This is the third post in the Historicizing Adaptation blog series, introduced here by series editor Shannon Stunden Bower.
“In the future, a planetary board of scientists will have to be created, which will regulate human labour in such a way that nothing decisive […] such as the deforestation of an entire continent or the piercing of an isthmus […] may happen without its prior authorization.”1 This call for a global, technocratic fix to environmental degradation was issued by the Parisian lawyer Eugène Huzar in The Tree of Science (1857), his second book on the dangers of industrial, technoscientific ecocide. He had previously published The End of the World through Science (1855), an idiosyncratic text combining a systemic critique of the technoscientific industrial complex with a comparative reading of creation myths to prophesize the coming apocalypse.2
By technoscientific industrial complex, I mean the close association between scientific research, technological development, and industrial activity. “Science,” Huzar wrote, “creates the industrial, and in turn, the industrial creates the intellectual.”3 This close alliance was visible in the nineteenth century, as were the associated risks. The scientific establishment worked hand in hand with governments and industrial actors to assuage popular fears about the risks of new industrial constructions, such as gasometers in Paris.4 The close and potentially deadly relationship between science, industry, and government was clear to see.
Huzar, for whom this complex was marked by its desire for infinite growth, conjured unsettling and, at times, highly creative visions of the apocalypse. If coal consumption continued increasing, he noted, the resulting CO2 emissions, coupled with deforestation, a major concern in nineteenth-century France and beyond, would eventually render the atmosphere unbreathable. By cutting down the forests, “civilization [had not only] pierced its own heart,” but also produced runaway effects not immediately deducible from the original act.5 In Huzar’s texts, science, industry, and human greed combined into a potent, poisonous cocktail.
Huzar was no misunderstood prophet of apocalypse. His works attracted widespread attention and were predominantly well-received.6 Written at the tail-end of an intense preoccupation with humanity’s impact on nature, Huzar’s work tapped into a widespread sense of environmental dread. The latter 1810s had seen significant temperature drops following the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. The environmental and pedological impact of deforestation eventually led the French government to order a study investigating the possibility of anthropogenic climate change in 1821.7 In 1846 and 1856, France witnessed catastrophic floods. Huzar used the latter as central supporting evidence in his Tree of Science. Finally, 1858 saw Europe buckle under an intense heatwave. These events showed the fragility of human existence in the face of nature.
Huzar recognized the intimate link between the deleterious effects of modern scientific discoveries in service of a rapacious industrialist system and environmental disasters. His critique reached deeper, however. Huzar believed in progress – but if the consequences of the technoscientific industrial complex were already so dire in its infancy, what did this mean for the future? We should consider Eugène Huzar as a – possibly inadvertent – degrowth theorist avant la lettre.
Does this mesh with the opening quote, which seemingly suggests that a risk-managed adaptation to an ecocidal society is possible? Yes, in the sense that, for Huzar, this planetary board was a “palliative measure,” delaying the inevitable extinction of the species. Infinite growth, no matter how well-managed, could not happen on a finite planet. The logical conclusion of this line of argument was degrowth. For Huzar, whose Edenic visions depended on technological and scientific growth, this was not necessarily a comfortable position.
To follow his argument, we need to lay out its two cornerstones: the systemic unity – and finitude – of the Earth, and the notion that science and industry were predicated on infinite growth. Huzar saw the Earth as a fine-tuned, harmonious machine. Crucially, this harmony was not static. Science and industry were providing Western societies with ever more tools to extract resources, ever new technologies necessitating intensive resource use, from gas lighting to railways. These societies proved capable of leaving their mark on the Earth’s fragile system beyond their immediate needs.
Huzar was not an enemy of science, nor progress, per se. His target was the paradigm of imprescient, or experimental, science. Proceeding by experimentation without precise knowledge – or care – for its consequences, it was highly efficient and uniquely suited to producing knowledge and innovations at break-neck speed. Under the influence of the material improvements that experimental science had wrought, humanity had increasingly substituted pride for caution. Influenced by a paradigm of discovery and extraction, Western societies had come to believe themselves to be masters of nature, not part of its harmony. Consequently, humanity had fallen prey to a hubristic inability to conceive of the idea that nature might come back with a vengeance.
The core danger lay in growth and its unintended consequences. Through the exponential growth of the scientific and industrial output, society was simultaneously exponentially increasing the probability of catastrophically disrupting the Earth’s fragile system. Huzar here essentially prefigured the butterfly effect. He argued that imprescient science would by its very nature remain unable to accurately judge the consequences of its experiments before conducting them. Yet, the smallest incision could lead to catastrophic consequences. Drawing on the catastrophic 1856 floods in Southern France, Huzar argued that the deforesting of mountainous regions prevented the break-up of clouds, producing long-lasting cold spells and torrential rain. The resulting humidity would lead to vegetal blights, such as oidium. More generally, widespread deforestation, he argued, had led to an almost complete disappearance of spring itself. In an enclosed system like the Earth, Huzar pointed out, every action had an unintended, unforeseen consequence.
Was there a solution? Combining hubris, growth, and a precarious planetary system into a systemic analysis, Huzar had, correctly, concluded that adaptation to environmental degradation could never emanate from within an ecocidal system. No matter how well the scientific board would manage the risks of industrial society, it would not be able to prevent the eventual cataclysm. More importantly perhaps, humans would never be able to truly take the risk of an apocalypse seriously. A technological fix was just around the corner for the masters of nature. The only adaptation possible, then, was palliative care.
There seemed another way out. Concluding The Tree of Science, Huzar announced that his third book, The Tree of Life, would develop a predictive science which would allow humanity to fulfil its Edenic potential while steering clear of extinction. This book remained unwritten. Not, I suspect, because the task was too tall for the Parisian lawyer. Rather, the republican Huzar balked at the task, for the logical conclusion of his own writings would have been a revolutionary degrowth argument. When he finally married in 1870, he had amassed a small fortune through investing in the very projects he had so vigorously denounced only a few years earlier, among them the Suez Canal.8
Huzar was a theorist of systems. Of the Earth’s, of the technoscientific industrial system, and of the consequences of system failure. His work was marked by an understanding of the intricate links between the constituent parts of a system, and the way they fit together like clockwork to create a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. Consequently, he rejected the idea of adaptation to environmental degradation as long as that adaptation came from within the system. From the energy transition to carbon capture, technological fixes from within the system are on full display today.9 At best, Huzar would argue, they can delay the inevitable, but they still operate from the same assumptions – unfettered growth, mastery over nature, and so forth – that had navigated humanity into its crisis. If we want to move beyond hospice care towards a new understanding of adaptation and degrowth, Huzar’s work constitutes a critical tool.
Feature image: The Great Day of His Wrath, John Martin (1851-1853), Tate, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-great-day-of-his-wrath-117730, 15.02.2025
Notes
1. Eugène Huzar, L’Arbre de la Science (Imprimerie de d’Aubusson et Kugelmann, 1857), 275, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k996239q. All translations my own.
2. Huzar’s religious argument is fascinating and critically important to his apocalypticism. It is also profoundly odd, talking about ancient supercivilizations and creation myths as the tales of their hubristic fall from grace, leading to the cyclical eradication of all organic life on Earth.
3. Eugène Huzar, La Fin du Monde par la Science (Librairie de E.Dentu, Éditeur, 1855), 29.
4. See in particular ‘La Libéralisation de l’Environnement’ in Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’Apocalpyse Joyeuse : Une Histoire du Risque Technologique (Éditions du Seuil, 2012), 149-202. Verso has published an English translation titled Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk (Verso Books, 2024).
5. Huzar, L’Arbre de la Science, 114.
6. For a discussion of the popularity and historical impact of Huzar’s works, see Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘Introduction: Eugène Huzar et la genèse de la société du risque,’ in Eugène Huzar, La Fin du Monde par la Science, eds. J.-B. Fressoz and F. Jarrige (Éditions Ère, 2008), 16-17. Fressoz notes that Huzar’s work went on to inspire a host of catastrophist texts in the following years, including most notably Jules Verne’s L’Éternel Adam, published in 1910.
7. For a detailed overview of these debates, and their relationship to the French Revolution, see Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, Les Révoltes du Ciel: Une Histoire du Changement Climatique (XVe-XXe Siècle) (Éditions Seuil, 2020), 171-8. An English translation of this was published by Verso Books in 2024 under the title Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change.
9. See Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Penguin, 2024). Fressoz shows how we have never had an energy transition, and how our energy consumption has been increasing in absolute terms. On the way the IPCC’s recommendations have, for the longest time, been dependent on non-existing technologies, see Jason Hickel, ‘Degrowth: A Theory of Radical Abundance,’ Real World Economic Review, 87 (2019), 54-6.
