Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is an associate professor of British history and the history of science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (2013) and, with Vicky Albritton, Green Victorians (forthcoming).
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
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Writing on Public Books
The Holocene Hangover
As a child growing up in the early 1980s, I often daydreamed of space exploration and interstellar frontiers. The leap into outer space seemed tantalizingly close. In the science fiction stories I read, the chronology of the future was also the potential biography of adulthood. One story projected a settlement on Mars in 1995; another […]
Planetary Politics
In 2000, the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stoermer proposed that the earth had entered a new age. The Holocene period, the geological term for the past 11,500 years, had given way to a new epoch—the Anthropocene. A warmer, more extreme, and less predictable pattern of weather had replaced the Holocene’s relatively […]
