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

不久前，理解和解决环境问题还被认为是科学和技术的工作。今天，人们普遍认为‘环境’是由自然和文化系统组成的。要成功理解和影响这些系统，就需要在科学/人文领域开展合作。这在物种保护等领域非常紧迫：尽管40年来国际上采取了协调一致的保护行动和倡导，但如今生物多样性的损失率比以往任何时候都要高。然而，事实证明，在努力发展所需的知识和方法的过程中，很难调和纪律上的分歧。科学家们不确定如何将定性数据纳入他们的生态模型。社会科学家经常对管理社会生态系统的量化方法持怀疑态度。许多人文学者不熟悉自然科学的数据和方法，也很少接触科学文献。该项目旨在解决这一紧迫的实际和智力问题。它的目标是以一种新颖的方式做到这一点：通过对围绕环境的现有跨学科努力的回顾，以及通过比较对同一环境问题的科学研究和人文研究，对科学/人文关系进行实证研究。这将通过一种新的科学史应用来实现：这是一个跨越科学/人文领域的领域，专门对过去和当代的研究和知识进行概念和背景分析，涉及自然和文化两个方面。该项目将收集和回顾美国、欧洲、非洲、东南亚和澳大利亚对环境问题和干预措施的分散的跨学科、跨学科和一些单一学科的研究(约1950-2010年)。在这一广泛的范围内，重点将是生物多样性保护、自然环境中的牲畜流行病以及自然环境中的土著土地利用做法。这些焦点被选为具有自然和文化层面的关键问题领域，在这些领域中，保护工作可能与人类社区的需求和发展相冲突。要提出的问题包括：尝试了哪些组合和方式来结合方法或批判性观点？哪些类别的问题吸引了跨学科协作？这些方法在假设和结论上有何不同？哪些方法和/或项目效果很好？为什么？对这些问题的回答将成为提出今后科学/人文合作能够富有成效的方式的经验基础。这是该项目的总体目标。该项目是伦敦帝国理工学院人文和科学的首次正式研究合作，该项目将科学、技术和医学史中心与帝国理工学院保护科学结合在一起。因此，这些成果将更有可能对科学和人文领域的研究人员有用。这些成果将包括出版的文献综述、方法类型、案例研究的注释书目，以及如何设计对科学和人文领域的研究人员都有意义和有用的跨学科和协作工作的建议，并将最大限度地提高两者的洞察力和批判能力。这些成果将超越学术研究--专业和第三部门组织、政策制定者、受环境问题和保护解决方案影响的社区，以及更广泛的参与环境和人类发展问题的公众--感兴趣。结果将在网站上公布，供这些受众讨论和使用，并在可能的情况下直接传达给政府和非政府组织，特别是参与调查的案例研究的组织。

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.