New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies

1. Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies: Promises, Challenges, and Contributions

1 Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies Promises, Challenges, and Contributions Sara B. Pritchard This edited volume is the product of recent dialogue within and between the fields of environmental history and science and technology studies (STS). It is also the outcome of a workshop that examined one piece of this larger intellectual puzzle: how perspectives gleaned from STS might facilitate and ultimately extend the contributions of environmental history. Indeed, disciplinary hybridity has marked the professional identities and trajectories of the three editors of this collection (not to mention many of the authors whose chapters are included here). We self-identify as environmental historians who were also trained and publish in the history of technology and science and technology studies. At the beginning of this project, we all held positions in STS departments. Although there has been growing interest in how environmental history and science studies have engaged with and can contribute to one another, and stimulating scholarship has begun to develop at their nexus, we were interested in fostering more explicit theoretical dialogue between the fields. In particular, we wanted to think deeply about the ways in which our skills, developed from our experience in these fields, could enhance our work as environmental historians. For example, how might fundamental STS tenets Chapter 1 2 Sara B. Pritchard such as knowledge production as a social process, the politics of professionalization , and negotiations over expertise help us gain a richer understanding of how “the environment” is constructed, perceived, contested, and (re)shaped by historical actors? How might unpacking the processes of knowledge making and technological development illuminate human interactions with nonhuman nature and therefore enrich our analyses of those relationships? Most broadly, how might conceptual STS tools such as black boxes, boundary-work, and technological systems offer insights that enable, but also deepen and sometimes even transform, our understanding of past human-natural interactions? The title of this book, New Natures, seeks to suggest how new natures emerge from studies that join environmental history with science and technology studies. From the very outset, then, this project has been premised on an asymmetrical relationship between environmental history and STS. Indeed, it is appropriate that we here use the concept of symmetry to frame the dynamic between the two fields, since it is basic to STS.1 Yet in framing the disciplines and their relationship in this way, it is essential that we make two crucial caveats. First, we acknowledge that we are certainly not the first scholars to engage STS in the writing of environmental history. To the contrary, as I have already suggested, this volume builds on conversations within and between the fields that emerged during the 1990s and 2000s. During those years, a number of conferences, publications, and institutional changes not only reflected but also fostered growing interest at the intersection of STS and environmental history, both relatively new fields.2 Conference panels at the American Society for Environmental History, the History of Science Society (HSS), and the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) explored these concerns empirically and analytically. In 1997, the theme of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science’s Summer Academy was “Nature ’s Histories,” which focused specifically on the history of science and environmental history. Influential monographs such as Gregg Mitman’s The State of Nature, Robert Kohler’s Lords of the Fly, Conevery Bolton Valenčius’s The Health of the Country, Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, and Linda Nash’s Inescapable Ecologies, among others , made crucial interventions in these discussions.3 Meanwhile, hybridity and actor-network theory had become increasingly prominent within environmental history.4 Research at the intersection of science, technology, and the environment eventually became institutionalized within subspecialties affiliated with relevant professional organizations. In 2000, James C. Williams and I cofounded Envirotech, a special-interest group within SHOT; the Earth and Environment Forum, a parallel group within HSS, was officially established the following year.5 Meanwhile, several PhD programs further Joining Environmental History with STS 3 institutionalized the convergence of the fields, while environmental history began to have a stronger presence in some STS departments.6 As this brief overview suggests, significant dialogue, scholarship, and professionalization efforts have emerged over the past two decades. This volume therefore both reflects the conversation thus far and seeks to develop additional contributions . Second, readers familiar with even a few of the...