Two Kingdoms: New Perspectives on Flora and Fauna in Environmental History

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Main Group

Overview

Human societies have always been defined by their relationship to plants and animals, whether through the domestication efforts that underlay the earliest sedentary societies, the commodification of plants and animals that arrived in the industrial age, or the new opportunities for manipulation that genetic engineering has provided. This conference used the topic of plants and animals to explore current scholarship in environmental history presented by ten doctoral students from northeastern universities.

On April 14, 2012, Yale Environmental History welcomed participants from northeastern colleges and universities to a conference featuring new work by doctoral students from five northeastern universities.

Three moderated panel sessions explored the conference theme. Our first session examined resource conservation, including forests in pre-industrial Korea, native Hereford cattle in Britain, and migratory shorebirds in the United States.  Our second session explored the connections between wildlife, humans, and environmental change, including pigs in India, birds in New York City and Philadelphia, and moose in the colonial Maritime Peninsula and Gulf of Maine.  Our third session considered scientific experimentation and technology in agriculture and dairy production and in research on curare poison.   A faculty panel, including HARRIET RITVO (MIT), NANCY JACOBS (Brown), and AARON SACHS (Cornell) concluded the day.

         

Schedule
9:30

Opening Remarks

Paul Sabin, Yale University

Eric Rutkow, Yale University

9:45-11:00

Panel 1: Resource Conservation

Chair: Peter Perdue, Yale University

John Lee (Harvard): “Protect the Pines, Punish the People: The Social Implications of Forest Conservation in Pre-Industrial Korea, 1600-1876”

Rebecca Woods (MIT): “The Return of the Native Breed: Place, Belonging and Hereford Cattle in Britain”

Kristoffer Whitney (University of Pennsylvania): “Domesticating Nature?: Surveillance and Conservation of Migratory Shorebirds in the 20th Century”

Commentator: James McCann, Boston University

11:00

Coffee Break

11:20-12:35

Panel 2: Wildlife, Humans and Environmental Change

Chair: Alan Mikhail, Yale University

Thomas Wickman (Harvard): “Great Snows and Big Animals: Moose and Other Ungulates on the Contested Maritime Peninsula in the Little Ice Age, 1675-1700”

Radhika Govindrajan (Yale): “Pigs Gone Wild: The Production of Wildness and Human-Wildlife Conflict in Modern India”

Nadia Berenstein (University of Pennsylvania): “They Rush Blindly at the Light at the Expense of Their Lives”: Bird Collisions, Urban Illumination, and ‘Tragedies of Migration’ in New York City and Philadelphia, 1887-1915”

Commentator: Shafqat Hussain, Trinity College

12:35 Buffet Lunch (free for all registered participants)

1:45-3:35

Panel 3: Scientific Experimentation and Technology

Chair: Daniel Kevles, Yale University

Tamar Novick (University of Pennsylvanis): “Holy Cow! On Milk Yield, Fertility and the Creation of Plenty in Palestine/Israel”

Helen Curry (Yale): “King-sized Cabbages and Miracle Marigolds: Creating Crops and Flowers with a Chemical, 1937-1950”

Sarah Sutton (Brandeis): “Rethinking Land and Labor: Shifting Family Values and the Transition to Industrialized Dairy Farming in New England”

Shira Shmu’ely (MIT): “ ‘The Flying Death’: Curare Travels From American Jungles to the British Laboratories”

Commentator: Sarah Phillips, Boston University

3:35

Afternoon Refreshments

4:00-5:15

Faculty panel

Nancy Jacobs, Brown University

Aaron Sachs, Cornell University

Harriet Ritvo, Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, MIT

Moderator: Rachel Rothschild, Yale University

Participants

Graduate Student Presenters

Nadia Berenstein, University of Pennsylvania, “ ‘They Rush Blindly at the Light at the Expense of Their Lives’: Bird Collisions, Urban Illumination, and ‘Tragedies of Migration’ in New York City and Philadelphia, 1887-1915”

Nadia Berenstein is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she calls the History & Sociology of Science department home. She is interested in encounters between humans and other organisms, species extinction, specimen collecting and display, and urban environmental histories. She has recently begun a project tracing the history of artificial grape flavor in the United States. A former English major, she loves a good animal story, even if it has a sad ending.

Helen Curry, Yale University, “King-sized cabbages and miracle marigolds: creating crops and flowers with a chemical, 1937-1950”

Helen Curry is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University, where her studies focus on the history of the twentieth-century life sciences, as well as the histories of agriculture and environment. Her dissertation, “Accelerating Evolution, Engineering Life: American Agriculture and Technologies of Genetic Modification, 1925-1960,” offers a history of the development, application, and public reception in the United States of early means of manipulating the genes and chromosomes of agricultural plants. She is a 2011-12 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow, and currently resides in Philadelphia where she is a visiting fellow of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. In September 2012 she will begin as University Lecturer in the History of Modern Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge.

Todd Holmes, Yale University (co-organizer)

Todd Holmes is a History PhD candidate at Yale University, focusing on 20th century U.S. political, economic, and labor history, as well as California and the American West. He is the author of several articles on American politics, California agribusiness, and environmental issues in the Far West, and has served as the Graduate Assistant for Yale’s Agrarian Studies Program for the last three years. His dissertation explores shifts in party politics and political economy during the United Farm Workers’ movement.

John S. Lee, Harvard University, “Protect the Pines, Punish the People: The Social Implications of Forest Conservation in Pre-Industrial Korea, 1600-1876”

John Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University, specializing in the environmental history of early modern Korea. Originally from southern California, he received his master’s degree in East Asian Regional Studies from Harvard in 2009 and began his Ph.D. the same year. In addition to his current focus on the various dimensions of forest conservation in early modern Korea, John is broadly interested in early modern forest conservation and deforestation as an avenue for pursing comparative world history.

Tamar Novick, University of Pennsylvania, “Holy Cow! On Milk Yield, Fertility and the Creation of Plenty in Palestine/Israel”
Tamar Novick is a fourth year graduate student at the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Tamar holds a dual BA in Cognitive Science and in History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is interested in the history and anthropology of health and the body, environmental history, and their intersections with nationalism and colonialism. She is also interested in the bidirectional relations between humans and animals in the production of medical knowledge. Her dissertation project is currently titled “Milk & Honey: The Technomystical Creation of a Holy Land, 1900-1960.” In this project, she examines the efforts to make plenty in Palestine/Israel, and how people used science and technology to revive a mystical past.

Rachel Rothschild, Yale University (closing panel moderator, co-organizer)

Rachel Rothschild is a third year graduate student in the History of Science and Medicine program at Yale University. Her academic interests include the history of earth and environmental science in 20th century Europe and America, particularly connections between environmental science, public policy and law. Rothschild is currently working on several projects related to the development of ecology, atmospheric science, and climatology after World War II. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and intends to seek ways for her scholarship to find wider application among government officials and the public.

Eric Rutkow, Yale University (co-organizer)

Eric Rutkow is a second year graduate student in the Department of History at Yale University. Before coming to Yale, he earned a J.D. from Harvard and worked as a lawyer. His current research interests include environmental history, legal history, and the U.S. and the world. He is the author of American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation (Scribner, 2012).

Shira Shmu’ely, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “ ‘The Flying Death’: CurareTravels from American Jungles to the British Laboratorie”

Shira Shmu’ely studies the intersection between legal history and history of science, and the history and theory of human-animal relations. She holds an LL.B and LL.M degrees from Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law.

Sarah Sutton, Brandeis University, “Rethinking land and labor: Shifting family values and the transition to industrialized dairy farming in New England”

Sarah Sutton is a PhD candidate at Brandeis University. She is currently writing a dissertation that explores the intertwined histories of milk consumption and dairy farming in New England from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Her research interests include agricultural and environmental history, and she is currently teaching a first-year writing seminar at Brandeis.

Kristoffer Whitney, University of Pennsylvania, “Domesticating Nature?: Surveillance and Conservation of Migratory Shorebirds in the 20th Century”

Kristoffer received a B.S. in environmental management and technology in 1998 from the Rochester Institute of Technology, taught ecology in a Kazakhstani university through the Peace Corps, worked as a professional environmental consultant and educator, and joined the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.  He is currently completing a doctorate at Penn as a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow.  Broadly interested in environmental history and policy, his forthcoming dissertation on the red knot/horseshoe crab controversy in the Delaware estuary explores the links between wildlife biology, commercial fisheries, and endangered species policy.

Tom Wickman, Harvard University, “Great Snows and Big Animals: Moose and Other Ungulates on the Contested Maritime Peninsula in the Little Ice Age, 1675-1700”

Tom Wickman is a doctoral candidate in History of American Civilization at Harvard University. His dissertation, “Snowshoe Country: The Indian Northeast in the Little Ice Age, 1620-1727,” is a political and environmental history of winter in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Northeast. The project shows how Native American family hunting bands creatively drew power from winter environments during a century of colonization and climate change and how over time English settlers increasingly contested Indians’ winter mobility.

Faculty Chairs and Commentators

Shafqat Hussain is assistant professor of Anthropology at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. Shafqat obtained a Ph.D. from the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, USA in 2009. He is from Pakistan and has worked in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan for Aga Khan Rural Support Program in Skardu and IUCN – Washington as a Ford Foundation Policy Fellow. Shafqat Hussain is interested in understanding how human societies and environment shape each other. He is particularly interested in how geo-political and intellectual changes effect the perception of nature, and human society’s relationship with it.

Daniel Kevles is Stanley Woodward Professor of History and Professor of History of Medicine, of American Studies, and of Law (adjunct) at Yale University. Kevles’ research interests include: the interplay of science and society past and present; the history of science in America; the history of modern physics; the history of modern biology, scientific fraud and misconduct; the history of innovation and intellectual property in living organisms; the history of environmentalism; and the history of science, arms, and the state. His teaching areas are the history of modern science, including genetics, physics, science in American society, and U.S. history since 1940.

Alan Mikhail is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University.  He is the author of Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the 2009-11 Roger Owen Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association and the 2011 Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication from Yale University.  His articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the OrientHistory Compass, the Bulletin of the History of MedicineAkhbār al-AdabWijhāt Naẓar, and elsewhere.  He is currently writing a book about the changing relationships between humans and animals in Ottoman Egypt and completing an edited volume on the environmental history of the Middle East, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

Peter 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). 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 is a recipient of the 1988 Edgerton Award and the James A. Levitan Prize at MIT. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

Sarah Phillips is an assistant professor of history at Boston University, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century U.S. history and American environmental history. She is the author of This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge, 2007). Other publications include articles in Environmental History and Agricultural History, and anthology chapters on transatlantic agrarian history, the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, and the conservation and environmental policy of state governors. She is currently working on a history of the foreign policy generated by the post-WWII agricultural surplus.

Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at MIT, where she teaches courses in British history, environmental history, 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), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, forthcoming).

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). He teaches courses on environmental history, commodification and consumerism, and the practice of writing history.

Paul Sabin is Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Yale University. Sabin’s research and teaching focus on United States environmental history, energy politics, and political and economic history, including natural resource development in the American West and overseas. Professor Sabin’s book, Crude Politics: The California Oil Economy, 1900-1940 (2005), examines how politics and law shaped a growing dependence on petroleum in California and the nation. He has written scholarly articles on environmental and legal history and U.S. overseas expansion and popular pieces on energy politics and leadership development.

Steven Stoll is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University, where he teaches environmental history, capitalism, American Indians, and agrarian societies. He writes about the ways people think about resources, capital, and how the human economy functions within the larger economy of Earth. His books include Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (2002) and The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (2008). He is at work on a book about the ordeal of peasant societies in North America.

 
Abstracts

Panel 1: Resource Conservation

“Protect the Pines, Punish the People: The Social Implications of Forest Conservation in Pre-Industrial Korea, 1600-1876

John S. Lee, Harvard University

In Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) during the late seventeenth century, central bureaucrats, provoked by the triple specters of wood scarcity, elite land grabs, and commoner slash-and-burn cultivation, began restricting general access to pine forests along Korea’s western and southern coasts. Generally known as Reserved Forests (pongsan), these sites numbered in the range of 678 by the early nineteenth century, and their management was tasked to local functionaries such as magistrates, military officials, clerks and wardens. However, these seemingly conservationist policies also empowered local functionaries to transform the Reserved Forests into mechanisms for extracting bribes and smuggling lumber. Meanwhile, in the coastal towns and villages during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, elites and commoners alike resorted to organizational means, notably the formation of community-level Pine Associations (songgye), to better meet the twin pressures of conservationist regulations and local wood scarcities.

Utilizing government records, literati treatises, lawsuit transcripts, and village-level documents, I argue that initial bureaucratic policies aimed at forest conservation actually contributed to growing social and environmental problems in southern Korea during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The government’s emphasis on protecting the Korean Red Pine (Pinus densiflora) proved detrimental to the long-term health of Korea’s coastal forests; the delegation of forest administration to local functionaries generated rural resentment and failed to clarify forest tenure rights; and the rise of local organizations dedicated to pine conservation, while confirming the state’s successful insertion of pine protection into village-level norms, augured other social divides that would turn Korea’s nineteenth century into the “age of rebellions.”

“The Return of the Native Breed: Place, Belonging and Hereford Cattle in Britain

Rebecca Woods, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the late nineteenth century, British breeds of livestock dominated pastoral economies around the world, and none more so than Hereford cattle. The breed began as a local strain of oxen restricted to the border between England and Wales in the early nineteenth century, but by the turn of the twentieth century Hereford cattle reigned supreme, as ubiquitous on the rough scrubland of Queensland, Australia, or the snow-covered plains of Western Canada, as they were in the green paddocks of Herefordshire. Yet by the turn of the twenty-first century, a subset of this breed had been marked for conservation. As varieties from the former colonies, prized for their greater size and productivity, were re-imported into Britain, they threatened to displace endangered “traditional” strains of the Hereford breed passed over in the earlier mania for exportation. In this paper, I will use the case of Traditional Herefords to analyze the way in which place-specific associations produce notions of heritage and belonging in recent efforts to conserve rare breeds of livestock. Through generations spent on foreign lands and in unfamiliar climates, Hereford cattle re-imported to their erstwhile native land have been redefined in such a way as to deny claims to regional and national belonging. At the same time, Traditional Hereford cattle are set apart as an environmentally and culturally autochthonous breed within a breed. These definitions and delineations privilege certain historical narratives over others, celebrating a specific interpretation of cultural heritage and a shared rural past while eliding the uneasy history of colonial expansion in the history of British agriculture.

“Domesticating Nature?: Surveillance and Conservation of Migratory Shorebirds in the 20th Century

Kristoffer Whitney, University of Pennsylvania

Since the nineteen-seventies, wildlife biologists and environmental activists have converged on the Delaware Bay, in the northeastern U.S., to study a migratory shorebird called the ‘red knot’.  Ecologically linked with the spawning cycle of the horseshoe crab, the population of this bird has declined precipitously in recent decades with the advent of a crab fishery on the east coast.  Attempts to halt this decline have hinged on shorebird population surveys and horseshoe crab harvest quotas.  In this paper, I develop an environmental history of migratory shorebirds in the Western Hemisphere, paying particular attention to the methods and motivations for tracking their movements and population levels from South America to the Canadian arctic.  Dependent upon the technological means for surveillance and international mandates for conservation of endangered species, protection of animals like the red knot have involved visual surveys, “mark/recapture” studies, geolocator devices, and complex computer mapping and modeling.  In the wake of the U.S. Endangered Species Act such efforts have increased exponentially, leading some scholars to suggest that wildlife conservation now constitutes a form of domestication of nature.  At what point does surveillance of animals become domestication?  What are the effects of such studies on the animals they purport to conserve?  To what extent does surveillance imply control, and what space is left for animal agency?  My work with red knots in North America addresses these questions in order to suggest ways in which the histories of wildlife conservation and biology instantiate new, “posthuman” relationships, values, and ethics between human and non-human nature.

Panel 2: Wildlife, Humans and Environmental Change

“Great Snows and Big Animals: Moose and Other Ungulates on the Contested Maritime Peninsula in the Little Ice Age, 1675-1700

Tom Wickman, Harvard University

In the frigid last quarter of the seventeenth century, the nadir of the Little Ice Age, deep snow covered Indian country as well as colonized spaces on the Maritime Peninsula, affecting hoofed animals differently. Moose, being the best equipped ungulate to cope with heavy snow, moved to the uplands of the Gulf of Maine, giving Indian family hunting bands and raiding parties a vital source of food and raw materials as they waged wars of attrition against the English. Stable snow also permitted Indians on snowshoes to descend swiftly to lowland English settlements and ravage the less mobile and more dependent cows and sheep that colonists had to gather into barns and pens for the long winters. Horses did English soldiers little good in winter pursuit of Indians.

Complementing the predominant assumption of scholarship on the Little Ice Age—that colder weather adversely affected cultures built around domesticated plants and animals—this paper pursues the less studied question of how abundant and long-lasting snows differentially empowered people with access to wild food sources in winter. Indigenous knowledge of ungulate winter behavior—how wild and domesticated ungulates moved through snow, what food they sought, what company they kept, and what elevations they preferred—gave Indians in the Gulf of Maine a key advantage against less winter-savvy colonial opponents. Only eighteenth-century English snowshoe companies patrolling upland hunting grounds, together with a slight warming trend, jeopardized the seasonal independence that Indians had forged from the coldest weather of the Little Ice Age.

“  ‘They Rush Blindly at the Light at the Expense of Their Lives’: Bird Collisions, Urban Illumination, and ‘Tragedies of Migration’ in New York City and Philadelphia, 1887-1915”

Nadia Berenstein, University of Pennsylvania

After a late August cold snap in 1887, the bodies of hundreds of birds of dozens of species, some rarely seen in the city’s vicinity, littered the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Drawn to Liberty’s blazing electric torch, migratory birds collided with the monument in what would become a seasonal event. Similar scenes would occur in other cities, as electric lamps turned prominent structures into beacons for passing flocks.

Coinciding with the rise of a conservation movement increasingly concerned with migratory bird protection and the growth of amateur and professional ornithological societies, these spectacular avian fatalities at newly illuminated urban structures became a subject of popular, scientific, and civic interest. This paper examines reactions to the death of migratory birds at two public sites, the Statue of Liberty and Philadelphia’s City Hall, and aims to present a fresh perspective on urban environmental history, one that situates the city within migratory corridors and traces unexpected consequences of electrical illumination.  Spanning the first record of mass bird fatalities at the Statue of Liberty to a decline in interest in the phenomenon as urban electrification became general, I review accounts of migratory bird collisions in periodicals, ornithological journals, and city records, and consider collaborations among ornithologists and building maintenance staff to record and collect the bodies. I also follow the afterlives of the slaughtered birds themselves: as contested raw material for milliners, objects of a perverse form of urban bird-watching, a specimen source for natural history museums, and a data set for ornithologists.

“Pigs Gone Wild: The Production of Wildness and Human-Wildlife Conflict in Modern India”

Radhika Govindrajan, Yale University  

Human-wildlife conflict has become an increasingly serious issue in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand over the last couple of decades. In mountain villages adjoining forested areas, cultivators complain of large-scale crop raiding and livestock depredation by a variety of protected species including wild boar, bears, leopards, monkeys, deer and birds. Attacks on human beings, though not as frequent, can prove fatal, and often lead to reprisals by frightened and angry villagers. Conservationists and forest officials generally attribute the increase in conflict to deforestation, increased human population, expanding agrarian frontiers and the loss and fragmentation of wildlife habitats. However, in this paper I will argue villagers who live in this area view human-wildlife conflict as part of a larger process relating to the actual production (inadvertent or otherwise) and protection of wild animals and wild landscapes by a range of different actors - the state; veterinary science; development agencies; city-dwelling professionals looking to build vacation homes in the mountains; local gods and goddesses who use wild animals to enforce ritual taboos; and by villagers themselves. As an inseparable element of the production of wildness, human-wildlife conflict is no longer just about habitat fragmentation and the loss of traditional lifestyles due to the abandonment of agriculture by frustrated villagers. Instead it is part of a more complex process involving rapidly transforming cultural attitudes towards cultivation and modernity, shifting landscape ecologies, and the simultaneous urbanization and reforestation of rural areas.

Panel 3: Scientific Experimentation and Technology

“King-sized cabbages and miracle marigolds: creating crops and flowers with a chemical, 1937-1950”

Helen Curry, Yale University

In 1940, the Burpee Seed Company offered for sale the seeds of its new Tetra Marigold, the “first flower ever created by the use of a chemical.”  The chemical was a toxic substance that had been discovered in 1937 to cause the duplication of chromosomes in plants.  This treatment sometimes led to larger fruits and flowers – as with the oversized Tetra Marigold – and in other cases enabled difficult hybridizations that could lead to the development of wholly new types.  The chemical was the object of intense interest among agriculturists at mid-century, and the crops and flowers it promised to deliver were a source of fascination for many Americans.  These were thought by some to augur a revolution in agricultural production, an era when “chemical plant engineers” would refashion crops to meet specific needs or, as Burpee described it, when plants would be “manufactured scientifically.” 

This paper explores the use of the chemical colchicine by American plant breeders especially in conjunction with the presentation of this work in popular media and in advertising such as that of Burpee.  The application and celebration of this chemical tool centered on a widely shared understanding that it presented the opportunity to precisely alter plants, and perhaps animals, to better meet human needs.  It inspired a hope that controlling organisms at the level of the chromosome and gene would improve everyday American living by increasing the abundance and variety of the food supply.  As such, the paper provides a new perspective on the history of agro-genetic technologies and their reception in American culture.

“Rethinking land and labor: Shifting family values and the transition to industrialized dairy farming in New England

Sarah Sutton, Brandeis University

In the second half of the twentieth century, rural New England farm families began to transition from a system of household dairy production to a more industrialized system of dairy farming. As demand for butter and cheese in Boston increased, dairying families increased production by testing and adopting emerging technology, conducting experiments on their cows in the hopes of improving milk yields, supplementing their cows’ diets with imported grains from the Midwest, and eventually, by moving butter and cheese production out of the household and into factories. This paper suggests that farmers’ decisions during this period were driven by the fact that increased market production placed a heavy burden on farm women, the primary source of dairy labor, and on New England’s pastures, the ecological base of dairying in the region. In other words, the old system of household dairy production was both socially and ecologically unsustainable. Adopting new strategies enabled New England dairying families to transcend the limits placed upon them by their environment and their labor source, and also represented a radical shift in thinking about their relationship to their land, animals, and labor.

“The Flying Death”: Curare Travels from American Jungles to the British Laboratories

Shira Shmu’ely, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Spanish explorers first encountered the poisonous substance curare, also known as curara, curari or worari, in the mid 16th century. South American indigenous people used it for fighting and hunting - by dipping arrows in this black substance they guaranteed the killing of hunted animals. Curare, subtracted mainly from the tropical plant Strychnos Toxifera, was introduced in Britain arguably in the early 19th century. The substance perplexed British scientists with its paralyzing effect on the muscles, and they used it to keep animals still during experiments. Since under the influence of curare animals showed no manifestation of suffering, scientists were divided in the question whether curare made animals insentient. Curare destabilize the very understanding of pain (can a paralyzed body feel pain? how can it be recognized?) and aroused ethical concerns. Anti-vivisection activists joined the debate, and led to an 1876 law provision stating that curare does not consider anesthetic. 

The peculiar story of curare entangles together plants, animals and humans in radically changing geographies and contexts. It is a story of the ways in which flora and fauna kingdoms encountered Native American and British kingdoms, creating provocative links between hunters and physiologists; wild and experimental animals; poison and anesthetics. In my presentation, I’ll follow the curare through its shifting settings. I’ll explore how environmental history, history of science and British colonial history mesh together in the curare’s travels from the South American tropical jungles, through experimental laboratories, to the British House of Lords.

 
“Holy Cow! On Milk Yield, Fertility and the Creation of Plenty in Palestine/Israel”

Tamar Novick, University of Pennsylvania

Cows in Israel are claimed to produce the highest annual milk yield in the world. While milk yield has reached remarkable levels only in recent years, efforts to create plenty have been constant since the early days of Western settlement in Palestine, in the early 20th century. This paper examines the invention of the “Hebrew Cow,” and how it helped demonstrate that the land of Palestine/Israel was literally “flowing with milk and honey.” Drawing from the disciplines of cultural and environmental history, and the methodological tools of science and technology studies, my paper examines the way in which people who attributed special qualities to their land found technological means to materialize them. Furthermore, this paper explores the different kinds of bodies took part in the process of place-making, as well as the making of science. For example, historians of science thus far have paid much attention to model animals, and particularly to the process of extrapolating knowledge from animals and its application to humans. The centrality of female cows and women to the process of creating plenty, and their fertility in particular, exposes the boundaries between human and animal, and demonstrates how humans became model animals for other animals. By focusing on the relations between fertility and environmental conditions (most notably heat, scarcity of water, and the lack of grazing areas), I consider the roles cows and other females played in the making of the Holy Land.

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. 

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