Suchergebnisse

"The English word "environment" dates to the mid-nineteenth century, and the concept that it was invented to describe is not much older. Only since the late eighteenth century, and only in certain contexts, has it become common to believe that life can best be explained in environmental terms. Surroundings is the first full history of the concept - one that shows how it became compelling to particular communities of people. Today we confront the legacies of this long history, which the author argues has made it difficult to speak coherently and persuasively about questions of environmental justice and equity. The history recounted in Surrounded can help us better understand why we find ourselves in this predicament and what we might do about it. For it uncovers not only the diversity of forms that environmentalism has taken in the past but how paying attention them can open our eyes to the promising new varieties of environmentalism that are emerging today"--

In the twentieth century, conservation biology became one of the forms of expert knowledge contributing to governmental efforts to manage territories and populations. This article offers a situated account of the development of one of the key concepts deployed by biologists for such purposes in the mid-twentieth century: territoriality. It focuses on the work of Helmut K. Buechner, an American wildlife biologist who spent two years in Uganda on a Fulbright fellowship in the late 1950s and remained engaged with East African conservation into the 1970s. Building on observations of Uganda kob made by his wife, Jimmie Buechner, Buechner was able to demonstrate the existence of a complex territorial breeding system in a mammal for the first time. The existence of such a system, like the ability of the Buechners to observe it, was in part a product of the colonial land regime, which allowed dense antelope populations to develop within protected areas where they could be easily studied. The discovery of the kob's territoriality encouraged speculation about the fundamental nature of the territorial instinct and contributed to the biologization of postcolonial conservation. In the 1960s and 1970s, biologists began to argue that conservation was more than a "numbers game"; it also required taking into account nonhuman traditions and social structures. The theory of biological territoriality thus became a conceptual tool for asserting nonhuman claims to land, often in competition with human claims. Colonial and postcolonial land-use regimes, Benson argues, can only be understood by studying such tools for the management of nonhuman populations alongside those applied to humans.

Argos is a satellite-based data collection and location system that has been in operation since the late 1970s; it is the only such system to be dedicated solely to environmental applications. This paper shows how multiple and sometimes conflicting ways of envisioning and studying the global environment have been embodied in the Argos system. In particular, it shows how the system's initial focus on meeting the needs of meteorologists and oceanographers made it difficult for wildlife biologists, who were interested in tracking the long-distance movements of animals, to use Argos tags. Physical environmental scientists' vision of the global environment as a 'volume of flows' dictated their need for regular, precise, standardized sampling stations distributed in a grid across and above the Earth's surface. Biologists interested in the interactions of individual animals and populations in a 'web of life', in contrast, demanded a flexible system of global access to the movements of individual bodies. Until the mid-1980s, the unit of the French space agency responsible for Argos resisted changes to the system that would have made it easier for biologists to deploy lightweight, low-reliability tags. It was only after the quasi-commercialization of the system in 1986 that it began to make significant concessions to the needs of biologists. The history of Argos suggests that individual infrastructures of environmental observation can host multiple and conflicting global environmental visions and that commercialization, at least within certain constraints, has provided opportunities for such visions to proliferate.

This article introduces the special issue on 'Estimated Truths' which investigates the role of estimation in knowledge-making about water and, through it, contributes to thinking place as environment in the historical geography and history of knowledge. It argues that while historical geographers and historians of science have paid much attention to precision and quantification, approximation and estimation have also played an important role in knowledge-making and deserve more attention. It discusses the roles played by uncertainty and estimation in the water sciences and makes the case for more sustained engagement with the influence of the environment – understood as a dynamic set of human and non-human actors and forces – on knowledge-making. Finally, the article presents the five papers and discusses their individual and collective contributions to the themes of the special issue and to further investigation into the making and operation of estimated truths.

This article introduces the special issue on 'Estimated Truths' which investigates the role of estimation in knowledge-making about water and, through it, contributes to thinking place as environment in the historical geography and history of knowledge. It argues that while historical geographers and historians of science have paid much attention to precision and quantification, approximation and estimation have also played an important role in knowledge-making and deserve more attention. It discusses the roles played by uncertainty and estimation in the water sciences and makes the case for more sustained engagement with the influence of the environment – understood as a dynamic set of human and non-human actors and forces – on knowledge-making. Finally, the article presents the five papers and discusses their individual and collective contributions to the themes of the special issue and to further investigation into the making and operation of estimated truths.