Pathologies of Materials: Environmental Histories of Material Decay and Its Management

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Historians have long studied human endeavors to keep living organisms—humans, animals, plants—safe from environmental threats such as diseases and pests, yet less attention has been paid to analogous efforts to protect materials from decay, decomposition, and ruination. To enrich our understanding of this underexplored aspect of nature, this panel examines the tension between decay and the countervailing pursuit of durability from multiple angles in history. While conversations on this topic often highlight ecological tolls of durable materials (e.g., plastics), we challenge this standard account by offering fresh, historically specific understandings of decay and its management. We consider decomposition to be not merely a subject of prevention and control, but also a fundamental part of ecological cycles of natural and artificial materials that invites new ways of speculating about human-nature relations.

In connection with the conference theme, each presenter provides a unique perspective on decay and durability as a lens for human relationships to natural resources. Brooke Grasberger explores the deterioration of ships to reveal their interconnections with oceanic environments and forest resources within the nineteenth-century British empire. Moving forward to the turn of the twentieth century, Derek Nelson shows how the preservation of coastal infrastructures against marine borers contributed to the conservation of timber, but at the expense of toxifying the coastline with chemical preservatives. Our attention then turns from natural to artificial materials. Examining the science of environmental deterioration of materials in the U.S. since World War II, Boyd Ruamcharoen discusses how growing interest in deterioration prevention in increasingly “extreme” environments coincided with the shift in its approach from biodeterioration control to materials science and engineering. Lastly, Ji Soo Hong details how the vision of economic development in the postwar Soviet Union involved the promotion of durable synthetic materials as a solution to corroding industrial infrastructures.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Falling Apart Over Oceans: Sailing Ships and Decay in the Oceanic Environment - Brooke Grasberger, Boston College

• Preserving Is Conserving: Marine Borers, Chemical Preservation, and the Toxification of the Coastline - Derek Lee Nelson, Emanuel Fellow, Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

• Deteriorating Relations: Environmental Deterioration of Materials and U.S. Global Environmental Management - Boyd Ruamcharoen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Synthetic Dream: Durable Materials, Corrosion Control, and the Chemicalization of the National Economy in the Postwar Soviet Union, 1958-1965 - Ji Soo Hong, Brown University

Chair

• Victoria Lee, Ohio University