In 'Last and First Men' (1930), the philosopher Olaf Stapledon used what he called ‘an essay in myth creation’ to construct a prospective future history for humanity across eighteen species, three planets and two billion years. In 'Star Maker' (1937), this whole history occupied a mere paragraph within an exploration of billions of years across multiple cosmoses. In this paper I will argue that Stapledon’s uniquely expansive perspective on time had a profound influence on the thinking of two prominent post-war British scientists who read his books in the 1930s. John Maynard Smith was a leading evolutionary biologist whose contribution to neo-Darwinism built on the work of his mentor J. B. S. Haldane – another keen reader of Stapledon. James Lovelock was the architect of Gaia Theory. Although they ended up on opposite sides of a key debate as to the scope of natural selection, their conceptions of evolution on timescales at orders of magnitude far beyond the human are both foreshadowed in Stapledon’s books. In the first half of this talk I will trace the development of Maynard Smith’s writings on evolutionary time to show how the structural model of 'Last and First Men' enabled him to conceive of an apparently saltationist model of major transitions in evolution within a rigorously neo-Darwinian framework. In the second half I will show how Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, in which time as well as space functions on a planetary not a human scale, is indebted to the imaginative stimulus of 'Star Maker'.

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet – known variously as the Polar Plateau, the Inland Ice, and the Antarctic Ice Cap – formed 34 million years ago and has been largely stable for the last 14 million years. This geographic feature, one of the largest on the planet, existed without scientific or literary description until 1903, when a sledging party led by Albert Armitage, from the British National Antarctic Expedition, camped on the 2700-metre-high plateau and took altitude, magnetic and meteorological measurements. Armitage’s expedition leader, Robert Falcon Scott, led a party onto the ice sheet the following summer, describing the ‘lofty, desolate plateau’ as ‘terrible’ and ‘awe-inspiring’ .

Today, following mid-20th century geophysical exploration, and intense monitoring using geophysical, satellite, and geological methods, we know the ice sheet’s coastal glaciers are vulnerable to the warming oceans and atmosphere. Climate scientists now use paleoclimate evidence and ice sheet models to warn of potential consequences of this warming, describing the East Antarctic Ice Sheet as a ‘sleeping giant’ and leading to headlines warning of an ‘ice apocalypse’ and ‘catastrophic sea level rise’.

Antarctica has been described by Elizabeth Leane as ‘beyond representation’, and by Stephen Pyne as ‘a wasteland for imaginative literature’. This paper explores the East Antarctic Ice Sheet’s 34-million-year geological history against 120 years of human attempts to understand and describe it, with a focus on language used by scientists, writers and journalists to express first its size and age, then its vulnerability – and what this means for our future.

This paper is inspired by two Chinese proverbs: 飲水思源 (one cannot drink water without thinking of its source) and 前人栽树后人乘凉 (the shade that future generations enjoy is a reward reaped from the trees planted by their ancestors). By exploring the aesthetics of water and wood that forms the basis of contemporary American poet Pattiann Rogers’s construction of humanity’s origin story entwined with the environment, I aim to analyze how ecopoetry that traces our Human/Nature ancestry can influence our collective attitudes towards environmental stewardship. By analyzing “The Rites of Passage” (1981), “The Reincarnated” (1981), “Song of the Oceans of the World Becoming” (2001) and “Speaking of Evolution: Luminosity” (2001), I argue that the imagery in these poems encapsulate this sense of ‘eco-genesis’ whereby humanity is returned to the cradle of nature, rooted in environment just as any other nonhuman lives. Rogers —who was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry in 2018— utilizes these elemental aesthetics to demonstrate how “every nonhuman life is an expression somehow of an aspect of myself” (Rogers 31, The Dream of the Marsh Wren). Her ecopoetics centers around her belief that “Nature is everything that is…Our choices and our actions are never for or against nature. They are always simply of nature” (39). Through this state of being of nature, these poetic narratives of humanity’s evolution serve as an awakening into our own origin stories, enabling us to envision our kinship with nature as a fundamental aspect of environmental stewardship.

Current microbiome research has revealed the manifold intricacies of the relationships between humans and microbes. In recent decades, many studies have demonstrated that microbes sustain almost all life forms on Earth, presumably even beyond planetary boundaries. The microbiome – the entire microbes that live in and on our bodies – is closely linked to human physical and mental well- or ill-being- and intricately connects us with human and non-human bodies' inner and outer environments. Imagining and thinking about the microbial world has fascinated and haunted humankind since its discovery. My paper provides a tentative history of microbiomic imagination across time, place, and disciplines. Working at the intersection of literary studies and history, theory, and ethics of medicine, I ask how knowledges of the microbiome have been generated and circulated. Which knowledges prevailed, which knowledges became submerged? How do literary texts inform and challenge biomedical knowledge in the making, and how can Indigenous microbiomic knowledge gain its rightful place in the genealogy of microbes?
By reading literary microbiome stories, such as Mark Twain’s 3,000 Years Among the Microbes (1905), together with historical and contemporary (popular) science publications, such as Ed Yong’s I Contain Multitudes (2016), I focus on the manifold circulatory processes of knowledge production. Thus, the paper ultimately wants to demonstrate how, in the face of the antibiotic era at a dead end and the Anthropocene in crisis, the diverse knowledges of the microbiome are extraordinary manifestations of imagining human-microbe entanglements beyond the infection paradigm and human hubris.