Among the first who calculated resources on a global scale was the Viennese geologist and reformer Eduard Suess. Which influence did these global statistics and inventories of nature have on the economic thought of his epoch? From the perspective of resource statistics and administrative metrics we look at situations of crisis and scarcity. In these shifting environments, a history of units can help to trace political decisions and agency.

Networks in Vienna / Berlin / UK

This work is discussed especially by Nils Güttler and Anna Echterhölter within three larger networks. With the Vienna Anthropocene Network, which has particularly strong contributions from the department of geology, we began right from the beginning to organize the opening conference on “Resource Imaginaries”. As members of the Berlin Technosphere Conference and the “Anthropocene Markers Project” at the MPIWG in Berlin we accompanied the Anthropocene Working Group in their quest to identify the most telling physical signal in the Earth’s strata. Together with the UCL Anthropocene we co-convened an international online-seminar on “Anthropocene Histories” together with various partners form UCL, Oxford and Cambridge at the Institute of Historical Research London.