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- Convenors:
-
Kristian Mennen
(Utrecht University)
Margot Lyautey (Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg)
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- Chair:
-
Margot Lyautey
(Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Streams:
- Nature for Harvest: Commodities and Resources
- Location:
- Room 14
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 21 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The roundtable sets out to explore the specific regime of management of natural resources between 1945 and 1970. When reviewing various natural resources (water, soil, energy…), can we discern a discourse of scarcity, rational management and science-based solutions to optimise natural environments?
Long Abstract:
The roundtable sets out to explore the specific regime of human management of natural resources in the period 1945-1970. Environmental historians commonly consider these decades as a transition towards an affluent consumer society based on cheap, petrol-based mass production, with due consequences for environment and climate. In this roundtable, we will look into the prevalent discourses and ways in which management of natural resources was organised and institutionalised in various policy fields at the time.
As a working hypothesis, we assume that this regime of managing natural resources was characterised by: 1) unbroken trust in technical expertise, science-based solutions and in humans’ capacity to manage or conserve natural resources and mould natural environments to their economic needs; 2) a sense of limits to these natural resources. Coal and steel, food and water, fish and whale were considered as finite resources, which explains why contemporaries wished for an ‘optimised’ use, a rational management and fair world-wide distribution. The term ‘natural resource’ itself implies an idea of manageability.
The roundtable seeks to approach these discourses and practices by bringing together discussants working on various commodities and natural resources, which are often analysed separately, such as water, soil, fish, timber, fossil fuels, energy, vegetation, etc. Did water management follow the same patterns as the emergence of soil conservation or the development of agricultural policies? Did impending scarcity induce new scientific ideas about the management of natural resources? This will be a suitable basis for reflecting on the general question at stake.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Wednesday 21 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
Modernist discourse dictated that there should be a clear separation between land and water in the Netherlands. Between 1945 and 1970, Dutch water engineers got the financial and technical means to implement this ideal: the land became dry, water was controlled and locked outside the sea dykes.
Contribution long abstract:
The boundaries between land and water were, traditionally, quite fluid in the landscape of the Netherlands. Not all land was not really land (e.g. peatlands) and there were numerous transition zones: wetlands, floodplains, reed swamps etc.
Modernist discourse since the 19th century, however, insisted that a clear boundary be drawn between land and water. Wetlands and peatlands should be drained and turned into ‘real’ agricultural land, rivers ‘normalised’ and swamps and tidal marshes reclaimed and impoldered. The ideal of a strict separation between land and water was already in place, but its implementation was often impeded by the high costs and the low value of the newly reclaimed land.
That changed after 1945. Financial and political constraints were brushed aside and the Netherlands embarked on a full-scale modernist programme of moulding the land according to human needs. Large-scale projects of land consolidation and drainage maximised the amount of agricultural land suitable for intensified, mechanised forms of agriculture, whereas water engineers built an elaborate system of flood protection works. Politicians, citizens and planners canalised remaining streams and waterways and responded to floods by building higher dykes. Water increasingly turned from a natural resource into a nuisance, a feature of the human environment that had to be managed and controlled by modern technology.
Between 1945 and 1970, the Netherlands discursively ‘turned its back on the water’. The country now regularly suffers from severe droughts in summer, although 26 % of its land surface lies below sea level...
Contribution short abstract:
My contribution would draw from my research into the British Colonial Fisheries Advisory Committee, which centred on developing, exploiting, and regulating fisheries towards an optimum yield in the coastal and inland waters throughout the British empire.
Contribution long abstract:
My research focuses on fisheries governance within the context of British colonialism, interrogating how science, law, and development converged in blueprints to exploit and control marine resources throughout the British empire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For this panel, I would particularly draw from my research into the Colonial Fisheries Advisory Committee (CFAC), which operated between 1943 and 1961, and focused on ‘optimising’ and ‘developing’ fisheries throughout the British empire. CFAC concentrated on advancing research into fish biology and stock health while encouraging a programme of fisheries technology transfer. In this vision for fisheries development, nutritional concerns were paired with commercial development and conservationist regulations, in which fish were recognised as crucial sources of protein for coastal and inland communities but were perceived to be underexploited or harvested using inefficient and unsustainable methods.
Crucially, CFAC was instituted at a time when the major principles and approaches of fisheries science developed and became embedded within Western-oriented fisheries management regimes. This centred on attaining an optimum yield—where ‘optimum’ meant optimum long-term economic potential—by maximising yields to a level that did not cause declining stocks. From the colonial perspective, the scene was set whereby the idea of an optimum yield provided the groundwork for fisheries development programmes based on scientific research and assumptions of centralised control over natural resources.
In contributing to the roundtable, I would focus on the discourses of scarcity, rational management, and science-based solutions surrounding global fisheries that influenced CFAC’s activities and vision.
Contribution short abstract:
West Germany suffered timber shortage in the wake of World War II, inasmuch as it had to export it. Therefore, West German forestry came to consider timber imports as a way of optimising nature. Underexploited (African) tropical forests had to be made productive to supply timber-consuming countries.
Contribution long abstract:
Contrary to a linear narrative that relegates timber to the status of a natural resource of the past, it is striking to see the extent to which it became the material backbone of Western societies in the second half of the 20th century. In West Germany in particular, timber consumption per capita almost doubled between 1949 and 1973, driven by a variety of industrial needs. This was made possible by a massive and fast increase in global production and international trade in forest products that can be quantified. West German forestry played a key role in this process. Right after the Second World War, it protested against the status of exporter of forest products imposed on it by the Allies and raised the spectre of "Holznot" ("urgent shortage of wood") to reverse this degrading status. To revive the economy and relieve the "German forest", forestry experts argued that it was necessary to develop the exploitation of forests that were still under-exploited, particularly primary forests ("Urwälder"). In their minds, Central Africa and West Africa in particular had to be Germany's new log suppliers. To achieve this, the foresters were involved in projects to develop ("erschliessen") the African rainforests , to which they intend to apply their principles of scientific forestry. These projects, which are perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the Division of Forestry of the FAO, included the improvement of forestry statistics, the expansion of botanical knowledge of tropical tree species, and the massive development of appropriate transport infrastructures.
Contribution short abstract:
Explores the emergence of soil conservation and soil health concepts during the second American agricultural revolution, especially in relation to discourses of national wealth, both economic and social.
Contribution long abstract:
I am interested in contributing to the roundtable with a discussion on soil conservation and soil health, concepts that emerged in the United States during the second American agricultural revolution, 1945-1970. These complementary concepts reflected deep anxieties about national stability in a time of massive social upheaval. Despite its association with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, soil conservation emerged in the mid-nineteenth century among New England farmers who recognized the impacts of their practice in the changing colour of their soils. Similarly, while soil health is generally understood to be a recent concept, it emerged in the 1950s among Southern farmers who were seeing the effects of erosion. What I find interesting is that both of these concepts really started to take hold in soil science and politics during the mid-twentieth century in a time of impoverishment. I'd love to talk about how both are in some ways discourses of economic restoration. Soil conservation seeks to restore national wealth, and soil health seeks to restore the ecosystem service of human health. In general, I'd like to examine these discourses further in the American context and possibly compare them in a global context.
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing on the Soviet example, I will contribute to the hypothesis by showcasing the transition to a new fish resource management regime in the first post-war decades, enabled by the new producing and transporting capacities due to fossil energies and amplified by the context of the Cold war.
Contribution long abstract:
Drawing on the archival and printed sources, this paper brings to discussion the specificity of fish resource management in URSS in the 1945-1975 period. While the Soviet case follows the global tendencies, peculiarities are observed in the chronology, official discourse, political economy and the consumer patterns.
While the ichthyologists had been warning since 1920s that the populations of valuable commercial fish species of the Caspian Sea could be depleted, their exploitation was only banned after these fish became extinct in the wild. Technical solutions intended to mitigate this problem (artificial hatcheries, passages across the hydroelectric dams etc.) were both ineffective and implemented with considerable delay. It wasn't until the early 1960s that the exploitation of depleted species was banned or restricted in the Volga-Caspian basin.
This extinction in an inland sea has not shaken the certainty of the Soviet industrialists that the sea fish was inexhaustible. In 1960s, the USSR invests in large fish processing vessels to capture fish and whales in the global ocean, especially in the waters of newly independent states.
The freshwater river fish followed a different pattern. As its share in total catches declined, largely due to water pollution, the Ministry of Fisheries massively invests in intensive fish farming in artificial reservoirs. However, the species cultivated are not the same as those that inhabited the rivers.