Climate Collections and Photosynthetic, Fossil-Fueled Atmospheres

Historical, cultural, and technological collections are routinely put to work to illustrate narratives of progress, history, and identity. They can also convey new stories that articulate how cultural objects might serve as material expressions of climate change embedded in climate processes. This article considers the oldest surviving largely unaltered Boulton and Watt rotative engine, housed in the collection of the Science Museum, London, as an example to examine how objects are at once the material expression of carbon economies and cultures that have generated them and the material archives of the climate histories in which they are enmeshed. It draws on insights from the environmental humanities and the critical posthumanities and augments these with other knowledge practices from the biogeochemical sciences. Specifically, it utilizes stable carbon dating, whose methods provide the opportunity to locate particular cultural objects in relation to the deep time of planetary climate change. In doing so this paper develops the proposition that, articulated as such, these objects are complex climatic ecological compositions, and so understood, they can serve as cultural carbon mitigation strategies that occasion possibilities of new material and climatic attunement that can complement climate mitigation policies and programs. This proposition is trialed in relation to Object No. 1861-46—the Boulton and Watt “Lap” Engine.