Paper short abstract:

A Cold War collaborative program in nature protection between the United States and the Soviet Union involved environmental scientists and ran from 1973 to the collapse of the USSR. This talk explores the meaning of the program as usable past for politics, science diplomacy, scientists, and nature.

Paper long abstract:

The 1970s saw not only an ascending environmental movement but a rise in U.S. environmental sciences. The newly created, fast-moving Environmental Protection Agency built its own system of research facilities to monitor pollution and investigate threats industry posed to nature and humans themselves. In recognition of the global impact of environmental hazards, the White House struck agreements with several nations to perform joint research and “promote a global environmental ethic.” Interestingly, the first of these bilateral accords was with the Soviet Union.

The environmental card was actively played in the 1970s-1980s to various ends. At the top level, there was entanglement of collaborative environmental research in international politics, Cold War diplomacy, and East-West policy struggles for leadership in approaches to the environment. On the ground, despite this entanglement (and occasionally because of it), a different conversation was going on among American and Soviet researchers. They were tasked with finding ways of working together and producing research results in unchartered territories, sometimes literally. They had never worked together, knew little about one another professionally or otherwise, and had no common problems to solve or a common language to speak. Or so they thought at the beginning. What motivated these scientists? What happened to this program during and after the dissolution of the Soviet system? Drawing on archival research in both the U.S. and Russia, this paper discusses their professional interests and goals to approach a distinct, less explored issue: how much of this large-scale environmental research program was about environmentalism?