One of the attractive features of the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History is its commitment to field trips.  On at least one day, historians are encouraged to get out of their hotels, change into comfortable clothes, and hop on a bus to one of several optional locations—a museum, an interesting building, a park, or perhaps a wilderness area.  Usually there is a trip for birding (or as many know it, bird-watching). There are at least two species of humans who sign up for these birding field trips.  Some call themselves birders: they know a lot about birds, how to differentiate them, and how to identify them. They carry scopes or binoculars, they dress appropriately, and they typically wield some kind of pre-printed list. The other group—and I confess to have belonged to it—are those who are curious about the enterprise, are happy to be outside, and count themselves lucky if they can differentiate ducks from non-ducks. At the 2012 trip to a wildlife area outside Madison, Wisconsin, I personally witnessed some ducks and several of what I termed “regular birds.” Back on the bus, I was stunned to learn that my companions had identified dozens of different species.

It is easy to envy these birders, whose hobby has imparted to them not only a discriminating eye and some cool gear, but also a working knowledge of nature, including ornithology, ecology, and natural history.  They seem to be products of an informal nature education that exists outside the walls of any school or university.   Their source, besides one another, is the printed field guide. The guides themselves might at first appear as technical manuals, or something like a stamp-collector’s toolkit.  But don’t they also serve as a conduit of knowledge?  If so, what kinds of values, what kinds of science, do they convey?  How has that changed in the past century or so?

Such questions motivate Thomas R. Dunlap in his book In the Field, Among the Feathered. If there were millions of people buying them and tramping around in natural settings, birding guides should bear investigation as primary sources for environmental historians and historians of science. In Dunlap’s hands, the guides serve as a lens for those who watched, those who read, those who studied, and those who quested to fill up their lists.  He starts with the first American guides written by aristocrats toting opera-glasses, and he culminates in an era that, he suggests, reflected the values of environmentalism.

I asked Kristin Johnson to provide commentary because of her expertise in the history of science, particularly ornithology.  Like Dunlap, she has resisted studying natural history as mere stamp-collecting, and has looked to key publications to trace important transformations in the perceptions of birds.  She has argued for example that the British Ornithologists’ Union’s journal The Ibis can be taken as evidence of the increasing infiltration of specific scientific values from evolutionary theory, ecology, and ethology.  In Johnson’s study, the printed journal became a venue for reshaping scientists’ identities.[1]

Paul J. Baicich offers a rather different perspective, as an author, editor, and longtime birdwatcher.  Unlike the other contributors to this roundtable, he has written numerous columns about birding and has written and edited a number of bird guides, including one on nests, eggs, and nestlings.  The latter was a new edition of a late-1970s field guide by Colin Harrison, and Baicich not only updated the taxonomy and added new illustrations, but offered a portrait of what remained to be learned about the habits of several species.[2]

Akihisa Setoguchi has devoted considerable scholarly attention to the place of animals in historical narratives.  His interests cross between environmental history and the history of biology, including the introduction of scientific values from one culture to another, and the importation of cultural practices such as hunting.  He has written, for example, about the Japanese royal family’s interest in ornithology as a product of the rise of hunting after the Meiji Restoration.  He shows how a Japanese sport hunting magazine, Ryôyû, shaped the earliest Japanese ornithologists and also encouraged women to participate in sport hunting.[3]

Jeremy Vetter is an environmental historian and historian of science, and has been particularly interested in drawing scholars’ attention to the field sciences.  He shares with Dunlap an interest in laypeople’s involvement in science, and has argued that despite the purportedly sharp distinctions between professionals and amateurs, the lines often blurred—especially for sciences whose activities entailed fieldwork, where negotiations with local people could shape the practice of science, or perhaps create a network of knowledge production.[4]

The full roundtable, along with all the others, can be accessed (for free) at http://www.h-net.org/~environ/roundtables.html

As Marsh and his contemporaries lamented the lost natural wealth of the land, environmental changes still were taking place in Italy. Areas like the Liri River Valley became drivers of industrialization.  Some called the region the “Manchester of the Two Sicilies.” In factories along the river, machines benefited from a power that neither humans nor animals could produce.  The enclosures of land and water as private property during that era seemed to mark a contrast with centuries of feudal carelessness and held great promise not only in financial, but also natural, wealth.  After all, if Italy was backward because of wastefulness and longstanding feudal traditions, some reasoned, wouldn’t the relatively new political economy of private property restore order where there was chaos?

In Enclosing Water, Stefania Barca presents an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, through the lens of the Liri River Valley. She takes on conventional views about environmental degradation and suggests that new instruments of controlling water in the nineteenth century reconfigured nature and exposed people to increased risk. The book won the 2011 Turku Prize from the European Society for Environmental History.

I asked Stéphane Castonguay to comment on Enclosing Water because he also has devoted scholarly attention to the causes and impacts of river flooding.  In his study of the St. Francis River in Quebec, he shows how nineteenth-century rapid industrialization and intensification of agriculture modified the flow of water, and dramatically increased the risks of disasters such as floods. When floods were particularly severe, he has claimed, economic and political elites portrayed them as natural disasters.  Castonguay has suggested that consciousness of vulnerability made it likely that future disasters would be perceived as natural occurrences.  In other work he has shown how government sponsorship of science contributed to environmental transformation, as scientists helped to bring a large portion of Canada’s rural areas into regimes of state management.[2]

Charles-François Mathis is a specialist on the emergence of environmental thought in nineteenth-century England, and has written on the links between land practices and broader intellectual trends.  In his study of the 1894 creation of the National Trust, he explores how the forces of industrialization evolved alongside renewed appreciation for natural landscapes.  His work reveals how influential figures such as the poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) blended patriotism with aesthetic and spiritual themes, creating a sentimental conception about the natural world that would inform nature protection well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His book on the English countryside amidst industrialization explores this further, showing how land enclosures threatened urbanites’ access to the countryside.[3]

Marcus Hall has written on environmental rehabilitation and impacts in a variety of contexts, especially North America and Europe.  In Earth Repair, Hall showcases the Piedmont region of Italy, and he notes how cultural perspectives shaped responses to challenges, even in the nineteenth century.  For example, while Americans were blaming damage on human activities such as mining and logging, Italians tended to see natural events such as floods and avalanches as the crucial agents of change.  Hall’s essay “Environmental Imperialism in Sardinia” analyzes the twentieth-century pressures on the Italian people and countryside from those who hoped to solve their problems, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropic organization whose International Health Division supported widespread spraying of DDT to control malaria.[4]

The moment of brain strain usually occurs about the time that I have to explain that the speed of light does not change, but that measurements of mass, time, and space differ from one observer to the next.  It’s a challenging concept that gets even more tricky when confronted by the twin paradox.  You know the one: two twins, one on earth and one in a spaceship traveling near the speed of light.  The traveling twin returns to find his twin much older than him.  Students invariably ask, if these measurements are relative, why wouldn’t the earth-bound twin be the one to be younger?  The answer, which a physicist could explain better, has to do with physical acceleration of the rocket ship (when it turns around) interfering with the effects of time dilation.  French physicist Paul Langevin put forth one such explanation back in 1911.  Side note: yes, Langevin did have some actual ideas and should be remembered for more than his having an extramarital affair with Marie Curie.

Anyway, if anyone would like to see a nicely done animation of these concepts, I’d recommend the following short one, which is done very well. Enjoy the brain melt!

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It’s exciting to be connecting with other scholars working on this topic, and I couldn’t resist sharing the poster, which draws on the images from the 1956 Disney short Our Friend the Atom.  It was an episode of the series Disneyland.  The episode touches on many of the scientific applications that the scholars at the meeting this month are writing about, including the use of radioactive material to study crops, irradiate food, or induce mutations.  The film is fascinating, entertaining, and is guaranteed to make you smile.  Who doesn’t love seeing Walt Disney talk about nuclear physics?

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The meeting is being organized by Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez, and it will include also Ana Barahona, Angela Creager, María Jesús Santesmases,  Karin Zachmann, and myself. Please enjoy the poster!

No one today takes ownership of Russell Train, despite his influential role in the Nixon White House when the environmental movement finally hit the big time, reaching the highest levels of national and international policy.  It’s a pity.

Train was Nixon’s personal environmental envoy, pioneering some of the major international agreements of the 1970s—to control pollution, to protect wildlife, and to create lasting relationships on environmental matters across national lines.  At the creation of the first Council of Environmental Quality, Russell Train headed it up.  At creation of the EPA, there was Russell Train again, its second Administrator.  At the first UN Conference on the Human Environment, hey look! There was Russell Train.  And who was that person who helped found the World Wildlife Fund?  Oh… well, you get the idea.  Even when Nixon had the strange idea of putting environmental issues on NATO’s agenda, Russell Train was there trying to make it happen.

The bipartisanship on environmental issues during that period is truly remarkable.  Here’s Train arguing in favor of the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1975 (dry stuff, be warned, but try to imagine a similar speech today):

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Although there are plenty of scholars who doubt that Nixon cared much for the environment, one can hardly doubt the integrity and devotion of Russell Train.  J. Brooks Flippen once argued that Nixon’s concerns—expressed in his shocked reactions to the Santa Barbara oil spill, and his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency—were really just cynical moves designed to win back the votes he’d lost among those who opposed his policies in Vietnam.  And yet Flippen’s biography of Train himself, who helped Nixon implement these things, is far more sympathetic.  It paints a portrait of a man who was devoted to wildlife protection, was proud of being at the cutting edge of environmental diplomacy, and was a staunch Republican.  Ultimately, his own party abandoned him, even disinviting him from the Republican convention in 1980.  Too tree-huggy.

That abandonment of Russell Train—and arguably of environmental issues—crossed the point of no return during the Reagan years.  Reagan wasn’t against the outdoors.  He maintained a well-polished image of the rugged individual, surrounding by Western paraphernalia—horses, hats, saddlebags, tumbleweeds—you name it.   He threw his support behind the “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the 1970s, a reactionary movement that sought to curb federal ownership of land and return it to the states (where it could be sold or leased to developers).  But this was not the kind of environmentalism that had motivated Russell Train.

It must have been hard for Train to watch everything he had done unravel during the 1980s.  The Council on Environmental Quality was whittled down to a powerless body.  The Environmental Protection Agency that Nixon and Train had helped to create was eviscerated—its funds blocked by the White House-controlled Office of Management and Budget, while Reagan party loyalists were put in charge of it.  The EPA was soon so riddled with scandals that Reagan brought back a Train-era scientist, William Ruckelshaus, to restore its integrity.

On a range of issues—timber harvesting, acid rain, population control, land management, toxic waste—Reagan was adamantly opposed to environmental regulation.

Still, Russell Train stayed loyal to the party during the Reagan era.  He continued to try to influence events through his many friends, including Vice President George Bush (senior).  But Reagan’s influence was so pervasive that the “Reagan Republicans” increasingly adopted a view that environmental protection was wrong whenever it hindered economic growth.  This attitude has proven incredibly durable in American politics since the 1980s.

Train tried to fight this trend among Republicans, and he did it without breaking ranks.  But he failed.  Eventually he threw in the towel, and openly sided with Democrat John Kerry in the presidential election of 2004.  But the window of opportunity to exercise his considerable influence had passed.  Train’s opposition to George W. Bush, the son of his friend, was like the tree falling in the forest without a sound… because no one was there to listen.

R.I.P. to a longtime public servant.

P.S. Here’s a video of Train looking back in 2005, and contrasting events of the 1970s with those of the early 2000s. (also a bit dry, but you can skip ahead to 12 minutes for comments on Bush-style environmental politics, to get the gist of it).

I’m not sure if it is fascinating or horrifying—perhaps both—to discover that life is like a video game.  At least since the Columbine shootings, the Virginia Tech shootings, and certainly into the more recent Aurora shooting, pundits have lamented the fact that young men are inspired by video games to enact cruelty on a shocking scale.

The moralizing that goes hand-in-hand with anti-video game rhetoric often targets parents. During his 2008 presidential campaign Barack Obama pulled no punches, saying that parents needed to stop blaming teachers for failing to raise good citizens.  Tell your kids to put down the video games and read a book, he said.  And keeping to this theme of growing up, he exhorted us as a nation to set aside our petty squabbling.  During his 2009 inaugural address he referenced the Bible—specifically, a passage from Corinthians—and told us to set aside childish things.  When we were children, we spoke and thought as children, but when we grew up, we were supposed to put away childish things.

Okay, fine.  So we’re not supposed to act like kids.  And parents are bad to encourage violent video games.

But if I may be forgiven a Michael Jackson reference, let’s look at the man in the mirror, shall we?  The U.S. government is a big promoter of video games, and spends a lot of money making them.  And some are quite, quite violent.

It turns out that the most “grown up” thing you can do—fight, and possibly die, for your country—is fully intertwined with the technology of video games, itself the knee-jerk symbol of all bad parenting.  The U.S. government treats its soldiers like children.  Let’s leave aside the fact that you can join the military at 17, just a year after getting behind the wheel of a car, before you can vote and long before you can drink alcohol legally.  Instead let’s focus on the fact that the U.S. government’s recruitment campaign is to appeal to what children love to do.  Namely, to play games.

You’ve probably seen ads similar to this one.  Here the U.S. Marines describe joining up “as more than a trial by fire,” and then go on to show a young man wielding a sword, negotiating an incomprehensible but fairly Super Mario-esque geared contraption, pulling a sword from a stone, and then fighting a—what is that, a fire golem?  I can’t tell.

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Tying military recruitment to games or sports is not a new idea.  Here’s an ad that aired during football games in 1981.  Its production values are WAY less than the above, but it does draw links between playing football games and joining the Marines.  It is interesting to note that thirty years ago, the Marines courted athletes, whereas now it courts video gamers.

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Today, the U.S. Army has completely abandoned the idea of forcing its recruits to grow up, and instead adopts a mentality that is very like the characters in the award-winning 1985 Science Fiction novel Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.  It’s soon to be a movie starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford.  In the book, a cadre of children is recruited to play games, simulating command of a space fleet to fight alien invaders.  Turns out (spoiler alert!) they are partaking, from afar, in actual battles without realizing it. The hero, Ender Wiggin, is the best gamer around.  It’s a fascinating premise, to use those young kids whose dexterity and mental prowess, not to mention their subtle mastery of game controls, are far superior to those of grown-ups.

In reality, the U.S. Army has invested considerable sums in its America’s Army franchise (rated T for teen!), which has its own YouTube page:

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The Army decided some years ago that, if kids were going to play games anyway, they might as well be playing out scenarios that might, conceivably, help them on the battlefield.  If you don’t want to click the link, I’ll give away what’s in the game: there’s lots and lots of shooting and blowing things up.  Also some tactics that really are only going to be useful in certain settings.

I still remember my discomfort about the hazy line between our love for violent games and our selectively favorable views of human violence when I would talk to soldiers in Atlanta, Georgia (this was when I was teaching history at Clemson University, in South Carolina).  I did a lot of traveling then, and I would often depart from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport.  There were almost always soldiers there in desert fatigues, waiting around for their flights or, just as often, for a bus to take them somewhere.  If I had time to spare I would make conversation with them.  Some were coming home, some were shipping out.  Men and women.  Some didn’t even have uniforms yet, but instead had these fat envelopes with recruitment info inside.  Most seemed far too young to be in uniform.

Do you know what struck me most about these soldiers? The vast majority of them had portable video games!  At the time, the PlayStation Portable (PSP) was the system of choice among the military, at least in the airport.  The image of a kid (yes, a kid) slumped down in an airport chair, playing a video game, about to be shipped off to Iraq, is a hard one to process.  I wondered, “Are PSPs standard issue now?”  That was right before I wondered what percentage of these kids would make it home safe from Iraq.

Military analysts, and historians of science and technology like myself, continue to debate not just the past but also the future of war and the role of technology in it.

To me, there appear to be two broad schools of thought: one wants to use technology to improve the American soldier: to make him a better fighter, to keep him in the best shape, to equip him with the best technology, etc.  The other is to rely less on soldiers, but instead to deploy unmanned vehicles and drones.  (I’ll give you three guesses which the Air Force prefers!)

One side emphasizes fighting with boots firmly on the ground, with all the personal risk involved, just like in America’s Army. The other is based on remote operation, with humans fighting in Ender’s Game fashion, from afar, without much at stake personally, like a kid in a video game.

In gaming terms, one is a first-person shooter, and one is a flight simulator.  For a gamer, there’s no question about which one is more fun (sorry, flight simulator fanatics).  But for the United States, which one is the most wise?

I remember that during the crisis in Kosovo, then-President Bill Clinton caught some flack for not being realistic about what it takes to win a war.  Clinton was committing the apparently mortal sin of using drones and remote technology to fight.  It seemed amateurish and non-committal.  General Wesley Clark and others complained—to use the memorable phrase—that you’ve gotta have “boots on the ground.”  Years later, Clark and other still underplayed the role of remote warfare—an attitude some Air Force aficionados didn’t care for.

Well, we’ve had plenty of boots on the ground since then.  And between Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I feel like I know which one caused the least trauma to Americans, and least long-term repercussions worldwide.

Either way, we’ve passed the point of no return on integrating video games into our military.  And in fact this is the case in other domains too.  We’re a “gaming” culture now, apparently.  Even President Obama, who has made some pretty anti-game statements in the past, has embraced them as part of promoting science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, in projects like the “National STEM Video Game Challenge.” 

The United States does flex its military might around the world, and it does operate in ways that mimic computer and video games—or it creates games that mimic battlefields, with all the shooting and mass killing that it entails.

So next time you want to blame parents for allowing these video games to ruin the next generation of kids, maybe you could—again, quoting Michael Jackson—look at the man in the mirror, or at least consider where your own tax dollars are being spent.

An almost entirely separate literature exists on “modernization” schemes of economic development, the failures of which have been subjects of high-profile books such as James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.[1] In Vietnam, French colonial administrators and over-confident American nation-builders tried to bulldoze and engineer Vietnam’s way to economic prosperity.  Their shortcomings have been traced to many causes, such as inattention to local knowledge, desires, and capabilities.  Rarely has the natural world itself featured in a starring role.  That is, until now.

In Quagmire, David Biggs has written a book that, on the face of it, requires no introduction.  For most Americans, the word “Quagmire” is already associated with the war in Vietnam.  Why not take a metaphor and make it literal?  It seems to be an ideal vehicle for exploring the actual uses of land and water in Vietnam through its troubled history.  However, the book is not specifically about the American war in Vietnam, but rather takes a longer view, trying to understand the role of pre- and post-colonial experts, Vietnamese people, and the landscape itself, in making or breaking economic schemes.

To comment on this roundtable, I solicited scholars with a range of historical and anthropological interests, all of whom have written about environmental change in Southeast Asia.  Greg Bankoff’s work has focused primarily on the Philippines.  His recent research has focused on the idea of natural disasters, and the ways in which human societies denote them as such.[2] In the Philippines, he writes, disasters are simply a fact of life, but we assess their effects through a very narrow lens.  By contrasting the impacts of events (such as floods) on humans and on livestock, he has shown how “natural disasters” were constructed almost entirely in relation to effects on human communities, rendering the animals’ roles (and their vulnerabilities) virtually invisible to the historian.[3]

David Zierler shares with David Biggs the distinction of having recently written a book that blends environmental history, history of science, and the history of Vietnam.  Their approaches differ in that Zierler’s work addresses the influence of the Agent Orange controversy—part of the massive herbicide spraying program conducted by the U.S. Air Force during the American war—on American scientists and the environmental movement.  Zierler’s The Invention of Ecocide was the subject of H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 2:1 (2012).[4]

Holly High’s research also focuses on Southeast Asia, specifically on Laos.  High brings an anthropologist’s perspective to this roundtable, reflecting her work on concepts of desire in everyday politics and economy.  Her past work has shown how changes in landscape are inscriptions of science, planning, politics, and often violent intervention, and that these changes continue to influence people’s outlooks.  “To be in Vieng Say today,” she writes of a village in Laos, thirty years after the end of American bombing, “to walk among the caves, gardens, fields and homesteads, is to walk in a violent landscape.”[5]

John Kleinen is a historian and anthropologist with a keen interest in Vietnam’s history.  He began his career by studying anti-colonial peasant movements, and in recent years he has looked more closely at global and regional changes in climate, water levels, and land use.[6] His study of Pierre Gourou, the French colonial geographer who penned a 1936 study of the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, underlines the persistence of certain geographic ideas, despite enormous political and social changes since the 1940s.[7]

Before turning to the first set of comments, I would like to pause here and thank all the roundtable participants for taking part.  In addition, I would like to remind readers that as an open-access forum, H-Environment Roundtable Reviews is available to scholars and non-scholars alike, around the world, free of charge. Please circulate.

Back cover of "Lords of Conquest" game by EA

“Nice Guys End Up With Madagascar.”

This was the phrase on the back of the box for one of the most addictive strategy games of the late 1980s, Lords of Conquest, by Electronic Arts.  I played this as a teenager and, looking back from this era of virtual-world games, I’m a little surprised at how compelling it was.  But as gaming goes, the basic concept has stood the test of time: manage resources, equip armies, and take over the world.

I recently was reminded of it because I reviewed Gabrielle Hecht’s new book on the uranium trade in Africa, Being Nuclear. (I’ll link to the review later when it is published).  It turns out that Madagascar—surprise!—is not quite the meaningless backwater portrayed in the game. Madagascar was an essential part of France’s nuclear program, and President Charles De Gaulle went out of his way to ensure that, throughout the process of decolonization, no one tried to wrest Madagascar from France. In Lords of Conquest, Madagascar didn’t even make it onto the screen, too unimportant to merit conquest by intrepid game-playing teenagers.  Ironically, that fits quite well with Hecht’s theme in the book, because the uranium mines in Madagascar were fairly invisible too.  They went unnoticed by most of the world, and even the miners themselves seemed unaware that they were subjecting themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation in the service of the French force de frappe.

But more on Being Nuclear later.  Right now let’s put our geek caps on and talk about how much games reflect our values and worldviews.

Should the management of dwindling resources, so pervasive in the design of strategy games today, be considered an “environmental” point of view?

In my forthcoming book Arming Mother Nature, I spend some time discussing the relationship between early environmental modeling and the heyday of game theory in the 1950s and 1960s.  These were years when cooperative games (remember the film A Beautiful Mind?) not only formed the cornerstone of new academic publications like The Journal of Conflict Resolution, but also informed the first economic models that predicted environmental doomsday.  The most famous of these was a controversial book called Limits to Growth, but there were plenty of other less well-known models.  The point of modeling was to think of all the important inputs and attempt to draw order out of the chaos.  Then, given the perceived order, one could attempt to influence it using any number of strategies.

Plenty of people contested those doomsday theories, and I’m not going to try to convince you that they were correct.  However, the prevailing idea in them was to focus attention on the non-renewable nature of important resources, and the potentially devastating effects of not adjusting and adapting.  Some said humans should stop being so rapacious, to ratchet back on what is produced and consumed.  E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful was the classic statement.  If we treated natural resources as capital, he argued, we wouldn’t be so eager to spend them down.  Others counted on technology and market adjustments to help humans adapt to changing times.  Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hydrogen-fueled, non-girly-man Hummer.

But what’s fascinating to me now is that anyone who plays a strategy game today is enacting those same values.  Lords of Conquest didn’t have dwindling resources (at least not that I remember!).  The resources were static, and the goal was to control them.  By controlling them, one could support more troops, and thus control them even better.  That’s the classic worldview of empires—carving up the world’s resources and competing for them.  In those games, dynamism came from the ebb and flow of human control, not in the availability of the resources.

Games today are more cynical.  Resources get used up.  Solutions usually involve more sophisticated technology, not restraint (sorry, Schumacher!!!).  After all, restraint is no fun in a strategy game.  Still, there is definitely no sense of infinite resources in games; no sense of carving up the pie and controlling it.  Instead, you have to eat the pie, and once you do, it’s gone.  The most popular games incorporate the idea that resources are quickly depleted and must be renewed.  This is especially so of real-time strategy games like the Age of Empires or Starcraft franchises, which set a premium on one’s ability to adjust to changing economic circumstances quickly.

OK, I get it.  They’re games, and they are supposed to be fun.  Don’t over-think it.  But I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that these games ARE environmental, in that they reinforce among their players that the central economic problem is one of resource availability in a world of dwindling supplies.  But strangely enough the gaming solution typically reflects strategies that are quite real when measured against history:  find resources, deplete them, find more, and develop technology to mitigate the problem, all while continuing to grow, grow, grow.  In games, small is not beautiful.

As an American citizen, I find myself uncomfortable with the disconnect I feel between my desire to read the cables and the hard-line stance about the cables taken by the United States government.  Daniel Ellsberg (the Pentagon Papers whistleblower) is one of my heroes, exposing the lies of successive presidents during the Vietnam war era.  And let’s be honest, he probably is revered by the same people in today’s government who would like to see Julian Assange hang from a tree.  It’s hard to reconcile.  Forty years from now, I wonder how Wikileaks will be perceived.  Actually, I don’t wonder.  I’m pretty sure I already know.

Still, following Wikileaks requires one to stomach a lot of sanctimonious verbage, and more than a little of what Han said to Leia when he learned that Luke had been strutting around calling himself a Jedi: “talk about delusions of grandeur.”

It’s clear that Assange and others at Wikileaks are giddy at their role in facilitating what they perceive as the decentralization of technological control.  To hear Assange talk with other “cypherpunks” (you can watch this at assange.rt.com), one might get the impression that they over-dramatize their roles.  They think they are at the cusp of a massive reconfiguration of social power, largely because of the internet’s ability to strip governments of tight controls of information.  And they may be right.  But it is still a little… well… here’s a quote from Assange, which admittedly is just an intro to the program, but it gives you a sense of the drama:

“A furious war over the futures of our societies is underway. For most, this war is invisible.  On the one side, a network of governments and corporations that spy on everything we do. On the other, the cypherpunks: virtuoso geek activists who make codes and shake public policy.  This is the movement which spawned Wikileaks.”

Using the word “war” has some consequences.  Mainly it forces us to ask, which side am I on?  I’m not just talking about those who will want to use this as an excuse to throw out the rule of law and just “take him out,” as an endless stream of jingoistic pundits have done and will continue to do.  What I’m talking about is the notion that the decentralization of cyberspace will lead to more voices being heard, less ability of governments to stifle information, and presumably greater democracy around the world.  But who really is the war against?

Watching Assange interact with hackers is an interesting experience, and it is not unlike sitting in a graduate seminar and discussing the ways that technology shapes our lives.  It reminds me of the revelatory experience of reading Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society or Lewis Mumford’s multi-volume The Pentagon of Power.  Ellul was distrustful of technology, seeing it taking on an oppressive life of its own, directing us onto paths not of our own choosing.  And Mumford, taking a position that always surprises my students, compared American technological projects during the Cold War arms race and space race to the Pyramids of Egypt.  They were mega-technologies, built on the backs of the masses whose direct interests were hardly involved at all.  When I read these books for the first time, I began to question my own role in facilitating technological control by others.

I think of Mumford in the context of Assange because, in an era when China and Russia continue to clamp down on freedom of speech and—at least in China—internet access is severely censored, it is remarkable to see the United States portrayed as the epitome of information control, as if it stands for the forces of evil.  But it is even more remarkable to see the United States and the United Kingdom taking the bait, acting in reactionary ways, which surely just makes matters worse.  The witch-hunt model is counterproductive, especially when the entire strength of Wikileaks is its ability to disseminate widely each step and misstep that any government takes against it.  The Wikileaks affair is a textbook case on how to lose a PR war.

This past week we watched two important and very disappointing events unfold.  The United Kingdom, evidently against the advice of its own very sensible lawyers, threatened to enter the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange currently resides, despite this being a self-evidently bad idea.  Presumably the British did not want to lose face by allowing Assange to get out of their hands.  Once the government realized what a horrible idea it was, it backtracked.  In the meantime, the UK’s commitment to the rule of law (treaties, anyone?) was momentarily shaken.  Predictably, Assange’s stock went up in the eyes of the world and the US and UK’s stock plummeted.  I couldn’t help but think of all the Cold War era spy movies I’ve seen, in which the principal goal was to get someone safely into an embassy, where he could not be touched.  Did I misunderstand that detail?

But the other event was the sentencing, in Russia, of the punk rock band Pussy Riot, who played their loud guitars in a church, sang an anti-Putin song, and got two years in prison because they had “crudely undermined the social order.” The romantic in me says that rock music might have such power, but the realist in me says that this is just another genuine example of a government disallowing dissent.

It will be interesting to see what comes of Wikileaks, and the self-described hacker warriors who are fighting the “war over the future of our societies.”  Something tells me that even if Assange himself is contained by one means or another, he will become representative of a form of subversion that will be with us for some time.  Will they simply be an irritant to North American and European diplomats, or will they actually empower people who today cannot express themselves?

In The Passage to Cosmos, literary scholar Laura Dassow Walls has shown us how Humboldt the explorer produced this unitary worldview.  Throughout the book is a sense that the division between the humanistic and scientific traditions is itself an unfortunate historical development.  Perhaps we can learn something from Humboldt.  It seems appropriate that the book itself easily crosses over stiff academic boundaries, not just between science and the humanities, but also between literary criticism and history.  The book already has won several awards, and the range is indicative of the book’s appeal across such boundaries.  The Organization of American Historians awarded it the Merle Curti Prize for intellectual history; the Modern Languages Association awarded it the James Russell Lowell Prize for literary studies; and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts awarded it the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize.

For this roundtable, I solicited comments from scholars of exploration, geography, and the history of science.  Felipe Fernández-Armesto has written that history has two big stories: how human cultures diverged thousands of years ago, and how they found one another again.  Since the 1970s, Fernández-Armesto has been writing about these encounters, beginning with the quintessential patrons of exploration, Ferdinand and Isabella, and later exploring the creation of colonial society in the Canaries, an area often perceived a template for later colonial expansion.  Since then he has written books about Columbus, pre-Columbian exploration, the Spanish Armada, and other topics on a scale that has made him a leading scholar of world history.[2]

Michael F. Robinson also writes on the history of expeditions and uses it as a lens for understanding the meaning of exploration in American culture.  For Robinson, the scientific content of the voyages often gave way to stories of masculinity and conquest, as ships traveled to more obscure and harsh environments in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  For Robinson the stories do not stop with the voyages themselves, but rather they continue to the process of men coming home, defending claims, and trying to “cast themselves as men worthy of the nation’s full attention.”[3] Robinson continues to probe these topics through his exploration history blog, “Time to Eat the Dogs.” See timetoeatthedogs.com.

Michael S. Reidy and Daniel Zizzamia have co-authored comments here that reflect Reidy’s existing expertise, while introducing us to Zizzamia’s insight as he works on his doctoral dissertation. Reidy’s past work has illuminated the rise of geophysical sciences in the nineteenth century, showing the relationship between natural philosophers and the Royal Navy that was so central to the success of voyages and expeditions.  His work not only contextualizes the story of disciplinary growth, but also implicates men of science in the consolidation of empires.  He has argued that natural philosophers adopted the spatial approach of Humboldt, with its influence on mapping and data collection over large areas, and in so doing complemented the expansion of British imperialism.[4]

Innes M. Keighren shares with Walls a fascination with the reception of geographic texts over time.  He has written about the influence of German geography on the United States during a later era, particularly the westward movement of Friedrich Ratzel’s ideas through Ellen Churchill Semple, who studied with Ratzel in Leipzig at the close of the nineteenth century. Semple’s 1911 Influences of Geographic Environment is the classic of environmental determinism that shaped geographical thought in the English-speaking world (especially the United States) for a generation.[5]

Before turning to the first set of comments, I would like to pause here and thank all the roundtable participants for taking part.  In addition, I would like to remind readers that as an open-access forum, H-Environment Roundtable Reviews is available to scholars and non-scholars alike, around the world, free of charge. Please circulate.