Uneasy Partners: Evaluating the Relationships between Science, Environments, and the State

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel’s papers collectively address the complex relationship between the practitioners of science and the state authorities that they are often forced to work with, or seek funding from, to further their research goals. While scholars often see scientists simply as agents of the modern state, the panel argues that the relationship between science and the state is much more complicated, relying on factors such as political regime; the aims and motivations of the scientists, bureaucrats, and the people in power; and the perceived stakes in the questions at hand. To investigate the diverse experiences of state-science relations, the panel draws on a diverse set of twentieth-century case studies from Brazil, Romania, the Soviet Union, and the United States, including how the relationship between authority, science, and society played out under democratic, military, settler-colonial, and state socialist regimes.

George Andrei’s presentation examines the economic and environmental arguments for statism among Romanian foresters in the 1920s and 1930s to demonstrate how forestry engineers attempted to navigate the multifaceted institutions of the state in a fragile interwar democracy. André Bailão investigates the complex relationships between Brazil's military regime and climate and environmental scientists working in Amazonia in the 1970s, demonstrating their shift from supporting development programs to becoming important voices against deforestation. Marek Eby looks to early Soviet Central Asia to investigate how the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath forced doctors battling malaria outbreaks to reevaluate the relationship between science, state, and politics to continue their work in the new environments of the socialist order. David Horst Lehman’s paper applies theory from American Indian Studies to examine the parallel consequences of US-sponsored work on the soil science of Potawatomi homelands in the early 20th century to the consequences of land surveys from the 19th century.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Rejecting the Olive Branch: State Forestry and the Environmental Politics of Citizenship in Rural Romania, 1920-1940 - George Andrei, Indiana University Bloomington

• From developmentalism to environmentalism: climate and environmental scientists and the Amazon during Brazil's military regime (1964-1985) - André Secchieri Bailão, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil

• Expert, Empire, and Socialism: Negotiating Malariology across the Environments of Stalinism, 1926-1937 - Marek Eby, New York University

• Glacier Erasure: Stories, Speculation, Surveys, and Soil Science in Potawatomi Homelands - David Bontrager Horst Lehman, Westminster College

Chair

• Chau Kelly, University of North Florida