The debate on the origins of climate change is often considered a contemporary one, arising out of the present crisis. In Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking and debating on the consequences of our action upon the environment for centuries. This question was raised wherever history was accelerating: by the Conquistadors in the New World, by the French revolutionaries of 1789, by the scientists and politicians of the 19th century, by the European imperialists in Asia and Africa until the Second World War. This book shows that climate change was at the heart of fundamental debates about colonisation, God, the state, nature, and capitalism, and that from these battles emerged some key concepts of contemporary environmental science and policy. For a brief interlude, science and industry instilled in us the reassuring illusion of an impassive climate. But, in the age of global warming, we must, once again, confront the chaos in the heavens.

Why do we accept pollution in the name of progress? Why has the pursuit of modernity permitted increasing exposure to environmental catastrophe. In Happy Apocalypse, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz - co-author of the highly successful The Shock of the Anthropocene - shows how debates on risk and profit in the Industrial Revolution set the foundations of our own precarious times. This book plunges us into the controversies and struggles around vaccines and factories, railways and urban infrastructure, steam engines and chemical industries. Presenting the dangers of progress as everyday hazards to be tolerated. For instance, the 'polluter pays principle' is often seen as a 1970s invention aimed at curbing pollution. In fact, it was established in the early 19th century under the pressure of industrial capitalists themselves and it replaced a far more stringent way of regulating pollution based on police. Furthermore Fressoz argues that the determination of risk management has been used to suppress protests and alternative models of economic advancement.

The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years. How did we get to this point? Refuting the convenient view of a "human species" that upset the Earth system, unaware of what it was doing, this book proposes the first critical history of the Anthropocene, shaking up many accepted ideas: about our supposedly recent "environmental awareness," about previous challenges to industrialism, about the manufacture of ignorance and consumerism, about so-called energy transitions, as well as about the role of the military in environmental destruction. In a dialogue between science and history, The Shock of the Anthropocene dissects a new theoretical buzzword and explores paths for living and acting politically in this rapidly developing geological epoch