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Abstract Credible fact-making for policy demands the same legitimating moves as are required for credible politics. Experts, like politicians, must represent the world in ways that respect diverse standpoints, aggregate disparate opinions to produce a semblance of objectivity, and find persuasive ways to bridge gaps between available and ideal states of knowledge. Every society, moreover, commands its own culturally recognized approaches to producing and testing public knowledge, and expert practices must conform to these to be broadly accepted. Insisting on the superior authority of science without attending to the politics of reason and persuasion will not restore trust in either knowledge or power. Instead, trust can be regained with more inclusive processes for framing policy questions, greater attentiveness to dissenting voices and minority views, and more humility in admitting where science falls short and policy decisions must rest on prudence and concern for the vulnerable. 

This paper contrasts two approaches to implementing the notoriously ambiguous ideal of sustainability: one driven by the centralized, managerial metaphor of Spaceship Earth, and the other by a notion of stewardship that foregrounds the values of care and obligation. Both approaches depend on infrastructures to enable them, but these are built on different combinations of the material, the social, and the moral. Viewing Earth as a spaceship amenable to human guidance and control makes sense only if we also accept the power of dominant “centers of calculation” that gather and disseminate standardized knowledge instrumentally to ensure global coordination. Stewardship, by contrast, relies on infrastructures of locally shared values and distributed innovation in human-nature relations ra- ther than on universal scientific knowledge or technology. Stewardship is of- ten propagated by social movements seeking to promote globally sustainable ecological practices. The two approaches have markedly differ- ent implications for designing future infrastructures to promote transfor- mations to sustainability. 

Keynote talk 

Abstract History at one time drew unproblematically on records produced by human societies about themselves and their doings. Advances in biology and the earth sciences introduced new narrative resources that repositioned the human story in relation to the evolution of all else on the planet, thereby decentering earlier conceptions of time, life, and human agency. This essay reflects on what it means for our understanding of the human that the history of our species has become so intimately entangled with the material processes that make up the biosphere, while concurrently the temporal horizon of our imagination has been stretched forward and back, underscoring the brevity of human existence in relation to earthly time. I suggest that, despite significant changes in the resources with which we can rethink the human condition, drawing upon the sciences, history’s fundamental purposes have not been rendered irrelevant. These center, as before, on the normative project of connecting past and future in ways that make sense of human experience and give meaning to it. In particular, the question of how humans should imagine the stewardship of the Earth in the Anthropocene remains an ethical project for history and not primarily the domain of the natural sciences.