ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Participation and Information: Alternative Science and the Environmental Movement in the 1970s and 1980s

• In Event: Science and Activism: A Long History

English Abstract

“Information” became a key political resource in the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s, creating new spaces for alternative science. Throughout Europe and North America, activists published compendia listing reliable information sources, such as individual scientists referred to as “counter-experts,” citizens’ initiatives, alternative research institutes, and trustworthy government agencies. This emerging alternative science infrastructure was driven by a hope for democratization: by making scientific information available to a wider public, science itself would become more participatory and democratic. Taking the compendia as a starting point, this paper examines the formation of political spaces of knowledge production and of new media and social formats for knowledge transfer in the environmental movement in Europe after 1945. How did the “epistemization” of environmental politics shape activist practice? How, in turn, did activist practice change the moral economies of the established sciences? And what archives and sources do we, as historians of science, need to consult in order to understand and describe the interactions of environmental sciences and environmental movements—or of academic disciplines and social movements more generally? Although the contribution focuses on the 1970s and 1980s, it extends back into the nineteenth century. Can we find evidence of alternative environmental sciences in nineteenth-century popular natural history, the nature conservation movement, or anthroposophy? And how did these more bourgeois alternatives to ecology compare to “green” approaches in the labor movement at the time?

Author

• Nils Guettler, Universität Wien