Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism

You are invited to the annual Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture. This year’s guest speaker will be Jacob Darwin Hamblin; his talk will be drawn from his new and acclaimed book Arming Mother Nature. A description of the talk and information about the speaker is below. The talk will be held November 7, 2013 7:00 PM at the Loma Pelona Conference Center on the UCSB campus. Parking is available in Parking Lot 23 near the UCSB Faculty Club.
When most Americans think of environmentalism, they think of the political left, of vegans dressed in organic-hemp fabric, lofting protest signs. In reality, the movement–and its dire predictions–owe more to the Pentagon than the counterculture. In his talk, Hamblin argues that military planning for World War III essentially created “catastrophic environmentalism”: the idea that human activity might cause global natural disasters. This awareness emerged out of dark ambitions, as governments poured funds into environmental science after World War II, searching for ways to harness natural processes–to kill millions of people. Hamblin explains the history of how the Cold War coincided with and catalyzed the birth of modern environmental science. Along the way, we see how Cold War scientists, driven initially by strategic imperatives, learned to think globally and to grasp humanity’s power to alter the environment.

About the Speaker:
The author of Arming Mother Nature and other books, Jacob Darwin Hamblin writes about the history and politics of science, technology, and environmental issues. He was born in Germany and grew up on or near American military bases, before going to college and graduate school in California, where he earned a Ph.D. in History at UC Santa Barbara. As an adult he has lived and worked in France, England, and several universities in the United States. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and many publications devoted to the history of science, technology, and the natural world. He currently resides in the American Pacific Northwest, where he is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University.