Jeremy Vetter (University of Arizona), one of the working group's co-conveners, will discuss one of his ongoing projects, Agate: The Biography of a Scientific Field Site, building on previous journal articles to explain how he is working to turn it into a book, and to reconceptualize it in the process. This will serve as an opening example of our intended theme for this academic year in this working group -- "Small Stories with Big Significance" -- and we will also discuss this theme in more general terms. We will encourage other group members to consider sharing their own research later in the year that might fit within this theme:
Small Stories with Big Significance. Even as more specialized subfields emerge such as ecology, climatology, ocean science, energy, paleontology, and agricultural science, what big questions and issues unite all of us as historians of earth and environmental sciences? How can we use specific and unabashedly local or smaller-scale case studies in specific places and subfields to address these questions? How can the rapidly worsening environmental crises in which we find ourselves that seem to unfold on a global scale, such as climate change or biodiversity loss, be illuminated by histories of specific places and projects? What leverage do these specific histories of science give us? What are the strengths and weaknesses of embracing localized case studies? How might microhistories of science in the climate crisis, and of other environmental challenges, go beyond “big history” to re-embrace small stories as well, but with a challenge to make them speak to larger questions?
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