History of Earth and Environmental Sciences

We will discuss selections from two related and recently published books on the history of science, technology, and the environment in Latin America:
 
Buckley, Eve E. Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. (Intro and ch. 5)
 
Wolfe, Mikael D. Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. (Intro and ch. 4)
 
The two authors will open the discussion with comments on each other's books.
 
Note: This is the discussion that was postponed from last December due to technical difficulties.

Draft chapter by Gabriel Henderson (American Institute of Physics),
"Global 2000 and the Politics of Neo-Malthusian Alarm, 1972-1984"
which examines the influential "Global 2000" report on environmental policy, produced during the Carter Administration, along with the primary source text itself.

Selections from two related and recently published books on the history of chemicals, agriculture, and the environment:

Vail, David D. Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying, and Health in North America's Grasslands since 1945. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018.

Davis, Frederick R. Banned: A History of Pesticides and the Science of Toxicology.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

The two authors opened the discussion with comments on each other's books.

We discussed the recent Osiris volume on "Data Histories" focusing especially on these two articles related to the earth and environmental sciences:
 
Benson, Etienne. "A Centrifuge of Calculation: Managing Data and Enthusiasm in Early Twentieth-Century Bird Banding," Osiris 32 (2017), 286-306.
 
Aronova, Elena. "Geophysical Datascapes of the Cold War: Politics and Practices of the World Data Centers in the 1950s and 1960s." Osiris 32 (2017): 307-327.
 
Elena and Etienne both presented to open the discussion by providing some background on how the volume came together, what they see as the key contributions and debates it offers, and how their own articles connect those issues to the history of the earth and environmental sciences.
 
Also recommended are the introduction by the editors, which is included in the file below, and other articles in the volume, such as those by Staffan Mu:ller-Wille (on natural history) and David Sepkoski (on paleontology).

POSTPONED until spring due to technical difficulties
We will discuss selections from two related and recently published books on the history of science, technology, and the environment in Latin America:

Buckley, Eve E. Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. (Intro and ch. 5)

Wolfe, Mikael D. Watering the Revolution: An Environmental and Technological History of Agrarian Reform in Mexico.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. (Intro and ch. 4)

The two authors will open the discussion with comments on each other's books.

We discussed two recently published papers on the history of climate change, which take very different approaches to the topic, with discussion opened by James Bergman:
Supran, Geoffrey, and Naomi Oreskes. "Assessing Exxonmobil's Climate Change Communications (1977-2014)." Environmental Research Letters 12 (2017).
Coen, Deborah R. "Big Is a Thing of the Past: Climate Change and Methodology in the History of Ideas." Journal of the History of Ideas 77 (2016): 305-21.
 

We will discuss two thematically related papers: a work in progress by Frank Zelko (University of Vermont, who will be present with us via teleconference), "Optimizing Nature: Invoking the ‘Natural’ in the Struggle over Water Fluoridation" and a recently published article by Linda Nash, "From Safety to Risk: The Cold War Contexts of American Environmental Policy," Journal of Policy History 29 (2017): 1-33.

Our theme was Polar Science. Adrian Howkins (Colorado State University), author of Frozen Empires: An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula (Oxford, 2016) and Andrew Stuhl (Bucknell University), author of Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands (Chicago, 2016) will open the discussion by commenting on each others' books.

Note Special Day.

Elaine LaFay, from the University of Pennsylvania, presented “’The slandered torrid zone’: Medicine, Botany, and the Imperial Vision of an American Tropics along the U.S. Gulf Coast, 1820 – 1840.”

The group continued its discussion of climate history with:

• Oreskes, Naomi, Erik M. Conway and Matthew Shindell. “From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, Global Warming, and the Social Deconstruction of Scientific Knowledge.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 38 (1) (Winter 2008): 109-152.
• Weart, Spencer. “The idea of anthropogenic global climate change in the 20th century.” Climate Change 1, (January/February 2010): 67-81.
• Weart, Spencer. 2005. “Depicting Global Warming.” Environmental History 10 (October 2005): 770-75.

Optional / Recommended:

• Nierenberg, Nicolas, Walter R. Tschinkel and Victoria J. Tschinkel. “Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40(3) (Summer 2010): 318-349.
• Lepore, Jill. “[Autumn of the Atom]: The Atomic Origins of Climate Science.” The New Yorker (January 30, 2017). New Yorker Online.