Climate Change Collection, Interview with Emma Walshe
This week Silke Lohmann talked to Emma Walshe at Peter Harrington about their latest catalogue for the first Climate Change Collection: 'One Hundred Seconds to Midnight – Sounding the Alarm for Climate Change'.
The landmark collection is valued at $2.2m (£1.65m) and hopes to attract rare book collectors as well as general collectors when it is launched at Frieze Masters on 13th October 2021.
Please tell us a little bit about the collaboration with David L. Wenner and how your different approaches to create a Climate Change Collection has led to such an unparalleled, all-encompassing result.
We began discussing the Peter Harrington climate collection with Dave about a year and a half ago over Zoom, and it quickly became clear that the material he had collected – predominantly 19th- and 20th-century climate science – would provide an excellent scientific backbone to the overall collection. I was so excited when I finally had the material to hand, because it’s a real who’s who of climate scientists, all their key works, in lovely condition. I admire Dave’s approach to collecting and it has been a pleasure to work with him. I think he’s also enjoyed seeing how Peter Harrington has approached the topic of climate change from our own, complementary perspective. We’ve grown the collection into one that spans over five centuries and that pairs landmark scientific works with contemporary literature, philosophy, politics, and art. Considering the subject from multiple angles has resulted in an exciting and diverse exploration of climate change and environmentalism.
What astonished you most during your three-year research? Is there particular work that you would personally rate as the most exciting or important item in the collection?
What surprised me most as the project took shape was how far back discussions of climate change can be traced, and not only that, but how many people were contributing to these discussions, on both sides. Recognizing that our understanding of climate change stems from a wider knowledge of weather patterns and meteorology, it was important for the collection’s narrative to have an early anchor, which is why finding a copy of the French astrologer Firmin de Beauval’s In mutationes aeris (1485), in a contemporary binding and with carefully penned annotations, was so special. As one of the first printed works on weather forecasting, it starts our collection’s narrative at the dawn of printing, which is very fitting given how instrumental print culture continues to be in facilitating climate change studies.
You realised that climate change has been a topic for far longer than we are led to believe. Tell us more about the links between recent works and much older books or manuscripts.
This kind of concept-driven collection encourages us, I think, to identify meaningful connections between the oldest and most recently published material, between printed matter and manuscripts, and between the sciences and the arts. Wegener’s proof of continental drift (1912) has its roots in a 16th-century work by Ortelius. The air pollution which John Evelyn worried about in the 17th century is denounced in later anti-Industrial Revolution speeches by artists like William Morris and John Ruskin. Concerns about the impact of overpopulation on the Earth’s resources are seen in Malthus’s 1798 treatise and again in the 20th century in the Ehrlichs’ Population Bomb and in protest materials from the activism movement. Efforts to accurately chart weather patterns adapted to new technologies: voluminous manuscript volumes like Lewis’s Weather Record (1890s onward) compile decades of handwritten readings, whereas Richardson’s pioneering Weather Prediction by Numerical Processes (1922) sets out a modern forecasting scheme which far outstripped computing capabilities of the time.
Please tell us a bit more about Eunice Newton Foote and some other women who worked on climate change up to Generation Z.
The significance of Eunice Newton Foote and her experiments with carbon dioxide has thankfully come to light in the last ten years or so, resulting in her being recognized as a key figure in climate science history. She was a 19th-century American scientist, inventor, and women’s rights campaigner – and, most pertinently for this collection, the first to demonstrate that carbon dioxide and water vapour absorb heat. Despite this, Foote and her paper quickly faded into obscurity, meaning the discovery was historically attributed to her European counterpart John Tyndall who published on the topic a few years later. It was important to me that the collection fully foreground Foote’s achievements. She’s had many successors in the wider field, such as Esther Applin, Alva Ellisor, and Hedwig Kniker, whose 1925 paper on micropalaeontology and the oil industry proved that microfossils could be used to date the layers of the Earth’s crust, another pivotal turning point in Earth science. Camille Parmesan co-authored the most cited paper on climate change to date – her and Gary Yohe’s 2003 article on global warming’s effect on living organisms – and the collection includes it in first edition, as well as equally landmark papers by Susan Solomon and Naomi Oreskes. The warnings of environmental destruction which infuse Rachel Carson’s works are movingly echoed by present-day activists such as Greta Thunberg and Xiye Bastida.
Cli-fi is very much on trend after our own recent experiences and probably a great genre for young collectors to get their teeth into. Please share some of the early novels you think are outstanding.
I think climate fiction has an important role to play in the history of climate change. Data-heavy climate science can be hard to parse, so dystopian novels provide a powerful opportunity for us to imagine the full consequences of our actions. Books like Aldiss’s Hothouse, Ballard’s Drowned World, and Kavan’s Ice prefigure the more recent cli-fi of Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and N. K. Jemisin, for example. Cli-fi is a genre that extends to other media too; the collection includes the director’s copy of the script for the classic apocalyptic thriller The Day the Earth Caught Fire from 1961, which is one of the earliest examples of science-fiction cinema tackling ecological concerns.
You establish Alexander von Humboldt as the father of environmentalism – tell us a little bit about the works included in the collection.
After reading Andrea Wulf’s biography of Humboldt, The Invention of Nature, I realized how important it was to establish Humboldt’s significance in the collection, because of his status as the first person to develop the idea of human-induced climate change. The collection includes first editions of several of his works, from his better-known publications such as Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen (the world’s first ecology book), Ansichten der Natur (described as “the very poetry of geography”), and Kosmos (his magnum opus) to some of his more obscure university lectures on climatology. I especially love unfolding the large engraved plate in Ideen, which constitutes the first visual representation of Humboldt’s concept of a holistic, interconnected web of life, and also the proof state lithographic portrait of Humboldt that we have, which takes its provenance from the estate of Charles Lyell, the famous geologist who drew heavily on Humboldt’s observations for his own work on climatic change.
We are particularly struck by how visual the collection is. Photographs, maps and posters are all included, please share some highlights with us!
The material from the twentieth-century environmental movement is especially eye-catching; I love the bright colours of the original badge pins and the board games, and the punchy graphics of the Earth First! newspapers. There’s a photograph album from a grassroots environment action committee in New York during the 1970s which has photographs of trash cans painted with phrases like “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the pollution” – very evocative. And the visual impact of “Earthrise” goes without saying! The image of Earth “hanging in the void” appears repeatedly in the environmental movement, as both a visual motif – on Earth Day posters and across counterculture material – and as the idea behind a new understanding of our fragile place in the universe.
“One Hundred Seconds to Midnight – Sounding the Alarm for Climate Change” brings together more than 800 original works from the 15th century to the present day by the world's greatest scientists, writers, and activists – from Aristotle to Attenborough. Peter Harrington will donate 10% of the proceeds to fund international charity the World Land Trust's global habitat and wildlife conservation efforts.