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

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。这个名为“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”的研究项目是美国对一项名为“殖民地、帝国、环境：20世纪北极科学的比较国际历史”的九人、七项目合作研究的贡献。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，中东欧项目将产生北极景观概念变化的比较国际历史，其范围从科学到艺术。更大的合作项目将增进对实地监测站及其在研究中的作用的了解，以及对国际极地冲突及其对特定种类地理知识的需求如何形成对北极的认识和在那里进行的研究。此外，这项合作研究还将揭示西方对北极环境的意识形态概念如何帮助北极保持对殖民主义和自然保护的“开放”。这种广泛关注的项目是很难由一个学者完成的，需要合作和比较的方法。中东欧项目将有助于大大提高对二十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，北方景观的变化意义和重要性。在中东欧合作中，美国项目“构成北极环境：第二次世界大战后美国军事赞助如何影响远北地区的环境科学”将研究军方在塑造公众对北极的理解和影响环境科学方面的作用。1947年，五角大楼开始对极地变暖和全球气候变化产生兴趣。美国之所以这么做，并非出于对自然环境的担忧（这种担忧在上世纪80年代和90年代得到了普遍理解），而是出于务实的国防问题：高纬度地区气候变化的前景，让军事当局担心美国在北极高纬度地区对抗苏联的能力，在那里，与这个正在崛起的冷战对手发生激烈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潜在的战争战场。整个20世纪50年代，国家对北极环境的关注帮助塑造了美国陆军、海军和空军的科学规划和战术研究。与此同时，对北极的军事兴趣影响了二战后美国的地球科学研究界，建立了新的机构和新的资金，以解决广泛的跨学科问题。在20世纪60年代和70年代初环境运动（强调包括生态学、遗传学和自然史在内的生物环境科学）兴起之前，它帮助在美国形成了一种独特的环境科学形式。五角大楼官员寻求高层大气（用于导弹和远程通信）和海洋（用于潜艇作战）以及气候变化方面的知识，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，强调功利和操作问题。然而，军事规划者和文职研究人员希望在这个有限的地理区域建立全面的跨学科研究——将环境科学的生物和物理分支联系起来——最初证明是难以实现的。《北极环境的构成》不仅是一部北极科学史，而且将加深我们对20世纪自然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人员密切合作，开发研究项目以了解北方环境，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工作、军事部门如何运作、如何在北极和其他地方开发研究项目以及如何对五角大楼和国家做出反应的深入了解。虽然冷战已经结束，但国家安全问题在决定哪些知识受到重视或不受重视方面所起的作用，深刻地影响了我们现在对自然环境的认识。了解这段历史对于今天理解新学科的发展以及科学如何积极影响公共政策非常重要。

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.