Darwin Meets the Engineers: Scientizing the Forest at McGill University, 1890–1910
| Autor: | Suzanne Zeller |
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| Rok vydání: | 2001 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Environmental History. 6:428-450 |
| ISSN: | 1930-8892 1084-5453 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/3985663 |
| Popis: | Critical theorists in sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and science and technology studies (STS) have suggested insightful new approaches to the history of nature and environment. In return, writes Jan Golinski in MakingNatural Knowledge, "historians have qualified theoretical schemes to accommodate empirical findings that are always more complex than theorists would wish." Among the benefits of this dialogue, Golinski includes "a more subtle awareness," for both theorists and historians, "of the complexities of the sciences as creations of human culture." A case in point arises in a controversial program of timber studies initiated at McGill University in Montreal during the 189os a cooperative effort between engineers and botanists to bring their sciences to bear upon North America's coniferous forest. The conifers formed "boundary objects" between social worlds, not only of scientists but also of lumbermen, woodworkers, politicians, conservationists, and others., McGill's timber researches developed in the context of a broad North American movement for international cooperation to conserve the continent's natural resources, through the Joint Fisheries Commission (1892); the Boundary Waters Treaty and the Washington Conservation Conference (1909); and the Migratory Bird Convention (1917). Continental outlooks that overarched the rampant exploitation of North America's timber supplies in turn permeated the forest conservation movement from the 188os, its Canadian adherents often supporting American initiatives. Indeed, American prompting at the highest political levels persuaded the Laurier Liberal government to inaugurate a Canadian forest conservation policy in 1905.2 The conifers generated lively discussions among various sectors of the scientific community in North America. Invasive as never before, scientists subjected not only external ecological but internal biological forest spaces to intensified scrutiny, probing even tissues and cells for information. Unlike the inventory sciences of earlier generations who traditionally served as collectors and mapmakers, modern forest sciences beckoned the forest into the laboratory, promising sustainable yields through specialized knowledge as industrial research and its applications demanded more of the forest and its products.3 |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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