Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - 211 Dickinson Hall, 4:30 p.m.
Peder Anker
New York University, The Gallatin School of Individualized Study
"Spaceship Earth"
Abstract
Why did scientists and lay people alike in the 1970s talk about the Earth in terms of a Spaceship? And in what way did this frame the environmental debate? With a point of departure in the famous earthrise image, this lecture reviews the history of “spaceship earth”. The photo came to represent a dream of a globe in ecological harmony, yet it was taken by a crew of astronauts sent out in space to demonstrate the superiority of the United States in a world divided by Cold War tensions. Spaceship earth was not a vague analogy or metaphor, but that it reflected instead efforts to build a closed ecosystem within the spaceship in order to secure the health of astronauts. In other words, the Earth was literally understood as being construed as the spaceship and the environmental havoc was caused by humans not behaving like astronauts. Environmental ethics became an issue of trying to live like astronauts by adapting space technologies such as bio-toilets, solar cells, recycling, and energy-saving devices. Technology, terminology, and methodology developed for spaceships became tools for solving environmental problems onboard Spaceship Earth. Spaceships came to represent the rational, orderly, and wisely managed contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill managed environments on Earth.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 – 211 Dickinson Hall, 4:30PM
Rutgers University, School of Arts and Social Sciences
co-sponsored by Program in History of Science, and the Colonial Americas Workshops (CAW)
"Divers Things: Collecting the World Under Water."
Abstract
What did it mean to go under water in the early modern era? “I do not pretend to have visited the bottom of the sea,” wrote Robert Boyle in 1670, but that did not stop him from writing at length about the depths. Indeed, the same can be said of Jules Verne. This paper examines late seventeenth-century English travelers and natural philosophers' accounts of the submarine, in a period when diving projects proliferated due to dramatic new fortunes being made in Caribbean salvage. It begins by examining the significance of aquatic objects and perceptions of the deep in a providential framework that united the biblical Flood with contemporary natural disasters such as the 1692 earthquake in Port Royal, Jamaica. It argues that in addition to exemplifying connoisseurial fetishization of transformations between nature and art, collections of aquatic curiosities constituted a providential imperial chorography of the submarine. The paper goes on to situate collectors’ power to transform nature into art in relation to their ability to coerce the extraordinary capacities of Asian, American and enslaved African divers. Finally, it explores the shift from self-extension through human surrogates to the construction of prosthetic devices, in particular diving bells, linking programs of submarine knowledge at the Royal Society to entrepreneurial salvage projects, and attempts to colonize the depths by transforming the underwater world into dry land.
