The intersection of environmental and technological history creates the need and opportunity to investigate several central and pressing conceptual issues. For environmental history and the history of technology to learn from each other, we need to create a richer and more vigorous understanding of society, technology, and nature—and the interactions across that triangle. The goal of our program is to spend the next few years working with a postdoctoral fellow and several graduate students to wrestle with three particular tensions along each side of the triangle: social construction and determinism, nature and technology, individual agency and power.
One of the major developments in the history of technology and science-technology studies in the past fifteen years has been the appearance of the social construction approach. As first introduced by Pinch and Bijker (1987), social constructivism argued that technological change is underdetermined by nature and economics, leaving social factors to play an equally important role. Social construction appeared about the same time as conscious calls within the history of technology to challenge technological determinism (Smith and Marx, 1994) and to develop a contextual approach (Cutcliffe and Post, 1989). The result of these several developments has been the appearance of a strong and vigorous literature which explores how a variety of social factors--politics, class, gender, labor-management relations, business organizations, national styles--influence the design of technological artifacts (examples of this huge literature include Brown 2000; Carlson 1991; Cowan 1983; Fischer 1992; Haraway 1991; Hecht 1998; Hughes 1983; Lerman, Mohun, and Oldenziel 1997; Mackenzie 1990; Scranton 1997, 2001; Seely 1987).
While there is no denying that social factors shape the ways in which technology is produced and consumed, the trend in the history of technology has been to perhaps overemphasize role of social factors in shaping technology and downplay the constraints imposed by nature. For instance, as Walter Vincenti (2000) has observed, we can imagine numerous different airplanes that would serve needs of society, but due to the laws of aerodynamics, only a few of these designs might actually fly. What is now needed are new ways to think about how people shape technology in response to both social and natural factors. We need new analytical frameworks that have the flexibility of constructivism but do not become reductionistic or deterministic; developing such a framework is the first task of our project.
Both the need and opportunity for balancing the social and natural factors can be readily seen if we consider for a moment two other major conceptual developments in technological history and science-technology studies (STS), the systems approach and actor-network theory. As introduced by Thomas P. Hughes (1983), the systems approach calls for historians to investigate not just individual machines but how machines constitute a system with political, social, and economic elements. Although a powerful analytical tool, the systems approach draws a distinction between the human and non-human elements in the system, and in particular, nature is regarded as outside the system. In contrast, the actor-network theory--as developed by European sociologists Michel Callon (1987), Bruno Latour(1996) and John Law--treats human and non-human elements as equal players in the network. Most notably, not only are people and machines included in the network but nature is as well. For instance, in one memorable study, Callon (1986) argued that one could only understand the story of efforts to revitalize fishing in St. Brieuc Bay off France by treating the scallops as actors on a par with the humans. The actor-network model, then, shows one way to integrate technology and nature in our analysis.
Not only can science and technology studies contribute to reinterpreting social construction and determinism, but we will also draw on environmental history. Several promient historians of the environment have emphasized the role of natural forces in shaping human history--whether it be geography (Diamond, 1998), germs (Crosby, 1986), or rivers (Worster, 1985; White, 1995). Equally, William Cronon (1991) demonstrated how to blend natural factors (wheat, timber, the Great Lakes), technological factors (the railroad), and social factors (entrepreneurship and the market economy) into a rich narrative of the rise of Chicago. Hence the first question that we wish to investigate with our graduate students and postdoc is how to talk symmetrically about nature and society as forces that influence human history without being reductionistic or deterministic.
But to create a space between constructivism and determinism, we need to rethink what we mean by nature and technology. In both environmental and technological history, we tend to dicohotomize nature and technology (Marx 1964). Nature is "out there" beyond human control whereas technology is the product of human planning and action. We associate nature with the biological, organic, or earth-based while we assume that technology is about manipulating mechanical, chemical, or electrical forces. Yet both the agricultural revolution of 10,000 BC (Diamond 1998) as well as recent biotech developments remind us that humans have survived not only by manipulating physical but also biological forces. How useful, then, is this dichotomy of nature versus technology? Would it be useful to think of humans mobilizing both nature and technology?
In looking more closely at technology and nature as conceptual categories, we believe that scholars need a symmetrical or balanced perspective in our explanations. Borrowing again from SCOT, Bijker and Pinch (1987) observed that scholars often attribute the success of a new technology to its technical characteristics and failure to its social characteristics; what Bijker and Pinch were seeking in SCOT was to get scholars to be more even-handed and use both technical and social factors in explaining either success or failure. This sort of symmetry is vitally needed to advance both environmental and technological history and to get beyond labeling technology as “good” and nature as “bad.” For instance, in looking at natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, some historians of technology have taken the view that floods on the Mississippi are prevented by “good” technology like levees but that when floods do occur, it is because the river--nature--is being unruly or bad.
Conversely, environmental historians tend to bias their analyses in ways that characterize nature as good and technology, or any interfering human agency, as bad. In an important article, Cronon (1992) compared two histories of the Dust Bowl, a profound event in the nation’s technological and environmental history, to show that environmental historians tended to write stories of declension. At the time, he asked the field to challenge its assumption that people altered the environment and destroyed its suitability as a home for people, as well as for other creatures. A recent trend characterized by Steinberg’s work analyzes why society perceives hurricane and flood damage to be caused by nature’s aberrations rather than by people choosing to live on risky flood plains and beach areas (1995, 2000). Younger scholars like Paul Sutter and David Igler integrate Steinberg’s theme with older literature (Crosby 1986) as they trace environment, contact, technology, and disease transmission in Panama and the Pacific cultures (Sutter 2002, Igler 2002). Far from transplanting a declensionist narrative to new areas, Sutter and Igler get beyond rhetoric to seek the reasons that people adopt technologies and behaviors that affect their health and prosperity profoundly. Hence, a second goal of our work over the next three years would be to figure out ways to handle nature and technology in a symmetrical fashion in narrating human history
As noted above, both environmental and technological historians have examined how social categories--race, gender, class, politics, and economics- have informed technological designs and interaction with the environment. Using these categories, historians have been able to explore the nature of power in society, as it is often through control of technology or natural forces that some people are able to establish and maintain dominance over others (Noble 1977). In doing so, historians of the environment and technology have been participating in the larger agenda of American history to reinterpret the past through the lens of diversity.
But one should note that in working with these social categories, much of the analysis to date has been on the group or institutional level. We believe that the next opportunity for environmental and technological history is to consider how social factors may influence how individuals make choices as they interact with nature and technology. For instance, one of us (Carlson) is writing a biography of the inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) who was born into Serbian family and raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church. Tesla's ethnic and religious background are unusual for an inventor in the American electrical industry in the late nineteenth century; most of his peers (Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Elihu Thomson) came from Northern European and Protestant backgrounds. Surely, Tesla's unique background certainly influenced the inventions he produced, but there is no strong tradition in the biographical literature of inventors and technologists for linking broad social categories with technical choices. (There is, however, more of a tradition of relating social factors and environmental thought, as shown in biographies of John Muir [Holmes, 1999; Williams, 2002]) Hence, a third goal of our three-year project is to develop ways for drawing on social history and the social history of technology to think about how broad social categories "get into" technology via the actions of individuals.
More broadly, we feel that it is ongoing challenge for historians to grapple with the problem of agency; while individuals may respond in ways that reflect their social background, they may also make choices that do not mirror this background. How can historians acknowledge individual agency but at same time locate it within a social framework?
In thinking about the relationships among society and technology, we believe that there are additional important issues relating to power. In any society, not all individuals exercise the same amount of power over technology and nature; society tries to constrain access to power via categories such as race, gender, and class. Often however, individuals cope with or even circumvent social categories through use of technology or nature. For example, Jacoby (2001) has shown that local hunters and fishers continued to use technology (rifles, fishing rods, and other gear) to capture and use nature (fish and game) despite new laws supported by wealthy urbanites that reclassified subsistence hunting and fishing as poaching as part of the creation of Adirondacks State Park in New York state. Moreover, critics of technology sometimes assume that only the powerful are able to use technology to advance their interests. However, drawing on the work of Douglas (1987) on radio amateurs, Pfaffenberger (1987) on counterculture figures in the personal computer movement and Carlson (2001) on telegraph reformers, we wish to explore how other non-powerful groups for used technology or nature to cope with (or even change) the existing social order. How have women, minorities, and Native Americans shaped technology to create a place for themselves in American society?
We believe that it is essential for students and scholars in technological and environmental history to wrestle explicitly with what they mean by the relationships between nature, technology, and society; only by doing so will scholars then be able to make informed choices about the narrative strategies that now tend to dominant each field. Environmental historians are prone to narratives of decline while technological historians have been criticized for writing progess narratives (Staudenmaier 1985; Cronon 1992). For many environmental historians, the good life is that in which man lives in harmony with nature, and the rise of technology in the West has largely been a story of a loss of this pastoral ideal. (This perspective has come under criticism, provoking sharp debate among environmental historians [Cronon 1996a and 1996b, Hays 1996, Cohen 1996, Dunlap 1996]). In contrast, while many historians of technology are deeply concerned about the ways in which humans have used technology to alter nature, they have tended to assume that the cumulative development of technology has generally been positive for individuals and societies. For the most part, historians of technology argue that humans have used technology to bring about progress, whether measured in terms of material wealth, better health, or political and intellectual freedom. We would argue that, for scholarship about technology and nature to evolve, it will be necessary for historians to not “automatically” fall into either a narrative of decline or progress but instead think carefully about the narrative strategy they are constructing. In training our postdoc and graduate students, we believe that a close and careful discussion of how nature, technology, and society are intertwined will allow them to make informed choices about how they write technological and environmental history; perhaps they will even be able to construct alternative narrative strategies which explore what we mean by progress and if nature is truly the well-spring of human happiness.
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