The 1890s have a special significance in the literary history of the Anthropocene, and the fin de siècle has traditionally been understood as a moment when artifice triumphed over nature. Reexamining the period today, we can instead see how literature and art of the 1890s reckons with the idea of an indeterminate nature without design, purpose, or end – a nature profoundly shaped by human forces and yet beyond human reckoning and control. The concentrated finitude of the era, as framed in literary and historical study, actually reflects the period’s own grasp of the finitudes and vicissitudes of the natural world. This chapter aims to tease out the environmental and ecological inheritance of the decadent 1890s while simultaneously teasing apart the complex conceptual contestation among rival assaults on the category of the “natural” in the 1890s, assaults that can be roughly grouped around Oscar Wilde’s 1895 denaturalizing of heterosexuality and Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 denaturalizing of the atmosphere in his landmark essay “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

Forests regulate climate through exchanges of energy and materials with the atmosphere. The idea that forests affect climate is not new. A vigorous debate about deforestation, reforestation, and climate change began during European settlement of the Americas, spreading to all regions of the world before collapsing in the early 1900s. The story of forests and climate change is told as being scientifically wrong and advanced for political, economic, or cultural reasons, but it has not been told from a modern scientific perspective. In fact, it represents the foundation for the interdisciplinary study of Earth as a system. Many of the questions posed in today’s study of climate change and climate solutions have their origins in the forest-climate question. The multicentury controversy over forests and climate change is a narrative in which purposeful modification of climate is longstanding, but by felling or planting trees. Earth system science is a centuries old idea, conceived in the long-held belief that forests influence climate and doomed to fail by the disciplinary specialization of the sciences. Narrow-mindedness prevented a vision of the world as an interconnected system.