New Perspectives in Environmental History (2014)

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Main Group

Overview

Yale Environmental History hosted a one-day conference, “New Perspectives in Environmental History,” on Saturday, April 12, 2014. The conference included three moderated panel sessions featuring papers by students from nine different universities.

The first session, “POWER AND RESOURCES,” considered the use of forest resources during the American Revolutionary War; coal as a focus for Indian national development; and conflicts over wetlands flood control measures along the Euphrates. The second session, “WATER AND THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT,” examined struggles to control rivers in Brazil, contain invasive species along the United States coastline, and manage sewage treatment in Los Angeles. The third session, “SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION,” explored its theme in four settings: the field illustrations of the U.S. Exploring Expedition in the mid-nineteenth century; 1970s mushroom science as a tool for poverty alleviation and waste treatment; radiocarbon dating as a method for studying past climates and ecological communities; and, the links between sugar processing and the spread of dengue fever in South Africa.

A faculty panel, including KARL JACOBY (Columbia), JAMES MCCANN (Boston University), ALAN MIKHAIL (Yale), and HARRIET RITVO (MIT), concluded the day.

We are grateful to our Co-Sponsors and Supporters:

Department of History, Yale University
MacMillan Center at Yale
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Program in the History of Science and Medicine, Yale University

Schedule

9:30	Opening Remarks Paul Sabin, Yale University
9:45-11:00	Panel 1: Power and Resources Chair: Robert Harms, Yale University Steven Elliot (Temple): “Surviving the Hard Winter: Landscapes, Climate, and the Continental Army’s 1779-1780 Winter Encampment” Matthew Shutzer (New York University): “India in the Age of Coal: Geology, Hydropower, and Modernization in Princely India, 1920s-1940s” Faisal Husain (Georgetown): “Between the River and the Floodplain: The Khaza’il-Ottoman Encounter in the Marshes of the Middle Euphrates Region” Commentator: Peter Perdue, Yale University
11:00	Coffee Break
11:20-12:35	Panel 2: Water and the Urban Environment Chair: Karen Hébert, Yale University Sarah Randle (Yale): “Hyperion as Icarus?: The Delights and Disappointments of a Space-Age Sewage Treatment Plant” Derek Nelson (University of New Hampshire): “‘The Ravages of Teredo’: The Impact of Marine Wood-borers on Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century American Society and Culture” Adrián Lerner Patrón (Yale): “Missing the Rivers for the Forest: Regional Planning and Long-Term Continuities in the Representation of Amazonian Nature in Twentieth Century Brazil” Commentator: Aaron Sachs, Cornell University
12:35	Buffet Lunch (free for all registered participants)
1:45-3:35	Panel 3: Science and Knowledge Production Chair: Daniel Kevles, Yale University Leah Aronowsky (Harvard): “From Death and Decay to Reasoned Image: The Fish Illustrations of the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842)” Peter Oviatt (MIT): ”Cultivating Pleurotus: Species and Substrates in Mushroom Science” Laura Martin (Cornell): “G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s Geochronometric Laboratory and the Construction of Ecological Time” Philip Rotz (Boston University): “The Sweetness and the Fever?: Sugar Production, aedes aegypti, and Dengue Fever in Natal, South Africa, 1926-27” Comment: Alistair Sponsel, Vanderbilt University
3:35	Afternoon Refreshments
4:00-5:15	Faculty panel Karl Jacoby, Columbia University Alan Mikhail, Yale University Harriet Ritvo, MIT James McCann, Boston University Moderator: Timothy Lorek, Yale University

Participants

Graduate Student Presenters

Leah Aronowsky: Leah Aronowsky is a graduate student in the History of Science Program at Harvard University. She is currently developing a dissertation project on the history of science exploration and natural history collecting in the nineteenth-century United States, with a particular focus on the visual and material culture of expeditions. Leah graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in Science in Society, and worked at a health policy think-tank at Columbia University before coming to Harvard.

Steven Elliot: Steven Elliott is a PhD. student in history at Temple University. He holds a BA in history from The College of New Jersey and an MA in history from Rutgers University-Newark. Primarily interested in early American military history, Steven’s research has focused on the Continental Army during the American Revolution and its relationship with civilian populations, as well as the army’s interaction with the natural world. A lifelong northern New Jersey resident, Steven has also worked intermittently as a historical interpreter with the National Park Service for the past five years.

Faisal Husain: Faisal Husain is a PhD student at Georgetown University’s Department of History, where he holds the Environmental History Fellowship offered by the Department. In 2011 and before going to Georgetown, he earned a master’s degree in history from Yale University. Husain’s doctoral dissertation research focuses on the environmental history of the Mesopotamian alluvium during the Ottoman period, with particular focus on the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, wetland formation and habitation, and steppe-sown relations.

Adrián Lerner: Adrián Lerner is a third year student in the History PhD Program and a member of the first cohort of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Concentration in the Humanities at Yale University. His dissertation project at Yale focuses on the environmental and public health aspects of the history of urban growth in Amazonia during the twentieth century. Previous research and publications deal with the history of public health and human rights in Fujimori’s Peru, the history of Peruvian-Brazilian diplomatic relations, and ideas about development and inequality in Latin America.

Timothy Lorek is a PhD student in Yale’s History Department and the student coordinator of the Environmental History Working Group. His dissertation focuses on agricultural development projects in Colombia’s Cauca Valley in the context of the hemispheric Cold War. He has also conducted research on agrarian landscapes in the New Mexico-Chihuahua borderlands and, on a different note, Chilean history textbooks during the Pinochet regime. He holds a MA in history from the University of New Mexico and formerly worked with the Agri-Cultura Network, a farming cooperative in Albuquerque.

Laura Martin: Laura Martin is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University studying the intellectual and cultural history of ecological restoration in the twentieth-century United States. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in evolutionary ecology, and is interested in the convergence of humanistic and scientific research.

Derek Lee Nelson: Derek Lee Nelson is a PhD candidate in History at the University of New Hampshire, where he studies marine and littoral environmental history. His dissertation, “The Ravages of Teredo” explores the long forgotten, but significant relationship between coastal communities and marine invasive species around the turn of the twentieth century. His teaching interests lie in North American environmental history and American food systems.

Peter Oviatt: Peter Oviatt is a first year doctoral student in the HASTS program (History | Anthropology | Science, Technology and Society) at MIT. He earned a MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research. His research explores how fungi beneficially impact ecologies and economies. Peter’s current work examines the wide array of cultivation methods for edible and medicinal mushrooms, as well as the emerging technologies that employ microfungi for agricultural applications and bioremediation.

Sayd Randle: Sayd Randle is a doctoral student in the combined forestry & environmental studies and anthropology program at Yale University. Her dissertation research traces the history and politics of water supply “relocalization” initiatives in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in English literature from Williams College, an M.Phil in geography from the University of Cambridge, and a home greywater system installation certification from the California-based non-profit group Greywater Action. She plans to begin her dissertation fieldwork in July 2014.

Philip Rotz: Philip Rotz is a Ph.D. candidate in African history at Boston University. Prior to graduate study, he worked in public health programs in Southern Africa for the Harvard School of Public Health and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). Phil’s primary research interests are located at the intersection of environmental, urban, and health history. He will begin fieldwork later this year on a dissertation that focuses on dengue fever and the vector ecology of the aedes aegypti mosquito to explore the urban environmental of history of Durban, South Africa.

Matthew Shutzer: Matthew Shutzer is a graduate student in the Department of History at New York University. In addition to his current focus on geology and development planning, he is broadly interested in the creation of scientific and economic knowledge in the context of global imperialism. Matthew holds a BA in History from Northeastern University and was previously a Fulbright-Nehru grantee in Odisha, India where he studied land redistribution and forest policy.

Faculty Chairs and Commentators

Robert Harms, is the H. J. Heinz Professor of History and African Studies at Yale University. He is the author of River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (Yale University Press, 1981), the award-winning bookGames Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1987/1999), the multiple-award-winning book The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (Basic Books, 2002), and co-editor of Paths Toward the Past: African Historical Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina. (African Studies Association Press, 1994), and Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2013). He is currently doing research on the making of colonialism in equatorial Africa.

Karen Hébert is a cultural anthropologist whose research examines the development and implications of changing forms of natural resource production and consumption. Her work is situated in resource-dependent communities in the subarctic North. She has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in southwest Alaska, where she has analyzed historical and recent transformations in the region’s salmon industry. Her research and teaching interests focus on issues of globalization and economic restructuring; the rise of market-driven policy paradigms and new modes of consumerism; the regulation of fisheries and agro-food systems; the production and experience of ecological risk and vulnerability; human-environment relations and sustainable livelihoods; and the sociocultural theory of environment and economy.

Karl Jacoby teaches environmental, borderlands, and Native American history at Columbia University. His books include Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation and Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History.

Daniel J. Kevles, who took his doctorate at Princeton, teaches and writes at the intersection of the history of science and technology and the history of modern America. His works includeThe Physicists: the History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1978), In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1985), and The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (1998). He is a coauthor of Inventing America: A History of the United States (2002; 2^nd ed., 2006), and he is a contributor to the New York Review of Books, where several of his essays on environmental history have appeared. He teaches the History of Science and Technology in the U.S., which deals in part with environmental issues, and the Engineering and Ownership of Life. He is currently writing a history of innovation and intellectual property in living organisms. He is the Stanley Woodward Professor of History as well as Professor of American Studies and adjunct Professor of Law and former chair of the Program in the History of Science and Medicine.

James McCann’s research and teaching interests include agricultural and ecological history of Africa, Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa, field research methods in African studies, the agro-ecology of tropical disease, and the history of food/cuisine in Africa and the Atlantic world. He is the author of five books: Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine (2010); Maize and Grace: A History of Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop (2005); Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa (1999); People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia (1995); From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia: Rural History, 1900-1995 (1989). He has published articles and reviews in the American Historical Review, Journal of African History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies,Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of Interdisciplinary History,Environmental History, International Journal of Sustainability, and Northeast African Studies. His books have been reviewed in Nature, Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Times Educational Supplement.

Alan Mikhail is Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Peter C. Perdue has a Ph.D. (1981) from Harvard University in the field of History and East Asian Languages. He is the author of Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500-1850 A.D.(Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987) and China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Harvard University Press, 2005), which won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies. He has also written on grain markets in China, agricultural development, and environmental history. His research interests lie in modern Chinese and Japanese social and economic history, history of frontiers, and world history. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. Follow him on Twitter at @Pcperdue.

Harriet Ritvo teaches courses in British history, environmental history, the history of human-animal relations, and the history of natural history. She is the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), andNoble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, 2010); she is also the co-editor of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), and the editor of Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Her articles and reviews on British cultural history, environmental history, and the history of human-animal relations have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including The London Review of Books,Science, Daedalus, The American Scholar, Technology Review, and The New York Review of Books, as well as scholarly journals in several fields.

Paul Sabin is Associate Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future (2013) and Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940 (University of California Press, 2005). His current research examines the evolution and impact of modern environmental law and regulation in the United States. Sabin coordinates Yale Environmental History, and helps run Yale’s undergraduate Environmental Studies major. Sabin received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Newcomen Post-Doctoral Fellow in business history at the Harvard Business School. He was the founding executive director of the Environmental Leadership Program, a national nonprofit organization.

Aaron Sachs is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Envionmentalism(2006) and Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (2013). He teaches courses on environmental history, commodification and consumerism, and the practice of writing history.

Alistair Sponsel is a historian of modern science with special interest in the history of geographical exploration, the environmental and life sciences, and the physical and earth sciences. His current research focuses on Charles Darwin’s early career and on the history of coral reef science. His book “Darwin’s First Theory” will be published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press. Alistair received his PhD in history of science from Princeton University in 2009. He comes to Vanderbilt from Harvard University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Department of the History of Science and manager of the U.S. office of the Darwin Correspondence Project. He was previously a Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellow. His research has been awarded prizes by the History of Science Society and the Geological Society of America. In 2013 he was named the Ritter Memorial Fellow by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Ritter Fellowship is a biennial award to a historian, scientist, or other scholar whose research enlarges and deepens understanding of the history of the earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences. At Vanderbilt he teaches courses on the history of science, science and empire, environmental history, and the history of exploration. He will be on leave in 2013-2014.

Abstracts

Panel 1: Power and Resources

“Surviving the Hard Winter: Landscapes, Climate, and the Continental Army’s 1779-1780 Winter Encampment”

Steven Elliot (Temple)

This paper is an environmental history of the Continental Army’s 1779-1780 winter encampment in Morristown New Jersey. I choose Morristown in part to rectify the historiographical imbalance that has privileged studies of the Valley Forge encampment. This paper looks to uncover the intersections of military and environmental history through the case study of one winter encampment. Military-environmental history is a small but steadily growing sub-field, and this paper draws from the research of scholars including J. R. McNeil, Lisa M. Brady, and David C. Hsuing. These historians have emphasized the importance of food, water, and fuel to eighteenth and nineteenth-century armies. Here I look to expand on the food-water-fuel framework by including the need for wood as a building material, the effects of climate, and the strategic importance of geography. To bring together these disparate themes I center my study on the concept of a landscape. In this case, the landscape was the New Jersey Highlands in which the Continental Army took refuge. This paper thus traces the transformation of the New Jersey Highlands from a civilian environment to a militarized environment as the Continental Army responded to its need for shelter by deforesting the region to construct its quarters. The army’s negative affect on the environment continued throughout the winter as the logistical need for food, water, and firewood further despoiled the Highlands. This paper also looks at the natural world’s agency, such as how the Highlands’ environment constrained the army’s search for a camp site and how the local climate exacerbated supply difficulties during the winter. Overall, it hopes to show that understanding the Continental Army’s interaction with the natural world is crucial to explaining America’s victory in the war.

“India in the Age of Coal: Geology, Hydropower, and Modernization in Princely India, 1920s-1940s”

Matthew Shutzer (New York University)

Do ecological systems produce the territorial boundaries of states, or do states produce the limits of ecological systems? Drawing from the theoretical approaches of science and technology studies (STS) and critical geography, this paper examines the emergence of large-scale natural resource management regimes along the coal seams and river systems of the Orissa and Chhattisgarh princely states of eastern India after the First World War. I argue that the technological conditions of coal production created peculiar linkages between the princely states and British India, resulting in the states acquiring a prototypical ‘special economic zone’ status as a means of rationalizing emergent developmental inequalities. Contrary to historicalstudies that have treated princely India and British India as discrete spaces with distinct sovereignties, I demonstrate how the resource needs of shared ecological spaces, namely the Gondwana Mineral Basin and the Mahanadi River System, created areas of contestation that routinely undermined claims to political autonomy. Further, I show how coal became the pivotal object of future oriented developmental projects on both sides of the political divide, radically transforming a region of fragmented polities into a singular political unit with monopoly rights to minerals, forests, rivers, and laboring bodies in the years leading up to decolonization. The totalizing vision of these new developmental projects was conditioned by technological advancement and the diffusion of geological expertise, yet it was also integrally linked to midcentury questions of resource scarcity and energy sovereignty. Coal, in this analysis, figures as a material object inscribed by the contradictions of Indian national development and the global economy in the first half of the twentieth century.

“Between the River and the Floodplain: The Khaza’il-Ottoman Encounter in the Marshes of the Middle Euphrates Region”

Faisal Husain (Georgetown)

The economic fortunes of Mesopotamian states and grain farmers plummeted following the deterioration of the Sasanian irrigation system during the early medieval period, giving scholars the impression that the region’s environment went through a period of perpetual decline. However, the Mesopotamian alluvium contained several specialized subsistence zones and should not be treated as an ecologically undifferentiated region. This essay utilizes the flood pulse concept and argues that the deterioration of flood control measures and irrigation works restored the natural, unmodified flood regime of the Euphrates and reinvigorated different species and natural systems, particularly the Mesopotamian wetlands and their biota. Vibrant and reviving, wetlands provided the material basis for the rise of the Khazaʿil tribal confederation to political dominance in the Middle Euphrates region at the turn of the eighteenth century. The essay relies on largely untapped Ottoman and Arabic sources and demonstrates that wetland habitation was a viable and effective subsistence strategy for the Khazaʿil in early modern Mesopotamia. Wetlands served the Khazaʿil as an ecological niche and political ally during their struggle with one of the most powerful early modern empires, and their settlement was an environmental and political adaptation. Throughout the eighteenth century, Ottoman officials repeatedly dammed the Middle Euphrates and drained its wetlands that sustained and fortified the Khazaʿil in order to break the basis of their power. Ottoman hydraulic warfare weakened their tribal foes, but it produced unexpected outcomes in the long term that changed the history of the Ottoman Empire and its Mesopotamian provinces forever. Most notably, it forced the Middle Euphrates to shift its channel westward, an environmental transformation that facilitated the revival of the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala’ and the consolidation of Shiʿism as a majority religion in the region.

Panel 2: Water and the Urban Environment

“Hyperion as Icarus?: The Delights and Disappointments of a Space-Age Sewage Treatment Plant”

Sarah Randle (Yale University)

On May 15, 1950, before a crowd of nearly 2000, Mayor Fletcher Bowron smashed a bottle of champagne to celebrate the opening of the newest, most modern piece of Los Angeles’s infrastructure: the upgraded Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant. According to many Angelenos, the upgrade was long overdue. After all, the city’s beaches had been closed for nearly a decade due to outbreaks of bacillary dysentery among bathers from contact with untreated sewage. In 1956, following a tour of the plant, the usually tech-cynical Aldous Huxley was moved to publish an essay stating that the plant “triumphantly solved” the problem of keeping a great city clean, once and for all. Just three decades later, however, Hyperion was no longer an object of celebration, but the target of noisy environmentalist protests for its perceived role in the fouling of the Santa Monica Bay and the killing of local marine species. Rather than a triumphant solution to the problem of urban pollution via human waste, Hyperion was widely understood to be the cause of drastic environmental degradation. Drawing on historical newspaper coverage, city records, and the collected papers of L.A. engineers and activists, this paper uses these two rare periods of public attention to a city’s sewage treatment plant to investigate the shifting meanings of pollution and the urban environment in the global North. By focusing on public representations and interpretations of such a rarely remarked upon piece of a city’s infrastructure, the essay also offers a novel angle through which to examine the ways in which urban material networks and spatial politics quietly co-produce one another – and how these relationships evolve over time.

“‘The Ravages of Teredo’: The Impact of Marine Wood-borers on Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century American Society and Culture”

Derek Nelson (University of New Hampshire)

An important aspect of late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. commercial

expansion is the large incidence of wood-boring worms along the American coastline. This study of a particularly nasty organism called teredo shows just how dramatic the impact of wood-borers was on U.S. society and culture. Teredo is an invasive species to the American coastline and is now endemic throughout the world. Its penchant is to bore into and inhabit wharves and ships washed by seawater until commercial infrastructure crumbled from multiple infestations. Fear of teredo cannot be understated. Engineers and waterfront goers rarely spoke about the wood-borer separate of the ominous phrase “the ravages of teredo” or the “ravages of the worms.” Even robber barons and senior statesmen monitored its ravages and worked hard to lessen its impact. Teredo is rarely remembered today (largely because of the adoption of steel and fiberglass hulled vessels as well as better pile preservation methods) but the historical presence of teredo (or lack thereof) signaled to engineers and investors which coastal communities were worthy of commercial investment. Thus, teredo shaped the geography of commercial capitalism during a period of rapid expansion. Teredo also wormed its way into language and became a cultural icon of sorts. The word “teredo” became synonymous with terms like “damage,” “unstable” and “furtive.” Because teredo enters wooden planks and piles as microscopic juveniles, and grows to maturity beyond view, it was often detectable only after wharves collapsed and waterfront strollers were injured. This negative association made the word “teredo” a handy metaphor in songs, poems and short stories. A study of teredo has several historiographical implications—it can draw connections between marine environmental history and other fields such as urban, terrestrial and global environmental history.

“Missing the Rivers for the Forest: Regional Planning and Long-Term Continuities in the Representation of Amazonian Nature in Twentieth Century Brazil”

Adrián Lerner Patrón (Yale University)

This paper is an exploratory approach to the roles attributed to rivers in the history of regional planning projects in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest during the twentieth century. Using government-issued planning documentation as well as secondary sources, I focus on the foundational, yet understudied period of developmental regional planning of the Second Republic (1945-1964), and particularly on the ways in which Amazonian rivers were depicted and conceptualized. I argue that the ideas about Amazonian nature featured in planning projects formulated during this period included remarkable continuities with received ideas about the region dating at least from the years of the Old Republic (1889-1930), while, at the same time, they laid the ground for the earthshattering, authoritarian development planning projects put forward by the military after 1964. Regional planning for economic development is often presented as a radical rupture with the past. Nevertheless, close attention to specific elements, such interpretations of nature, and roles attributed to it and, by association, to the peoples that inhabit it, can show remarkable continuities between allegedly opposed strategies. The case of rivers, defining and distinctively prominent environmental features of the Amazon rainforest, shows the persistence of long-term historical patterns in the understanding of the region and of its role in the national development of Brazil. As some of the less encouraging social and environmental consequences of the process of modernization of the Brazilian Amazon during and after the military dictatorship have shown, these also had important and long-lasting practical consequences.

Panel 3: Science and Knowledge Production

“Making Global Nature Visible: The Field Illustrations of the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842)”

Leah Aronowsky (Harvard)

As the United States Exploring Expedition sailed across the globe from 1838 to 1842, Joseph Drayton, one of the Expedition’s two official artists, drew the fishes that were caught along the way. Fish were not the only animals of interest during this voyage—as the first major federally-sponsored nautical science expedition, naturalists and other crew members collected and illustrated over 160,000 botanical, zoological, and geological specimens during the four-year journey. These objects composed the foundational collection of what eventually became the Smithsonian Institution, and represented the United States’ first major foray into the sponsorship of oceanic scientific exploration.

This paper takes Drayton’s fish illustrations as its primary source to examine the distinct artistic and epistemic priorities of natural history illustration as practiced in the field versus the artist’s studio. Working in the field, Drayton grappled with how to accurately represent the recently-captured fish as they transitioned from life to death and rapidly changed in coloration and appearance. These questions were less of a concern to artists working with specimens back in the studio, who worked with fish specimens that, although vastly different in appearance from the moment of their capture, had by this point stabilized in appearance. Studio artists, then, were most concerned with producing a reasoned image that highlighted a specimen’s taxonomically relevant features. This paper shows how even the same practice—in this case, natural history illustration—can take on very different meanings across different sites, and argues that illustrations like Drayton’s fish constituted a new relationship between specimen and its representation. Working at the intersection of visual culture, history of science, and environmental history, this paper also makes a case for the value of images as source materials in their own right.

“Cultivating Pleurotus: Species and Substrates in Mushroom Science”

Peter Oviatt (MIT)

Pleurotus, a genus of edible fungi commonly known as oyster mushrooms, entered mushroom science in the early 1970s. Before this time, mushroom science—a field devoted to the cultivation of mushrooms—still focused on one species, and was largely restricted to the Western world. Mushroom production was homogenous, highly mechanized, required extensive inputs, and left behind xenobiotic waste. Pleurotus promised to change this scenario. Experiments involving Pleurotus began to accumulate, and they contained the same rosy conclusion: the aggressive fungus was found to grow readily on a wide array of agricultural and forestry waste. Not only does Pleurotus break-down waste into compost, it does so while providing a source of protein (or income) for rural economies. Moreover, this dual feat is accomplished with minimal inputs and simple procedures. This research gave Pleurotus an environmental and humanitarian face, a move that added value to mushroom science. In the decades that followed, experiments continued, cultivation manuals were written, and mushroom science congresses held. The new methods of production introduced new materials, new geographies, and new actors to mushroom cultivation. For example, rural communities in India and Nigeria began cultivating Pleurotus on agricultural wastes; non-professionals in the West also began to experiment with the fungi. This paper tracks the story of Pleurotuscultivation as a low-tech, low-cost technology that aids economies and repairs ecologies. However the application of Pleurotus science is still emerging and has yet to achieve consistent success. The promise of Pleurotus continues to grow, with applied results trailing behind. Finally, this paper moves beyond the science and technology, to consider the organism itself. After all, the uniquely adaptive and aggressive biology of Pleurotus is responsible for the added value and context this paper explores.

“G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s Geochronometric Laboratory and the Construction of Ecological Time”

Laura Martin (Cornell)

In the late 1940s, Willard Libby of the University of Chicago suggested that the decay of carbon-14 could be used to date organic matter. G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a limnologist at Yale, was among the first to apply Libby’s method of radiocarbon dating to biological specimens. At the time, students in the Hutchinson laboratory were immersed in established methods of historical dating: analysis of pollen trapped in peat cores, examination of tree rings, and fossil stratigraphy. Radiocarbon dating emboldened ecologists to make new claims about the conditions of past climates and ecological communities.

Historians of ecology have illuminated the ways in which atomic fieldwork reorganized spatial understandings of the natural world – a reorganization that can be broadly characterized as a shift from habitats to ecosystems. But atomic fieldwork also reorganized temporal understandings of the natural world. Radioisotopic “chronometers” led to new constructions of ecological time, and with them, new forms of environmental governance, such as the Nature Conservancy’s “living museums” and federal plans to restore “degraded” wetlands. The importance of ecochronological research also inheres in the work of Aldo Leopold, whose essays of the late 1940s repeatedly assert biologists’ abilities to read history through species, describing the burr oak as a “historical library,” the hen plover as an “immemorial timepiece,” an Illinois corn field as a “garden of forgotten blooms.” The work of G. Evelyn Hutchinson and other ecologists gradually became manifest in American ideas wilderness, restoration, and ecological legacy.

“The Sweetness and the Fever?: Sugar Production, aedes aegypti, and Dengue Fever in Natal, South Africa, 1926-27”

Philip Rotz (Boston University)

This paper is an old new thing. Thirty-five years ago, James Goodyear offered “a new perspective” on the history of yellow fever in the Caribbean and coastal United States. He argued that sugar processing, shipping, and refining created favorable ecological conditions for yellow fever’s vector mosquito—aedes aegypti—by providing ready sugar for sustenance and plentiful breeding sites. Across ten examples, Goodyear noted “an apparent connection in time and place” between yellow fever “and the presence of sugarcane cultivation, milling, refining, or shipping.”

A handful of historians have mentioned or marshaled Goodyear’s sugar connection. It appears no one has tested the argument. Nor has it been integrated into the literature on other viruses transmitted by aedes aegypti—like dengue. As such, examining epidemiological links with sugar production offers a new perspective on the history of dengue.

This paper uses an occurrence of dengue in another sugar region to test Goodyear’s thesis. Did the sugar business impact the sprawling dengue epidemic that gripped Durban and the Natal coast in 1926-27? I explore this question in two ways. First, by examining whether sugar cultivation, milling, and refining in 1920s Natal created favorable ecological conditions for aedes aegypti. And, second, by tracing “sugar connections” in time and place based on newspaper accounts of the 1926-27 epidemic.

Travel Information

Kroon Hall (Burke Auditorium, 3rd Floor)

195 Prospect Street
New Haven, Connecticut

Map Location

Getting to Kroon Hall
Driving
From north or south on Interstate 91, take Exit 4 (Trumbull Street). Continue straight on Trumbull Street until it intersects with Whitney Avenue. Turn right on Whitney Avenue. Take first left on Sachem Street. Continue two blocks and turn right on Prospect Street. Kroon Hall will on your left. There is metered parking throughout the area, and some Yale parking lots are open to the public after 4:00pm on weekdays and all day on weekends.

Parking

The largest and closest university parking lot is Lot 16/22, which is free after 4pm daily and free on the weekends. This parking lot is located on Whitney Ave., with access across from Humphrey Street. The parking lot is two blocks from Kroon Hall. To access this parking lot from Trumbull Street, turn right on Whitney Avenue and turn left into parking lot at second traffic light.

Maps and additional information on parking at Yale University are available here.

Trains and Buses

Amtrak and Metro North both stop at the New Haven train station (Union Station). Union station is also served by Greyhound and Peter Pan bus lines. Kroon Hall is about a $10 cab ride from the station.

Amtrak

(800) 872-7245 • www.amtrak.com

Metro-North Commuter Rail
(800) 638-7646 • www.mta.nyc.ny.us/mnr

Greyhound
(203) 772-2470 • www.greyhound.com/home

Peter Pan Bus Lines
(800) 343-9999 • www.peterpanbus.com

Air

New Haven has a regional airport, Tweed Airport, which is serviced by U.S. Airways.

Bradley Airport is 50 minutes away.

Staying in New Haven

The Courtyard by Marriott at Yale
30 Whalley Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
(203) 777-6221
www.courtyardmarriottyale.com
Approximate distance from Kroon Hall: .7 miles

Other hotel options in New Haven:

The Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale
155 Temple Street
New Haven, CT 06510
(800)THE-OMNI
(203)772-6664
www.omnihotels.com
Approximate distance from Kroon Hall: .8 miles

The Study at Yale
1157 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06511
(203) 503-3900
www.studyhotels.com
Approximate distance from Kroon Hall: .8 miles

Laquinta Inn & Suites
400 Sargent Drive
New Haven, CT 06511
(203) 562-1111
(800) 642-4271
www.lq.com
Approximate distance from Kroon Hall: 1.9 miles (not a pedestrian-friendly route, car necessary)

New Haven Hotel
229 George Street
New Haven, CT 06510
(203)498-3100
www.newhavenhotel.com
Approximate distance from Kroon Hall: .8 miles

Premiere Hotel & Suites
3 Long Wharf Drive
New Haven, CT 06511
(203) 777-5337
(800) 331-3131
Approximate distance from Kroon Hall: 2 miles (not a pedestrian-friendly route, car necessary)

Additional Maps

Yale Campus Maps

New Haven Area Map

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