Following the Data: Environmental Archives between Geophysics and Biology

AbstractIn this talk I will present my current project, which explores the practices and politics of large-scale data collection in the environmental sciences during the Cold War. One of the purposes of this project is to broaden the historical inquiry into how knowledge about the environment was produced, by exploring the practices of data collection in both physical and biological environmental sciences. I will illustrate my project by presenting two case-studies, one from the physical environmental sciences and another from biological environmental sciences. The first example draws on the history of the World Data Centers, organized to serve the International Geophysical Year (1957-8). I will take us through several moments that will serve as snapshots of the ways in which the practices of global data collection and data exchange in physical environmental sciences shaped and were shaped by the Cold War political economy in the 1950s and early 1960s. After establishing this background I will then turn to my second example and will trace the ways these practices were emulated in the biological environmental sciences, but also altered at the critical nexus of ecological science and environmental politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Taken together, these examples reveal a less familiar kind of narrative in the environmental history, illustrating how the focus on data practices, and “following the data” around, allows to re-think the history of environmental sciences and to broaden the inquiry into how the knowledge about the environment is produced within but also beyond its traditional relationship with ecology.