Date:
Location:
"Radiation and Restoration: The Politics of Ecological Care"
Speaker:
Laura J. Martin, Ziff Environmental Fellow, Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University.
Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Contact:
Shana Ashar
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Abstract:
Today environmental organizations spend billions of dollars per year on ecological restoration – a set of practices that encompasses everything from invasive species eradication to dam removal to captive breeding. In this talk, I consider the history of ecological restoration from the 1940s through the 1960s, emphasizing the intellectual and material connections between restoration and the US Atomic Energy Commission. It is widely accepted that in the aftermath of World War II, new technologies, funding structures, and understandings of war played crucial roles in the emergence of a number of disciplines, including molecular biology and oceanography. Ecology, in contrast, is often framed as having emerged in opposition to the “Atomic Age,” and yet, ecology had an Atomic Age of its own. In this talk I focus on ecologists’ efforts to simulate nuclear attack in order to visualize environmental recovery after WWIII. Contingently, but importantly for the history of ecology, ecologists working on these simulations distinguished between “ecosystem functions” and “ecosystem structure,” heralding a shift from single-species restoration to ecosystem restoration.
Biography:
Laura J. Martin is a Ziff Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the Department of the History of Science. In 2015 she received her PhD in Natural Resources from Cornell University, specializing in evolutionary ecology and environmental history. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Doris Duke Foundation. Her research explores how humans intentionally and unintentionally shape the distribution and diversity of other species. Her current project, Saving Species: Ecological Restoration from the Dust Bowl to De-extinction, examines the twentieth and twenty-first century history of ecological restoration as an idea, practice, and scientific discipline.
