ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Searching for Eden in 20th-Century Ecological Thought

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, multiple generations were exposed to two World Wars, the ideological tensions of the Cold War and a genuine anxiety of nuclear apocalypse, and the shifting tides of global geopolitics through the dissolution of colonial powers. This period also witnessed the emergence of ecological science as an epistemological paradigm that would come to dominate the practice of conservation biology and political atmospheres of environmentalism. In this panel, we seek to explore how these narratives and broader conjunctural factors shaped a particular vision of Nature in Western Europe, embedded within a Judaeo-Christian ontology related to the Genesis depiction of Eden, the fall, and environmentalism as an act of multispecies stewardship. We focus on individual ecologists and ecological research projects linked to a search for Edenic nature, often practicing a temporal narrative which sought to identify and demarcate pre-Modern ecologies to serve as models for the practice of ecological science, embodying a specific ethical and moral orientation. Key figures in British postwar ecology’s ‘new naturalism’ movement which incorporated descriptive and affectively charged accounts of Nature into scientific observation – such as Frank Fraser Darling, John Morton Boyd, Peter Scott, James Fisher, and Julian Huxley – were often explicitly driven by visions of both paradise and apocalypse. These histories have contemporary significance for ecological governance across the British Isles, not least given the influence of such figures in the foundation or direction of national and international conservation organisations, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the Nature Conservancy.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Etienne Benson, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Individual Presentations

• St Kilda, the fall, and the call of Eden - Adam Searle, University of Nottingham

• Evolutionary Eden: The Descent of Sheep in C20th Ecological Thought and Practice” - Rebecca Woods, University of Toronto

• Paradise Lost: Visions of Ecological Collapse in Postwar Conservation - Duncan Wilson, University of Manchester

• Articulating the voice of the mountain: ecological science, ski developments and contestations over conserving the Cairngorms - Hayden Lorimer, University of Edinburgh

Session Organizers

• Rebecca Woods, University of Toronto

• Adam Searle, University of Nottingham