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Accepted Paper:
“The problem of science in environmental history narratives”
Paul Sutter
(University of Colorado Boulder)
This paper examines issues inherent in environmental historians' use of science: the instability of scientific knowledge, scientists’ often poor use of history, and the value of mining older scientific studies to counteract what Lorraine Daston calls the “amnesiac” qualities of science.
Paper long abstract:
Environmental historians have long used science to animate our narratives, even if we have never quite developed a coherent approach to doing so. We are aware that science is a socially constructed and historically situated activity, and that it is only one of many ways of knowing the more-than-human world, and yet, for many of us, it has remained a steadfast informant. Using my efforts to reconstruct the history of the Aedes aegypti mosquito as a case study, this paper will examine several dimensions of the problem of bringing scientific insights into historical narratives: the instability of current scientific knowledge and the likelihood that understandings will change, undermining one’s narrative; the often poor ways in which scientists use history; and the value of mining older scientific studies, in conversation with contemporary ones, to glean new insights and work around what Lorraine Daston has called the “amnesiac” qualities of the sciences.