Issue 17.2 - April 2012
A year after the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, in Japan, we bring together five scholars of nuclear power and Japanese history to examine the causes of this disaster and the lessons for future nuclear power development. Sara B. Pritchard, in her essay “An Envirotechnical Disaster: Nature, Technology, and Politics at Fukushima,” explores the envirotechnical systems that shaped the disaster, paying particular attention to the political factors that made some workers far more vulnerable to radiation exposure than other workers. In “From Fearsome Pollution to Fukushima: Environmental Activism and the Nuclear Blind Spot in Contemporary Japan,” Simon Avenell examines the development of environmental activism in modern Japan, asking how and why a nuclear blind spot emerged in a nation with such striking successes in control of other pollution sources.
In two shorter thought pieces on the Japanese nuclear disaster, Frank Uekoetter explains its meanings for European nuclear policy, and Jacob Hamblin discusses several problematic tropes that historians use to frame our understandings of nuclear accidents. Finally, Christine Marran's gallery piece meditates on what become visible and what becomes invisible in the photography of crisis.
Other articles in this issue explore related themes of pollution and science. In “Defining a Nuisance: Pollution, Science, and Environmental Politics on Maine's Androscoggin River,” Wallace Scot McFarlane shows how citizen views of science and the environment were reshaped during the 1940 to 1970 transition from localized nuisance control to concerted environmental action. By focusing on a single key chemist in one watershed, McFarlane reveals how individuals and their ideas were influenced by the river itself.
Tom Robertson's “Total War and the Total Environment: Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt, and the Birth of Global Ecology” uses the work of Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt to reexamine our understanding of the transition from the early conservation movement to the postwar environmental movement. Robertson argues that the big stories of the mid-twentieth century—the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the postwar economy—had key international environmental components. In particular, Robertson asks us to attend to a conflict of economic paradigms that continues to haunt us today. Who was right about consumption? John Maynard Keynes, with his school of consumption-driven economic growth? Or Aldo Leopold, with his challenges to growth based on the ecological concepts of carrying capacity and limits? Osborn's Our Plundered Planet and Vogt's Road to Survival both argued that Keynes's vision of consumption-driven growth would lead inevitably to war.
Adam Hodge's essay, “In Want of Nourishment for to Keep Them Alive”: Climate Fluctuations, Bison Scarcity, and the Smallpox Epidemic of 1780–82 on the Northern Great Plains,” combines multiple lines of evidence to understand disease ecology. He asks why smallpox spread so widely among the migratory tribes in North American and why it proved so virulent. Hodge highlights the environmental and cultural complexity of infectious epidemics, revealing how humans and ecosystems transformed each other.
Finally, we are honored to include in this issue Harriet Ritvo's essay “Going Forth and Multiplying: Animal Acclimatization and Invasion,” which she delivered in Phoenix, Arizona, in April 2011 as the American Society for Environmental History Presidential Lecture. Ritvo discusses the nineteenth-century attempts by acclimatization societies to move animals from one part of the world to another. These transfers blurred the boundaries between the domesticated and the wild, and like the Japan disasters of 2011, they also undermined easy assumptions about human control.
Nancy Langston |
