ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Boggy Sciences: Peatland Studies in the Early 20th Century United States

• In Event: Plural Epistemologies and The Role of Time in the History of Waterscapes

English Abstract

In the early twentieth century United States, peatlands, long used for energy and agricultural purposes, became sought after by scientists with multiple epistemological agendas. Paleoscientists, ecologists, botanists, agricultural chemists, and a growing number of "peat scientists" all became newly interested in this unique wetland landscape as an object of scientific inquiry and a natural resource. New professional organizations formed, such as the American and Canadian Peat Societies, modelling themselves on existing European peat societies. They published articles on recent scientific developments, as well as ideas about how to best use peat for fuel and agriculture. Why did multiple lines of scientific inquiry converge on US peatlands in the 1910s and 1920s? More specifically, how did burgeoning ecological thought connect to practical concerns of fuel and agriculture in landscapes that had long been considered wastelands? Since 1850, multiple iterations of the Swamp Act had encouraged state-level wetland draining for agricultural and legal purposes. But in the early 20th century, peatlands featured prominently in the research of Henry Chandler Cowles (his famous studies of ecological succession in the Indiana Dunes included peatlands at the edge of Lake Michigan), Alfred Dachnowski, and George Rigg (a student of Cowles). Peatlands provided both a stratigraphic record of thousands of years of plant growth and a fuel alternative that attracted life and geo-sciences alike. By focusing on one type of landscape, this paper explores how the materiality of peatlands - specifically, their preservative and accumulative qualities - invited a plurality of science into its boggy depths.

Author

• Cecilia Slane, University of Oklahoma