“Envirotechniques of “Direct” Experience in Global Mega-Geomorphology”

Etienne Benson (University of Pennsylvania)

In the 1980s a number of Anglophone geomorphologists began to turn their attention to regional- and continental-scale landforms and to long-term processes of landform development. They framed this new “megageomorphology” as a revival of research interests that had been neglected since the 1950s due to the rise of process geomorphology, which privileged smallscale, short-term phenomena that could be easily measured and modeled in the field or in the laboratory. Through the adoption of plate-tectonic theory and the use of new methods of remote sensing and computer modeling, they aimed to recover the global perspective of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century physical geography without losing the quantitative precision and mathematical sophistication of late-twentieth-century process geomorphology. However, especially in the United States, where mega-geomorphology came to be closely associated with space technology, their reliance on remote sensing to do so posed a challenge to traditional modes of in situ fieldwork. How could geomorphologists produce authoritative knowledge about phenomena that took place over inhumanly vast scales or in places that they had never visited? I argue that they responded to this challenge by developing “envirotechniques” that allowed them to directly experience geomorphological phenomena on regional, global, and planetary scales.

“Human Bodies as Chemical Sensors: A History of Biomonitoring for Environmental Health and Regulation”

Angela Creager (Princeton University)

Testing of human blood and urine for signs of chemical exposure has become the “gold standard” of environmental public health, leading to ongoing population studies in the US and Europe. Such methods first emerged over a century ago in medical and occupational contexts, as a means to calibrate drug doses for patients and prevent injury to workers from chemical or radiation exposure. This paper analyzes how human bodies have come to serve as unconscious sensors of their environments, containers of chemical information determined by expert testers. As seen in the case of lead testing in the US, these bodily traces of contaminants can provide compelling evidence about dangerous exposures in everyday life, useful in achieving stronger regulation of industry. The use of genetic testing of workers by Dow Chemical provides an example of industry itself undertaking biomonitoring, though the company discontinued the program at the same time its studies indicated chromosomal damage in connection with occupational exposure to certain chemicals. In this case and others, biomonitoring raises complex questions about informing subjects, interpreting exposure in the many cases for which health effects at low doses are unknown, and who should responsibility for protection, compensation, or remediation. Further, the history of biomonitoring complicates how we understand human ‘experience’ of the global environment by pointing to the role of non-sensory— yet detectable—bodily exposures.

“Average Rainfall and the Play of Colors: Colonial Climates and Global Climatology”

Philipp Lehmann (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

The paper examines the co-construction of global, regional, and local climatic concepts at the turn of the twentieth century through a history of data gathering efforts in the German colonies in Africa. While governmental policies aimed at producing standardized – and thus globally comparable and economically useful – data in different environments, these efforts often tended to break down in practice. Rather than being able to turn the field into a finely tuned laboratory, both European and African data gatherers were confronted with complex and challenging environmental and institutional realities. The difficulties of meteorological work in the colonies led not only to the production of oftenquestionable numerical data, but also to alternative strategies of recording weather conditions, which placed a higher value on individual sensory perception.

“Experiential and Cosmopolitan Knowledge: The U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey during the Railroad Era”

Jeremy Vetter (University of Arizona)

Before global environmental knowledge producing networks and technologies, spatially extended field science at continental scale was performed by the U.S. Biological Survey, revealing similar tensions and dynamics in its mapping of distributions of birds and mammals, and its delineation of “life zones.” At the same time field zoologists of the Biological Survey produced cosmopolitan scientific knowledge, they also developed intimate, experiential knowledge of places where they traveled. I situate this continental-scale practice in context of the long-term history of global environmental knowledge, concluding that experiential knowledge lost some of its strength at continental scale and even more at global scale.