[SydPhil] HPS PRESENTATION - LEAH ARONOWSKY - Cybernetics and the Making and Unmaking of Ecological Threats

Wed Jan 22 14:38:58 AEDT 2020

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SCHOOL OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
PRESENTATION
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DR LEAH ARONOWSKY
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

Cybernetics and the Making and Unmaking of
Ecological Threats.

Abstract: Scientists have widely accepted the greenhouse gas theory of climate change since the mid-twentieth century. Yet it was only in the 1980s that this phenomenon was cast as an environmental problem. This talk analyzes this disjuncture. It explores the role of the conceptual frameworks of science in the making and unmaking of ecological “threats” by charting the rise and fall of the idea of the planet as a cybernetic system. First introduced to the US and British environmental sciences in the immediate postwar era, cybernetics took a systems approach to the planet itself, recasting the environment as a self-regulating, self-correcting, stable system. In so doing, it offered a new way to understand the ecological effects of anthropogenic pollutants by making it possible to imagine chemical pollutants like radioactive fallout and greenhouse gases as merely “temporary disturbances” to the system. Using the case of greenhouse gases and global warming, the talk traces how this cybernetic conception of the planet led scientists to cast the climate as fundamentally imperturbable to human-induced disturbances. In so doing, the talk shows how the conceptual frameworks of science have historically been used to produce—as well as counter—ideas about what constitutes an ecological threat at a given historical moment.

WHERE:  LEVEL 5 FUNCTION ROOM
F23 ADMINISTRATION BUILDING
WHEN:  TUESDAY 28TH JANUARY 2020
START:   5.00PM
All Welcome | No Booking Required | Free

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Unit for History and Philosophy of Science · University of Sydney · Sydney, NSW 2006 · Australia

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