History of Earth and Environmental Sciences

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.

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."