Tropical forests are globally recognised as biodiversity hotspots and environments that are crucial for climate regulation, landscape stability, and the carbon cycle. Local deforestation can have regional and global feedbacks and 20th-21st century human actions in tropical forests are seen as a key part of the ‘Anthropocene’ – or the anthropogenic domination of earth systems. It remains an open question, however, as to whether pre-industrial human impacts on these environments had similar earth systems effects. 15th to 18th century European colonial empires drew together long-separated Old and New World ecologies, with implications for species distributions, demography, and land management in the tropics. This followed millennia of indigenous activities with possible regional and global cumulative results. Yet, we have no concrete understanding of how pre-industrial impacts varied spatially and temporally, what they meant for local sustainability, and how they compare to modern human impacts. The PANTROPOCENE Project addresses these questions by taking the Spanish Empire as a frame of reference for using archaeological, historical, and palaeoenvironmental data to build ‘pan-tropical’ spatial characterisations of pre-colonial, colonial, and industrial land-use. Undertaking novel palaeoecological and landscape survey fieldwork in the Philippine Archipelago, the often-neglected centre of the Spanish East Indies, the project will bring new data together with existing records, notably from the Neotropics, to ensure full tropical coverage of the Spanish Empire. The results will be factored into climate, geomorphological, and atmospheric models to determine how changing pre-industrial technology, subsistence, and administration had regional and global feedbacks on occupied human environments, informing understandings of the pace and threat of contemporary land-use changes in the context of endemic Island Southeast Asian biodiversity and the tropics more broadly.

Artificial cooling fundamentally shapes the world in which we live. Since the onset of the Cold War, cooling and freezing technologies have become increasingly vital for a wide array of everyday practices, from nutrition, health and reproduction to dwelling, telecommunication, scientific research and economic productivity. A global system of cold storages, cold chains and air-conditioned spaces has become an energy-intensive yet barely considered planetary infrastructure: an “artificial cryosphere”. Artificial cold has drastically restructured life both on a biological and social level, yet the far-reaching impact of this technology is still largely unexplored and unresearched. Recent studies estimate that global cooling demand will increase five-fold by 2050, dramatically exceeding our future energy budget and urgently calling for change. CultCryo argues that avoiding the impending global cooling crisis will be impossible if we do not understand how the planetary infrastructure of artificial cold is deeply interwoven in cultural practices. Thus, in order to analyze the constitution of “cryogenic cultures”, we will undertake four interdisciplinary multi-sited case studies in the domains of food supply, air conditioning, biomedicine and computing. We develop innovative approaches using mixed-methods rooted in the history of technology, geography, digital history of concepts, ethnography and the philosophy and ethics of technology. Breaking ground for an innovative interdisciplinary field of research, CultCryo will provide the first geographical mapping of the cryosphere, a historical reconstruction of its emergence, an ethnographic account on its cultural constitution, and a philosophical analysis and ethical assessment of its underlying norms and values. Thereby, we develop a corpus of urgently needed knowledge to critically analyze a pressing global phenomenon while also identifying alternatives towards a more sustainable future of artificial cold.