Constituting the Arctic Environment: How U.S. Military Patronage after World War II influenced the Environmental Sciences in the Far North

Florida State University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This research project, "Constituting the Arctic Environment: How U.S. Military Patronage after World War II influenced the Environmental Sciences in the Far North," is the US contribution to a nine-member, seven-project collaboration, seven-nation research study titled, "Colony, Empire, Environment: A Comparative International History of Twentieth Century Arctic Science (CEE). One of seven research teams funded within the framework of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES initiative "BOREAS: Histories from the North," the CEE Project will produce a comparative international history of changing conceptions of the Arctic landscape, its scope ranging from science to art. The larger collaborative project will increase understanding of field stations and their role in research, as well as how international polar conflicts, with their resultant demand for particular kinds of geographic knowledge, shaped perceptions of the Arctic and research undertaken there. In addition, this collaborative research will also reveal how western ideological conceptions of the Arctic environment helped to keep the Arctic "open" for colonialism as well as nature conservation. Wide-focus projects of this kind are extremely difficult to accomplish by a single scholar, necessitating cooperative and comparative approaches. The CEE project will contribute a greatly improved understanding of Arctic scientific research during the twentieth century, as well as deeper insight into the shifting meaning and significance of the northern landscape as colonialism was replaced by cold war military activities and ultimately increased native autonomy. Within the CEE collaboration the US project, Constituting the Arctic Environment: How U.S. Military Patronage after World War II influenced the Environmental Sciences in the Far North, will examine role of the military in shaping public understanding of the Arctic and influencing the environmental sciences. In 1947, the Pentagon became interested in polar warming and global climate change. It did so not because of concerns about the natural environment, as these became generally understood by the 1980s and 1990s, but because of pragmatic defense issues: the prospect of climate change in high latitudes left military authorities worried about the United States' ability to confront the Soviet Union in the high Arctic, where a hot conflict with its emerging cold war adversary seemed increasingly possible. Pentagon officials also saw polar warming as a broader kind of threat: a warming Arctic climate meant that the Soviet Union might obtain new advantages in developing its agriculture and deploying its fleet from high-latitude ports. By the late 1940s the polar region had become, as never before, a potential theater of war. State concern with the Arctic environment helped to shape U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force scientific planning and tactical studies through the 1950s. In parallel ways, military fascination with the Arctic influenced the earth sciences research community in post-World War II America, creating new institutions and new funding to address broad interdisciplinary problems. It helped shape a distinct form of the environmental sciences in the United States before the environmental movement (which emphasized the biological environmental sciences including ecology, genetics, and natural history) gained ground in the 1960s and early 1970s. Pentagon officials sought knowledge about the upper atmosphere (for missiles and long-range communications) and the oceans (for submarine warfare) as well as about climate change, producing unprecedented volumes of data about environmental conditions. Military patronage created a distinct form of the environmental sciences that stressed utilitarian and operational concerns. Yet the hope of military planners and civilian researchers to create comprehensive cross-disciplinary studies of this bounded geographic region - linking the biological and physical branches of the environmental sciences - initially proved difficult to achieve. "Constituting the Arctic Environment" is not only a history of science in the north, but will increase our understanding of the rise of the physical environmental sciences in the twentieth century. This research will examine how U.S. earth scientists, working closely with military patrons and planners, developed research programs to understand the northern environment, requiring often-challenging interdisciplinary collaborations between glaciologists, meteorologists, and oceanographers. It will illuminate the creation of permanent new institutions that undertook and shaped research in these environmental science fields. It will also investigate the intimate knowledge certain scientists had of how Washington worked, and how the military services operated, developed research programs in the Arctic and elsewhere, and were responsive to both the Pentagon and the state. While the cold war has ended, the role that national security concerns played in determining what kinds of knowledge were valued or not, profoundly shaped what we now know about the natural environment. Understanding this history is important today in understanding the development of new disciplines and how science can actively have influence on public policy.