“Memory Effects” and Dark Histories

Abstract

Ecologists’ concept of “memory effects” considers how past environments shape current and future ones. Drawing on ethnographic research and historical scholarship, this essay uses their concept to ask what scientists remember and what they forget, and to expand ecologists’ definition of the environment. The author argues that contemporary ecological light-pollution research in greater Berlin can take place because of the site’s longer naturalcultural history, which includes the Nazi regime’s role in creating the nature reserve where Lake Stechlin and scientific infrastructure—the “LakeLab”—are located. Reserve status protected the area from suburbanization and artificial light at night. Current light-pollution research there is thus entangled with and indebted to Germany’s dark history—giving the phrase a poignant double meaning. This essay interweaves three parallel but entwined narratives: the author’s ethnographic fieldwork, a history of the site, and the area’s Nazi history. The resulting experimental form uses ideas such as enclosures and sediments to frame these intertwined histories, and juxtaposition and resonances among stories to do analytic work. In the process the essay urges light-pollution scientists to wrestle with a dark, unjust history. Across the globe scientists, scholars, and citizens alike have been increasingly forced to reckon with landscapes and their histories of violence, dispossession, and oppression in diverse contexts.