Abstract

Scientific discourses on environmental change often propose to retain and possibly to revert change. Notions such as resilience, planetary boundaries, rewilding or de-extinction suggest implicitly the idea that processes in earth history are somewhat reversible through intense, often large-scale, bio- and geo-engineering. Attending to the training of skills for measuring and recording atmospheric variables among earth scientists, I look into the proposal to bombard the sky with chemicals to keep the atmosphere within “safe” boundaries. I argue that reversibility in earth history results from a process of abstraction, related to the need to measure, average and represent temporal processes in climate science. Though abstraction the atmosphere is contained and isolated from the earth, emulating the macro-engineering of concrete surfaces that currently dominate human built environments and from which climate change is often modelled. Abstraction and containment of climate coincide, in turn, with traditional narratives of how ‘Man the Maker’ tames a passive nature through labour. Yet, the image of a passive and reversibility nature, I argue, contradicts the irreversible experience of feeling immersed in living world in constant becoming.