. This talk explores an alternative approach that reconstructs Earth history through biographies of individual organisms. From “life histories” recorded in the tusks of mastodons and mammoths, paleobiologists investigate the drivers of species extinction at the end of the Ice Age. The scalar perspective that emerges from the interaction of fossilized animal traces and a scientific career offers a planetary imaginary individuals may relate to.

Perrin works at the intersection of environmental history and Science & Technology Studies to understand how the global-scale environment became an existential crisis. He is the author of The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (2018). His current project, “The Holocene Is History: Human Nature at the End of the Last Ice Age,” received a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for retraining in the paleosciences. It explores how scientists from the late-nineteenth century to the present assembled fragmentary traces of the past to tell morally and politically fraught stories about the origins of civilization.

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.