Constituting the Arctic Environment: How U.S. Military Patronage after World War II influenced the Environmental Sciences in the Far North

北极环境的构成：二战后美国的军事支持如何影响远北地区的环境科学

• 批准号: 0922651
• 负责人: Ronald Doel
• 金额: $ 48.94万
• 依托单位: Florida State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-07-01 至 2013-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0922651&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Constituting; Arctic; Environment; How; U.S.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This research project, "Constituting the Arctic Environment: How U.S. Military Patronage after World War II influenced the Environmental Sciences in the Far North," is the US contribution to a nine-member, seven-project collaboration, seven-nation research study titled, "Colony, Empire, Environment: A Comparative International History of Twentieth Century Arctic Science (CEE). One of seven research teams funded within the framework of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES initiative "BOREAS: Histories from the North," the CEE Project will produce a comparative international history of changing conceptions of the Arctic landscape, its scope ranging from science to art. The larger collaborative project will increase understanding of field stations and their role in research, as well as how international polar conflicts, with their resultant demand for particular kinds of geographic knowledge, shaped perceptions of the Arctic and research undertaken there. In addition, this collaborative research will also reveal how western ideological conceptions of the Arctic environment helped to keep the Arctic "open" for colonialism as well as nature conservation. Wide-focus projects of this kind are extremely difficult to accomplish by a single scholar, necessitating cooperative and comparative approaches. The CEE project will contribute a greatly improved understanding of Arctic scientific research during the twentieth century, as well as deeper insight into the shifting meaning and significance of the northern landscape as colonialism was replaced by cold war military activities and ultimately increased native autonomy.Within the CEE collaboration the US project, Constituting the Arctic Environment: How U.S. Military Patronage after World War II influenced the Environmental Sciences in the Far North, will examine role of the military in shaping public understanding of the Arctic and influencing the environmental sciences. In 1947, the Pentagon became interested in polar warming and global climate change. It did so not because of concerns about the natural environment, as these became generally understood by the 1980s and 1990s, but because of pragmatic defense issues: the prospect of climate change in high latitudes left military authorities worried about the United States' ability to confront the Soviet Union in the high Arctic, where a hot conflict with its emerging cold war adversary seemed increasingly possible. Pentagon officials also saw polar warming as a broader kind of threat: a warming Arctic climate meant that the Soviet Union might obtain new advantages in developing its agriculture and deploying its fleet from high-latitude ports. By the late 1940s the polar region had become, as never before, a potential theater of war. State concern with the Arctic environment helped to shape U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force scientific planning and tactical studies through the 1950s. In parallel ways, military fascination with the Arctic influenced the earth sciences research community in post-World War II America, creating new institutions and new funding to address broad interdisciplinary problems. It helped shape a distinct form of the environmental sciences in the United States before the environmental movement (which emphasized the biological environmental sciences including ecology, genetics, and natural history) gained ground in the 1960s and early 1970s. Pentagon officials sought knowledge about the upper atmosphere (for missiles and long-range communications) and the oceans (for submarine warfare) as well as about climate change, producing unprecedented volumes of data about environmental conditions. Military patronage created a distinct form of the environmental sciences that stressed utilitarian and operational concerns. Yet the hope of military planners and civilian researchers to create comprehensive cross-disciplinary studies of this bounded geographic region - linking the biological and physical branches of the environmental sciences - initially proved difficult to achieve. "Constituting the Arctic Environment" is not only a history of science in the north, but will increase our understanding of the rise of the physical environmental sciences in the twentieth century. This research will examine how U.S. earth scientists, working closely with military patrons and planners, developed research programs to understand the northern environment, requiring often-challenging interdisciplinary collaborations between glaciologists, meteorologists, and oceanographers. It will illuminate the creation of permanent new institutions that undertook and shaped research in these environmental science fields. It will also investigate the intimate knowledge certain scientists had of how Washington worked, and how the military services operated, developed research programs in the Arctic and elsewhere, and were responsive to both the Pentagon and the state. While the cold war has ended, the role that national security concerns played in determining what kinds of knowledge were valued or not, profoundly shaped what we now know about the natural environment. Understanding this history is important today in understanding the development of new disciplines and how science can actively have influence on public policy.

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏与再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。该研究项目名为《构成北极环境：二战后美国军事赞助如何影响远北地区的环境科学》，是美国对一项由九人、七个项目合作、七个国家参与、题为《殖民地、帝国、环境：二十世纪北极科学史(CEE)国际比较史》的研究项目的贡献。作为欧洲科学基金会EUROCORES倡议“BOREAS：来自北方的历史”框架内资助的七个研究小组之一，中东欧项目将制作一部关于北极景观概念变化的比较国际历史，其范围从科学到艺术。这个更大的合作项目将增进对野外观测站及其在研究中的作用的了解，以及国际极地冲突以及由此产生的对特定类型地理知识的需求如何影响对北极和在那里进行的研究的看法。此外，这项合作研究还将揭示西方关于北极环境的意识形态概念如何帮助保持北极对殖民主义和自然保护的“开放”。这类广泛关注的项目很难由一位学者完成，需要合作和比较的方法。中东欧项目将大大提高对20世纪北极科学研究的理解，并更深入地了解随着殖民主义被冷战军事活动取代并最终增加土著自治权，北方景观的含义和重要性的变化。在中东欧合作中，美国项目--构成北极环境：二战后美国军事赞助如何影响遥远北方的环境科学--将研究军队在塑造公众对北极的理解和影响环境科学方面所扮演的角色。1947年，五角大楼开始对极地变暖和全球气候变化感兴趣。它这样做并不是因为对自然环境的担忧，而是因为务实的防务问题：高纬度地区气候变化的前景让军事当局担心美国在高北极地区对抗苏联的能力，在那里，美国与冷战对手爆发热冲突的可能性似乎越来越大。五角大楼官员还将极地变暖视为一种更广泛的威胁：北极气候变暖意味着，苏联可能会在发展农业和从高纬度港口部署舰队方面获得新的优势。到20世纪40年代末，极地地区已经前所未有地成为一个潜在的战区。20世纪50年代，国家对北极环境的关注帮助形成了美国陆军、海军和空军的科学规划和战术研究。同样，对北极的军事迷恋也影响了二战后美国的地球科学研究界，创建了新的机构和新的资金，以解决广泛的跨学科问题。在环境运动(强调包括生态学、遗传学和自然历史在内的生物环境科学)在20世纪60年代和70年代初取得进展之前，它帮助塑造了美国环境科学的独特形式。五角大楼官员寻求有关高层大气(用于导弹和远程通信)和海洋(用于潜艇战争)以及气候变化的知识，从而产生了前所未有的大量环境条件数据。军事赞助创造了一种独特的环境科学形式，强调功利性和可操作性。然而，军事规划者和民间研究人员希望对这一有限的地理区域进行全面的跨学科研究--将环境科学的生物和物理分支联系起来--最初被证明很难实现。《构成北极环境》不仅是一部北方科学史，而且将加深我们对20世纪物理环境科学兴起的理解。这项研究将考察美国地球科学家如何与军方赞助人和规划者密切合作，开发研究计划来了解北方环境，这需要冰川学家、气象学家和海洋学家之间经常具有挑战性的跨学科合作。它将阐明在这些环境科学领域开展和塑造研究的永久性新机构的创建。它还将调查某些科学家对华盛顿如何运作、军方如何运作、在北极和其他地方开发研究项目，以及对五角大楼和国家做出回应的私密了解。尽管冷战已经结束，但国家安全担忧在决定哪些知识被重视或不被重视方面所发挥的作用，深刻地塑造了我们现在对自然环境的了解。今天，理解这段历史对于理解新学科的发展以及科学如何积极地影响公共政策具有重要意义。