{"id":10108,"date":"2017-08-07T10:04:55","date_gmt":"2017-08-07T17:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/?p=10108"},"modified":"2017-08-07T10:04:55","modified_gmt":"2017-08-07T17:04:55","slug":"osu-libraries-resident-scholar-lecture-leah-aronowsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/2017\/08\/07\/osu-libraries-resident-scholar-lecture-leah-aronowsky\/","title":{"rendered":"OSU Libraries Resident Scholar Lecture: Leah Aronowsky"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The OSU Libraries\u2019 first Resident Scholar lecture for 2017-18 has been scheduled for <strong>Wednesday, August 16<sup>th<\/sup><\/strong> at <strong>2:00pm<\/strong>, to be held in the Willamette East seminar room on the 3<sup>rd<\/sup> floor of the Valley Library. Our speaker will be Leah Aronowsky, a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Harvard University. Her presentation is titled \u201cAccounting for Ecosystems in a Post-DDT Age: The Case of the Microcosm.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Leah Aronowsky is a historian of the modern life and environmental sciences, technology, and the environment. Her work has appeared most recently (or is slated to appear soon) in <em>Environmental Humanities, Environmental History, <\/em>and <em>Endeavour.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Faced with mounting evidence of the pervasive environmental threat of DDT, the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s was forced to contend with a new kind of hazard: the slow-moving, insidious danger of a chemical\u2019s persistence over time and space. DDT, a pesticide whose full range of deleterious effects had come to light only years after an environment\u2019s exposure and in bodies far beyond these initial exposure sites, demanded a means of evaluating a chemical\u2019s harm that extended beyond a single species or even a single environmental medium; it required a screening test that could reveal the relationship between a chemical and an entire <em>ecosystem.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Drawing on archival research conducted in the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections and Archives Research Center, this talk charts the rise and fall of one such screening test: the microcosm. Microcosms were simple, lab-based ecosystems designed to be complex enough to correspond to processes in the real world, but simple enough to serve as reproducible, standardized instruments. The microcosm ultimately failed as a viable screening test but, in so doing, I show, became entwined in ongoing efforts among systems ecologists to rethink longstanding assumptions about the fundamental nature of ecosystems. The talk stems from a broader ongoing research project on the history of the concept of <em>steady-state stability <\/em>in the American environmental sciences, focusing on how it took shape in the postwar era as a framework for re-theorizing the relationship between \u201clife\u201d and \u201cthe environment.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>We hope to see you there!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The OSU Libraries\u2019 first Resident Scholar lecture for 2017-18 has been scheduled for Wednesday, August 16th at 2:00pm, to be held in the Willamette East seminar room on the 3rd floor of the Valley Library. Our speaker will be Leah Aronowsky, a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Harvard University. Her presentation is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6949,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1292117,607472],"tags":[476,1206,629426],"class_list":["post-10108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-sustainability","category-events-outreach","tag-corvallis","tag-sustainability","tag-sustainability-office"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6949"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10109,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10108\/revisions\/10109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}