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Earth After Empire: Planetary Knowledge and Globalization Since 1945
Abstract:
Planet Earth has become a potent symbol of solidarity in our time of intersecting social and environmental emergencies. Efforts to confront the challenges of inequality and ecological degradation may require forging new relationships with the planet. Uncovering the history and valences of planetary thought has thus emerged as a topic of urgent debate among academics, activists, and members of the public. This talk contributes to that conversation through an examination of the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958.
The International Geophysical Year constituted the most ambitious cooperative program of the twentieth century to study Earth as a planet. It involved tens of thousands of scientists and citizen volunteers from most countries. Its organizers (a team of rivals from both sides of the Iron Curtain) shared stated commitments to scientific progress and economic development while in other respects falling on different parts of a vast political and ideological spectrum. Organizers sought to acquire comprehensive environmental data—including data related to “extreme” regions like the upper atmosphere, the deep ocean, the poles, and outer space. Cold War rivalries and the collapse of empires shaped and were, in turn, informed by this transnational quest for planetary knowledge, pursued in concert with the construction of postcolonial globalization.
Bio: Benjamin W. Goossen is a historian at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. His work focuses on the intersections of environmental history, the history of science, and global and international history. Goossen’s research has been published in Antisemitism Studies, Contemporary European History, German Studies Review, Journal of Global History, and elsewhere. His first book, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, appeared with Princeton University Press.
Books to learn more:
Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).
Jacob Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Naomi Oreskes, Science on a Mission How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)
Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).