Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk - Hardcover

Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste

 
9781839765506: Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 183976550X ISBN 13: 9781839765506
Verlag: Verso Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact humanity has on the environment. Hence there is a fashion for green confessions and mea culpas.

But the notion of a contemporary ecological awakening leads to political impasse. It erases a long history of environmental destruction. Furthermore, by focusing on our present virtues, it overlooks the struggles from which our perspective arose.

In response, Happy Apocalypse plunges us into the heart of controversies that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around factories, machines, vaccines and railways. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz demonstrates how risk was conceived, managed, distributed and erased to facilitate industrialization. He explores how clinical expertise around 1800 allowed vaccination to be presented as completely benign, how the polluter-pays principle emerged in the nineteenth century to legitimize the chemical industry, how safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital and how criticisms and objections were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity.

Societies of the past did not inadvertently alter their environments on a massive scale. Nor did they disregard the consequences of their decisions. They seriously considered them, sometimes with dread. The history recounted in this book is not one of a sudden awakening but a process of modernising environmental disinhibition.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology, previously at Imperial College London, now based in Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of The Happy Apocalypse (forthcoming) and The Shock of the Anthropocene (with C. Bonneuil).

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Verlag
Verso Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
183976550X
ISBN 13 
9781839765506
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
259
Kontakt zum Hersteller
VERSO BOOKS
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb

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