Under Stormy Skies: Atmospheric Science, Technology, and Society

ASEH Environmental History Week

Transformative Histories: Connecting Science, Weather and Environmental Change

Chair: Dr Ruth Morgan (ANU)

Ruth Morgan is Director of the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University in Canberra, where she is researching the environmental exchanges between British India and the Australian colonies during the long nineteenth century.

Overview:

This roundtable proposes to interrogate two concepts within the interconnected histories of science, climate and environment. First, it considers how climate and environmental historians and scholars engaged in the history of science are bridging existing gaps between the three fields. Disaster history has traditionally been placed at this nexus examining, for instance, multi-field responses to extreme weather including transformations of urban, coastal and riverine landscapes through nature-induced damage but also through rebuilding and risk management efforts. This roundtable seeks to build on such work through our second concept: exploring alternative or new ways of reading and connecting climate and environment. It does so by engaging scholars working at the nexus of science, climatic and environmental histories - across themes that are connected to social, environmental and scientific transformations. These include colonialism and its relationship with changes to indigenous communities and landscapes; disaster, extreme weather and climate; land reclamation and surveying and meteorology, weather science and knowledge making. In doing so, the roundtable also proposes to address the methodological challenges and rewards of working across these related areas and suggest pathways toward future methodological apparatus.

We have five panellists - Robert Rouphail (SUSQU); Geoffrey Pakiam (ISEAS); Philipp Lehmann (UCR), Sarah Carson (Northwestern) and Fiona Williamson (SMU) all of whom will speak for 10 minutes each, followed by a discussion chaired by Ruth Morgan (ANU).

Panellists and themes:

Cyclone Carol and the Remaking of Urban Space in Mauritius, 1950s-1970s

Robert Rouphail (Susquehanna University): Rouphail is Assistant Professor of African history whose research investigates the social, political, and environmental histories of empire and decolonization in East Africa and the western Indian Ocean World.

Humans versus wetlands: connecting intertidal livelihoods across the modern Malay world

Geoffrey K. Pakiam (ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore): Pakiam works on societies and commodity frontiers in Southeast Asia, particularly the environmental history of Malay world coastal communities.

El Niño and the human-environment nexus: drought and vulnerability in Singapore 1877-1911

Fiona Williamson (Singapore Management University): Williamson is an environmental historian, with a particular interest in climate, extreme weather and in weather science in colonial Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Human Sensors and Climate Machines: Collecting Environmental Data in Colonial Africa

Philipp Lehmann (UCR): Lehmann is Assistant Professor at UC Riverside, who works on the history of colonial climate science in Africa and Europe from the late nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries.

The Future of Climate History in South Asia

Sarah Carson (Northwestern): Carson is an historian of modern South Asia studying the intersections between weather reasonings, prediction technologies, and state-society relations.

Robert Rouphail, Susquehanna University
Race, Cyclones, and the End of Empire in Mauritius
 
In February of 1960, the most powerful and destructive cyclone in Mauritian history, Carol, made landfall. In its wake, the British colonial state embarked on a reconstruction effort that would reshape the material and social worlds of Mauritius for decades to come. This article analyzes the responses to both the storm itself and to one of the hallmark efforts of the rebuilding process: the construction of cités, “cyclone-proof” housing estates that were meant to permanently shelter those left homeless. Using colonial state papers, songs, poetry, and oral history, this paper shows how both the landfall Carol and the cités that emerged in its wake were understood to be transformative historical events and processes for Afro-descendant Creole Mauritians. In so doing, this paper demonstrates the importance of the natural world to narratives of diasporic community in the southwest Indian Ocean. 
 
Dr Rouphail is Assistant Professor in History at Susquehanna University. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is primarily interested in the social and cultural histories of race, gender, empire and the environment in East Africa and the Indian Ocean world. His current research is on the modern histories of cyclonic weather in Mauritius, a multiethnic and religiously plural island nation off the coast of southeastern Africa, and the Indian Ocean World. His book manuscript, Cyclonic Lives: Disaster and Society in Modern Mauritius, is an environmental history from below. It seeks to understand how everyday people reckoned with these meteorological phenomena in Mauritius. This project traces how popular ideas of race, gender and national belonging in Mauritius transformed in relation to the destruction caused by tropical cyclones and reconstruction efforts that followed. He is also broadly interested in the intersecting histories of Afro-Asian politics, decolonization, technology and the natural world in the 20th century Indian Ocean World.

Carlos S. Dimas, University of Nevada
State Visions: Exploring the Argentine Landscape in the Gran Chaco, 1870-1910
 
In 1845, the Argentine liberal intellectual Domingo F. Sarmiento published his famous work, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. The premise of the book is straight forward: the vast and underpopulated interior was representative of barbarism and the legacies of the colonial era, while the globally oriented metropole of Buenos Aires embodied civilization. Sarmiento’s ideas encapsulated the sentiments of Latin America’s liberal reformers of the nineteenth century. Steeped in the positivist discourse of order and progress, elites developed grandiose visions of creating the modern nation-state through economic development, social transformation, and scientific rationalism. In the case of Argentina, the interior presented an enigma. Although intellectuals repeatedly considered the land and its people as “backward”— often through referring to it as el desierto (the desert)— it was also seen as an area prime for socioeconomic development through large-scale agriculture and settler-colonialism.
 
This talk focuses on the work of Argentine explorers venturing into the Gran Chaco. Today, the region forms part of Argentina’s northeastern border. However, during the colonial period and much of the nineteenth-century indigenous communities populated the Gran Chaco, with many maps referring to the region as “Toba Land.” In the 1870s the Argentine state initiated a process of extending its presence into the peripheries and pushing back internal borders, often using soldiers, engineers, naturalists, and scientists to complete field work. In the northeast, national authorities sent soldiers and engineers to travel across the Chaco to complete detailed reports, often requesting descriptions of the environment. During their travels, many completed basic weather observations to help provide some more detail to their visual observations. Collectively, the reports attempted to draw comparisons and differences between the Argentine “mainland” and the Gran Chaco. Overall, they enthusiastically supported increased exploration of the region’s dense humid forest with “tropical qualities,” to expand Argentina’s environmental diversity.
 
Carlos S. Dimas is an assistant professor of Latin American history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His monograph, Poisoned Eden: Cholera Epidemics, State-Building, and the Problem of Public Health in Tucumán, Argentina, 1865-1908, is forthcoming with University of Nebraska Press. His work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies and the Bulletin of Latin American Research.

Rumors, Panic, and Disasters:
The Experience of Candelaria Town in Quezon Province, Philippines, 1934 and 2014
 
Kerby Alvarez
Assistant Professor
University of the Philippines Diliman
 
The history of disasters has been an exponentially growing research field in the social sciences in the Philippines. In particular, the field of Philippine environmental history is regarded as an overarching framework in local, regional, and national history writing.
 
In times of disasters, rumors are one of the prime instigators of fear and panic to people. Whether in everyday life situations or cases of emergencies, rumors cause massive disruptions in the normative state, and orderly thinking and response of the people. And in many cases, panic experiences are unnoticeably repeated or unconsciously become part of a cycle of events where people are rendered helpless. The panic and stress instigated by these rumors hamper the proactive way of responding to the dangers of situations caused by natural hazards. A study of these rumors provides an avenue where the complex interplay of local culture, scientific knowledge, and people’s vulnerability can be viewed, mainly through how rumors dictate people’s actions and views towards natural hazards. The mass hysteria of Filipinos concerning typhoons, for example, has a surmountable influence on the way they view and respond to such environmental threats. This “cultural trait” of spreading and absorbing rumors, though maybe labeled as a product of collective panic, was once described in the 1930s by Jesuit scientist Miguel Selga as tifonitis or the “mass state of fear of people in the archipelago due to the frequency or extraordinary intensity of typhoons.”[1]
 
This paper is a case study of how Filipinos perceive natural hazards in a local-traditional and scientific manner. It will examine the case of the Candelaria town in the province of Tayabas (presently Quezon Province), wherein incidents of massive panic happened twice, eighty years apart, in 1934 and 2014. These events have similarities and portray a continuity of people’s cultural consciousness towards disasters. A comparative diachronic analysis of the two events sheds light to the complicated conjectures of local knowledge and scientific norms and illustrates an image of Filipino vulnerability in times of disasters.

[1] Greg Bankoff, “Storms in History: Water, hazard and society in the Philippines, 1565-1930”, Peter Boomgaard (ed.), A World of Water: Rain, rivers, and seas in Southeast Asian histories, Singapore, National University of Singapore Press, 2007, p. 179.

Megan Raby: United Fruit's Experiment Station: Lancetilla as a Laboratory for Corporate Science
 
From 1926 to 1974 the United Fruit Company operated the Lancetilla Experiment Station near Tela, Honduras. As a laboratory and botanical garden where one of the world’s largest living collections of tropical fruits could be found, it stood in apparent contrast to the vast banana monocultures of the surrounding area. While United Fruit’s infamous plantations depended on the application of pesticides and chemical knowledge to produce a single commodity crop, its Lancetilla Experiment Station pursued a broad research program oriented toward agricultural diversification. Drawing on the writings of United Fruit-sponsored scientists (a surprisingly under-used set of primary sources) this essay examines the history of Lancetilla to explore the shifting relationship between the company’s administration of scientific research and its control of land. Business, labor, cultural, and environmental historians have contributed to an enormous literature on United Fruit, notorious for its influence on Latin American political and economic life during the twentieth century. Historians of science, however, have paid little attention to United Fruit, despite its major sponsorship of scientific research and status as a prototypical transnational corporation. This essay approaches Lancetilla as both a site of agricultural experimentation and as a “laboratory” for corporate science. Its history demonstrates how United Fruit’s (fluctuating) sponsorship of science gave it new means to control and transform the land. At the same time, corporate science was at the center of land disputes and contested visions of economic development in the twentieth century, leaving surprising traces in local landscapes and the face of global agribusiness today. 
 
Megan Raby is a historian of science and environment whose work emphasizes the transnational connections of science in the US and Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) was awarded the 2019 Philip J. Pauly Prize by the History of Science Society. It explores the relationship between the history of field ecology, the expansion of U.S. hegemony in the circum-Caribbean, and the emergence of the modern concept of biodiversity. Megan Raby is also the author of articles appearing in journals including Environmental History and Isis.

 May Chi Chi Huang, University of Strathclyde
Unified by typhoons: British discussions on extreme storms of Hong Kong

This paper explores British popular accounts of typhoons affecting Hong Kong during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In understanding how these storms were conveyed to a disconnected public back home, I ask how were the experiences of typhoons re-created and why? Documenting typhoons in and around Hong Kong were, of course, important for merchants and mariners, but the British press and travel writers transformed these often violent disruptions to shipping and commerce into a cultural experience of the tropics and of Hong Kong as an idealized colony: one that fostered international co-operation and one of colonial cohesion. Through this exploration, I also trace how ‘typhoons’ transitioned from an object of local knowledge to a technical European term. This act of claiming knowledge over ‘typhoons’ reverberated in British cultural outputs, specifically re-framing the Chinese populations, and their relationship with the weather.

Clark Alejandrino: The Science of Storms: Modern Meteorology in Guangdong's Typhoon Space from the 1850s to the 1950s
 
In 2010, the Guangdong Provincial Meteorological Bureau published a history of the weather stations in China’s richest and most populous province that proudly traced the beginnings of its meteorological network only to the 1950s when the Communist took over China. In this paper, I demonstrate how the Communist, rather than progenitors, were heirs to and fulfillers of a plan that had its origins in the 1850s. Along the way, I show how the century-long quest to establish a viable meteorological network along coastal China was linked first to Western colonial interests, then Chinese nationalist concerns about defending what I call their “meteorological sovereignty,” and the developmentalist dreams of the Republican and Communist states.

Sarah Carson: Negotiating Tropical Difference: The Domestication of Meteorology in India, 1880-1960
 
What exactly is “tropical” about tropical meteorology? Until recently, accounts of atmospheric science have taken Euro-American temperate weather as the universal field for the history of rapid conceptual and scientific developments after 1850, leading to, among other achievements, tolerably-accurate short- and medium-range forecasting. But weather in the equatorial and sub-tropical regions is distinctive, involving powerful hurricanes, pronounced intra-annual oscillations, and monsoonal seasons. With reference to the particular case of South Asia, I argue that the wide semantic field between the literary and the geophysical “tropical” opened up space for creative reinvention and redefinition of atmospheric science in the lower latitudes, lending support to an emerging consensus that meteorology is best understood as a poly-centric science.
 
Through the production of standardized data, leaders of the India Meteorological Department (IMD, f. 1875) sought to render the atmosphere above South Asia not only bureaucratically manageable, but also comparable across the globe, a project entailing the extension of communication and mapping technologies and the recruitment of Indians as—often reluctant—human instruments. However, architects of this data-generating apparatus repeatedly expressed concern that the tropical environment and its inhabitants made faithful transplantation of European systems impractical, even if the imperial exchequer agreed to devote adequate resources (it didn't). The first part of the talk considers instructional observer handbooks alongside the coercive figure of the traveling “inspector,” whose peculiar responsibility it was to discipline troublesome observers and calibrate their finicky, fragile instruments. 
 
Next, I discuss the gradual replacement of expensive, often climatically-unsuitable European instruments with domestic alternatives or new inventions altogether, revealing that the trend toward substitution accelerated because of the requirements of upper-air balloon researchers and the promotion of highly-trained Indian scientists. Finally, I will investigate a short-lived IMD project to gather and statistically assess vernacular weather proverbs, an enterprise grounded in a 1950s nationalist critique of “foreign” methods for studying India’s tropical weather. These cases help us to understand how these figures’ experimentations with local materials and methods over several decades reciprocally influenced evolving theories of tropical “difference” advanced by imperialists and nationalists alike, if for quite different reasons.
 
Sarah Carson (Ph.D. September 2019, Princeton University) is a historian of modern South Asia studying the intersections between weather reasonings, forecasting technologies, and state-society relations. Her dissertation, “Ungovernable Winds: The Weather Sciences in South Asia, 1864-1945” charts the particular history of the India Meteorological Department alongside economic, social, and atmospheric developments in the region to argue for the centrality of “nature” to the politics of imperialism and nationalism. Sarah’s related interests include astrological knowledges, global environmental science, histories of bureaucracy, and pluralistic narratives of environmental change. As a postdoctoral fellow in Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture Program, Sarah will be expanding her dissertation into a book exploring the connections between weather knowledges and state power in India spanning the colonial period and extending into the 1950s, engaging questions surrounding the scientific invention of “the tropics,” the innovation of modern statecraft through authoritarian imperial experimentation, and the role played by weather in everyday public life. She will also begin work on her next book project, which will explore the cultures of the postcolonial earth and environmental sciences in India and Pakistan, using oral history to complement the fragmentary textual archives available.

*Please note: due to the time of this meeting, the Consortium will not host a table at its Philadelphia office. All members of the working group are invited to participate online.*
 
Jim Fleming: Into the Clouds: Joanne Simpson and the Tropical Atmosphere
 
This discussion will be based on the life and work of Joanne (Gerould) Simpson (1923-2010), examines the history of women in meteorology and the history of tropical meteorology in the context of Simpson's long and productive career as pioneer scientist, project leader, and mentor.
 
In 1943 women had no status in meteorology, tropical weather was largely aer incognita, and Joanne Gerould, a new graduate student at the University of Chicago, had just set her sights on understanding the behavior of clouds. Establishing her career in an era of overwhelming marginalization of women in science was no easy matter, and Joanne (who published under three married names and raised three children) had to fight every step of the way. Under the mentorship of Herbert Riehl, she received a Ph.D. from Chicago in 1949. Later, while working at Woods Hole, she collaborated with Riehl on their revolutionary and controversial "hot tower" hypothesis that cumulonimbus clouds were the driving force in the tropical atmosphere, providing energy to power the global circulation.

The mechanism of hot towers alludes to the incessant battle between buoyancy and entrainment in tropical convection, valorizing those clouds that successfully break through the trade wind inversion to soar to the top of the troposphere. The metaphor of hot towers points to the incessant battles Joanne waged between her sky-high aspirations and the dark psychological and institutional forces dragging her down. Yet she prevailed, attaining personal and professional accomplishments, especially in her years at NASA where she directed the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite program.
 
Jim Fleming is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. His books include Meteorology in America (Johns Hopkins, 1990), Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford, 1998), The Callendar Effect (AMS Books, 2007), Fixing the Sky (Columbia, 2010), and Inventing Atmospheric Science (MIT, 2016). Awards include the Eduard Brückner Prize for interdisciplinary climate research and the Sally Hacker and Louis Battan book prizes. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society, and series editor of Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology.