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- Convenors:
-
Lucie Gerber
(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 7363 SAGE, FRANCE)
David Munns (City University of New York)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the ties between innovations in climatic engineering technologies and experimental research on climate-organism relationships to put into perspective the recent emphasis on understanding climate change in the life sciences.
Long Abstract:
This panel looks to gather STS perspectives on conditioned artificial climates. Notably in the life sciences, the improvement of lighting, heating and ventilation, the invention of air conditioning in the 20th century enabled the creation of highly controlled environments. The panel proposes to explore the historical ties between innovations in climatic engineering technologies and experimental research on climate-organism relationships. It seeks to put into perspective the recent emphasis on understanding climate change in the life sciences by gathering long-standing analysis of preoccupations for the climatic and ecological conditions of plants, animals and humans and their conversion into objects of experimentation. We invite contributions that examine the epistemological shifts involved in this process, and discuss resonances with current issues in climate change impact research and responses (the limits of a genocentric approach to agricultural adaptation, regional downscaling, climatic thresholds of production and life...). We welcome empirical studies that address some of the following themes:
- Experimental systems: instrumentation and equipment (phytotron, biotron, ecotron…); their development within interdisciplinary and transnational networks; the diversification of uses.
- Knowledge production: “ways of knowing” climate-organism relationships (analysis, experimentation, modeling…); play of scales and epistemological tensions in laboratory studies of the biological action of environmental conditions; physiology, ecology, bioclimatology, chronobiology.
- Production: the climatic conditions of industrialization of factory and farm; built production environments (mills, livestock buildings…); environmental interventions to accelerate, intensify, regularize re/production processes or capacities.
- Power dynamics and politics: the entanglement of experimental physiology and climatic engineering with domestic modernization policies, colonial expansion, developmental agendas; technology-based responses to air-pollution and climate change; arbitration between mitigation and adaptation strategies; conflicts over the economic, ecological, and social viability of conditioned environments.
- Categories and imaginaries: historicity of the scientific concept of climate; situated views of the organism; fatalist and proactive attitudes towards climatic conditions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Grégoire Chamayou (CNRS ENS Ulm)
Short abstract:
Tracing the emergence of wet-bulb temperature as a heat stress index, I show how this physiological knowledge, crucial for assessing the health effects of global warming, grew out of the problems raised by scorching artificial microclimates imposed on industrial workers in the early 20th century.
Long abstract:
Today, wet-bulb temperature has become a key factor in assessing the potential health effects of global warming. When the wet-bulb temperature exceeds a certain maximum, the organism loses its ability to dissipate heat through perspiration and evaporation rapidly. If this persists, the body overheats inexorably to the point of death within a few hours. This thermo-physiological threshold represents an "upper limit of human survivability". How did this heat stress index emerge? In this presentation, I turn to the research of industrial hygienist J. S. Haldane, who studied working conditions in mines in the early 20th century. The first warming of the thermo-industrial era was local, not global. It affected work environments, providing a fertile field of observation for occupational medicine and experimental physiology. These investigations revealed a wet-bulb temperature threshold beyond which efficiency deteriorates, which I interpret as the manifestation of an internal, climato-physiological contradiction between microclimates of production and labor power. However, as the long struggle of the Lancashire weavers against "steaming" illustrates, an emerging labor environmentalism targeted these hostile atmospheric conditions. There, wet-bulb temperature and class struggle are combined in what I propose to call thermopolitics, which is understood as both government and conflict over temperatures. It was not just about controversies over regulatory standards; it was also about a clash between two opposing normativities, one quantitative, reduced to the physio-economy of productive efficiency, the other qualitative, vital, inviting us to rethink the notion of a democratic atmospheric politics.
Lucie Gerber (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 7363 SAGE, FRANCE)
Short abstract:
This talk explores the climatic conditions of industrialization in animal production at the beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the artificial lighting experiments carried out at the Cornell Poultry Department to make the distribution of egg production and price more even through the year.
Long abstract:
If we are to grasp the ramifications of conditioned artificial climates, they need to be recognized as more than experimental systems designed for strictly scientific purposes in the isolation of the life science laboratory. This paper explores the climatic conditions of industrialization in animal production, focusing on the artificial lighting of hen houses. In the United States, this practice developed in the early 20th century along experiments in agricultural colleges and stations on the optimal environmental conditions of egg production. At Cornell’s Poultry Department, the domestic fowl was framed as a tropical animal by nature, which, when transposed to the north temperate zone, had developed seasonal habits to fit the light conditions that now surrounded her. For department director James E. Rice, artificial lighting provided a lever for breaking seasonal feeding and reproductive patterns, and making egg production and price more even through the year. This talk describes the Department's experiments in the use of artificial light regimes to control bodily and market rhythms, along with the agricultural extension work that touted it to be the key to 'perpetual egg production'. As this paper will discuss, this body of work highlights a conception of climate steeped in biology, tied to the limits and potential of animal life in time and space, which was operationalized to further the modernization of poultry husbandry and the management of production.
David Munns (City University of New York)
Short abstract:
This talk shows why the technology-based responses to climate change, and how conflicts over the economic, ecological, and social viability of conditioned environments were all played out in-vitro in the Soviet and American space programs.
Long abstract:
Abstract:
One of the issues of Global Climate change is the lack of immediacy between large-scale environmental conditions and localized, even personal experience. As this paper explores, that was exactly the issue for the series of experimental animals, namely the “humans” sealed inside the Soviet closed environment life support system experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. Detailing the creation of space station closed environments, the use of “phytotrons” as food providers and waste disposers, this paper examines how the hierarchical assumptions of human centrality to not only Earth-bound life but especially space bound life were undercut and altered by the lived experimental experience of cosmonauts-on-Earth in closed environments. As this talk shows, the entanglement of experimental physiology and climatic engineering with domestic modernization policies, the technology-based responses to air-pollution and climate change, and conflicts over the economic, ecological, and social viability of conditioned environments were all played out in-vitro in the Soviet and American space programs.
Elie Danziger (Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, EHESS)
Short abstract:
Ecotrons, advanced ecological platforms, replicate controlled environments for studying ecosystem dynamics. This communication explores the history of the Île-de-France Ecotron, emphasising its 'model organism' approach and the interplay between "climate" and "ecosystems" in scientific discourse.
Long abstract:
In the field of ecology, a new type of experimental platform has been developed at the turn of the 21st century. Ecotrons are replicated climatic chambers whose environmental parameters (CO2, humidity, temperature, etc.) are very finely measured and controlled in order to experiment on the functioning and evolution of ecosystems. In their enclosing of life, Ecotrons thus make it possible to reconstitute artificial ecosystems, through which scientists and engineers aim to unravel the interrelationships between multiple ecological phenomena otherwise impossible to discriminate ‘in the wild’, or studied individually in other experimental contexts. From the standpoint of STS, they testify to the way in which ‘ecosystems’ are being made into a scientific object experimentally. In this presentation, I propose to retrace the history that led to the building of the Île-de-France Ecotron, drawing from extended interviews with major actors of its inception since the 1990s, as well as a physical description of platforms whose gradual material archeology of construction maps onto a conceptual lineage. I focus on the role granted to model organisms as a source of inspiration for ecologists to affirm the legitimacy of their field in a context of defiance from other biophysical sciences. Most importantly in relation to the panel theme, I grant specific attention to the way “climate” is being situated as a scientific object in relation to “ecosystems" and their organisms through the emergence of Ecotrons facilities and associated discursive apparatuses, especially in comparison with previous facilities such as phytotrons.