The fields of the History of Science and Environmental History have both staked their professional inquires on the assumption that science attempts to know nature. Yet new work in both fields has raised new questions. If there are eras and places in which the concept of nature did not even exist, what does the concept of science look like from a perspective broader than that of Western Europe? If there is no concept of science as an inquiry into nature, but science is instead a social construction based on an already socially- or racially-constructed nature, what is nature? Has nature been so altered by science and technology in the Age of the Anthropocene that it can no longer be thought to exist separately from humanity? Are science and nature now so completely intertwined and merged that we can no longer even use the two words separately? This panel will discuss new work that forces both fields to confront the basis for their very existence, for their existence as separate fields, and their major focus on the West. It will revisit the parallel panels on “Natural Knowledge: Roundtable on the Histories of Science and the Environment,” held at ASEH St. Paul, March 30, 2006 and HSS Vancouver, Nov. 3, 2006. The ASEH 2018 panel was held the ASEH meeting in Riverside, CA on March  17 and we are proposing this parallel session for HSS Seattle.

Organized by Carolyn Merchant (University of California, Berkeley)