Dissertation Research: The Population Explosion: Population Growth, Environmentalism, and American Culture, 1945-1980

这是一个科学和技术研究论文改进补助金。 该项目将使用保罗埃利希的1968年的书人口炸弹的案例研究，阐明美国环保运动的社会起源。赠款资金将用于资助前往帕洛阿尔托、丹佛、华盛顿和纽约进行档案研究和定性访谈。埃利希的“人口炸弹”帮助生物学重新获得了自二战前以来从未见过的社会意义。然而，环境历史学家和科学历史学家还没有探索环境主义核心的新马尔萨斯主义的爆发。就像更大的人口控制运动一样，埃利希的书最初似乎在一系列问题上团结了来自不同政治派别的美国人。它似乎将保守派和自由派在当时许多最紧迫的问题上聚集在一起。 美国与第三世界的关系，内城的种族骚乱，以及郊区的发展问题。然而，在几年之内，埃利希和人口控制的论点就成了一个目标，一大批团体对自己进行了定义。社会主义者和自由市场保守派、黑人民族主义者和白色保守派、女权主义者和新右翼，甚至环保主义者都批评埃利希的逻辑，有时甚至是尖刻的。到了20世纪70年代中期，埃利希和人口炸弹曾经有过的吸引力似乎是一个奇迹。这个研究项目回到20世纪50年代和60年代，研究在环境运动早期对人口控制的兴趣激增的科学/知识和文化根源。它希望揭示埃利希的书的持久的贡献，以及批判性地审查的方式，无意的种族，阶级和性别的不敏感性发挥了埃利希的逻辑。将环保主义与其新马尔萨斯主义根源重新联系起来，有可能改变历史学家讲述战后环保运动兴起的方式。

This is a Science and Technology Studies dissertation improvement grant. The proposed project will use a case study of Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb to shed light on the social origins of the American environmental movement. Funds from the grant will support travel to Palo Alto, Denver, Washington, and New York for the purposes of archival research and qualitative interviews. Ehrlich's Population Bomb helped biology recapture a social relevance not seen since before WWII. Environmental historians and historians of science, however, have yet to explore this explosion of neo-Malthusianism at the heart of environmentalism. Like the larger population control movement, Ehrlich's book at first appeared to unite Americans from across the political spectrum on a host of issues. It seemed to bring together conservatives and liberals on many of the most pressing issues of the day. American relations with the third world, racial unrest in the inner city, and suburban growth issues. Within a few years, however, Ehrlich and the population control argument became a target against which a vast array of groups defined themselves. Socialists and free-market conservatives, black nationalists and white conservatives, feminists and the new right, and even fellow environmentalists all critiqued Ehrlich's logic, sometimes bitterly. By the mid 1970s, it seemed a wonder that Ehrlich and The Population Bomb ever had the appeal that it once did. This research project returns to the 1950s and 1960s to examine the scientific/intellectual and cultural roots of the explosion of interest in population control during the early days of the environmental movement. It hopes to reveal the lasting contributions of Ehrlich's book, as well as to critically examine the ways in which unintentional race, class, and gender insensitivities played out in Ehrlich's logic. Reconnecting environmentalism with its neo-Malthusian roots has the potential to alter the way historians tell the story of the environmental movement's postwar emergence.