[Sci-tech-public] REMINDER: STS Circle, November 4 - James Bergman (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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James Bergman
Harvard, History of Science

on
Working on Climatic Time: Climatology and Labor
Practices in Postwar Industrial Agriculture

Monday, November 4
12:15-2:00 pm
Maxwell Dworkin, 33 Oxford Street, Room 119

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Today, Wednesday, October 30.

Abstract: In 1946, C.W. Thornthwaite left his position as principal climatologist at the Soil Conservation Service to consult for Seabrook Farms, one of the largest growers of truck crops and distributors of frozen foods in the United States. While there, he attempted to redress the problem of labor unrest and employment uncertainty brought on by the seasonal hiring and firing by reorganizing the farm’s harvest schedule. The new schedule staggered planting and harvesting on the basis of a “climatic calendar,” rather than a civil calendar, and was widely hailed as a successful nonmilitary application of the new field of operations research. For present-day scholars, it provides an opportunity to understand how ideas about climate were embedded not only in the physical characteristics of a region (rainfall, temperature, etc.), but also in practices of labor and industrial organization. It also illustrated the way in which climatology was presented as a way to understand and mitigate both environmental and social instability.

Biography:  James is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University. His dissertation traces the career of the climatologist C.W. Thornthwaite through government, academia, and business consulting (from 1933 to 1963), with a view toward understanding the interaction between climatology and ideas about environmental control and stability. He was the recipient, in 2011, of the History of Science Society’s Nathan Reingold Prize for best original graduate student essay on the history of science and its cultural influences, for “Fighting Chance: The Science of Probability and the Forecast Controversy Between the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory and the U.S. Signal Service, 1884–1890.” Prior to his PhD work, James received his A.B. in History and Science at Harvard. He later worked as a research associate in the areas of science and technology policy and international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.



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