RII Track-4: Defining the Environment in Science and Policy

非技术描述RII Track-4 EPSCoR研究奖学金支持人类学研究，研究化石燃料问题与环境科学和政策形成之间的内在关系。作为2018-19年新泽西州普林斯顿高级研究所(IAS)社会科学学院的成员，PI打算继续进行关于化石燃料灾难和环境保护之间关系的人种学研究，通过与社会科学领域的领先学者直接对话来综合研究结果，并完成一本书那么长的关于环境在动荡的当下的地位的手稿。从污染的历史和美国关于清洁空气和清洁水的里程碑式的立法，到今天致力于测量和管理碳氢化合物污染的场所，这本书描述了化石燃料的负面生态如何帮助将环境的坐标吸引到有效的科学和政治救济中。尽管化石燃料在当前对气候变化的担忧中占据了重要地位，但石油问题和环境保护的更长历史往往被忽视。这种被忽视的关系对当今环境问题在理论和政治上的复兴具有严重的影响。？在倡导、科学和治理中，环境已成为当代知识和责任的重要领域。虽然人们在环境方面做了很多工作，但人们对环境本身作为倡导、科学和监管的一个汇聚行动领域的出现关注较少。这项研究描述了从20世纪60年代到现在，环境如何在应对化石燃料问题时获得了强有力的经验和伦理定义，并探索了这种被忽视的关系对理论、政治和今天的人的影响。在一个惊人的程度上，环境意识到的具体危机，它授权的理解和责任的形式，以及它例行化的行动和预期，都带有碳氢化合物死后的印记。无论是通过城市雾霾、石油化工径流，甚至是石油泄漏，随着化石燃料破坏生活条件，它们也激发了新的国家权力，以监控和监管这些条件。然而，由此产生的可防御环境的定义，夹在碳氢化合物过量和公众愤怒之间，往往是有效的，因为它回避了潜在的石油问题，转而将注意力集中在稳定暴露的媒介上，比如干净的空气和干净的水，或许现在是稳定的气候。这产生了严重的后果，因为环境不仅被设计成将伤害的衡量标准与获得的衡量标准分开，而且这个类别通过说教和管理对合法生活的非历史、适度污染和极端技术性的理解，找到了它最有力的定义。今天，随着化石燃料的破坏重新成为围绕全球变暖、海洋酸化和所谓的人类世等日益加剧的地球担忧的焦点，我们现在的这段历史不仅因为它以前的忽视，而且因为它对环境危机和今天的批评的重新书写，具有重要意义。作为本宁顿学院第一位被邀请到IAS的教职员工，这项工作还将提高PI所在机构的学术形象，在教职员工和学生中激发雄心勃勃的研究议程，同时改善对此类工作的支持基础设施，并在当前的合作者中催化新的研究，无论是在所在机构还是在其他地方。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Non-Technical DescriptionThe RII Track-4 EPSCoR research fellowship supports anthropological research that examines the constitutive relationship between the problems of fossil fuels and the formation of environmental science and policy. As a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey for the academic year 2018-19, the PI intends to continue ongoing ethnographic research on the relationship between fossil fuel disasters and environmental protections, synthesize findings in direct conversation with leading scholars from across the social sciences, and finish a book length manuscript on the place of the environment in the tumultuous present. With sites ranging from the history of pollution and landmark legislation on clean air and clean water in the United States to present day venues working to measure and manage hydrocarbon pollution, this book describes how the negative ecologies of fossil fuels help draw the coordinates of the environment into effective scientific and political relief. Although fossil fuels loom large in present concerns over climate change, the longer history of petro-problems and environmental protections is often neglected. This understudied relation has serious implications for the resurgent place of environmental concerns in theory and politics today. ???Technical DescriptionIn advocacy, science, and governance, the environment has become a vital field of knowledge and responsibility in the contemporary. While much is done with the environment, less attention has focused on the emergence of the environment itself as a converging field of action for advocacy, science, and regulation. The research describes how the environment gained potent empirical and ethical definition in response to the problems of fossil fuels from the 1960s to the present, and explores the implications of this neglected relationship for theory, politics, and people today. To a striking degree the specific crisis that the environment realized, the forms of understanding and responsibility it authorized, and the horizons of action and anticipation it routinized all bear the imprint of hydrocarbon afterlives. Whether by way of urban smog or petrochemical runoff or even oil spills, as fossil fuels unravel the conditions of life they also instigate new state authority to monitor and police those conditions. Yet the resulting definition of the defendable environment, wedged in between hydrocarbon excess and public outrage, has often been effective to the extent it sidesteps the underlying petro-problems and focuses attention instead on stabilizing the mediums of exposure, like clean air and clean water, and perhaps now a stable climate. This has serious consequence, for not only has the environment been designed to divorce measures of harm from measures of gain but the category has found its most forceful definition through moralizing and managing an ahistorical, moderately contaminated, and exceedingly technical understanding of legitimate life. Today, as the disruptions of fossil fuels snap back into focus around rising planetary concerns like global warming, ocean acidification, and the so-called Anthropocene, this history of our present is significant not only for its previous neglect but also for its reworking of environmental crisis and critique today. As the first faculty member from Bennington College to be invited to IAS, this work will also raise the intellectual profile of the PI's home institution, stimulate ambitious research agendas among faculty and students while improving infrastructures of support for such work, and catalyze new research among current collaborators, both at the home institution and beyond.?This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.