Case Studies Flashcards
When was Chernobyl, how did it heighten sensitivity to the environment?
26 April 1986 - Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine heightened concern about how nuclear particles travel on the wind, how they go into the soil and affect food, what they mean for the future health of children growing up and how the plants and animals that remain have responded to the traces of nuclear explosions in the environment.
How did Carson describe the environment in Silent Spring?
“the environment”, as Carson put it, a fragile “web of life” subject to contamination, and assault, its “integrity” subject to “disturbance”, become “corrupt” and threatened to be “engulf[ed]”.
George Orwell, 1948
“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from loudspeakers, but the earth is still going around the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”
What did 1957 see?
International Geophysical Year of 1957, which encouraged much international collaborative research, particularly on the oceans and polar regions across the icy frontiers of the Cold War
What did the 1965 US Environmental Pollution Committee report?
Restoring the Quality of our Environment: focused on pollution but also embraced public health, potential ecological effects, impacts on soil and water, and even possible climate change driven by carbon dioxide emission.
What was an early attempt at cybernetics?
The 1950s work of Yale Mintz at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to develop an early General Circulation Model (GCM) of the atmosphere and oceans were characterised in an obituary as “heroic efforts… during which he coordinated an army of student helpers and amateur programmers to feed a prodigious amount of data through paper tape”
Comment on the conference Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, 1955
Brainchild of William L. Thomas, Carl Sauer, Marston Bates, and Lewis Mumford.
The conference was organised in three parts, covering the past, the present and the future.
The centrepiece was the singular phenomenon: ‘man’.
40% of the attendees came from the earth sciences, 28% from the biological sciences, 12% the social sciences and humanities, and 20% from applied fields such as planning.
Not explicitly “environmental”. The word was not employed much. Activists and intellectuals still regarded themselves as “conservationists”, not “environmentalists”.
What did 1948 see in Russia?
Implementation of Joseph Stalin’s “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature”: responding to the 1946-47 disaster of drought and subsequent famine that saw half a million deaths. A series of dam and irrigation projects, designed to protect the future of agriculture on the Russian steppes and plains, ultimately wreaked new havoc, including the desiccation of the Aral Sea.
Quote Truman
“The real or exaggerated fear of resource shortages and declining standards of living has in the past involved nations in warfare… Conservation can become a major basis of peace.”
What did Cassandras do in 1923?
Cassandras had raised fears of oil exhaustion after the surge of demand during the First World War, which had led to the setting aside for the future the protected region of the Naval Petroleum Reserve in Alaska in 1923.
What did Aldo Leopold encourage in terms of history?
‘Think like a mountain’ ie. narrate history from the point of animals, eco-systems and other non-human entities.
Describe changes in George Tindall’s history
- 1984 -> disease as a contributing but relatively minor factor in the colonists’ displacement of natives
- 2010 -> “By far the most significant aspect of the biological exchange,” they wrote, “was the transmission of infectious diseases from Europe and Africa to the Americas. European colonists and enslaved Africans brought with them deadly pathogens that Native Americans had never experienced…”
- 1984 -> Only a few sentences on the dust bowl. “In 1933, widespread drought in the wheat belt reduced production and removed any need to plow up growing wheat.”
- 2010 -> “a decade-long drought during the 1930s spawned an environmental and human catastrophe known as the dust bowl.”
Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History
What is important about the site of Carneige’s death?
- Carnegie’s mangled body outraged McKean, the Field & Stream journalist, precisely because the young man was “human,” not an “animal” such as a moose or caribou.
- His anxieties exposed the carefully policed divide between humans, who have long fancied themselves as outside nature, and other animals.
Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History
How does William McNeill regard humans?
Plagues and Peoples, disease transfer as a kind of predation on humans by microparasites, microscopic meat-eaters that stalk the human herd.
McNeill writes that, “one can properly think of most human lives as caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators
Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History
Detail Joshua Blu Buhs’s history of ants.
The Fire Ant Wars argues that fire ants exploited what historians call the “bulldozer revolution” in the American South, following humans as they disturbed the landscape. The ant, because it evolved in the floodplains of South America, thrived in areas of upheaval. Buhs submits that fire ants “exploited this revolution to spread across the region. Thus it was a combination of the ant’s natural history and human action that caused the insect’s irruption.”
Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History
How does Walker treat dogs?
Obviously, he writes, the “sharing of infection increases with the degree of intimacy that prevails between man and beast.”Man’s best friend, the dog, has bestowed on the human species more (p. 58) infectious microparasites than any other domesticated creature.
Walker - Animals and the Intimacy of History
What happened to Kenton Carneige in 2005?
A geological engineering student, was attacked and killed by four wolves on a trail near a uranium mine in Saskatchewan.
Deserts - Diana K. Davis
Who does Davis contest first wrote about desiccation theory?
Deserts - Diana K. Davis
Theophrastus - earliest thinker to draw a connection between deforestation and decreases in rainfall.
Deserts - Diana K. Davis
How were deserts imagined and treated in the American mindset?
Deserts - Diana K. Davis
- American deserts were primarily categorized as barren, sterile, savage, and altogether unnatural—as places to be conquered.
- Ranching led to serious overgrazing in parts of the West.
- Led to 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which regulated grazing.
Deserts - Diana K. Davis
Where does the term ‘desert’ originate from?
Deserts - Diana K. Davis
Deserts as we know them today, in distribution and extent, were largely formed by the time Greek civilization began to produce writers of geography and history. The word desert itself may be one of the oldest written words, probably originating in the Egyptian hieroglyph “tésert.”
Sara B Pritchard
Evidence technology-induced anxieties
Sara B Pritchard - Toward an Environmental History of Technology
- Disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and most recently Fukushima Daiichi, but these brief cases point to the complex ways in which ecology and the nuclear age were entangled.
Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity
How did blacks overcome their circumscribed access to the white environment?
Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity
As some African Americans grew more affluent in the 1910s and 1920s, they continued to seek leisure activities in nature. This impulse led to the establishment of all-black resorts, such as Idlewild in Michigan. With private lots for sale, African Americans built both modest and more lavish homes and escaped the cities during the summer to hike, boat, swim, and fish along Lake Idlewild.
- While Kahrl and others have shown how African Americans tried to made in-roads into recreational activities often understood to be white, they do not fully explain how these pursuits became constructed as white in the first place.
Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity
How did Chinese immigrants in California see the utility of the environment between 1810 and 1910?
Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity
Environmental strategies for economic and cultural survival in the face of overt racism. Chinese immigrants saw the cultivation of land as a route to prosperity and stability, and their establishment of permanent rural communities was a testament to their ability to adapt to environmental conditions.
Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity
What occurred in British Honduras?
Connie Y Chiang - Race and Ethnicity
Masters affirmed slaves’ suitability for forced labor by emphasising their intrinsic connections to nature. For instance, they often equated their slaves to animals—both wild and domesticated—to justify their regime. In the case of British Honduras, a colonial official described a slave who spotted mahogany trees as an “instinctual creature” imprinted with knowledge of the jungle—not a rational human being who found trees through observation and reason.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did the river shape human development along the river.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
Hudson’s Bay Company to transport all its goods in ninety-pound packages. The expenditure of labour in carrying these packages involved numerous acts of calculation, conflict, abuse and cooperation. In these acts a social order became transparent. If all journeys were downstream, if there had been no rapids or falls, then the human relations on the early-nineteenth century river would have been different’
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did the damming project play out (RE: Emerson or Mumford?)
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
Nature was central to this vision in a classically Emersonian way… a series of giant slack-water ponds, the river’s energy turning turbines: pumps limiting its waters into canals, its bed a highway for barges. Hoover’s “maximum utilisation” seems more fitting than Mumford’s vision of the Neotechnic as a world of ecological balance.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did Mumford react to Giant Power?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
Lewis Mumford - ‘espoused a common energy utopianism’. He made Giant Power into a social theory. He thought that when we switch energy sources, we potentially change the possibilities for our society.’
Mumford explained by Emersonianism had gone wrong. It had depended on the wrong energy source for its machines. Steam engines producing mechanical energy through shafts and belts belonged to what Mumford, following Patrick Geddes, called Paleotechnic. The Paleotechnic depended on coal and iron; it represented an ‘upthrust from barbarism’ that was hardly progress at all.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
What did Report 308 Recommend?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
“308 Report” into the Grand Coulee river basin, by John Butler. AKA “The Columbia River and Minor Tributaries”, which recognised in the Columbia the potential for being the ‘greatest system for water power to be found anywhere in the US’. Butler imagined a Columbia eventually “controlled and managed as one system”. Its immense yield of power could make the cost per unit small, although the initial investment for the ten dams the Corps envisioned would ‘exceed that of any other single development of any kind for power that has ever been made’. Giant Power.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did human intervention play out in attempting to manage salmon populations?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
Decline in natural salmon runs forced humans to intervene in spawning process to create more fish.
Hatcheries - the product- wed technology and biology.
New hatcheries operated without actual knowledge of the life cycle of salmon. 1920 - Bureau of Fisheries - ‘the hatcheries inflicted as much, or more, damage to the salmon runs than they had service of value’
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How was Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons not applicable to the situation on the Columbia?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
Hardin’s model of the commons is an invention. It never existed on the Columbia. There were rules and restrictions
- Indians possessed treaty rights (de jure, at least)
- Gillnetters controlled access to drifts
- Fix-gear men commandeered space on the river.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How was space and race changed by the influx of new populations to the Columbia?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
⁃ New work depended on precise organisation of humans and nature, and this organisation was spatial. Race divided space.
As the Whites feared the Chinese - denying access to the river, their space was isolated in the canneries.
The Whites saw Indians as anarchic and nuisances - moving them from their (granted) access to the river to margins narrower than before.
- Gender was also subdivided by the river.
- Chinese exclusion act 1992 left a shrinking and ageing workforce - replaced with Scandinavian women (daughters and wives of the men on the river)- who inherited the interior space in factories and canneries.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did Emersonian logic impact Americans?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
Emerson reconciled nature with the busy, manipulative world of American capitalism. He reconciled utilitarianism with idealism; he reconciled the practical and the spiritual. When humans acted on nature they did not defile it, they purified it. “Art was nature passed through the alembic of man”
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did Emersonian logic interpret the mechanisation of the river?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
The mechanical was not the antithesis of nature, but its realisation in a new form. Stream was wind in the boiler of the boat, trains imitated pages or swallows darting from town to town. What seemed ugly in isolation became beauty reattached to “the Whole”.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did Kipling see the canneries?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
‘the canneries encapsulated a basic spatial division between the mechanical and the natural. Inside, crowding, humanity, death, machines, routinisation; outside, solitude, nature, life, the organic and freedom’
Kipling was disturbed by the disconnect between man and nature - prompting him to go fishing with a rod - to match his power against that of the chinook. This was a restoration of the masculine relation with nature.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did canneries impact spatio-temporality on the river?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
‘Even partially mechanised canneries so greatly increased the scale of everything - time, space, organisation, and energy - as to make Indian harvest seem distant and irrecognisable… whereas most salmon preserved by Indians usually lasted no more than six months, canned salmon lasted for many years.’
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did the Columbia facilitate the spread of Malaria?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
Brought up from California by returning Hudson’s Bay Company fur brigades in 1830. Catastrophically rearranged the human geography of the river. The mosquito that carried the disease was rare along the coast and scarce east of the Cascades, but thrived in the Lower columbia - where death rates reached 90%.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
How did social rituals and gender imbalances arise from salmon fishing in the Columbia?
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
As natives assumed the salmon return was not inevitable: Rituals, social practices and stories all recognised the possibility that the fish would fail to appear. They waited for salmon not with faith but anxiety.
This had historical precedent. When Table Mountain slid into the river ~800 years ago, the population were cut off from salmon runs until the river broke through.
Myths of the river had a recurring motif of when women imprisoned salmon within a pond, to be freed by Coyote - a lecherous and often foolish culture hero. Women are (for reasons unknown) associated with birds, such as the Eagle, whom feasted on the trapped salmon. This created a gender power dynamic which circumscribed the power of women, who were seen as threats to salmon supply. Women were kept away from the streams and distribution centres. Also symbolic ritualism surrounded menstruation - the loss of blood seen as a trope for the need for death to sustain life.
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
Evidence changes in social ritual driven by the nature of the river in David Thompson’s oral account
Richard White - The Organic Machine - 1998
‘My reasons or putting ashore and smoking with the Natives, is to make friends with them, against my return, for in descending the current of a large River, we might pass on without much attention to them; but in returning against the current, our progress will be slow and close along the shore, and consequently very much in their power; whereas staying a few hours, and smoking with them, while explaining to them the object of my voyage makes them friendly to us.’
