Donnerstag, 16.04.2015
Emily Brock (Berlin): Philippine Trees and American Forestry: Development of the Twentieth Century Tropical Lumber Trade

Donnerstag, 23.04.2015
Nicolas Maughan (Aix-Marseilles): The End of Water Scarcity in Provence: Technological Breakthroughs and Management of Natural Resources in the South East of France (1849-1969)

Donnerstag, 4.06.2015
Jan-Henrik Meyer (Aarhus/Copenhagen)
Albert Presas I Puig (Barcelona):
HoNESt – Exploring the History of Nuclear Energy and Relations with Society in Europe

Donnerstag, 11.06.2015
Carolyn Taratko (Nashville):
Horror vacui and the Colonization of the German Moorlands

Donnerstag, 25.06.2015
Christoph Becker-Schaum (Berlin):
Die Grünen und Differenzierungsprozesse in der Umweltbewegung in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren

Donnerstag, 09.07.2015
Hendrik Ehrhardt (Berlin):
Von 'verbeamteten' Umweltschützern und Kraftwerksbetreibern: Das Verhältnis von Umweltbewegung und Energiewirtschaft seit den 1970er Jahren

Donnerstag, 16.07.2015
Kyle Harvey (Sydney, Australia):
Atomic Testing, Fallout, and Environmentalism: Australian, European, and Pacific Anti-Nuclear Networks, 1945-1970

Ort: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Friedrichstraße 191-193, Eingang Friedrichstr., Lift in den 5. Stock, Raum 5061.
Zeit: 18:30 (s.t.) – 20:30 Uhr
Kontakt: Astrid M. Kirchhof astrid.m.kirchhof@geschichte.hu-berlin.de
Jan-Henrik Meyer jan.meyer@nyu.edu

Abstracts

Donnerstag, 16.04.2015
Emily Brock (MPI for the History of Science, Berlin):
Philippine Trees and American Forestry: Development of the Twentieth Century Tropical Lumber Trade

Science and the state both have roles in creating and controlling environmental change. This project examines the complex dynamics within the research communities asked to assist and advise governments’ imposition of order on chaotic, yet valuable, natural resources. The field of scientific forestry was designed to plan for long-term stability through management of forest ecology and human use. This research project focuses on the rescaling of forest management techniques and predictions in the American-controlled Philippines, and the larger context of globalized industrial tropical forest management in the twentieth century. American businesspeople, middle-class Filipinos, biologists, and military officers worked in concert with the goals of U.S. colonial governance to define the Philippines’ forests in terms of American forestry and economics. The presence of American forest managers in remote areas conveyed to local people the occupying government’s ability to control and transform not just the archipelago’s governance but its very environment. At the same time, creating locally-determined rules for scientific forest management led to hybrid constructions of American ideas and Philippine realities.

Donnerstag, 23.04.2015
Nicolas Maughan (Aix-Marseilles University, Marseilles):
The End of Water Scarcity in Provence: Technological Breakthroughs and Management of Natural Resources in the South East of France (1849-1969)

Until the early nineteenth century, the South East of France, especially the Provence area, was mainly a dry land with agrarian activities exposed to Mediterranean climate variability, whose societies have long suffered of a chronic lack of freshwater. However, the industrial development of this time was only predominant along the coast and in cities like Marseilles, leaving the "hinterland" in a rural situation until the mid-twentieth century. It was only during the last five decades that the region has experienced one of the strongest economic and agricultural growths in southern Europe. This thanks to an ambitious fluvial planning based on hydropower generation projects in the Southern French Alps following World War II. The Durance River valley has been the centerpiece of this project, along which hydropower generation plants, large water supply aqueducts and massive dams were built. The river became a lifeline for an entire region but also, in the same time, the most regulated French waterway. We are trying to understand origins and evolution of the process of political decision-making, together with technical constraints and diffusion of new technologies, which have led to the strategic choice of using the “white coal” but also its negative environmental and social consequences.

Donnerstag, 4.06.2015
Jan-Henrik Meyer (Aarhus & University of Copenhagen) &
Albert Presas I Puig (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
HoNESt – Exploring the History of Nuclear Energy and Relations with Society in Europe

Societal perceptions of and political responses to nuclear power differ widely between European countries. Funded by Horizon 2020/Euratom, the collaborative research project HoNESt (History of Nuclear Energy and Society) sets out to explain variety and change in European societies’ relations with nuclear energy on the basis of the historical experience. Assembling an interdisciplinary team of 22 partner institutions in Europe, HoNESt embarks on the first comprehensive comparative and transnational analysis of nuclear developments and their relations with society in 20 countries during the past 60 years. Providing an innovative interdisciplinary framework, the project embraces the complexity of political, technological and economic dimensions, issues of safety, risk perception and communication, public engagement and media framing. It takes seriously the role and often contradictory perspectives of the actors involved – industry, policy makers, experts, civil society actors and the media –, as well as the rapidly changing contexts over the past 60 years.

Donnerstag, 11.06.2015
Carolyn Taratko (Vanderbilt University, Nashville):
Horror vacui and the colonization of the German moorlands (1871-1923)

Following German unification in 1871, efforts to bring the high moorlands under cultivation were intensified. Politicians, bureaucrats and scientists collaborated to bring the high moors under cultivation and settlement. This was not merely a technological feat in which humans tamed the forces of nature; bringing territory under cultivation required redistricting, remapping, and resettlement. Authorities used these tools to bring productivity and administrative clarity to zones that represented blank, depopulated spaces on the map that aroused, according in the words of one politician, a horror vacui, or a fear of empty spaces. This paper looks at various ways that the colonization and settlement of the high moorlands contributed to a reconceptualization of land use and natural resources in Germany from roughly 1871-1923.

Donnerstag, 25.06.2015
Christoph Becker-Schaum (Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis der Heinrich Böll-Stiftung, Berlin):
Die Grünen und Differenzierungsprozesse in der Umweltbewegung in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren

Kann man über die Anfänge der Grünen, über die doch so viel geschrieben worden ist, noch etwas Neues sagen? Ich meine: ja! Was die differenzierte Betrachtung der Grünen betrifft, fehlt mir auch nach noch so vielen Darstellungen der Breite der ideologischen Positionen, die entweder zu Beginn in die Partei hineingetragen worden sind oder die sich die innerparteilichen Strömungen im Laufe der Parteigeschichte zueigen gemacht haben, eine Betrachtungsweise, die die deskriptive Perspektive auf die grüne Vielfalt durch eine Fokussierung auf funktionale Dynamiken und den Wandel der Parteistrategie ersetzt, die meines Erachtens am besten geeignet ist, die Entstehung einer Anti-Parteien-Partei, das Zusammengehen so unwahrscheinlicher Partner im Gründungsprozess der Partei, den Wechsel der Parteieliten und die erfolgreiche Parlamentarisierung der Grünen zu erklären. Der zeitliche Fokus liegt auf den 1970er und 1980er Jahren, inhaltlich geht es insbesondere um das Wechselspiel zwischen innerparteilichen und außerparteilichen Einflussfaktoren, welches die vorliegenden Parteigeschichten zu wenig belichten.

Donnerstag, 09.07.2015
Hendrik Ehrhardt (TU Berlin):
Von 'verbeamteten' Umwelt-schützern und Kraftwerksbetreibern: Das Verhältnis von Umweltbewegung und Energiewirtschaft seit den 1970er Jahren

Im Zentrum des Vortrags steht die Frage nach dem Selbstverständnis von Umweltbewegung und Energiewirtschaft sowie deren gegenseitige Wahrnehmung. Eine aktive Umweltbewegung, die noch dazu in traditionelle Verwaltungs- und Politikbereiche vordrang, war für die Energiewirtschaft zusehends ein ernstzunehmendes Problem. Für die Energieerzeuger wurde es damit immer schwieriger sich gegenüber Öffentlichkeit und Politik zu legitimieren. Durch die Politisierung der Energiefrage seit Ende der 1960er Jahre erlebten Umweltbewegung und Energiewirtschaft einen Transformationsprozess der u.a. durch ihre gemeinsame Geschichte erklärt werden kann.

Donnerstag, 16.07.2015 Kyle Harvey (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia):
Atomic Testing, Fallout, and Environmentalism: Australian, European, and Pacific Anti-Nuclear Networks, 1945-1970
Throughout the era of atmospheric atomic testing in the Pacific Ocean, environmental issues played an auspicious part in opposition from Australians, Europeans, and Pacific Islanders against the nuclear powers conducting these tests in the early Cold War period. As scientific understanding of the impact of radiation from atmospheric atomic tests increased, activists sought to use this science, and their own understandings of the dangers of nuclear weapons, to oppose the nuclear testing programs of the American, British, and French governments. This paper investigates how Australian anti-nuclear activists opposed nuclear testing programs in the Pacific, and how they made tentative steps towards regional and transnational networks opposed to these testing programs and the environmental and health risks they engendered across the Pacific. Coinciding with – and contributing to – the beginnings of modern environmentalism in the west, this activism helped to further the idea that the Pacific was much more than a region of isolated contaminated zones.