Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology StudiesPromises, Challenges, and Contributions – Sara Pritchard

• 1-2 – For example, how might fundamental STS tenets such as knowledge production as a social process, the politics of professionalization, and negotiations over expertise help us gain a richer understanding of how “the environment” is constructed, perceived, contested, and (re)shaped by historical actors?
• 2 – how can social constructivism of knowledge borrowed from STS help make sense of social construction of environment? See p. 8
  • 2
• How might unpacking the processes of knowledge making and technological development illuminate human inter-actions with nonhuman nature and therefore enrich our analyses of those relationships?
  • 1
• 3 – human perceptions of and interactions with non-human nature are valuable objects of historical inquiry
  • 3
• 8 – “Below, I discuss constructivism to highlight the social shaping of knowledge production and thus knowledge itself. As such, contextualizing knowledge making stresses how knowledge systems always mediate representations and understandings of the environment.”
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• 13 – “Analyzing expertise thus often opens up contestation over nature: what it is, who knows it best, how it should be managed, and by whom.”
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• 21 – in 1795 pres. Of Yale Timothy Dwight knowing nature — and getting some much needed exercise — by traveling new england by horseback in order to write a nat. Hist.
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• 35 – “The combination of spatial indeterminancy and chronological blurring in eighteenth-century natural histories made them composites, inherently ambiguous documents of landscape conditions.”
  • 3 – they didn’t know exactly where new england was and they willed themselves to see it as it could be, rather that as it was

 

Frank Uekotter – Farming and not Knowing: Agnotology Meets Environmental History

• 37 – ignorance: connect to wolfe and mathews
• 40 – “Agriculture is certainly not the most popular topic within the history of science. In fact, there is good reason to lament its marginal status within the discipline, as much of what Deborah Fitzgerald bemoaned two decades ago still holds true: ‘For historians of science, agricultural science represents a distinctly ‘blue collar’ phenomenon, which, like engineering, suffers from neglect partly because of its practical aspects. If the physical sciences are highest in intellectual status, the agricultural sciences are near the bottom.’”
• 47 – “Thanks to ignorance, farmers were free to act in a way that would have been irresponsible, and arguably impossible, with greater attention to the complexity of agriculture. In short, wasteful use of resources was the functional equivalent of deficient knowledge.”

 

Dolly Jorgensen – Environmentalists on Both Sides: Enactments in the California Rigs-to-Reefs Debate

• 52 – scientific knowledge enforced two competing, incompatible enactments of nature
• 53 – “Through the way they understand the oil structures, sea life, and humans, the actors on both sides created seascapes.”
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• 60 – even before decomissioning, rigs were already freakologies supporting novel hybrid marine ecosystems
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The Backbone of Everyday Environmentalism: Cultural Scripting and Technological Systems – Finn Arne Jorgensen

 

• 72-73 – I will argue that the extremely high beverage container recycling rates in Norway cannot be explained solely from moral and ethical values—in other words, environmentalism as a philosoph-ical outlook—among Norwegian consumers. Rather, this everyday environ-mentalism exists within the configurations of technologies, organizational forms, materials, and users that channel and enable it
  • 2 – amended to include technology —> human/non-human nature & tech

 

Part II. Constructions of Environmental Expertise

 

The Soil Doctor: Hugh Hammond Bennett, Soil Conservation, and the Search for a Democratic Science – Kevin C. Armitage 87

• 88 – Bennett’s challenge exemplifies a fundamental tension that has in-formed the entire history of environmental reform: how to translate expert knowledge into common practice. How can experts inform the broad public? Can a genuinely democratic social movement derive from the elite knowl-edge of experts? The quandary was how to reconcile democratic and expert knowledge.
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• 89 – His job was to dig small holes that would mark successive points, which in turn would denote the plow line for turning up soil for terraces. A homemade “horse” or wooden bipod substituted for a transit when plotting the lines. It was difficult and cumbersome labor. When he asked his father why they went to such trou-ble, his father supposedly snorted, “To keep the land from washing away!”9Bennett later recalled that this lesson impacted him more greatly than any he learned in school.”
  • 1, 2

 

Communicating Knowledge: The Swedish Mercury Group and Vernacular Science, 1965–1972 – Michael Egan 103 

Signals in the Forest: Cultural Boundaries of Science in Białowiez ̇ a, Poland – Eunice Blavascunas 118

• 118 – There are multiple ways to know nature, particularly nature that is forested and “wild.” But which experts do people trust when those experts speak about nature, about the ontology of the forest? Which compositions of plants and animals belong there?
  • 2, 1 “Wild” in quotation marks

 

Part III. Networks, Mobilities, and Boundaries

 

The Production and Circulation of Standardized Karakul Sheep and Frontier Settlement in the Empires of Hitler, Mussolini, and Salazar – Tiago Saraiva 135

 

 Trading Spaces: Transferring Energy and Organizing Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Grain Trade – Thomas D. Finger 151

• 155 – The trade required perfect timing and a knowledge of up-to-date weather conditions in both the United States and Great Britain. Drought, excessive rain, rust, rot, and the dreaded Hessian fly all made grain production highly variable from year to year in the United States and Great Britain. Grain merchants turned a profit when they could time demand in one area with abundance in another.
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 Situated yet Mobile: Examining the Environmental History of Arctic Ecological Science – Stephen Bocking 164  

 

White Mountain Apache Boundary-Work as an Instrument of Ecopolitical Liberation and Landscape Change – David Tomblin 179

• 187 – radio collars for elk
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• 188 – “wilderness” in quotes
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NEOecology: The Solar System’s Emerging Environmental History and Politics – Valerie A. Olson 195

• 196 – The space that matters in this extreme environmental history and activism is not a sedate solar system but instead, as scientists informed me during my ethnographic fieldwork at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a dynamic “helio-sphere” of interactive matter and energy. This heliosphere is starkly natural but now also contains social topologies made by decades of remote sensing scans and spacecraft missions to its far edges. According to these scientists and policy activists, the heliosphere is the macroenvironmental context for terrestrial, and by extension human, history.
  • 1 – we know our macroenvironmental context differently through our astronautical labor
• 210 – Like the heroic plan of a Hollywood asteroid-impact action movie, the ASE’s goal is to unite humanity against a shared solar system threat, dra-matically expanding the high-stakes arena in which the “Earthly politics” of global environmental governance and resistance is negotiated.
  • 2 – co-control and co-resistance

 

Epilogue: Preservation in the Age of Entanglement: STS and the History of Future Urban Nature – Sverker Sörlin 212

• 212 – “Preservation and conservation are standard tropes of environmental his-tory, nowadays often cited as icons of the field’s backward past rather than its bright future. In this chapter I argue that, on the contrary, there is currently a major transformation regarding how we understand the social-ecological processes of protecting nature and how previous dichotomies between na-ture and culture can be transcended in order both to better understand preservation as a social phenomenon and to inform policy.”
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• Not surprising that ANT and boundary-work are overwhelmingly the most common theoretical tools borrowed from STS for environmental history, as they reflect the multifarious spatio-temporal contingencies of ecological relationships, i.e. Latour’s entanglement — the blurring and permeated boundary that exists between the human and nonhuman worlds — perhaps just another way of saying freakology
• 219 – Recent research in ur-ban ecology has confirmed that not only urban parks, which always served a similar purpose, but also railway yards, allotment parks, golf courses, sports fields, and other typically urban zones have become the home of remark-able and unexpected varieties of biodiversity, not in spite of but rather as a consequence of human interaction and “disturbance” and with significant implications for urban planning. The “urban” thus offers an entirely new ecology, where old truths and theories from “pristine” nature did not work adequately.
  • 4- freakology

 

1. Knowledge politics and labor: how did different groups and individuals know nature through their labor (a la Richard White)? How did different actors develop knowledge and skills and what kinds of contests emerged among them over how to intervene in non-human nature? Who gets to decide what landscapes and waterscapes are produced? What were the consequences of these contests for nature itself?

 

2. Human-non-human-nature relationship: how do people produce nature? what role does non-human nature play in these stories? Is it an actor, acted upon, co-production?

 

3. Relationship between time and space.

 

4. Declensionism: early environmental histories were often declensionist narratives, often about deforestation. How have these environmental historians of Latin America attempted to move beyond declensionism since the 1990s?

—- David Fletcher, Flood Control Freakology