Meeting Nature Halfway: Georg Forster, Mining, and Aesthetics of Artifice, 1784

In 1784, Georg Forster traveled through mining-landscapes in Germany’s Harz and Ore Mountains--a journey long neglected in favor of his more glamorous globe-trotting with Captain Cook. But it was in these industrial landscapes that Forster encountered “a new and rejuvenated Nature." Descending shafts, inspecting weirs, and studying smelting ovens, Forster came to see water- and horse-powered industry as a noble human effort to participate in the “workshop of Nature.” His journals oscillate between hubris and humility: keenly aware of the awesome power of nature evidenced by mine collapses, Forster understood mining as a project of “fitting,” even “completing,” natural landscapes. Following Forster, this talk elucidates the unfamiliar sentimental world of late-eighteenth-century resource extraction, which beguiles two dichotomous historiographical traditions. While some scholars describe the extractive ethos of Forster’s generation as a wholesale “oeconomization of nature,” another tradition identifies this period, with its embrace of holism, as a wellspring of ecological thinking. The curious nature of this moment is captured by the fact that so many romantic figures participated in Germany’s mining industry—from poets like Goethe and Novalis to savants like Henrik Steffens and Alexander von Humboldt. Forster, to whom Humboldt attributed his own holism, helps us engage the alterity of a worldview whereby dominion over nature was to be “shared with nature.” To that end, this talk grounds the lofty aesthetic meditations of Forster and his contemporaries in the “working world” of mining, specifically in the hydraulic systems that epitomized their philosophy of nature.