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National parks are one of the most important and successful institutions in global environmentalism. Since their first designation in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s they have become a global phenomenon. The development of these ecological and political systems cannot be understood as a simple reaction to mounting environmental problems, nor can it be explained by the spread of environmental sensibilities. Shifting the focus from the usual emphasis on national parks in the United States, this volume adopts an historical and transnational perspective on the global geography of protected areas and its changes over time. It focuses especially on the actors, networks, mechanisms, arenas, and institutions responsible for the global spread of the national park and the associated utilization and mobilization of asymmetrical relationships of power and knowledge, contributing to scholarly discussions of globalization and the emergence of global environmental institutions and governance.

Global climate patterns such as El Niño are not simply the outcome of scientific modeling derived from satellite images and other ocean temperature sensing technologies. El Niño first emerged as a narrative through local stories of extreme weather events, preserved by the people of the coastal countries of South America, Indonesia and Asia. This rich local environmental knowledge of extreme weather events and the storms, floods, droughts, and famine it causes in these regions, went largely unnoticed in the northern hemisphere. Only in the 1980s and 1990s did El Niño become part of the new scientific imagery of a global environmental science. Although the ocean gained both public and scientific recognition as a main agent of global climate patterns, the scientific integration of  El Niño  into global climate models and their forecasting has so far not led to the prevention of local environmental catastrophes. Instead, science changed how “the catastrophic” is perceived. Video available at: https://vimeo.com/527398121

El Niño denotes a periodical warm water stream in the Pacific Ocean. But who knew about this phenomenon, where and how? El Niño ‘the boy’ emerged as a fabric of local experiences and stories of extreme weather events: tropical winter storms, floods, droughts and famines in the coastal states of South America, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In the Northern Hemisphere this rich cultural history went largely unnoticed. Only in the 1980s and 1990s did El Niño acquire global recognition as an effect of the oceanic and atmospheric currents in the tropical Pacific region. As the oceans moved from a marginal to a central position in the discourse on the Earth's climate cycles, ENSO – the ‘El Niño Southern Oscillation’ – became part of a global climate pattern. This paper explores El Niño ‘the boy’ and ENSO El Niño Southern Oscillation as juxtaposed and superposed environmental perceptions. While El Niño the boy conveyed horrific weather experiences on the human scale, ENSO became known through terrific scientific views of Earth from space. Earth observation by remote sensing satellites collected vast arrays of local measurements into new data fabrics. Studying the case of the US–French orbital satellite mission of TOPEX/Poseidon, this paper examines both the imagery from satellite data and the forecasting efforts preceding the strong El Niño winter of 1997–8. From the data and image sets of remote sensing satellites, recurring local disruptions emerged as a periodic global climate condition. Local experiences of El Niño and scientific perceptions of ENSO as a global climate cycle did not translate easily into each other. The paper discusses some of the epistemological tensions across spatial scales. While El Niño's shift from exception to regularity fed into the framing of ‘climate change’ as a global disaster, the emerging ENSO regime obscured disaster locally. This paper explores El Niño the boy and ENSO, the El Niño Southern Oscillation as juxtaposed environmental experiences. While El Niño the boy has been connected to catastrophic weather experiences on the human scale, ENSO became known through satellite views of earth from space. From the data and image sets of remote sensing satellites, recurring local weather disruptions emerged as a periodic global climate condition. e00034

This paper studies the new repositories of specimens and knowledge that emerged from Sweden’s first “phytotron,” a modern climate laboratory for plant research established in Stockholm in the 1960s. Different aspects and scales of technoscientific plant and crop growth came together under one roof: inhouse trials on the timing and spacing of trees and crops, postwar domestic policies to modernize a largely rural country, and Swedish forest geneticists’ expertise in international efforts to improve forest stand and productivity globally. I argue that a scalar analysis of scientific forestry can help identify and assess the historical contingencies and contexts that formed the interventions in planetary order invoked by the Anthropocene.

We introduce three topics that characterize research in and of the Anthropocene: terrestrial scales (temporal, systemic, and spatial); accountability within and beyond the social, cultural, and political realms of human interaction; and the unprecedented accumulation and redistribution of earth matter. Historians are well equipped to both explain social change and expose the historicity of concepts, institutions, individual or collective routines, and experiences. Considering this double interest, along with the methodological renewals of their discipline, historians are able to historicize the terrestrial environment and expose geological and ecological causalities across all scales without losing sight of human dimensions and responsibilities.

This paper explores examples of Mars fiction of “terraforming”—of creating Earth-like environments in space—against the background of the Earth’s environmental degradation and restoration. Visions of Mars settlement offered an escape route for a threatened humanity and a blueprint for the eco-technological recreation of the Earth’s environment. This paper aims to outline the Anthropocene as an epoch that not only compromised the Earth but also essentially transformed the understanding of Earthly life to a minimalist principle of survival through infinite metabolic conversions. This understanding of immortality conjoined images of recreation and creation, of paradisiacal pasts and eco-technological futures.

Even though geologists have rejected the designation of an Anthropocene epoch, the idea of a major planetary transition in the mid-twentieth century remains useful across physical and social sciences, the humanities and policy.

In the 1970s the world's oceans were not just another resource to be developed, they were imagined as a place of inexhaustible supply, an unlimited reservoir of proteins, mineral resources and human living space, supplementing the exploited landmasses. This article argues that the sciences, technologies and politics of ocean exploration promoted the image of the earth's biotic and abiotic matter as convertible and replaceable in perfect metabolic cycles. Human matter, the earth's only excess living resource, was seen as feeding directly into these global supply chains and recycling systems. The eco-technological reorganization of the earth's environment, based on biomass as the communal unit, opened the oceans up as a new dimension in the global economy and ecology of flows.

In the 1970s the world's oceans were not just another resource to be developed, they were imagined as a place of inexhaustible supply, an unlimited reservoir of proteins, mineral resources and human living space, supplementing the exploited landmasses. This article argues that the sciences, technologies and politics of ocean exploration promoted the image of the earth's biotic and abiotic matter as convertible and replaceable in perfect metabolic cycles. Human matter, the earth's only excess living resource, was seen as feeding directly into these global supply chains and recycling systems. The eco-technological reorganization of the earth's environment,, based on biomass as the communal unit, opened the oceans up as a new dimension in the global economy and ecology of flows.

Even though geologists have rejected the designation of an Anthropocene epoch, the idea of a major planetary transition in the mid-twentieth century remains useful across physical and social sciences, the humanities and policy.