At our graduate student conference in May 2016, I broke the rules of etiquette by checking my email on my phone, and instantly regretted it. It was news of Ron Rainger’s passing. Knowing that his illness had gotten worse, and that he did not have long to live, I expected the news. But it was still painful to…
Yesterday I accidentally ran a trail marathon. It was a weird moment in which my personal life collided with my professional one in a roundabout way. Because I teach environmental history, and I direct our Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative at the university, I am constantly aware of the huge range of experiences that people have…
In “Beyond the Lucky Dragon,” Linda M. Richards and I make the case that we need to tell the story of thermonuclear testing a bit differently than in the past. The essay focuses on the influence of Japanese scientists upon a few key Americans in the aftermath of the 1954 Bravo shot (an American hydrogen bomb…
Before the end of his first term in office, President Ronald Reagan seemed to alienate, outrage, and motivate more environmentalists than any of his predecessors. His reforms, his bureaucratic strategies, and the people he put into positions of power all had the appearance of reversing the political successes of the environmental movement of the previous…
Can the atom quicken the pace of evolution in order to feed a hungry world? The notorious Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko used to claim (or shout) that real scientists don’t wait for random changes to happen. They don’t wait for favors from nature! Real scientists use tools and knowledge to shape human destiny! He wasn’t the only…
U.S. President George H. W. Bush captured the malleable meaning of sustainable development when he announced at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that “to sustain development, we must protect the environment. And to protect the environment, we must sustain development” (261). Sustainable development might call to mind a managerial ethos similar…
A memorable scene in the 1983 film The Dead Zone provides an ethical justification for actions that harm innocent people. The protagonist presents his friend and psychiatrist with a well-worn hypothetical query: If he could travel back in time to pre-Nazi Germany, would he kill the young Hitler? His friend responds cannily, “I’m a…
The sacred success story in environmental literature is that of Rachel Carson, who awakened America to the dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use, and led the charge to ban the sale of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons in the United States. In her best-selling 1962 book Silent Spring, Carson introduced many readers to the concept…
When I created H-Environment Roundtables in 2010, I hoped to generate some thoughtful discussions about books I wanted to read… a pretty modest aim! I did not anticipate how much I would learn, and how many fascinating people I would meet in the course of editing … let’s see… 32 of them! The first…
Environmental issues have not always divided people along party lines. Anyone who teaches American environmental history probably gets a kick out of bursting this bubble among students, when showing how many crucial environmental initiatives were initiated or backed by Richard Nixon, a U.S. president from the Republican party. Yet it is hard to ignore that…
One of historian Lewis Mumford’s many complaints about modern society was that compulsory action often posed as freedom of choice. In his 1970 book The Pentagon of Power, for example, he marveled at the free-loving, drug-taking, war-protesting hippies at Woodstock, who believed they were defying society’s expectations by acting out against the establishment. He thought…
Date: Apr. 22, 2015 Time: 6:30-9:30 p.m. Located at: Empirical Theater at OMSI Who is this for: All ages Cost: $7 non-members; $6 members Reel Science: Planetary with Jacob Darwin Hamblin, author and associate professor of history at Oregon State University Watch and learn at The Empirical Theater as OMSI highlights the science of documentaries on the big screen. Perfect…
For the world’s fish populations, the concept of Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) has stood for years as a working blend of economic goals and conservation principles. The word “sustainable” lends it a particular respectability in our environmental age. It purports to answer the burning question about how many fish can reasonably be taken from the…
Just west of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the site of the first atomic test in 1945, there is an enormous stretch of land that is off-limits to civilians, known as White Sands Missile Range. Since the Second World War, White Sands has been a notorious military proving ground. Not limited to any one armed service, the…
On the eve of the Second World War, Mexico led the world in number of national parks. The Mexican government designated hundreds of thousands of hectares in fourteen states as national parks by 1940, during a time when the country was still recovering from the tumultuous revolution and civil war of the century’s second decade.…
I am delighted to report that my most recent book, Arming Mother Nature: the Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism, was awarded the 2014 Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association. I was able to pick up the prize just after spending an incredible New Year’s eve and day staying in Times Square, the venue of the…
My essay on how “seeing the oceans” has changed over time was published in the June 2014 issue of Isis. The title is “Seeing the Oceans in the Shadow of Bergen Values.” It begins with a discussion of how the oceanographer Roger Revelle is lionized today because of his role collecting data on the carbon…
By Jacob Hamblin, Oregon State University When we agree to send our young men and women to war, we expect the reasons why to be made clear. At least some of us will want to subject that explanation to scrutiny at the time, and often even more so with hindsight. That’s why having access to…
The English language has not been kind to wetlands. We have swamps, bogs, quagmires, mires, and morasses. These are not words that call to mind productive landscapes. Such terms describe wet or inundated natural areas but they also double as metaphors for being stuck—-being bogged down, swamped with work, in a tangled morass of problems,…
Note: this is my contribution to an online roundtable on Kate Brown’s book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2013). The roundtable was published in H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 4:5 (2014). For the full roundtable, including Kate Brown’s response, click here. Few places encapsulate the concept of the Faustian bargain more…
Suburbia is the Rodney Dangerfield of environmental history. It gets no respect. Cities are fascinating metropoles where cultures blend and clash, creating stories of great historical significance, while rural areas have the great appeal of being natural spaces of pastoral or wild beauty, raising perennial questions about land use and conservation. But suburbs? Blech. Christophers Sellers wants…
You’ve heard the phrase “war is hell.” But you probably haven’t heard the phrase “war is when you attack agroecosystems.” It’s a lesser known aphorism of General Sherman’s, to be sure, mainly because he didn’t actually say it. But reading Lisa Brady’s book, War Upon the Land, made me wonder how much Sherman understood about…
After editing a couple of dozen H-Environment roundtables myself, it was fun to have one of my own books, Arming Mother Nature, as the subject of one, this time guest-edited by Michael Egan of McMaster University. It was a great opportunity to engage directly with commentators. One of them, Dolly Jørgensen, recently featured my book…
For most people, saving a critter from extinction is a laudable goal with a fairly straightforward action-item: don’t kill the animal. The 1973 the Endangered Species Act in the United States set forth guidelines for compiling lists of such species, such as the California condor. In practice, however, the law did not just establish a…
It’s fun to be a historian of the oceans these days. Environmental scholarship has yielded some fascinating clashes of perspective in recent years, and the conversations are lively. Scientists, historians of science, and environmental scholars are all working intensively to establish a narrative of the sea’s life forms, its physical and chemical conditions, and the impact of…
Running the McDonald Forest 50k, this past Saturday, taught me a lot. About myself, the place I live, the forest, and about the people who are drawn to sign up for a 31-mile forest run. In my “real” life, I’m an academic historian. I teach history of science and environmental history at Oregon State, and…
Ukraine’s inability to stop Russia from seizing Crimea may sound the death knell for the global nuclear order. For years I have written about the environmental dimensions of nuclear power and nuclear weapons programs, and more recently I have been exploring the connection between environmental crisis rhetoric and the proliferation of nuclear communities all over…
Driving eastward from Portland, Oregon, in the shadow of Mount Hood, it is easy to get the feeling of entering a gorgeous wilderness, away from human development. On the right, the verdant cliffs and hills of the Cascades. On the left, the wide Columbia River, flowing toward the Pacific. Depending on your mood, the scene…
Included here is my review of Audra Wolfe’s fine book Competing with the Soviets, which I read shortly after completing my own Arming Mother Nature. I mention this because the gloom I felt after writing my book may have fallen over me a bit while reading Competing with the Soviets. Although others have evaluated the…
Included here is my review of Edwin Martini’s book on Agent Orange, originally published in Pacific Historical Review 83:1 (2014), 179-180. Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty. By Edwin A. Martini. (Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. xvi + 302 pp. $24.95 paper) In this provocative book, Edwin A. Martini provides an international history of…
If your New Year’s resolution includes reading more environmental history, you are in luck! A new installment of H-Environment Roundtable Reviews is available! This one focuses on environmental interpretations of iconic events in American history. My introduction is here: Should environmental historians confine themselves to subjects that clearly have environmental links, such as stories of…
Surely there are too few environmental histories of the Middle East. With its distinctive landscapes and impressive features—the intimidating mountains of Iran, the nourishing rivers of Mesopotamia, the dangerous yet life-giving floods of the Nile, and the harsh deserts of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, to name just a few—it is perhaps surprising that…
I was delighted to have Giff Johnson come to my class yesterday. It was bizarrely good timing. A fellow professor contacted me to ask if there was anything I was teaching that might be relevant to the radioactive fallout that afflicted the Marshall Islanders beginning in the 1950s. It turned out that Giff Johnson, husband…
Today I learned through the scholarly grapevine, specifically from my colleague Audra Wolfe, that historian Mark Finlay was killed last week in a car accident. My heart goes out to his family. Details can be found here and here. I’m sure Mark was missed this weekend in Portland, Maine, at the annual meeting of the Society…
Skipping over the experimentalists? Ernst Mach is rolling over in his grave. So are most of the Nazis. Let me explain. Even though the Higgs particle has been in the news over the past year because of the extraordinary work in Geneva at CERN, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to the scientists who first…
Is there such a thing as “world heritage” when it comes to food? We are outraged when an intolerant regime destroys artifacts, buildings, or other objects of cultural significance in their own countries, and we take steps to encourage them to realize their global importance. After all, these are the common heritage of humankind. But…
Throughout “Appalachia,” a vast mountain region stretching from northern Alabama to Quebec, it is easy to betray one’s outsider status. In many Southern parts, one might simply pronounce the third syllable in Appalachia with a long A, as in “name,” and it will be obvious to anyone that you are not from there. Instead, it…
We know that the treaty signed fifty years ago was an important arms control document. Was it an environmental document too? On the face of it, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 seems like two giant leaps forward, for world peace and for diminishing the contamination of the earth. But the closer we look…
The words “environmentalism” and “military” are not typically found in the same sentence. Yet ideas about our vulnerability to environmental change are directly linked to military plans for a third world war. Scientists planned to fight an unconventional war using the potential threats of the natural environment, calling it “environmental warfare”. Envisioning major threats to…
Environmental historians: want to take discussions of race beyond questions of environmental justice? I’ve got just the book for you. In fact, I’ve got something short and sweet that will give you a great idea of how scholars are exploring the interactions of different ethnic groups with the natural world. Four scholars agreed to take…
As American politicians discuss “red lines” about Middle East governments using weapons of mass destruction, it is easy to forget that Western nations like the US and UK initially pioneered in the development and use of them. I wrote a brief essay called “Beyond Narcissism and Evil,” for Oxford University Press’s blog, discussing our tendency…
Who knew live interviews could be fun? I had a fantastic time today in Portland talking with David Miller, the host of the radio program Think Out Loud. It was a live interview recorded at the studio of Oregon Public Broadcasting. It was great to have a real, in-person conversation rather than a phone call,…
Remember that photograph of Joseph Stalin with the flower in his hair on his way to San Francisco? It’s in the archives. Well, no it isn’t. The environmental credentials of longtime Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, at first glance, don’t seem very credible. And yet he and his scientific experts did have strong ideas about the…
I am fanatically enthusiastic about the organizers of this summer’s Congress on the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, in Manchester, UK. This is how conferences should be done! They have rejected curmudgeon-hood and have fully embraced social media. They have started a blog beforehand, and they have included a list of presenting historians of science —…
I learned today that a portion (chapter 6, to be exact) of my book Arming Mother Nature has been excerpted on Salon. The excerpt is titled “We Tried to Weaponize the Weather,” which is much more direct that the chapter’s title, “Wildcat Ideas for Environmental Warfare.” It’s the natural one to excerpt, I think, because…
It’s a classic tale of book learnin’ versus street smarts. Sort of. I just finished coordinating a roundtable on Ben Cohen’s first book, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil and Society in the American Countryside. I remember seeing it for the first time at a book exhibit during the meeting of the American Society for…
Population. It’s the bomb! Having just finished teaching my environmental history course, I can attest that population control is one of the most contentious of all issues that students discuss. Even though I bring in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb as part of a general discussion about the rise of the environmental movement, the discussion…
Same report, different headlines. The World Health Organization’s first major assessment of the impacts of the Fukushima nuclear disaster is unlikely to resolve anyone’s concerns. That’s because media coverage will happily reinforce whatever you expected to learn. Like all radiation reports since the first ones were created in the mid-1950s, the details are immensely vulnerable…
Who knew that recycling machines could be so controversial? I recently edited another roundtable for H-Environment, and the experience was slightly different from previous ones. I approached Finn Arne Jørgensen to participate in it because I thought his book (his first) was a nice example of the nexus between history of technology and environmental history.…
Biological weapons are not weapons of mass destruction. They are weapons of widespread death. The recent bombing of a Syrian research facility by Israel has brought into our view once again the future of the Middle East as a place of continuing political, religious and ethnic conflict, and a place where the worst manifestations of…
Nostradamus could have been a policy wonk. My favorite not-so-witty quip during my public talks is “historians are always asked to predict the future.” It usually gets a chuckle. I say it as a cop-out when someone asks me about anything controversial: the future of nuclear power, the future face of warfare, or whether Iran…
“World War II was wide ranging in its human, animal, and material destruction, it halted certain political ideologies in their tracks and strengthened others, and entailed the mobilization of natural resources on an unprecedented scale. And yet scholars have been slow to assess the war’s environmental dimensions.” So begins my recent essay on the environmental…
One of the jarring elements of the blockbuster sci-fi film The Hunger Games was the setting of its quasi-gladiatorial combat. Rather than enter an arena and fight to the death, kids from all over the land arrived in the woods, in what appeared to be a gorgeous wilderness. As the characters try to survive, the…
Happy new year, folks. The Mayans were wrong, and I hope you haven’t cashed in the retirement fund. We’re still here. And yet the rhetoric of doom is alive and well, as the lead up to the entirely-avoidable “fiscal cliff” in the United States testifies. It seems like we always enjoy flirting with disaster. And…
Here’s a fairly mundane post but on a subject that I could use some advice about. And I imagine it touches on a question that others face. It’s the holiday season and I am in limbo, with time to think about publication strategies and next steps in my academic life. My book Arming Mother Nature is still…
