News
October 2023
On October 20th 2023, SPHERE researcher Erik Isberg successfully defended his PhD. dissertation Planetary Timemaking: Paleoclimatology and the Temporalities of Environmental Knowledge, 1945-1990. Erik’s defense included a stimulating discussion with opponent Dr. Etienne Benson of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, as well as the examination panel and members of the audience. The defense was followed later that evening with celebrations deep below KTH campus in the storied KTH Reactor Hall, site of the first nuclear reactor in Sweden.
August 2023
SPHERE researchers Sverker Sörlin and Eric Paglia have contributed a chapter to Sites of International Memory, edited by Glenda Sluga, Kate Darian-Smith and Madeleine Herre, and published on University of Pennsylvania Press (2023). Paglia and Sörlin’s chapter “Greening our common fate: Stockholm as a node of global environmental memory” examines how the host-city of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment has over the past half-century and more become closely associated with the rise of global environmental governance.
November 2022
SPHERE team member Prof. Glenda Sluga has co-authored a new article published in the journal European Contemporary History. "Business and the Planetary History of International Environmental Governance in the 1970s" examines the involvement of business actors in the formative 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and subsequent establishment of the UN Environment Programme.
September 2022
Professor of Environmental History, Sverker Sörlin, will speak at one of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study seminars on Tuesday 27 September at 14.15. Further information »
July 2022
SPHERE P.I. Sverker Sörlin is one of this year’s prestigious Summer Speakers on Swedish National Radio. Listen to his talk (in Swedish) on a vision for a fossil-free and welfare-full Sweden.
May 2022
Reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm in June 1972, SPHERE is on June 6th co-convening a webinar on Stockholm and the rise of global environmental governance.
SPHERE PhD candidate Erik Isberg's article "A new Earth rises: How did the planet replace the nation-state to become the prime political object of the 21st century?" has been published by Aeon.
SPHERE P.I. Sverker Sörlin delivered the Twenty-Sixth Annual Hans Rausing Lecture on 12 May 2022 at the University of Cambridge. In his lecture, "Environing technologies – shaping, seeing, sense-making," Professor Sörlin explored some of the ways we can think about what technologies do when they shape the material environment that is now present on all possible scales of the Planet, but also how technologies – observational, computational, visual, economic – were essential in shaping the policy concept.
SPHERE Blog
1977
Paul Warde goes back to 1977 and two books that came out of debates around the idea of 'limits to growth' that was given such traction by the Club of Rome's report of that name in 1972. Read more »
Tactics and Strategy in the Environmental Revolution (Part II)
In this piece Paul Warde picks up the question of the importance of individual trajectories in environmental governance, considering its importance of part of a story that at a more abstract level appears to be of increasing integration, institutionalization, and aggregation. Read more »
Tactics and Strategy in the Environmental Revolution (Part I)
What does it mean to govern the global environment? The question almost seems redundant, for to govern the global environment is surely to govern everything. Paul Warde reflects that ‘the environment’ is a multi-scalar concept par excellence, that today incorporates the whole planet, and at the same time is pervasive and microscopic, observable with only the most sensitive of instruments, simultaneously pertaining to vast weather systems, pandemics, toxic bodies and bodies of toxins, and everything in between. Read more »
How a warmer climate drives us to revalue the environment: an example from Argentina
Employing shifting societal perceptions of glaciers in Argentina as an example, SPHERE PhD. candidate Jasmin Höglund Hellgren demonstrates how planetary dynamics of climate change alter and reframe discussions of what, why and how environmental objects should and need to be governed, revealing the complex and changing relationship between society and environment. Read more »
Seeing Like a Planet
Using a local wind energy project in Taiwan that environmental NGOs accuse of posing a threat to endangered dolphins as an example, SPHERE PhD. candidate Thomas Harbøll Schrøder reflects on the inevitable tensions associated with the idea of planetary stewardship. Read more »
Ice Cores and Planetary Encounters
In this inaugural post for the SPHERE blog, PhD. candidate Erik Isberg provides an icy explanation of the intertwined histories of glaciology and geological time, and how ice cores extracted in 1966 at Camp Century in Greenland—and recently discovered in a forgotten freezer in Copenhagen—point to a past, and potentially future, green Greenland. Read more »
SPHERE Podcast
Environment, Population and a Lifetime Journey through Science and Politics with Professor Paul R. Ehrlich (7/9/2023)
Earth system governance, planetary justice and geoengineering with Prof. Frank Biermann (5/28/2021)
Rendering the Earth a Governable Object in the Anthropocene (4/26/2021)
Spaceship Earth: from the Environmental Age to the Anthropocene with Sabine Höhler, pt. 2 (1/20/2021)
Spaceship Earth: from the Environmental Age to the Anthropocene with Sabine Höhler, pt. 1 (12/16/2020)
The Environment: A History of the Idea with Prof. Sverker Sörlin (11/8/2020)
The SPHERE podcast, featuring interviews with a wide range of experts on global environmental governance issues, is available on most major podcast apps and platforms.
