RII Track-4: Defining the Environment in Science and Policy

Bennington College, Bennington VT

Investigators

Abstract

Non-Technical Description The RII Track-4 EPSCoR research fellowship supports anthropological research that examines the constitutive relationship between the problems of fossil fuels and the formation of environmental science and policy. As a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey for the academic year 2018-19, the PI intends to continue ongoing ethnographic research on the relationship between fossil fuel disasters and environmental protections, synthesize findings in direct conversation with leading scholars from across the social sciences, and finish a book length manuscript on the place of the environment in the tumultuous present. With sites ranging from the history of pollution and landmark legislation on clean air and clean water in the United States to present day venues working to measure and manage hydrocarbon pollution, this book describes how the negative ecologies of fossil fuels help draw the coordinates of the environment into effective scientific and political relief. Although fossil fuels loom large in present concerns over climate change, the longer history of petro-problems and environmental protections is often neglected. This understudied relation has serious implications for the resurgent place of environmental concerns in theory and politics today. ? ?? Technical Description In advocacy, science, and governance, the environment has become a vital field of knowledge and responsibility in the contemporary. While much is done with the environment, less attention has focused on the emergence of the environment itself as a converging field of action for advocacy, science, and regulation. The research describes how the environment gained potent empirical and ethical definition in response to the problems of fossil fuels from the 1960s to the present, and explores the implications of this neglected relationship for theory, politics, and people today. To a striking degree the specific crisis that the environment realized, the forms of understanding and responsibility it authorized, and the horizons of action and anticipation it routinized all bear the imprint of hydrocarbon afterlives. Whether by way of urban smog or petrochemical runoff or even oil spills, as fossil fuels unravel the conditions of life they also instigate new state authority to monitor and police those conditions. Yet the resulting definition of the defendable environment, wedged in between hydrocarbon excess and public outrage, has often been effective to the extent it sidesteps the underlying petro-problems and focuses attention instead on stabilizing the mediums of exposure, like clean air and clean water, and perhaps now a stable climate. This has serious consequence, for not only has the environment been designed to divorce measures of harm from measures of gain but the category has found its most forceful definition through moralizing and managing an ahistorical, moderately contaminated, and exceedingly technical understanding of legitimate life. Today, as the disruptions of fossil fuels snap back into focus around rising planetary concerns like global warming, ocean acidification, and the so-called Anthropocene, this history of our present is significant not only for its previous neglect but also for its reworking of environmental crisis and critique today. As the first faculty member from Bennington College to be invited to IAS, this work will also raise the intellectual profile of the PI's home institution, stimulate ambitious research agendas among faculty and students while improving infrastructures of support for such work, and catalyze new research among current collaborators, both at the home institution and beyond. ? This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.