Thesis ID: CBB001567605

Climates on the Move: Climatology and the Problem of Economic and Environmental Stability in the Career of C.W. Thornthwaite, 1933--1963 (2014)

unapi

Bergman, James Henry (Author)


Harvard University
Galison, Peter
Cohen, Deborah
Browne, E. Janet
Beckert, Sven
Coen, Deborah
Beckert, Sven


Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Advisor: Galison, Peter; Committee Members: Browne, Janet, Beckert, Sven, Coen, Deborah.
Physical Details: 288 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation examines the role of climate science in ensuring environmental stability. It traces the career of the climatologist Charles Warren Thornthwaite, beginning with his work as a population geographer for the Social Science Research Council in the early 1930s and ending in the early 1960s with his work as an independent consultant for the military, agribusiness firms, and international organizations. I argue that Thornthwaite's approach to environmental stability began as an effort to create "holistic" stability, one characterized by a relative continuity of the relationships of people to the land they inhabited, and evolved into approach that favored "mechanistic" stability, one characterized by the interaction and exchange discrete environmental factors--energy, water, crops, etc. Underlying this evolution in his approach to stability was Thornthwaite's adaptation to a changing series of "workscapes," of the sets relationships that he formed with his economic, political, and social environment, where "environment" includes not only the landscape, but also the economic, social, and material landscape of science. As his career progressed, the scale of Thornthwaite's area of study became progressively smaller, from the large scale planning efforts of New Deal land use planning committees, to the watersheds studied by the Soil Conservation Service, and finally to the industrial farms and military bases of Thornthwaite's later clients. Thornthwaite studied migration patterns in the Great Plains region while a staffer Study of Population Redistribution, managed weather observation networks in a drought-ridden section of Oklahoma and a repeatedly inundated Ohio, and consulted on harvest and irrigation planning at farm and frozen foods distributor Seabrook Farms. Tracing the career path of an individual scientist through a diverse series of workscapes, as opposed to focusing on particular institutions and infrastructures--laboratories, universities, regions--this dissertation offers an account of science, specifically climatology, whose role in governance had to be secured by manipulating an ever-changing set of relationships between capital, labor, infrastructure, and interpretation.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/10(E), Apr 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1557761519.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567605/

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Authors & Contributors
Benjamin W. Goossen
Johnson, Alison F.
Woodhouse, Keith M.
Turner, James Morton
Rothman, Hal
Robertson, Morgan
Concepts
Environmental sciences
Science and politics
Environmentalism
Science and government
Science and economics
Climate and climatology
Time Periods
20th century, late
21st century
19th century
Places
United States
Delaware (U.S.)
Greenland
Germany
Institutions
International Geophysical Year (IGY)
United States. Environmental Protection Agency
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