History of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Note Special Day. Discussion of the "virtual issue" on climate history recently published online by Environmental History. https://academic.oup.com/envhis/pages/virtual_edition_on_climate_change including articles by Lydia Barnett, "The Theology of Climate Change: Sin as Agency in the Enlightenment's Anthropocene" and Joshua P. Howe, "This Is Nature; This Is Un-Nature: Reading the Keeling Curve" along with any other articles that interest you

Tiago Saraiva (Drexel University), “Frantz Fanon in LA: Cloning Oranges and American Democracy in the Global South.”

Catherine Dunlop (Montana State University), author of Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland (Chicago, 2015) and Bill Rankin (Yale University), author of After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016) opened the discussion by commenting on each others' books.

Abe Gibson of Arizona State introduced selections from his new book, Feral Animals in the American South, Cambridge University Press, 2016

Members in the Philadelphia area were invited to attend a local screening of Peter Galison and Robb Moss's new film, Containment (2015), about nuclear waste sites and the challenge of communicating their danger to humanity 10,000 years in the future, followed by a discussion with Peter Galison: here.

Elaine LaFay of the University of Pennsylvania introduced her paper "'On the Teeth of the Wind': Medical Meteorology and the American Empire Along the Antebellum U.S. Gulf Coast."

Note special day. Nick Shapiro, research fellow at CHF joined the group for a discussion of his recent work published in Cultural Anthropology, "Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime." The article is available for download at www.culanth.org/articles/781-attuning-to-the-chemosphere-domestic.

The group discussed a recent forum on "Technology, Ecology, and Human Health since 1850," Environmental History 20 (2015): 710-804. The group's conveners (Benson, Roberts, and Vetter) began the conversation by introducing specific themes and topics relevant to their own work.

Larry Kessler from Temple Univ. shared his paper, "'Overcoming Nature by Nature': Biological Pest Control and the Campaign for Hawaiian Annexation."

Lisa Ruth Rand of the University of Pennsylvania introduced her paper "Under the Copper Curtain: Project West Ford and the Roots of Outer Space Environmentalism, 1958-1964."