HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 123

wheat and running cattle, American farmers were capable of transforming their “desert” land
into “the most fruitful, healthy, and opulent in the world.” 23
Global cooling—slow but inexorable—remains the apocalyptic truth at the heart of
Buffonian earth science. 24 Until the twentieth-century discovery of radioactivity, logic dic-
tated as much. Emitting heat from its core since the hour of its molten creation, the Earth
must eventually freeze. But Buffon, though a great controversialist, appears to have been un-
comfortable with the mantle of prophet of doom. His theories should be more hopeful and
offer something for everyone: hence his assurances that “Man is able to modify the influence
of the climate that he inhabits—to fix, you might say, the temperature most convenient to
him.” 25
The centrality of climate engineering to Buffon's most famous text explains how Jefferson
could depart Montbard in 1785 expressing nothing but admiration for his host's “extraordin-
ary powers” and “singularly agreeable” nature. 26 On the basis of the climate control argument
that concludes “Des époques de la nature ,” Buffon was able to render a blueprint for agricultur-
al imperialism utterly congenial to the Jeffersonian vision of America. The promise of climate
salvation, like republican democracy itself, lay in agricultural expansion: “As the hallmark of
his own civilization … Man changes the face of the earth, converts deserts into pastures, and
wild heaths into fields of grain … and everywhere he produces abundance, there follows a
great wave of migration; millions of men may inhabit the space formerly occupied by two
or three hundred savages.” 27 Europe had already enjoyed such a transformation. Now, the
United States stood at the cusp of epochal environmental change and a similar population ex-
plosion. A bucolic western landscape, populated by waves of settler farmers, prosperous and
free … just such a vision filled Jefferson's imagination two decades later when, in his dealings
with another eminent Frenchman, he concluded the Louisiana Purchase.
Call it the Great Climate Compromise. One could complain about the weather in the new
American republic, but all must agree it was changing for the better. The notion of an im-
proving climate had been an article of faith in the American colonies since the days of Cot-
ton Mather. A century later, climate boosterism still ruled the day. Constantin François Vol-
ney, a brilliant geographer and friend of Jefferson's who traveled the United States in the
early 1800s, grew accustomed to hearing the gospel of benevolent climate change preached
wherever he went:
I have collected similar testimonies in the whole course of my journies [ sic ]…. On the Ohio,
at Gallipolis, Washington (Kentucky), Frankfort, Lexington, Cincinnati, Louisville, Niagara,
Albany, everywhere the same changes have been mentioned and insisted on. Longer sum-
mers, later autumns, shorter winters, lighter and less lasting snows, and colds less violent
were talked of by everybody; and these changes have always been described, in the newly
settled districts not as gradual and slow, but as quick and sudden, in proportion to the extent
of cultivation. 28
Enlarging on this patriotic theme, the eminent New England naturalist Samuel Willi-
ams—who modeled his Natural and Civil History of Vermont (1794) on Jefferson's Notes —nar-
rated in glowing detail the ameliorative powers of agriculture:
When the settlers move into a new township their first business is to cut down the trees, clear
up the lands, and sow them with grain. The earth is no sooner laid open to the influence of