RHN 101/2023 | Call
Organisers: Kristian Mennen (Utrecht University), Margot Lyautey (Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg)
19–23 August 2024, Oulu, Finland
Deadline for submissions: 18 September 2023
Call for Papers for a Roundtable
at the World Congress of Environmental History:
Optimising Nature? The human management regime of natural resources (1945–1970)
The roundtable sets out to explore the specific regime of human management of natural resources in the period 1945-1970. Environmental historians commonly consider these decades as a transition towards an affluent consumer society based on cheap, petrol-based mass production, with due consequences for environment and climate. In this roundtable, we will look into the prevalent discourses and ways in which management of natural resources was organised and institutionalised in various policy fields at the time.
As a working hypothesis, we assume that this regime of managing natural resources was characterised by: 1) unbroken trust in technical expertise, science-based solutions and in humans’ capacity to manage or conserve natural resources and mould natural environments to their economic needs; 2) a sense of limits to these natural resources. Coal and steel, food and water, fish and whale were considered as finite resources, which explains why contemporaries wished for an ‘optimised’ use, a rational management and fair world-wide distribution. The term ‘natural resource’ itself implies an idea of manageability.
The roundtable seeks to approach these discourses and practices by bringing together discussants working on various commodities and natural resources, which are often analysed separately, such as water, soil, fish, timber, fossil fuels, energy, vegetation, etc. Did water management follow the same patterns as the emergence of soil conservation or the development of agricultural policies? Did impending scarcity induce new scientific ideas about the management of natural resources? This will be a suitable basis for reflecting on the general question at stake.