Description:

Speaker

Etienne Benson, University of Pennsylvania

Title

"Environments in the Plural: Reconstructing a Concept’s Multiple Pasts to Reimagine a Movement’s Future"

Abstract

Historians of science have recently begun to show how the environmental movement that emerged in the 1960s depended on the articulation of a new object of research and concern: “the environment,” conceived as singular, global, threatened, and knowable only through certain highly specialized forms of expertise. This is not the only way that the concept of environment has been understood or mobilized for social ends, however. This talk describes some of the alternative environments and environmentalisms that preceded “the” environment and “the” environmentalism with which we are most familiar, and suggests that these past forms may point the way toward more just and effective environmentalisms for the present and future. 

Biography

Etienne Benson is a historian of the environmental sciences, environmentalism, and human-animal relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before arriving at Penn, he earned a PhD at MIT and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.