03 Nov 2018 09:00 AM - 11:45 AM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T090020181103T1145America/Vancouver"Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth"
In 1955, an influential group of scholars, who included historians, geographers, ecologists, and zoologists gathered at the Princeton Inn for the international symposium “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, conference participants examined “man’s evolutionary dominance” and the changes he wrought on the “physical-biological environment.”[1] Among the topics they explored were deforestation, soil erosion, waste disposal, and energy use. The late Oxford geographer Michael Williams identified that the symposium “validated the interdisciplinary approach, heightened the environmental consciousness in the English-speaking world, and exerted an unprecedented influence on the development of a unified approach to environmental issues.” However, little historical attention has been devoted to “Man’s Role.”[2]
In this panel, we explore the environmental, social, and political issues that “Man’s Role” participants wrestled with, and we examine the intellectual legacy of the symposium. Simon Torracinta places the conference within broader debates about decolonization and universalist humanism. Jonathan Phillips identifies new evolutionary theories forged during the Cold War era and discussed at “Man’s Role.” Zachary Loeb examines the technological and ethical critiques Lewis Mumford issued at the symposium. James Bergman draws connections between the work of Paul Sears, R.J. Russell, C.W. Thornthwaite and that of nineteenth-century environmentalist George Perkins Marsh. And finally, Emilie Raymer suggests that “Man’s Role” precipitated interdisciplinary dialogues about anthropogenic environmental change.
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Chelan, First FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
In 1955, an influential group of scholars, who included historians, geographers, ecologists, and zoologists gathered at the Princeton Inn for the international symposium “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, conference participants examined “man’s evolutionary dominance” and the changes he wrought on the “physical-biological environment.”[1] Among the topics they explored were deforestation, soil erosion, waste disposal, and energy use. The late Oxford geographer Michael Williams identified that the symposium “validated the interdisciplinary approach, heightened the environmental consciousness in the English-speaking world, and exerted an unprecedented influence on the development of a unified approach to environmental issues.” However, little historical attention has been devoted to “Man’s Role.”[2]
In this panel, we explore the environmental, social, and political issues that “Man’s Role” participants wrestled with, and we examine the intellectual legacy of the symposium. Simon Torracinta places the conference within broader debates about decolonization and universalist humanism. Jonathan Phillips identifies new evolutionary theories forged during the Cold War era and discussed at “Man’s Role.” Zachary Loeb examines the technological and ethical critiques Lewis Mumford issued at the symposium. James Bergman draws connections between the work of Paul Sears, R.J. Russell, C.W. Thornthwaite and that of nineteenth-century environmentalist George Perkins Marsh. And finally, Emilie Raymer suggests that “Man’s Role” precipitated interdisciplinary dialogues about anthropogenic environmental change.
[1] Paul Fejos. “Foreword.” In Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Ed. William L. Thomas, Jr. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956), viii.
[2] Michael Williams. “Sauer and Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” The Geographical Review. Vol. 77, No. 2 (Apr. 1987), 218.
Organized by Emilie Raymer (Johns Hopkins University)
"The Agency of Man on the Earth": Cross-Disciplinary Studies about Anthropogenic Environmental Change View Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences09:00 AM - 09:30 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 16:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 16:30:00 UTC
In 1955, geographer Carl Sauer and geneticist Edgar Anderson were reunited in Princeton, New Jersey for the conference “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” Sauer, one of the conference organizers, delivered the paper “The Agency of Man on Earth,” in which he argued that although humans had always caused ecological damage, modern agricultural practices driven by industrial capitalism were particularly harmful. Consistent with his other work, Sauer painted in broad strokes, drew connections between ancient and modern man, and issued a scathing critique of contemporary profit-driven culture. In contrast, the paper of Edgar Anderson, “Man as a Maker of New Plants and New Plant Communities,” provided a careful study of how humans had cultivated vegetation. Anderson’s tone was diplomatic, and he concluded dispassionately that “man has been a major force in the evolution of plants and animals.” Although these two papers were, at least superficially, quite distinct, Sauer and Anderson had, prior to the conference, formed a close friendship and had conducted expeditions to Latin America to collect and study indigenous maize samples. Sauer had inspired Anderson to consider humans as an active agent in biotic change, and in turn, Anderson had inspired Sauer to draw connections between macro and microevolution. And their mutual influence is apparent in their “Man’s Role” papers. Sauer and Anderson are just one example of the interdisciplinary collaborations that had taken place prior to the “Man’s Role” symposium. In this paper, I examine the relationship between Sauer and Anderson and explore some
Man and Nature View Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences09:30 AM - 10:00 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 16:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 17:00:00 UTC
In 1955, the climatologist C. Warren Thornthwaite presented a paper to the conference on Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in which he proposed a way to improve the “water economy” of drought-prone regions. The language he used was one of “balance,” and the hope that he had was not that he would make the area better, but that he would correct “defects” in the climate. The rhetoric of “balance” pervaded the proceedings of the conference, from the introduction, which traced its ancestry back to the George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 work, Man and Nature, in which Marsh called for the possibility of restoring the “disturbed harmonies” of the natural world. In this talk, I will trace the usage of the words “balance” and “harmony” in a selection of papers delivered to the conference, including those by ecologist Paul Sears, geographer R.J. Russell, and climatologist C.W. Thornthwaite, as well as through the transcribed discussions from the conference. I will examine it in relation to their intellectual inspiration, Marsh, as well as changing ideas about the relationship between the economy and the environment in the 1950s.
"Our Destiny and Our Duty": Evolution’s Role in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the EarthView Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences10:00 AM - 10:30 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 17:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 17:30:00 UTC
Against the backdrop of the Cold War, several midcentury biologists worked to radically revise the basic idea of evolution, broadening it far beyond its traditional scope. Drawing heavily on the work of French paleontologist and idiosyncratic Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, biologists including Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and G.G. Simpson redefined evolution as a universal process encompassing all change over time, from the cosmic level to the cultural. This redefinition served to support an urgent conclusion: that humanity had replaced natural biological and geological processes to become the primary agent of evolutionary change. In this paper, I will explore how this understanding of evolution—explicitly adopted by a number of organizers and participants—informed the Wenner Gren Foundation’s 1955 conference, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. The ongoing interplay between the life and social sciences in the wake of that conference can be observed in the 1959 Darwin Centennial Celebration at the University of Chicago, an event ostensibly intended to delimit and define the discipline of evolutionary biology one hundred years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, but which included a number of the anthropologists from the Man’s Role conference, including Sol Tax, the Darwin Centennial’s organizer. Contextualized in larger contemporary discourses, these conferences can be used to trace the migration of ideas from evolutionary theory and outré Catholic theology into social scientific, ecological, and evironmental thought.
"Negative Miracles" – Lewis Mumford and Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the EarthView Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences10:30 AM - 11:00 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 17:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 18:00:00 UTC
When Carl O. Sauer and William Thomas began planning the “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” conference, they initially envisioned it as being a celebration of the 19th century conservationist George Perkins Marsh. As such, it seemed obvious to Sauer and Thomas that they could not put on a “Marsh Festival” without inviting the man they credited with re-discovering Marsh, namely: the social critic Lewis Mumford. Accepting the offer to help organize the event, and to be one of its three co-chairs, Mumford was involved in drafting lists of invitees and commenting on the shape and general tone of the conference. In particular, Mumford pushed his fellow organizers to invite speakers who would emphasize the question of ethical responsibility, who would consider the risk of irreversible technological damage to the natural world, and – most importantly – who would raise the question as to whether or not the urge to control the Earth had in the end been self-defeating. An active participant in the conference’s discussions, Mumford chaired the “Prospect” section of the conference, and was given the honor of delivering the event’s closing comment. An honor Mumford used to darkly muse “I would say that man’s future seems black, though perhaps a shade lighter that it was five years ago.” Drawing upon original archival research conducted using the Wenner-Gren Foundation Archives and the Lewis Mumford Papers, this paper will consider Mumford’s role in organizing the “Man’s Role” event, and on how the conference fits into Mumford’s oeuvre.
A Science for "Man with a Capital-M": Man’s Role and Anthropology in the Atomic AgeView Abstract Part of Organized SessionEnvironmental Sciences11:00 AM - 11:30 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 18:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 18:30:00 UTC
In the face of both decolonization and the threat of human extinction, many anthropologists in the Cold War sought to shake the discipline out of what they saw as its post-Boasian doldrums. In this paper, I use Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, the massive cross-disciplinary symposium of both social and natural scientists organized by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1955, to examine the question of “history” in anthropology. The Wenner Gren sought to use Man’s Role to renew dialogue between physical and cultural anthropology towards a new, unified science of Man, “the first species significantly to affect the course of his own evolution,” for the Atomic Age. Man’s Role was to delineate a new, species-level natural history of mankind, an approach championed by natural and social scientists alike, from the historical geography of Carl Sauer and Richard J. Russell to the organismic models of ecologists like F. Fraser Darling and Paul Sears. I contrast this approach to the cultural-ecological and materialist emphasis on history placed by the multilinear “scientific evolutionism” of Julian Steward and his students grouped around the Mundial Upheaval Society, developed in precisely this period though notably absent from Man’s Role. The conference’s conception of history as species-unity mapped onto a Cold War universalist humanism – what Eric Wolf derided as “Man with a capital M” – which starkly contrasted with the sympathies of Wolf et al. with the emerging politics of decolonization.
