[Sci-tech-public] Modern Times, Rural Places Seminar at MIT 12-10-2004

[Margo Collett]

Modern Times, Rural Places:

Seminar Series at MIT



Gregg Mitman

Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Science & Technology 
Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison





In Search of Health:  Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History



Health.  To Aldo Leopold it was the most vital function of living 
organisms. Land, like the human body, Leopold argued, was subject to 
disturbances that resulted in sickness and possessed a physiological 
capacity for self-renewal once disturbed.  The allusions to land health in 
A Sand County Almanac, a text heralded for laying the foundations of 
biocentrism, are striking.  But how are we to make sense of Leopold's 
seemingly incongruous mixture of medicine--the most anthropocentric of 
scientific arts--with that of conservation--the province and values of 
which Leopold hoped to ground largely in nonhuman nature?  Why, if health 
was so central to Leopold's conservation thought and practice, has it not 
been a subject more central to American environmental history?  Leopold's 
notion of land health takes us on an expansive voyage, from wildlife 
management in Wisconsin to colonial administration in the British empire, 
from the ecology of disease to the ecology of knowledge, from the Western 
frontier to landscapes of regeneration in city parks and wilderness 
retreats.  In this talk, I aim to show that health as an analytic category, 
embedded in the historical, material, and social relations of knowledge and 
place, reveals new patterns in the historical landscape of American 
environmentalism, whereby the spaces between health and conservation, 
humans and nature, city and country, and American and European 
environmental history appear not so wide. Air and water, microbes and 
pollen, toxic chemicals and radiation move in and out of urban and rural 
landscapes, through bodies, both human and nonhuman.  How such matter takes 
on form, acquires agency in bodies and landscapes, becomes a commodity in 
the consumption of health, or is turned into danger and risk, are themes 
that this lecture will explore.



Friday, December 10, 2004

2:30 to 4:30 pm

MIT, Building E51 Room 095



Sponsored by MIT's History Faculty and the Program in Science, Technology, 
and Society

For more information or to be put on the mailing list, please contact Margo 
Collett at <mailto:mcollet at mit.edu>mcollett at mit.edu

  or log onto our websites at 
<http://web.mit.edu/history/www/index.html>http://web.mit.edu/history/www/index.html 
and <http://web.mit.edu/sts/>http://web.mit.edu/sts/

For location visit http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg


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