Additional Flashcards
What are the environmental projects covered by James Roger Fleming?
- Geo-engineering
- 1952 - Op. Cumulus - Lynmouth flooded by Govt. cloud seeding project.
- Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation - WWII - 6000 gallons of petrol to clear airbase. 30m. gallons in operation.
- 1966-72 - Op. Popeye - US cloud-seeding over Ho Chi Minh trail.
- 1990s - iron injection into sea to create phytoplankton communities to sequestrate CO2
What did Lowdermilk claim about the agricultural politics of Syria?
“sucidial agriculture”
Harriet Ritvo
What did Ritvo note?
- Thirlmere - purchased by Manchester in 1877, 100 miles of water piping
- Opposed by Thirlmere Defence Assocation, 1877 - incl. John Ruskin and Robert Carlyle.
- Govt did not take Yellowstone approach, but left legacy in terms of approaching environmentalism
- Link to Mathis on Fontainbleu and Thirlmere.
Charles F Walker
What did Charles F Walker add?
- Discussion of 1746 Earthquake and Tsunami in Spanish held Peru
- Lima saw population decimated - from 6000 to 100s.
- Ecological concerns did not figure - blamed on women for being too independent and explicit - earned the wrath of God.
- Spanish did not care.
Joachim Radkau
What did Radkau note about colonial powers and the environment?
- Govt took crucial decisions with little to no interest in the environment - so far away.
- Paleolithic communities transformed plant and animal life on a grand scale.
- Radkau is Braudelian in nature, and the elevated presence of the environment in German politics figures within his discourse.
Grace Robertson
What did Grace Robertson add to the narrative?
- Explored the reconstruction of the sheep in the British imagination following Chernobyl disaster in April 1986.
- Evidences Commons debates which limited radioactive items present in the meat of sheep to 1000bq/kg, which was indicated through a colour system (green spotted sheep were deemed too irradiated)
- Had impact on meat consumption in 1986-7.
Gary Kroll
Important
America’s Ocean Wilderness
- 20th century saw the replacement fo the terrestial frontier with the hydrological one.
- Oceans source of intrigue and decline - particular interest in the dual role it played in extraction and entertainment
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Roy Chapman Andrews - Naturalist who studied whales - found the fascination with whale hunting paradoxically stimulated interest in conservation
- Progressive conservationist - with a romantic image of the sea as the new american west.
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Rachel Carson - 1951 - The Sea Around Us - placed the sea at the centre of affairs on earth, seeking to show that man could not alter the eternal sea. 1961, second edition, wrote that she had been naive, looking at nuclear testing.
- Trained as biologist and then in Bureau of Fisheries.
- Heyerdahl - reversionist - sailed out from Peru for 101 days on a log raft - claimed the experience to be purifying and awakened ‘primitive’ natural senses.
- Jacques Cousteau - technophile - developed scuba equipment. 1960s, went on TV, suggesting that tech could repair the oceans - coined the term ‘ecotechnie’
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Roy Chapman Andrews - Naturalist who studied whales - found the fascination with whale hunting paradoxically stimulated interest in conservation
William Cronon - A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative 1992
- Bonnifield -> optimistic, power of people to enact change against human disaster (dust bowl)
- Worster -> anthropogenic ecological disaster. (dust bowl)
- Non-human actors are co-determinants of history; though historians tend to place humans as the antagonist or protagonist of narratives.
- Narratives tend to talk about progress or declension. Look at Frederick Jackson Turner’s transformation of the American wilderness to trading post to farm to boomtown as central saga of nation. Conquest natural and inevitable.
Warde - 2018 Anthropocene
- Before the envrionmental historians, there were several works on landscapes, conservation, pollution, energy and animals. Only with environment that the association was made.
- Chakrabarty, 09 - ‘collapse of human history and natural history’
- Aristotle defined nature as things which possess their own inner principles of movement
- Environment as a word popularised by Herbert Spencer - in an evolutionary sense. Was not fundamentally interconnected
- Social history goes back to Vico (enlightenment). Above all concerned with human agency. Wary of bestowing too much agency to objects or natural forces.
- Anthropocene represents a mystification of social inequality and capitalism
- Fressoz - up to 1950, should really speak of Anglocene.
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What did the 1964 Wilderness Act in the US add?
Very Romantic language, embrace of the rhetoric of Muir and the Sierra Club a generation prior.
’ …community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.’
What did Samuel P Hays charge in his 1985 book, Beauty, Health and Permanence?
- Environmentalism was the outgrowth of conservationism.
- Prior to the 1950s, the Conservation movement was the entity bringing scientific management into the government.
- Limitations: Not a social scientist, superficial, handles new env. issues poorly (water and air pollution),
What could be said of Samuel P Hays’s Gospel of Efficiency?
- Classic text
- Concerning the history of conservation between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
What is important to note about the period in which the cameralists were writing?
principalities in the German lands were still devastated from the Thirty Years’ War and in desperate need of political, economic, agricultural, and technological cultivation
Who was a pre-eminent scientific forester who worked in Burma under British colonial rule?
- Dietrich Brandis
- Closely tied to the management of teak - proved useful for shipbuilding. Introduced the ‘taungya’ system.
- Formulated legislation and research + training institutions.
- Influential over Gifford Pinchot in the US Forestry Service.
What is the difference between conservationism and environmentalism
Conservationism is typically skewed to a greater extent toward yielding utility from human intervention in a limited number of spheres. Environmentalism tends to be more holistic, and respectful of the inherent rights of ecological entities.
What did Roosevelt recognise in the 1900s, in line with the Progressive attitude?
- Laissez faire attitudes towards the environment were wasteful and inefficient.
- Preservationists, under Muir, were more radical - believing stronger policy was needed and that conservationists’ focus on the natural world as the site of economic production would inevitably hinder their commitment to preservation.
