From Soil Erosion to Global Warming: The Postwar International Origins of Global-scale Environmental Crisis

• In Event: Agriculture, Environment, and Development: Imperial and International Contexts Across the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Before climate change, soil degradation was the global environmental crisis that scientists, activists, and politicians rallied to combat. Because soils are a historical product of interactions between climate, geology, plants, animals, and people, they provided a synthesizing lens for environmental concerns. Although soils and climate had long been linked in environmental anxieties about anthropogenic desiccation, the mid-twentieth century focus on soil erosion reproduced very different politics than global warming. This paper synthesizes extensive archival research on UN development and basic science projects to describe the role of soils in the construction of the global-scale environment during the quarter century following WWII. International experts negotiated ideological and material tensions. They were committed to a cosmopolitan vision of world community, and yet, in the context of the Cold War and decolonization, they worked to develop nation states. The material nature of soils supported a holistic epistemology, but soils were inherently local things that defied global standardization. Scientists’ struggles to manage these tensions shaped the emerging international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this history for our understanding of the international politics of global warming.

Author

• Perrin Selcer, University of Michigan