In 1784, Georg Forster traveled through mining-landscapes in Germany’s Harz and Ore Mountains--a journey long neglected in favor of his more glamorous globe-trotting with Captain Cook. But it was in these industrial landscapes that Forster encountered “a new and rejuvenated Nature." Descending shafts, inspecting weirs, and studying smelting ovens, Forster came to see water- and horse-powered industry as a noble human effort to participate in the “workshop of Nature.” His journals oscillate between hubris and humility: keenly aware of the awesome power of nature evidenced by mine collapses, Forster understood mining as a project of “fitting,” even “completing,” natural landscapes. Following Forster, this talk elucidates the unfamiliar sentimental world of late-eighteenth-century resource extraction, which beguiles two dichotomous historiographical traditions. While some scholars describe the extractive ethos of Forster’s generation as a wholesale “oeconomization of nature,” another tradition identifies this period, with its embrace of holism, as a wellspring of ecological thinking. The curious nature of this moment is captured by the fact that so many romantic figures participated in Germany’s mining industry—from poets like Goethe and Novalis to savants like Henrik Steffens and Alexander von Humboldt. Forster, to whom Humboldt attributed his own holism, helps us engage the alterity of a worldview whereby dominion over nature was to be “shared with nature.” To that end, this talk grounds the lofty aesthetic meditations of Forster and his contemporaries in the “working world” of mining, specifically in the hydraulic systems that epitomized their philosophy of nature.

This paper explores the US-Korea collaborative environmental assessment of Seoul, South Korea, in 1971-1975. With increasing global-scale pollution during the Cold War, environmental scientists and government officials of the U.S. recognized value of collecting environmental data. In this context, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) established a plan to make guidelines for the environmental policy in developing countries in the late 1960s. As a part of this plan, the USAID implemented an environmental assessment project of Seoul through a contract with the Office of International and Environmental Programs (OIEP) of the Smithsonian Institution. The goal of the guideline plan was to collect data and to reduce the environmentally detrimental impact on cities in developing countries. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, was an ideal place for USAID officials because as a result of urban growth and population increase the city had gone through the most severe environmental pollution among cities in the developing world. Although Korean Scientists were eager to engage in the collaborative project as it funded their research, the authorities of Seoul feared the project's possible conclusion that would harm the nation's reputation. This paper analyzes how science on environmental data collection was made compatible with the national economic development of Korea by examining the relationship and tensions among OIEP, Korean Scientists, and governmental officials of Seoul. This paper illuminates that the Seoul project was essential to the construction of the idea of a “sustainable development” for developing countries.

The Mobile-Tensaw Delta, known as “America’s Amazon,” supports incredible biodiversity—including oaks, turtles, birds, and snakes, who fill the landscape that has been carved by glaciation, flowing rivers, flood basins, and tidal patterns. Archeology also demonstrates varied human habitation. Prehistoric mound cultures illustrate the lives of a hereditary elite. Woodland cultures populated areas now named Little Lizard Creek and Bottle Creek. When Europeans arrived, they joined, and sometimes enslaved, native tribes such as Apalachees, Taensas, Chitimachas, and Alabamas (143). The landscape also bears marks of colonization by the British, African slavery, Civil War battles, and the American Black Freedom Struggle. In the spirit of “telling the stories of science,” in this paper I draw on recent oral history interviews to connect contemporary scholarly understanding of the ecology and pre-history of this area with the popular understanding of its environment, ecology, and archaeology. I argue that landscape, biodiversity, and human diversity create unique ecological juxtapositions in this little-studied part of Alabama. I will rely on oral histories of self-proclaimed "Delta rats," such as Lucy "Pie" Hollings, Sylvester Crook, and Jimbo Meador, who embody Native American, African-American, Creole, and/or European heritage (151-154). These interviews study local ways of life—including turtle harvests and farming, tourism, rattlesnake round-ups, and wildlife festivals—and how these demonstrate and relate to contemporary scientific understanding of the area. Notes from A State of Knowledge of the Natural, Cultural, and Economic Resources of the Greater Mobile-Tensaw River Area, Natural Resource Report NPS/NRSS/BRD/BRD/NRR--2016/1243.

In the late 19th century many biologists in Central Europe turned to the field of malacology, the study of snails and other molluscs. In a period when global environments changed tremendously due to human intervention and the growth of global transport and economy, many biologists believed that snails with their sluggish pace would allow them to turn back time. What became visible by studying snails, they thought, was a different temporality of nature: its original state. The rise of malacology as a paradigmatic subfield of biogeography reflected a fundamental shift, which was truly international: the ‘discovery’ of time as a fundamental factor of determining the distribution of species. By concentrating on the local example of malacology in the Frankfurt region by 1900, this paper argues that the temporalization of biogeography in Central Europe (and elsewhere) was not only caused by the rise of evolutionary theory, but also closely linked to a rapid modification of environments. Industries and their infrastructures substantially changed the biological composition of landscapes, and their construction sites allowed naturalists to observe history and deeper layers of time on an unprecedented and unexpected scale. As a result, the gap between a well-stored past and a rapidly changing present seemed to widen constantly. In the German-speaking context, this reconfiguration of time became manifest in the notion of “home” (Heimat), an alleged Ur-state of nature and culture where all creatures had allegedly stayed at the place where they “originally” belonged.