Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a collection of life story oral history interviews with ecologists, naturalists, paleoclimatologists, farmers and agricultural scientists who lived and worked in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century – a period of dramatic environmental change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a collection of life story oral history interviews with ecologists, naturalists, paleoclimatologists, farmers and agricultural scientists who lived and worked in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century – a period of dramatic environmental change. Recorded recently by National Life Stories at the British Library, these interviewees tell stories about themselves and human and non-human others during decades (especially the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s) of substantial habitat loss and biodiversity decline. By examining this collection of life stories, I seek to contribute to recent theoretical and methodological reflection in environmental biography. In particular, I pursue four questions. One, what do the interviews reveal about how particular plants, animals and habitats were bound up with and ‘shaped’ human subjectivities (White, 2020)? Two, how should the lives of plants and animals – including agricultural crops and livestock – be recovered from these accounts narrated by humans? Three, what are the advantages and challenges of exploring not a single life story but a collection of life stories in which the individuals we hear from variously ignored, studied, worried about and contributed to the ‘Great Acceleration’? Four, what is the particular contribution of attention to the lives of scientists, including James Lovelock, whose work partly inspires the ‘post-human’ critical theory that animates new environmental biography (Latour, 2017)?