Description:

Speaker

Deborah Coen, Yale University

Title

"The Atmospheric Commons: Adaptation Science from the Old Regime to the Climate Regime" 

Abstract

To begin to approach the atmosphere as a commons is to recognize its finitude and its susceptibility to the influence of human activities. In this sense, reframing the atmosphere as a commons is a problem for knowledge-making as much as for policy-making. A just and sustainable allocation of a common pool resource must engage stakeholders in a process of collective learning to understand how their lives depend on that resource and therefore on the choices made by everyone else who shares it. What tools of observation and analysis could stakeholders use to understand how their actions impact others by virtue of impacting the atmosphere? This is the question that animated a forgotten tradition in the history of science, one that that made the atmosphere perceptible as a medium of connection and communication for all living things. This neglected history holds essential clues to promoting just and peaceful approaches to the challenges of adapting to climate change.

Biography

Deborah R. Coen is a historian of science whose research focuses on the modern physical and environmental sciences and on central European intellectual and cultural history. She earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Before coming to Yale, she taught for ten years in the History Department at Barnard College and was Director of Research Clusters for the Columbia Center for Science and Society. At Yale she is also a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.