Spring 2022 | Yale University
Climate change, Overfishing. The hole in the ozone layer. Mass Extinction. Nuclear winter. For over two hundred years, the earth and environmental sciences have played a central role in cultural and political debates about potential threats to the planet and the influence of humanity on the earth’s natural systems. At the same time, they have also been crucial in exploring, harnessing, understanding, and safeguarding our home. This course explores this longstanding tension between control and catastrophe.
We will focus on four major questions cutting across several scientific disciplines: the history and future of the earth, the exploitation and conservation of natural resources, predicting and influencing the weather, and the earth as home. In each of these units, we will look at several decades of discovery and debate. We will ask how evidence about the earth’s past, present, or future is presented, what kinds of predictive tools are seen as trustworthy, and the nature of scientific (and cultural) consensus.
General
Readings
PART I: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF THE EARTH
January 28 and 31: The Controversy of Deep Time
Topics: Fossils and the Flood; Catastrophe and Uniformity
Martin Rudwick, “The Shape and Meaning of Earth History,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 296–321.
William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London, 1836), table of contents and pp. 1–33.
February 2: The Age of the Earth Debates
Topics: Darwin, Thomson, and Radioactivity
Stephen Jay Gould, “False Premise, Good Science,” Natural History 92 (Oct. 1983), pp. 20–26.
B. C. Shipley, “‘Had Lord Kelvin a Right?’: John Perry, Natural Selection, and the Age of the Earth, 1894–1895,” in The Age of the Earth: From 4004 BC to AD 2002, edited by C. L. E. Lewis and S. J. Knell (London: The Geological Society, 2001), pp. 91–106.
Week of February 7: Neo-Uniformitarianism and Neo-Catastrophism
Topics: Continental Drift and Its Discontents; Plate Tectonics, Mass Extinctions, and Evidence
Naomi Oreskes, read the introduction and conclusion to The Rejection of Continental Drift (1999), and “The Rejection of Continental Drift,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1988), pp. 311–348.
Ronald Doel, Tanya Levin, and Mason Marker, “Extending Modern Cartography to the Ocean Depths: Military Patronage, Cold War Priorities, and the Heezen–Tharp Mapping Project, 1952–1959,” Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006), pp. 605–626.
PART II: EXPLOITATION AND CONSERVATION OF RESOURCES
Week of February 14: Scientific Exploration of Land and Sea
Topics: Science and Capitalism; The Earth Sciences as a Government Service
Paul Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), introduction, chapter 1, chapter 10, and epilogue.
J. P. Lesley, “Obituary Notice of Charles Albert Ashburner,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 28 (Jan.–June 1890), pp. 53–59.
Helen Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), read the conclusion first, then chapters 2 and 3.
Week of February 21: The Bounty and Crisis of the Sea
Topics: Salmon – The Fish Are Gone; Can Science Save Us?; Cod and Tuna – Quotas, Territory, and Uncertainty
Joseph E. Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), preface, introduction, chapters 3, 4, 7, and 8.
Theodore C. Bestor, “Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City,” American Anthropologist 103 (March 2001), pp. 76–95.
Week of February 28: The Finitude of Fossil Fuels
Topics: Petroleum Geology and Mineral Rights; Peak Oil
Tyler Priest, “Extraction Not Creation: The History of Offshore Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico,” Enterprise & Society 8 (June 2007), pp. 227–267.
Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York: Penguin, 2011), introduction and chapters 11 and 12.
PART III: PREDICTING AND INFLUENCING THE WEATHER
March 9: Weather and Data
Topics: Weather Maps and Data Overload
James Fleming, “Storms, Strikes, and Surveillance: The U.S. Army Signal Office, 1861–1891,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30 (2000), pp. 315–332.
Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chapters 1 and 3.
Week of March 14: Predicting the Weather
Topics: The Determinists’ Dream; Numerical Forecasting and the Limits of Predictability
Kristine Harper, Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), introduction and chapters 4, 5, 6, and 8.
Sidney Shalett, “Electronics to Aid Weather Figuring,” New York Times, Jan. 11, 1946, p. 12.
Gary Alan Fine, Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chapter 5.
Week of March 28: Global Warming
Topics: The Greenhouse Effect, from Ice Ages to Global Warming; Skeptics, Economics, and Social Construction
Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), preface, chapters 5 and 7, and “Reflections.”
Paul Edwards, “Representing the Global Atmosphere: Computer Models, Data, and Knowledge about Climate Change,” in Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance, edited by C. Miller and P. Edwards (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 31–66.
Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, and Matt Shindell, “From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, Global Warming, and the Social Deconstruction of Scientific Knowledge,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38 (2008), pp. 109–152.
Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 258–259, 305–312, 318–324.
PART IV: EARTH AS HOME
Week of April 4: Biogeography
Topics: The Humboldtian Embrace of Nature; Wallace, Darwin, and Evolutionary Geography
Janet Browne, The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), chapters 1, 7, 8, and conclusion.
Diane Paul, “Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 214–239.
Week of April 11: Ecology
Topics: Cooperation or Competition? The Eternal Optimism of Human Ecology
Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), preface and Part IV.
Volker M. Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), introduction and chapter 3.
Robert E. Park, “Human Ecology,” American Journal of Sociology 42 (July 1936), pp. 1–15.
Week of April 18: Planetary Unity and Planetary Destruction
Topics: Pollution, Risk, and Environmentalism; The Ozone Hole, Nuclear Winter, and the Age of Catastrophe
Peder Anker, “Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth,” Minerva 45 (2007), pp. 417–434.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994), introduction, chapters 1, 2, 14, 21, and 22.
Paul Crutzen and John Birks, “The Atmosphere After a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon,” Ambio 11 (1982), pp. 114–125.
Reiner Grundmann, “Ozone and Climate: Scientific Consensus and Leadership,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 31 (Jan. 2006), pp. 73–101.
Week of April 25: Where Do We Go From Here?
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Lost World: The Mastodon’s Molars,” New Yorker, Dec. 16, 2013.
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Lost World: Fossils of the Future,” New Yorker, Dec. 23, 2013.