Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty: Smuts Lecture Series (Lecture 2)

Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)

Since the nineteenth century, and especially since the Cold War, economic growth and access to cheap energy have created infrastructures for boosting human population, living standards, and longevity. Global ideas about the good life for humans and how best to support these aspirations assume narratives of continuous growth. The same infrastructures, however, have interfered with the long-term earth-system processes that support all forms of life, including that of humans. The three lectures analyse this contradiction that constitutes the climate crisis and highlight the sense of facing a predicament that marks all climate debates - from politics to policy.

The series consists of three lectures that are free and open to all. Tickets via Eventbrite:

• Smuts Memorial Lecture One: Questions Concerning Longevity

• Smuts Memorial Lecture Two: The Sky and the Planet: A Cultural Critique of Technology

• Smuts Memorial Lecture Three: Wars on a Climate-stressed Planet

Lecture Two Abstract: The Sky and the Planet: A Cultural Critique of Technology (Friday 24th October)

Modern technology, it may be said, made the sky - and the sun, the stars, the air, and the rains - much more marginal to human activities than they were in our peasant or indigenous pasts. The same technology, however, woke us up in the late twentieth century to the importance of the atmosphere and the Ozone layer by documenting the damages that humans were causing to either. Nations are not on target to meet the IPCC goals of decarbonization by 2050, and the average rise of the earth's surface temperature may well cross the Rubicon of 2 degrees Celsius towards the end of the century. This lecture discusses the various possibilities for the politics of technology that follow, in this context, from imagining "the planet", i.e. the earth system, as One (as imagined by IPCC), and as plural at the same time.