Climate and beyond. Knowledge Production about Planet Earth and the Global Environment as Indicators of Social Change
Climate and beyond. Knowledge Production about Planet
Earth and the
Global Environment as Indicators of Social Change
The Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research of the
University of
Bern, the Institute of History of the University of Bern
and the History
Department of the University of Zurich are organising a
conference to
bring together historians of the earth sciences and
environmental
historians. It aims to explore the social, cultural and
political
changes induced by earth scientists and the knowledge and
institutions
they have created over the last two centuries.
Scope of the Conference
The conference will look at the issue of social change
through the lens
of earth matters. What do we learn about societies, their
norms and
collective mentalities by analysing how people dealt with
planet earth,
its history, climate, surface patterns, or the mechanisms
underlying its
dynamic structure? Topics of the precirculated papers
include, for
instance, the debate on desertification in the 19th
century, the idea of
deep time for social thinking about the future or the
history of Arctic
research. Each paper presentation will be followed by 20
minutes of
comment and discussion. Invited speakers are Erhard Oeser
(Vienna, A)
and Naomi Oreskes (San Diego, USA). The public evening
lecture is given
by Joachim Radkau (Bielefeld, D).
January 23rd, 2013
14:00 Opening (OCCR member, TBA)
Christian Rohr (Bern, CH) and Andrea Westermann (Zurich,
CH): Introduction
Session 1 Coping with Tectonic and Climatic Hazards
Chair: Stefan Brönnimann (Bern, CH)
14:20 Erhard Oeser (Vienna, A): The Development of the
Wave Theory and
its Application to Earthquakes. The Paradigm Shift at the
end of the
19th century
14:55 Kerry Smith (Providence, USA) : Making Disasters
Natural:
Seismology and Prediction Regimes in Modern Japan
15:30 Conevery Bolton Valencius (Boston, USA) : Fracking
and Seismic
History in the Contemporary United States
16:05 Coffee break
16:20 Brian Rumsey (Lawrence, USA) : The Application of
Methods of
Probability to the Prediction of Floods in the USA (late
19th c. to the
1970s)
16:55 Anna Carlsson-Hyslop (Lancaster, UK) : Knowledge
Production about
Coastal Flooding in Britain, 1919–1959: How and why
17:30 End of Session 1
19:00 Public keynote lecture and Apéro
Joachim Radkau (Bielefeld, D): Historiker und
Hockeyschläger –
Geschichte als Geheimwaffe im Klimadiskurs (45 min)
Apéro
January 24th, 2013
Session 2 Global Resources and Knowledge Production
Chair: Gunter Stephan (Bern, CH)
09:00 Andrea Westermann (Zurich, CH) : Supplying the 20th
century: How a
steady flow of industrial raw materials was developed and
how geologists
helped create it
09:35 Perrin Selcer (Austin, USA) : Fabricating Unity:
The FAO-UNESCO
Soil Map of the World
10:10 Christian Kehrt (Hamburg, D) : Gondwana's Promises.
German
Geologists in Antarctica between Basic Science and
Resource Exploration
in the Late 1970s
10:45 Coffee break
Session 3 Arctic Research: Scientific, Economic and
Social impact
Chair: TBA
11:00 Alexandra M. Avdonina (Vladimir, RUS) : Social
Transformation in
the Russian Far North in Connection with Discoveries in
Geosciences
11:35 Ronald E. Doel (Tallahassee, USA) : What Really
Mattered in the
Arctic? Military Patronage and the Pursuit of
Environmental Knowledge
during the Early Cold War
12:10 Matthias Heymann (Aarhus, DK) : Investigating
Arctic Environments:
The Role of Greenland in the Early Cold War
12:45 Lunch
Session 4 Earth and Climate Governance
Chair: TBA
14:15 Naomi Oreskes (San Diego, USA): How the Earth
Sciences Became a
Social Science (and Why It Matters)
14:50 Ola Uhrqvist (Linköping, S) : Mentalities enabling
Earth System
modelling in GAIM and AIMES
15:25 Elena Aronova (Berlin, Germany; Fribourg, CH) :
Knowledge of the
Globe and Global Politics: The "Global Network for
Environmental
Monitoring" Project in the 1960s–1970s
16:00 Coffee break
16:15 Matthias Dörries (Strasbourg, F) : Politics, deep
time, and the future
16:50 Christoph Rosol (Berlin, D) : Extremely Noisy and
Incredibly
Close. Reconstructing Deep-time Climate Change as a Means
to Define the
Present
17:25 Geoffrey I. Nwaka (Uturu, NG) : Indigenous
Knowledge as Local
Response to Globalization and Climate Change in Nigeria
18:00 End of Session 4
19:30 h Conference Dinner
January 25th, 2013
Session 5 Empires, European Experts and the Sciences of
the Earth
Chair: Iris Schröder (Braunschweig, D)
09:00 Ryan Tucker Jones (Pocatello, USA) : Empire and
Revolution in
Peter Simon Pallas's Betrachtungen über die
Beschaffenheit der Gebürge
09:35 Lorena B. Valderrama (Valencia, E) : European
Experts, Earthquake
Knowledge Transfer and the Institutionalization of
Seismology. The Case
of Chile
10:10 Coffee break
10:25 Bernhard C. Schär (Bern, CH) : Earth Scientists as
Time Travellers
and Agents of Social Change in the Colonial Era: An
Example from Basel
11:00 Philipp N. Lehmann (Cambridge, USA) : The Threat of
the Desert:
Debates on Climate Change in the Late Nineteenth Century
Conclusions
11:35 Christian Rohr (Bern, CH): Synthesis
12:05 Final discussion
13:00 Snack buffet
14:30 City of Bern guided tour
Kontakt:
Dr. Andrea Westermann
Historisches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Karl
Schmid-Strasse 4, 8006
Zürich, Switzerland
0041 44 6343813
Prof. Dr. Christian Rohr
Historisches Institut, Universität Bern,
Länggassstrasse 49, 3012 Bern,
Switzerland
0041 31 6318558
Our website: