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SUMMARY:Recovery after attack: 1960s radioecology and shifting conceptions
  of humans as agents of ecosystem change - Laura Jane Martin (Harvard Univ
 ersity)
DTSTART:20151019T120000Z
DTEND:20151019T131500Z
UID:TALK60877@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:39097
DESCRIPTION:When ecologist Lauren Donaldson was hired by the Manhattan Pro
 ject in 1943 to study whether radioactive effluent from Hanford Works affe
 cted Columbia River fisheries\, most scientists considered nuclear contami
 nation to be a localized threat. But by the time of the Castle Bravo deton
 ation in 1954\, scientists and the public had begun to conceptualize radio
 active fallout as a regional\, even a global\, concern. As a number of env
 ironmental historians have argued\, fallout studies played a central role 
 in the rise of ecosystem ecology and the idea of an interconnected biosphe
 re.\n\nIn this paper I likewise aim to illuminate the relationship between
  the Cold War\, the rise of ecosystem ecology\, and the postwar environmen
 tal movement. But my objects of analysis are not fallout studies\, but rat
 her studies in which ecologists simulated nuclear attacks. Alongside the C
 old War era concern over nuclear fallout was the blunter fear of World War
  III. In 1950\, the United States had 299 weapons in its stockpile. By 196
 0\, it had 18\,638. And by 1965\, it had 31\,139. As the United States and
  Russia increased both the power and the range of their nuclear weaponry\,
  it became possible to conceive of a catastrophic\, global-scale war\, and
  the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) funded studies to investigate the
  economic and environmental consequences of such a war. While ecologists a
 nd military planners were tasked with recognizing the immense destructive 
 power of nuclear weaponry\, they did not imagine the outcome of nuclear wa
 r as the total annihilation of life on earth. In a very definite way\, the
 re would have been no point to such a vision. Instead\, ecologists and mil
 itary planners envisioned the period of environmental and economic recover
 y after WWIII and considered how the government could hasten that recovery
 . Their visions both drew on and advanced ecological theory about the capa
 city of nature to self-regulate and to repair itself when damaged. Thus I 
 argue that those Cold War narratives about ecological destruction\, which 
 have had such staying power\, must be considered alongside those about eco
 logical restoration. Both narratives emerged simultaneously from the ideat
 ional and material entanglements between atomic warfare and ecological sci
 ence. And both would come to shape environmental management worldwide\, an
 d therefore\, the material environment itself.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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