Nature, Culture, Conservation: History of science as an integrative framework for analysis of research on environmental problems, 1950-2010

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Not so long ago, understanding and tackling environmental problems was thought to be a job for science and technology. Today it is widely recognised that 'the environment' consists of systems both natural and cultural. Understanding and affecting these systems successfully will require collaboration across the science / humanities divide. This is urgent in areas like species conservation: despite 40 years of concerted international conservation action and advocacy, rates of biodiversity loss today are higher than ever. Yet in the effort to develop needed knowledge and methods, it has proved difficult to reconcile disciplinary differences. Scientists are unsure how to accommodate qualitative data into their ecological models. Social scientists are often suspicious of quantitative approaches to managing social-ecological systems. Many humanities scholars are unfamiliar with natural-scientific data and methods and seldom engage with the scientific literature. This project aims to address this urgent practical and intellectual problem. And it aims to do so in a novel way: by studying science / humanities relations empirically through a review of existing interdisciplinary efforts around the environment as well as by comparing scientific and humanistic studies of the same environmental problem. This will be done through a novel use of the history of science: a field that straddles the science / humanities divide and that specialises in the conceptual and contextual analysis of past and contemporary research and knowledge involving both natural and cultural dimensions. The project will collect and review scattered interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and some single-discipline studies (c.1950-2010) of environmental problems and interventions in the USA, Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Within this wide spectrum, the focus will be on biodiversity conservation, livestock epidemics in natural environments, and indigenous land-use practices in natural environments. These foci were chosen as key problem areas with natural and cultural dimensions and in which conservation efforts can conflict with the needs and development of human communities.Questions to be asked include: What combinations and ways of combining approaches or critical perspectives have been tried? Which categories of problem have attracted cross-disciplinary collaboration? How have approaches differed in assumptions and conclusions? What approaches and/or projects have worked well, and why? Answers to these questions will form an empirical basis for suggesting ways in which science / humanities cooperation can fruitfully be undertaken in the future. This is the project's overall objective.The first-ever formal research collaboration of the humanities and the sciences at Imperial College London, the project brings together the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and Imperial College Conservation Science. Outcomes will therefore more likely be useful to researchers from the sciences as well as the humanities.These outcomes will include a published literature review, a typology of approaches, an annotated bibliography of case studies, and suggestions for how to design interdisciplinary and collaborative work that will be meaningful and useful to researchers in both science and the humanities and that will maximize insights and critical capacities from both. These outcomes will be of interest beyond academic research - to professional and third-sector organisations, to policymakers, to communities affected by environmental problems and conservation solutions, and to wider publics engaged in issues of the environment and human development. The outcomes will be made available on a website for discussion and use by these audiences and communicated directly where possible to governmental and non-governmental organisations, especially those involved in the surveyed case studies.