Pub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.3828/096734023x16702350656960
BISWAJIT SARMAH
The greater one-horned rhinoceros or Indian rhinoceros ( Rhinoceros unicornis ) faced extinction in British India at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1908, the Government of Assam established the Kaziranga Game Reserve (KGR, now Kaziranga National Park) to preserve the vanishing rhino. As the twentieth century progressed, creating wilderness – by demonising the presence of the peasants and graziers – became a global panacea for protecting wildlife. Contrary to that belief, this article will show how the rhino population revived amidst human existence dictated by agro-ecological interactions and bureaucratic expediencies. The rhino’s ethology and its place in the imagination of rural people minimised its enemies. Moreover, in fluvial geography that constantly transformed the KGR’s boundaries, peasants and graziers creatively negotiated their usufruct rights and supported rhino preservation. Locating the KGR in the historical analysis of fluvial agro-ecology, this study illuminates how a critical interaction between different actors, i.e. human and non-human and coloniser and colonised, accentuated the cultural and material contestations amidst which the rhino eventually survived.
{"title":"Empire, Nature and Agrarian World: A History of Rhino Preservation in the Kaziranga Game Reserve, India (1902–1938)","authors":"BISWAJIT SARMAH","doi":"10.3828/096734023x16702350656960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/096734023x16702350656960","url":null,"abstract":"The greater one-horned rhinoceros or Indian rhinoceros ( Rhinoceros unicornis ) faced extinction in British India at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1908, the Government of Assam established the Kaziranga Game Reserve (KGR, now Kaziranga National Park) to preserve the vanishing rhino. As the twentieth century progressed, creating wilderness – by demonising the presence of the peasants and graziers – became a global panacea for protecting wildlife. Contrary to that belief, this article will show how the rhino population revived amidst human existence dictated by agro-ecological interactions and bureaucratic expediencies. The rhino’s ethology and its place in the imagination of rural people minimised its enemies. Moreover, in fluvial geography that constantly transformed the KGR’s boundaries, peasants and graziers creatively negotiated their usufruct rights and supported rhino preservation. Locating the KGR in the historical analysis of fluvial agro-ecology, this study illuminates how a critical interaction between different actors, i.e. human and non-human and coloniser and colonised, accentuated the cultural and material contestations amidst which the rhino eventually survived.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135667097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.3828/096734022x16552219786636
ATTE ARFFMAN, ANTERO HOLMILA
In August 1969 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast. We argue that the disaster caused by the Hurricane was an outcome of the entanglement between human and non-human agents. As a non-human agent, Hurricane Camille thrust the prevailing socio-economic situation in the segregationist South into the spotlight, with all its political and cultural ramifications – much to the annoyance of the local political elite that had long sought to isolate southern politics from civil rights and the desegregation agenda. Consequently, it (re)invigorated and furnished the civil rights movement and the politics defining that era with new arguments and approaches that would have been impossible to develop from the perspective of human agency alone. By examining both local and national press discourses relating to the crisis caused by Hurricane Camille in the state of Mississippi in August 1969, we argue that historical agency should not be seen in purely anthropocentric terms but as an entanglement between human and non-human events.
{"title":"Race, Environment, and Crisis: Hurricane Camille and the Politics of Southern Segregation","authors":"ATTE ARFFMAN, ANTERO HOLMILA","doi":"10.3828/096734022x16552219786636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/096734022x16552219786636","url":null,"abstract":"In August 1969 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast. We argue that the disaster caused by the Hurricane was an outcome of the entanglement between human and non-human agents. As a non-human agent, Hurricane Camille thrust the prevailing socio-economic situation in the segregationist South into the spotlight, with all its political and cultural ramifications – much to the annoyance of the local political elite that had long sought to isolate southern politics from civil rights and the desegregation agenda. Consequently, it (re)invigorated and furnished the civil rights movement and the politics defining that era with new arguments and approaches that would have been impossible to develop from the perspective of human agency alone. By examining both local and national press discourses relating to the crisis caused by Hurricane Camille in the state of Mississippi in August 1969, we argue that historical agency should not be seen in purely anthropocentric terms but as an entanglement between human and non-human events.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135667098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.3828/096734023x16702350656933
JOHN CROPPER
This article offers a historical critique of the Great Green Wall Initiative of the Sahel and the Sahara (GGW) – an audacious project to stop the southern encroachment of the Sahara Desert by constructing a wall of trees across the continent. By situating the GGW within the longue durée of the Sahel’s environmental history, it examines how the narratives of environmental decline that underpin the initiative are not only misguided but born out of the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, and the neoliberal development projects of the postcolonial period. In doing so, it argues that narratives of environmental decline have not only served as a dynamic framework to rationalise Western exploitation of the Sahel’s environments over time, but have obscured, or even silenced, the effective practices of dryland regeneration of Sahelian communities.
{"title":"‘Growing a World Wonder’: The Great Green Wall and the History of Environmental Decline in the Sahel, 1450–2022","authors":"JOHN CROPPER","doi":"10.3828/096734023x16702350656933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/096734023x16702350656933","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a historical critique of the Great Green Wall Initiative of the Sahel and the Sahara (GGW) – an audacious project to stop the southern encroachment of the Sahara Desert by constructing a wall of trees across the continent. By situating the GGW within the longue durée of the Sahel’s environmental history, it examines how the narratives of environmental decline that underpin the initiative are not only misguided but born out of the transatlantic slave trade, imperialism and colonialism, and the neoliberal development projects of the postcolonial period. In doing so, it argues that narratives of environmental decline have not only served as a dynamic framework to rationalise Western exploitation of the Sahel’s environments over time, but have obscured, or even silenced, the effective practices of dryland regeneration of Sahelian communities.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135667104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.3828/096734023x16869924234804
ELIJAH DORO
During the first half of the twentieth century, white settler farmers in colonial Zimbabwe raised incessant complaints and alarm over ‘mysterious’ and inexplicably frequent incidences of cattle mortalities. These mortalities were attributed to poisoning from careless handling of arsenical dips, ingestion of arsenic sprayed grass and grazing in veld impregnated with arsenic trioxide. The arsenic question occupied the attention of experts from the colonial Branch of Chemistry, toxicologists, bacteriologists, veterinary officials and white settler farmers in contested cattle-centred narratives. Within the framing of colonial toxic politics, cattle poisoning disproportionately received more elaborate scrutiny and attention than that of humans and other species. The colonial archive only affords limited and vague visibility to the toxic encounters of humans and non-bovine species. This paper seeks to transcend and interrogate bovine-centric poisoning discourses with which colonial sources are replete and to use existing cattle poisoning records to amplify and construct multi-species toxic histories connecting cattle, humans, landscapes and other species in a co-constituted narrative of arsenic toxicities. The paper employs vicarious imagination of experiences to reframe Africa’s ‘arsenic century’ and colonial toxic histories outside the body-centric script, and examines the intricate and complex chemical relations enmeshing cattle, humans and other species in ecosystems of mutual toxic vulnerabilities and slow chemical violence. The paper uses archival sources, toxicological reports from the Branch of Chemistry and veterinary records of cattle poisoning in colonial Zimbabwe.
{"title":"No Body, No Crime? Vicariously Imagining Africa’s Arsenic Century: Bovines, Arsenic Poisoning and Multi-Species Toxic Histories in Southern Rhodesia (Colonial Zimbabwe), 1900–1940s","authors":"ELIJAH DORO","doi":"10.3828/096734023x16869924234804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/096734023x16869924234804","url":null,"abstract":"During the first half of the twentieth century, white settler farmers in colonial Zimbabwe raised incessant complaints and alarm over ‘mysterious’ and inexplicably frequent incidences of cattle mortalities. These mortalities were attributed to poisoning from careless handling of arsenical dips, ingestion of arsenic sprayed grass and grazing in veld impregnated with arsenic trioxide. The arsenic question occupied the attention of experts from the colonial Branch of Chemistry, toxicologists, bacteriologists, veterinary officials and white settler farmers in contested cattle-centred narratives. Within the framing of colonial toxic politics, cattle poisoning disproportionately received more elaborate scrutiny and attention than that of humans and other species. The colonial archive only affords limited and vague visibility to the toxic encounters of humans and non-bovine species. This paper seeks to transcend and interrogate bovine-centric poisoning discourses with which colonial sources are replete and to use existing cattle poisoning records to amplify and construct multi-species toxic histories connecting cattle, humans, landscapes and other species in a co-constituted narrative of arsenic toxicities. The paper employs vicarious imagination of experiences to reframe Africa’s ‘arsenic century’ and colonial toxic histories outside the body-centric script, and examines the intricate and complex chemical relations enmeshing cattle, humans and other species in ecosystems of mutual toxic vulnerabilities and slow chemical violence. The paper uses archival sources, toxicological reports from the Branch of Chemistry and veterinary records of cattle poisoning in colonial Zimbabwe.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135667105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.3197/096734022x16627150608050
M. Paulissen, R. van Beek, E. Huijbens
Scholars have radically turned away from the notion of ‘natural borders’ dictated by nature and now broadly agree that all borders are ‘artificial’ human constructs. However, there is a need to revisit environmental determinism in its nuances. We analyse the relation between distinct natural features and historical border development, using the notion of affordances and the example of raised bogs in the medieval and modern-period eastern Low Countries. For humans, bog landscapes in these periods functioned as both barriers and passageways through the spatiotemporal variability of these opposite affordances. At the scale of local settlement territories, large bog landscapes had the coercive agency to function as borderlands separating adjacent communities. Such coercion was absent on the larger spatial scale of princedoms. The growing economic importance of peat was a crucial driver for border demarcation at both scales from the late Middle Ages. Diplomatic risk calculation and path dependency explain the spatial concurrence and long persistence respectively of bog boundaries between successive polities.
{"title":"How Bogs Made for Borderlands: The Eastern Low Countries, c. 670 – c. 1900 CE","authors":"M. Paulissen, R. van Beek, E. Huijbens","doi":"10.3197/096734022x16627150608050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/096734022x16627150608050","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have radically turned away from the notion of ‘natural borders’ dictated by nature and now broadly agree that all borders are ‘artificial’ human constructs. However, there is a need to revisit environmental determinism in its nuances. We analyse the relation between distinct natural features and historical border development, using the notion of affordances and the example of raised bogs in the medieval and modern-period eastern Low Countries. For humans, bog landscapes in these periods functioned as both barriers and passageways through the spatiotemporal variability of these opposite affordances. At the scale of local settlement territories, large bog landscapes had the coercive agency to function as borderlands separating adjacent communities. Such coercion was absent on the larger spatial scale of princedoms. The growing economic importance of peat was a crucial driver for border demarcation at both scales from the late Middle Ages. Diplomatic risk calculation and path dependency explain the spatial concurrence and long persistence respectively of bog boundaries between successive polities.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74853904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.3828/096734023x16788762163696
FAHIMEH MOFRAD, MARIA IGNATIEVA
Canberra was built in harmony with its landscape setting, creating a legacy of urban form well-connected to the natural environment. Its urban design and planning not only amplified the surrounding natural landscape such as forested hills and mountains but also created a human-made green urban character. However, plans for future development as a compact city pose a challenge to conserving the city’s green spaces. A green infrastructure plan is necessary to consider the city’s green space design heritage and the linked socio-ecological values while minimising the urban footprint. The paper employs a historical literature review to understand the factors and characteristics that shaped Canberra’s green character and the socio-ecological values of its green spaces. The research found the influence of historical and modern design and planning concepts in consolidating green infrastructure and creating ecological corridors and social infrastructure. One of the essential conditions for maintaining the unique character of Canberra is the preservation of the socio-ecological values of its existing green spaces. A trade-off study must be conducted to balance green infrastructure planning while considering these values, in light of development changes.
{"title":"From a Grassland to a Bush Capital: A Historic Review of Canberra’s Green Infrastructure Development","authors":"FAHIMEH MOFRAD, MARIA IGNATIEVA","doi":"10.3828/096734023x16788762163696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/096734023x16788762163696","url":null,"abstract":"Canberra was built in harmony with its landscape setting, creating a legacy of urban form well-connected to the natural environment. Its urban design and planning not only amplified the surrounding natural landscape such as forested hills and mountains but also created a human-made green urban character. However, plans for future development as a compact city pose a challenge to conserving the city’s green spaces. A green infrastructure plan is necessary to consider the city’s green space design heritage and the linked socio-ecological values while minimising the urban footprint. The paper employs a historical literature review to understand the factors and characteristics that shaped Canberra’s green character and the socio-ecological values of its green spaces. The research found the influence of historical and modern design and planning concepts in consolidating green infrastructure and creating ecological corridors and social infrastructure. One of the essential conditions for maintaining the unique character of Canberra is the preservation of the socio-ecological values of its existing green spaces. A trade-off study must be conducted to balance green infrastructure planning while considering these values, in light of development changes.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135667099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-20DOI: 10.3828/096734022x16627150608050
MAURICE PAULISSEN, ROY VAN BEEK, EDWARD H. HUIJBENS
Scholars have radically turned away from the notion of ‘natural borders’ dictated by nature and now broadly agree that all borders are ‘artificial’ human constructs. However, there is a need to revisit environmental determinism in its nuances. We analyse the relation between distinct natural features and historical border development, using the notion of affordances and the example of raised bogs in the medieval and modern-period eastern Low Countries. For humans, bog landscapes in these periods functioned as both barriers and passageways through the spatiotemporal variability of these opposite affordances. At the scale of local settlement territories, large bog landscapes had the coercive agency to function as borderlands separating adjacent communities. Such coercion was absent on the larger spatial scale of princedoms. The growing economic importance of peat was a crucial driver for border demarcation at both scales from the late Middle Ages. Diplomatic risk calculation and path dependency explain the spatial concurrence and long persistence respectively of bog boundaries between successive polities.
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Pub Date : 2023-10-18DOI: 10.3197/096734022x16384451127384
R. G. Kirk, Neil Pemberton, Thibaut Serviant-Fine
This article examines health, human–animal relationships and environments within nineteenth-century France, focusing on Hirudo medicinalis, the medicinal leech. Drawing upon medical, environmental and ‘more than human histories’, we investigate how a ‘mania’ for bloodletting in the wake of Parisian medicine and what Michel Foucault has characterised as the ‘birth of the clinic’ produced a trade in leeches that threatened to push the species to extinction. While urban-educated naturalists, physicians, pharmacists, merchants and politicians worried over the scarcity of what was widely considered a commodity of national economic and medical importance, rural ‘leech gatherers’ quietly developed ways to breed leeches artificially. The outcome was hirudiculture: the farming of leeches on an industrial scale. We argue that the birth of hirudiculture was more than a practical and commercial response to the needs of medicine; it reflected and embodied similar shifts in knowledge and reveals the complex and diverse ways in which rural and urban environments, human and non-human relationships, have shaped each other in the pursuit of shared visions of health.
{"title":"The Birth of Hirudiculture: Parisian Medicine, Leech Farming and the Transformation of Marshland in Nineteenth-Century France","authors":"R. G. Kirk, Neil Pemberton, Thibaut Serviant-Fine","doi":"10.3197/096734022x16384451127384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/096734022x16384451127384","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines health, human–animal relationships and environments within nineteenth-century France, focusing on Hirudo medicinalis, the medicinal leech. Drawing upon medical, environmental and ‘more than human histories’, we investigate how a ‘mania’ for bloodletting in the wake of Parisian medicine and what Michel Foucault has characterised as the ‘birth of the clinic’ produced a trade in leeches that threatened to push the species to extinction. While urban-educated naturalists, physicians, pharmacists, merchants and politicians worried over the scarcity of what was widely considered a commodity of national economic and medical importance, rural ‘leech gatherers’ quietly developed ways to breed leeches artificially. The outcome was hirudiculture: the farming of leeches on an industrial scale. We argue that the birth of hirudiculture was more than a practical and commercial response to the needs of medicine; it reflected and embodied similar shifts in knowledge and reveals the complex and diverse ways in which rural and urban environments, human and non-human relationships, have shaped each other in the pursuit of shared visions of health.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76153874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-18DOI: 10.3828/096734022x16552219786627
R. ASHTON MACFARLANE
In the late 1960s, New Zealand and the United States collaborated to establish a southern hemispheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) monitoring station on New Zealand’s coastal cliffs. The New Zealand CO 2 Project, as it came to be known, is an underappreciated landmark in the history of environmental monitoring. The archival record of its early years reveals the extent to which efforts to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations interacted closely with one of the most hotly debated political issues of the mid-twentieth century: urban air pollution. The designation of CO 2 as air pollution on a planetary scale had profound legal implications in an era in which clean air legislation increasingly brought air pollution within the scope of governmental regulation, and administrative agencies began to jostle for control of the monitoring enterprise. The precise nature of CO 2 as an air pollutant, however, was difficult to pin down. In these initial years of concerted carbon dioxide monitoring, when the lines between climate science and air pollution research were still blurred, CO 2 developed its many pollutant identities. The nature of these identities – and the ways in which scientists and science administrators negotiated their boundaries – retain their relevance today, as nations continue to link air pollution and climate legislation in the twenty-first century.
{"title":"The Many Pollutant Identities of Carbon Dioxide: Global Climate Monitoring and Air Pollution Research in New Zealand, 1968–1975","authors":"R. ASHTON MACFARLANE","doi":"10.3828/096734022x16552219786627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/096734022x16552219786627","url":null,"abstract":"In the late 1960s, New Zealand and the United States collaborated to establish a southern hemispheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) monitoring station on New Zealand’s coastal cliffs. The New Zealand CO 2 Project, as it came to be known, is an underappreciated landmark in the history of environmental monitoring. The archival record of its early years reveals the extent to which efforts to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations interacted closely with one of the most hotly debated political issues of the mid-twentieth century: urban air pollution. The designation of CO 2 as air pollution on a planetary scale had profound legal implications in an era in which clean air legislation increasingly brought air pollution within the scope of governmental regulation, and administrative agencies began to jostle for control of the monitoring enterprise. The precise nature of CO 2 as an air pollutant, however, was difficult to pin down. In these initial years of concerted carbon dioxide monitoring, when the lines between climate science and air pollution research were still blurred, CO 2 developed its many pollutant identities. The nature of these identities – and the ways in which scientists and science administrators negotiated their boundaries – retain their relevance today, as nations continue to link air pollution and climate legislation in the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135944420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-18DOI: 10.3197/096734022x16552219786627
R. Macfarlane
In the late 1960s, New Zealand and the United States collaborated to establish a southern hemispheric carbon dioxide (CO2) monitoring station on New Zealand’s coastal cliffs. The New Zealand CO2 Project, as it came to be known, is an underappreciated landmark in the history of environmental monitoring. The archival record of its early years reveals the extent to which efforts to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations interacted closely with one of the most hotly debated political issues of the mid-twentieth century: urban air pollution. The designation of CO2 as air pollution on a planetary scale had profound legal implications in an era in which clean air legislation increasingly brought air pollution within the scope of governmental regulation, and administrative agencies began to jostle for control of the monitoring enterprise. The precise nature of CO2 as an air pollutant, however, was difficult to pin down. In these initial years of concerted carbon dioxide monitoring, when the lines between climate science and air pollution research were still blurred, CO2 developed its many pollutant identities. The nature of these identities – and the ways in which scientists and science administrators negotiated their boundaries – retain their relevance today, as nations continue to link air pollution and climate legislation in the twenty-first century.
{"title":"The Many Pollutant Identities of Carbon Dioxide: Global Climate Monitoring and Air Pollution Research in New Zealand, 1968–1975","authors":"R. Macfarlane","doi":"10.3197/096734022x16552219786627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3197/096734022x16552219786627","url":null,"abstract":"In the late 1960s, New Zealand and the United States collaborated to establish a southern hemispheric carbon dioxide (CO2) monitoring station on New Zealand’s coastal cliffs. The New Zealand CO2 Project, as it came to be known, is an underappreciated landmark in the history of environmental monitoring. The archival record of its early years reveals the extent to which efforts to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations interacted closely with one of the most hotly debated political issues of the mid-twentieth century: urban air pollution. The designation of CO2 as air pollution on a planetary scale had profound legal implications in an era in which clean air legislation increasingly brought air pollution within the scope of governmental regulation, and administrative agencies began to jostle for control of the monitoring enterprise. The precise nature of CO2 as an air pollutant, however, was difficult to pin down. In these initial years of concerted carbon dioxide monitoring, when the lines between climate science and air pollution research were still blurred, CO2 developed its many pollutant identities. The nature of these identities – and the ways in which scientists and science administrators negotiated their boundaries – retain their relevance today, as nations continue to link air pollution and climate legislation in the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":45574,"journal":{"name":"Environment and History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79155932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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