Erik Isberg, doctoral student at the division, will discuss the progress of his dissertation at his final seminar on 13 March 13.15-15:00 (Stockholm time). The title of his seminar is “Planetary Timekeeping: Paleoclimatology and the Temporalities of Environmental Knowledge. 1950-1990”. Dania Acherman, Senior Scientist from the University of Bern, will act as discussant during the seminar. The event will be held in the seminar room at the division (Teknikringen 74D, level 5).
About Erik
I am a PhD Student at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment since December 2018. I hold a M.A in the History of Ideas and Sciences from Lund University and I was a visiting student at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at UC Berkeley 2016-2017.
As a part of the research project SPHERE, my current work concerns the scientific construction of a global environment and, particularly, how planetary timescales were increasingly incorporated into human history and global environmental governance between 1950-1980. As human impact on the environment began to be understood in planetary terms, practices aimed at tracking environmental changes over vast periods of time, such as ice core drilling and pollen analysis, were drawn into the political spotlight. They spoke to more than just the deep past, as they gradually became immersed in the work to predict, visualize and alter the trajectories of the living conditions on the planet. Over the course of a few decades, long planetary timescales had moved into the realm of the governable. I am interested in this process and the way environmental and societal temporalities have been synchronized, mediated and negotiated as a part of a larger shift in the human-earth relationship. More broadly, my research interests concern the history of science and technology, environmental humanities and historiography.
In the think piece, “Our image of the savannah reveals who we are” (Vår bild av savannen avslöjar vilka vi är), doctoral student Erik Isberg reflects on how our image of the early people on the savannah has change over the centuries and how it is characterized by its time. The text originally was published in Swedish for Sverigesradio.se. Below is a translated, shorted version.
Already 60 years before Christ, the Roman poet Lucretius speculated whether the first humans were of stronger stuff than the spoiled civilized equivalent, and in the 18th century, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed a similar idea, contrasting an idealized image of a harmonious state of nature against a corrupt contemporary. However, after World War II, theories about the origin of humankind gained new weight: they were to be substantiated scientifically rather than philosophically.
In the book “Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America”, the historian of ideas Erika Lorraine Milam writes a kind of savannah’s cultural history from the end of World War II.
The popular science stories of the 1950s about the origins of humanity emphasized cooperation, everyone’s common roots and the ability to communicate as an essential human trait. They were often cheered on – intellectually and financially – by Huxley’s Unesco. However, as the dream of a harmonious world began to fall and the balance of the cold war terror took over, the mood on the savannah also changed.
60’s pay attention to man’s inherent aggressiveness. A new generation of popular science writers highlighted characteristics such as violence and dominance as defining for the first humans. This inherent aggression had dictated the conditions of existence on the savannah, where those who wanted to survive had to establish a violent capital.
This savannah did not become particularly long-lived. Milam places the end of the idea of The Killer Ape, the dominant male as ruler of the savannah, to the 1980s. Who stepped in and took his place? No one, she answers. “When violence and prejudice became personal,” Milam writes, “biological theories of aggression and human nature became inadequate.” Collective explanatory models lost status and when the Cold War regime began to loosen up, the terrorist balance of our ancestors disappeared. Time had run out from the savannah, free individuals who left the stone axes in the grass and did not want to feel any common prehistory replaced The Killer Ape.
Nevertheless, the cultural history of the savannah does not end here after all. We find it everywhere at the bookstores’ top lists, and in TV productions and radio shows, it is an obvious foundation. Rather than disappearing, the savannah just seems to have changed shape. The prehistory that appears in the health literature appears as a continuation of the ideas that Milam describes in her book, but where the individual is more interesting than the common. Today we do not refer to our ancestors in matters of violence and prejudice, instead they are used to answer questions about how to live a better life. In this way, the savannah retains its moral implications, but not for society at large, but for the individual. Huxley’s vision of society has been replaced by self-optimization.
Swedish epidemiologist Anders Wallensten, author of the book The health mystery (Hälsogåtan: evolution, forskning och 48 konkreta råd, Bonnier Fakta, 2020), presents a savannah where the community is larger and the group’s cohesion is crucial for its continued survival. However, the goal of the community is not, as was the case in the utopian descriptions of the 1950s, a new society, but how individuals, through the support of the community, are to create a good life. Cooperation and community do not appear as goals in themselves, but as means for the individual to realize himself. In addition, the individual’s responsibility seems almost absolute.
Since Julian Huxley stood on the steps in Paris, the inhabitants of the savannah have repeatedly changed shape, and the popular science writers of the future will probably let the savannah be populated by additional new inhabitants, where the props remain but the ensemble is replaced. Perhaps the self-optimizing savannah people will have to make sacrifices for each other when pandemics and climate change hit their contemporary counterparts. Or something completely different happens. Perhaps the most interesting thing is not what answers the savannah can give us, but what questions we think it can answer.
Sabine Höhler recently contributed with the chapter “Creating the Blue Planet from Modern Oceanography” in the sixth volume of the The Cultural Histories of the Sea in the Global Age (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).
Throughout history, how has the sea served as a site for cross-cultural exchange, trade and migration? As historians, how do the fields of naval history, maritime history and oceanic history intersect? About the series, from Bloomsbury
The full series can be purchased through the Bloomsbury link under the above qoute.
Information
Hoehler, S. (2021)
Creating the Blue Planet from Modern Oceanography: Creating the Blue Planet from
Modern Oceanography
In: Franziska Torma (ed.), A Cultural History of the Sea in the Global Age (pp. 21-44).
London: Bloomsbury Academic
The Cultural Histories Series
It is a new week at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment and this one begins with the official launch of the SPHERE podcast – produced by our very own Eric Paglia.
About the Podcast:
SPHERE is a podcast that investigates the historical evolution of global environmental governance through in-depth discussions with a wide array of scholars, scientists, and practitioners—including politicians, diplomats and other government officials—who have played decisive roles in shaping the course of environmental politics, science and activism over the past half century or more.
In the first episode, with 1948 as a starting point, Eric talks to prof. Sverker Sörlin on “the idea of “the environment” emerged at the outset of a radical reconfiguration of the human-environment relationship precipitated by an unprecedented post-war economic expansion that put enormous pressure on ecosystems and the Earth.”
Sverker is a professor of Environmental History at the Division, an author, writer, frequent debater and outdoor sports entusiast with an inexhaustible source of energy.
The SPHERE project is a historical study of humanity’s relation to planetary conditions and constraints and how it has become understood as a governance issue.