Creating Healthy Landscapes: Human and Environmental Well-being in Comparative and Historical Perspective.

Panel 1: Envisioning Imperial Landscapes

Elisa González , Columbia: “Dispensing Progress: Rural Health and Social Reform in Puerto Rico”

The New Deal fostered in Puerto Rico an increased recognition of the obstacles posed in the countryside to the model of ‘social progress’ much-aspired by the island’s elite. This included confronting widespread morbidity in impoverished rural areas, especially from malaria and intestinal parasites. This paper maps an intellectual history of ideas regarding social progress and public health narrated through the careers of an influential group of politician-public health ideologues whose writings dwelt upon the ills of an overpopulated and disease-ridden rural environment. It will explore the works of Antonio Fernós and Pablo Morales (physicians, public health officials, and politicians) and how they represented efforts amongst Puerto Rican techno-bureaucrats to address those challenges while also redeploying discourses on the environment, typifying rural landscapes and populations. It will examine the politico-economic contexts that informed their reformist trajectory as they designed public health agendas. It will also explore how their analyses resembled trends in international public health while fusing indigenous metaphors about landscapes and disease. I will argue that public health discourse employed images of social and natural environments to recast the social foundations of disease and address the dilemmas of decolonization. Through the study of these doctors’ publications, this exercise intends to understand the ways in which public health interacted with the Commonwealth development project and its political rhetoric. It will also explore how this case compares to patterns identified elsewhere in Latin America, where public health served to extend populist politics to rural areas and incorporate them into the national body.

David Kneas, Yale: “Racial Purity and Agricultural Plenty: Imagining National Well-being in the Frontier Landscape of Northwestern Ecuador, 1920-1960”

From the early 1920s through the 1950s, the Ecuadorian government promoted settlement of the country’s western cloud forests to stem prolonged economic decline and foster a new era of national prosperity. The western forests were particularly suitable for settlement, national planners argued, because they lacked the hostile natives and hostile diseases (especially malaria) that resided in Ecuador’s lowland forests. Ecuador’s political elites envisioned the western forests as “healthy” as much for their biophysical elements as for what they offered in terms of the country’s racial and ethnic composition. National politicians and intellectuals saw Ecuador’s highland Indian population, described as “enfeebled” and “diseased,” as the country’s greatest obstacle to progress. They advocated, therefore, that more “robust” races, especially white Europeans, should settle the western forests. Non-Indian, particularly foreign, settlers would not only transform these lands into ideal agrarian spaces, but strengthen Ecuador’s overall “national character.” Examining these programs of land settlement in the context of shifting ideas of race and public health, this paper analyzes the process that demarcated Ecuador’s western forests as unique landscapes of national well-being. In doing so, it explores how ideas of “healthy landscapes” in Ecuador during this period infused material concerns of disease and agriculture with discursive anxieties of race and nation.

Myrna Perez, Harvard: “The Picturesque Construction of Landscape: British Jamaica as an Agricultural Colony 1780-1840”

A period’s understanding of a landscape as natural, beautiful, tropical, temperate, etc. is shaped by the aesthetics, politics, economics and other cultural factors of its day. This point is perhaps most vividly made by the introduction of new worlds to the European ‘mental geography’ by conquest and exploration at the end of the eighteenth century. An understanding of what a landscape was (i.e. suitable for agriculture, resource laden or wasteland) played an important role in how it was to be used and generally reflected the metropolis’ understanding of its relationship to the colony. In this paper I will analyze the conceptualization of the Jamaican landscape as a British West Indies colony during the turn of the 18th century. By this period Jamaica was just reaching the zenith of its economic and political importance to the British crown as a major site of the sugar trade. I argue that importance of Jamaica as a settled colony and major source of economic wealth meant that its landscape was conceived in familiar, rather than exotic terms. Going to Jamaica was not to be thought of as an adventure into the unknown natural wilderness, but as an entrance into a necessary and civilized part of the British economic system. Crucially, Jamaica was not understood to be a ‘tropical’ island, as that regional and aesthetic category was only solidified during the Victorian era. Instead the visualizations of Jamaica are better understood in the context of the 18th century Grand Tour and the conventions of English landscape gardening of the time. By using the aesthetic standards of the picturesque movement and by comparing Jamaica to continental Europe, British colonists were able to articulate a landscape that was pleasingly, rather than frighteningly different from England.

Panel 2: Finding Rejuvenation in Nature

Christopher Bischof, Rutgers: “Resisting the ‘Peculiar Seductions’ of Urban Environments: Sexuality, Criminality, and the Culture of Space in Victorian Britain”

This paper attempts to explain why British reformatory schools, the number of which expanded rapidly after 1848, used farming and gardening as the cornerstone of their curriculum with boys working the fields for upwards of eight hours a day despite the fact that the vast majority of them were placed in either the military or in industrial manufactories. I show that through horticultural pursuits British reformers attempted to inculcate “self-government” in boys who posed a threat to the stability of British society. Drawing on archival evidence I briefly demonstrate that this self-government included a variety of senses ranging from industriousness to sexual restraint, the latter of which I take up in the most detail and sketch how reformers connected it to farming, gardening, and country settings for reformatory schools. While practical considerations such as farming’s ability to exhaust the body and the country’s spatial removal from the temptations of the city were important, I ultimately argue that reformers also drew heavily on symbolic, culturally-embedded ideas of the countryside and the metaphysical qualities it supposedly possessed which were connected to the project of inculcating sexual self-restraint and which working the land was intended to evoke.

Samuel Dolbee, NYU: “Cleaning the Land, Classing the Nation: The Village Recovery Program in 1930s French Syria and Lebanon”

In 1933, the American University in Beirut inaugurated what it called the Village Recovery Program, through which this elite educational institution dispatched teams of students and professionals to the countryside to work with rural residents. Over the course of the decade, the program expanded with several teams of volunteers spending months at a time in the field and considerable government and press attention to their activities. By 1938, Syrian officials had incorporated similar programs. Authorities saw the benefits of the endeavor as two-way. From the “cultured youth,” as the newspapers called the program’s volunteers, the peasants would learn modern techniques of agriculture and hygiene, abetted by both chemicals and medicine. From the peasants, the cultured youth would connect with the national essence that their privileged urban positions alienated them from. Yet while the goal of the rural development program was strengthening the connection between both of these groups and the nation, the Syrian government’s appropriation of the program also coincided with an effort to keep peasants in their particular physical place; while officials lamented the backwardness of peasants, they also bemoaned their steady migration to cities. Thus, while the Village Recovery Program was about reforming peasants, it was also about firmly attaching them to their respective villages. Based on a reading of Arabic-language newspaper coverage of the programs, I suggest that through this project, government officials made new claims about the state’s role of promoting modernization while also maintaining stability on the basis of a class-based logic.

Brian McCammack, Harvard: “Urban Parks and Rural Resorts during the Great Migration: Spaces for African Americans to “Keep Healthy” in the Modern Metropolis”

Published weekly between 1913 and 1915 on the cusp of the Great Migration, Doctor A. Wilberforce Williams’s Chicago Defender column, “Keep Healthy,” covered a variety of health-related issues of interest to an increasingly urban African American population. In one 1913 column, Williams suggested that “city dwellers should manage some way to take an occasional day’s outing in the woods and fields” and spend time “breathing the clean, fresh country air” where children could learn from “the greatest of all teachers, Nature.”  Far from an outlier, Williams’s column is representative of the importance of natural and landscaped environments to black urbanites in the interwar era, many of whom were newly-arrived from the less industrial and more rural South. In large part because of the perceived physical, mental, and spiritual health benefits, African Americans frequented parks, forest preserves, youth camps, and resorts in and around Chicago to an extent little recognized by the extant historiography. Especially for African American reformers focused on racial uplift and respectability, leisure in these spaces was inextricably bound to health. In short, they believed that healthy environments were key to producing healthy – and respectable – people.  To an extent, these were beliefs and concerns white Americans shared. But the stakes were particularly high for citizens living in the black belt, widely perceived by many to be one of the least healthy areas of Chicago; author Richard Wright described it as “a city whose black smoke clouds shut out the sunshine for seven months of the year; a city in which, on a fine balmy May morning, one can sniff the stench of the stockyards.”  This paper explores how natural and landscaped environments provided space for African Americans to both play out tensions and bridge differences surrounding ideas of respectability and uplift within their own community – all while uniquely building upon and altering broader cultural ideas about health and the natural environment in the interwar era.

Panel 3: Scientific Expertise, Ideology, and the State

Jonathan Anzalone, SUNY, Stony Brook: “Creating a Healthy Wilderness: Mass Recreation, Public Health, and the Transformation of the Adirondack State Park in the Twentieth Century”

As the United States urbanized over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, millions of urbanites lit out for the countryside in search of healthier surroundings. Clean air, fresh water, attractive scenery—these healthful features of the treasured Adirondack landscape, made accessible first by the railroad and later by automobile roads, beckoned city dwellers away from their urban homes. As demand for outdoor recreation grew during the 1920s and 1930s, New York State planners channeled that demand into a particular type of camping that to a significant degree shielded recreation-seekers from the hardships of life in the wilderness. While enjoying the novelty of visiting a natural park, urban vacationers also possessed peace of mind knowing that the state provided them with roads, drinking water, sanitary facilities, and other conveniences to ensure their comfort in the wilderness. Thus, the administrative challenges confronting managers of the Adirondack Park resembled those faced by early city planners. Whenever a large number of people gather in a single area, providing safe drinking water and functioning sanitary facilities becomes the principal public health challenge. Although planners’ efforts to concentrate campers in the areas featuring modern facilities may have addressed the challenge of accommodating growing numbers of people, developing the park created new problems—problems more characteristic of cities. The labor-intensive struggle to maintain campsites’ sanitation and water-supply systems often failed, much to the detriment of campers’ health. When the infrastructure broke down, as it did, for example, in 1938 when eleven visitors to Fish Creek Pond campsite fell ill with gastroenteritis, the challenge of merging human-built nature with nonhuman nature in a way that accommodated thousands of recreation-seekers became all too apparent.

Melanie Kiechle, Rutgers: “ ‘The Uses and Abuses of Air’: Mapping the Air in Nineteenth-Century New York City” 

As the sanitarian movement began in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, beliefs about health and the environment centered on bodies in places. Neither the body nor the environment alone was a sufficient cause of sickness; it was the interaction between the two, particularly through respiration, that Americans believed caused their illnesses. In his The Uses and Abuses of Air, Dr. John Hoskins Griscom summarized this belief with “a familiar maxim, ‘The air kills more than the sword.’” Environmental historians have studied nineteenth-century beliefs about health and environment, and their effects on human behavior in the countryside and in the settling of the American West, but have been less attentive to how the same beliefs guided reactions to cities.  My paper will use the documents of the early sanitarian and public health movements in New York City to explain how Americans understood their bodies in urban places, and the centrality of the air to those understandings. From Griscom’s 1840 survey of the city through the 1878 indictment of the Board of Health for neglecting to abate stenches, sanitarians documented different interactions with the air that humans had throughout the city, located those reactions in places, and tried to map the air. Winds and odors complicated this mapping, especially when the stenches from industries in Brooklyn blew into Manhattan streets and homes. As they tried to understand their bodies, New Yorkers developed a better understanding of air currents and pollution, and demanded the right to fresh air.

Anna Haas Kolchinsky, Boston College: “The Green Movement, Public Health and the East German State, 1960-1989”

In the 1960s, the East German state embraced the Green movement for its capitalist critique. However, by the mid 1980s the East German secret police actively surveilled, repressed, and harassed environmental activists, who responded by joining the political opposition and participating in the protests that culminated in the Peaceful Revolution of 1989. This paper examines how and why the relationship between the state and the movement emerged and evolved between 1960-1989. Brown coal and uranium were central to East Germany’s energy needs, but the state worked hard to quell any concerns about the potential dangers of nuclear energy and concealed mounting evidence that the mining process and resulting ecological destruction posed a public health threat. The state was particularly sensitive about these risks because its political legitimacy was explicitly bound to its ability to protect citizens’ health and to provide dignified living standards. But after the 1970s’ oil crisis, the state intensified domestic mining operations beyond the point where their harmful consequences could be denied, though the state did try.  This paper will argue that, as Green activists drew attention to the fact that East Germany pursued an energy policy and industrial practices irreconcilable with its ideological commitment to environmental and public health, the state began to repress the movement it had initially embraced as an anti-capitalist ally. Furthermore, this paper will argue that, especially after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the Green movement’s focus on the connection between health, energy policies, and the environment directly undermined the credibility of the East German leadership, thereby playing an important role in destabilizing and ultimately toppling the regime.

Rachel Rothschild, Yale: “Environmental Consciousness in the Cold War: Radioecologists, Nuclear Technology, and the Atomic Age”

This paper examines the emergence of ideas about environmental health and risk among the first ecologists to work for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) from World War II through the modern environmental movement of the 1960s. The development of nuclear reactors and atomic testing provoked concerns among these “radioecologists” about the damage nuclear materials could pose to the environment. These were separate, though related, to fears about the human health risks of radioactive substances. Their alarm over nuclear waste and the potentially catastrophic ecological consequences of a nuclear war prompted these scientists to try to document the environmental dangers of nuclear technologies for the first time, and the paper analyzes the impact of this work on ecological knowledge as well as the scientists’ increasingly fraught relationship with the AEC. Radioecologists made multiple attempts to raise awareness about these dangers among policymakers, and the paper also explores how their research intersected with the development of nuclear power, civil defense planning, and environmental policies. In conclusion, I suggest that the rise of radioecology is one part of a larger story concerning the coalescence of the environmental social movement and science in the late 60s and early 70s as well as the transformation of “ecological” research into “environmental science.”