Shannon Stunden Bower
This is the sixth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.
In The Great Acceleration, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke proposed four paired concepts as avenues into the global transformations they see as defining the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s: energy and population, climate and biological diversity, cities and the economy, and Cold War and environmental culture.1 I’d like to propose science and knowledge as a pair of concepts with potential to shed light on important dimensions of Canada’s Great Acceleration. What follows are but some preliminary and scattershot thoughts on these matters; I’d welcome discussion and corrections in the comments to this post.
Science as tricky infrastructure
Increased interest in science and technology is a characteristic of Canada’s mid-twentieth century. The questions raised by World War II and, later, the Cold War were taken by some political leaders to demand answers that were at least partly scientific in character. In this context, we see the operation of what Alex Souchen and Matthew S. Wiseman have identified as Canada’s military-industrial complex.2 Science served as a means through which the state consolidated authority and control over both human communities and non-human nature, with some social scientists and natural scientists exercising their expertise in service of what they conceived as the public interest, while others worked in private-sector contexts where profit was a prime motivator. As Blair Stein has proposed, mid-century scientific and technological advances like air travel affected people living in northern North America not just through the new possibilities these afforded but also through how these reshaped prevailing ideas of distance and environment – or, phrased more broadly, of human possibility in this time and place.3
A study of science in Canada’s Great Acceleration can take cues from recent scholarly examination of the relation between science and capitalism at transnational scales. Lukas Rieppel, Eugenia Lean, and William Deringer have proposed an analytic focus on the ways that science and capitalism have co-produced each other, arguing that the relation between these two is best understood in evidence-based analyses of particular historical contexts.4 From this perspective, we might consider how science and capital came together under the particular conditions prevailing in mid-twentieth century Canada, in the understanding that such studies might intersect in productive ways with efforts to probe interconnections between science and capital in different historical contexts or at different analytic scales, including the global or planetary. Studies of Canada’s Great Acceleration can help to illuminate the intersections between science and capitalism, on the one hand, and colonialism or imperialism, on the other – intersections that Rieppel, Lean, and Deringer identify as particularly in need of study.
Science might be understood as the tricky infrastructure underpinning Canada’s Great Acceleration. By the mid-1960s, a variety of ways of thinking about and with science were coming to the fore in Canada. Some federal leaders viewed science as a tool that had yet to be used to its full potential, looking to the prospect of a Canadian science policy as a way to improve matters.5 And science underpinned the amplification of this period’s environmentalist critiques, with activists (including some scientists) marshalling scientific insights in efforts to highlight what they saw as the alarming ecological changes associated with the Great Acceleration. While it facilitated the environmental transformations characteristic of this period, science also served as a lightning rod for anxiety on the part of political leaders and expert decision-makers, and it empowered emerging critiques of the accelerated environmental exploitation characteristic of the mid-twentieth century.
The history of science is both an established field of study in its own right and an important sub-theme in many works of Canadian environmental history. And historical work engaging with science is supported in a Canadian context by a number of important institutions, including the journal Scientia Canadensis, the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association (CSTHA), and Ingenium, a crown corporation that involves three museums focused on the history of science and technology in Canada. Expanded engagements with science in mid-twentieth century Canada are needed not only to generate insights on Canada’s Great Acceleration, but also to amplify and enrich important work already underway on the histories of science and technology in a Canadian context.
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