Environmental History Seminar

The middle of the nineteenth century was an era of sail and water that capitalized on the Cape's rich fishing grounds, forests, and marshes. This paper will focus on the environmental impact of the regime of resource utilization of extraction and production. It will explore why that environmental impact led to the crash of the regime.   The essay will then consider the emergence of the regime of tourism and the environmental impact of that regime. The example of Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker, who went before the Wellfleet town meeting in 1906 and argued that the community should spend tens of thousands of dollars dyking the tidal inlets to the town's saltwater marshes to cut down on mosquitoes and encourage tourism, provides an example of this shift and the underlying themes.

As the landmarks of architectural history are reconfigured according to the pressures of environmental crises, the Dover Sun House (1948) will likely assume a prominent position. Designed by Eleanor Raymond with the MIT engineer Maria Telkes, the house was built in 1948 on a site outside Boston. In this temperate climate, it was an "all‐solar house": there was no mechanical heating system. Winter heat was provided through a complex system of absorbing solar radiation and storing it in chemical compounds.

Today the house is not well known; neither is the fact that the late '40s was a period of intense anxiety over the depletion of energy resources. The Dover Sun House, as one of the most technologically aggressive of the solar houses in the period, was a catalyst for those arguing for the importance of "alternative energy" in the world's energy metabolism. Maria Telkes's presentations to UN conferences, corporate boardrooms, and philanthropic missions made her a central figure in a diffuse network attempting to harness the power of the sun to expand the economic and industrial possibilities of the so‐called "underdeveloped countries." This presentation will explore her exploits in the context of contemporary assumptions about the political valence of alternative energy technologies.

Since the English colonization of North America in 1620, the resources of New England’s coastal waters have supported the economic and cultural systems of what is now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This paper investigates the early history of state control of these offshore resources, drawing on colonial-era sources on fishing and whaling. It looks at the efforts of colonial authorities to oversee New England waters and describes the development over time of the colonies’ efforts to maintain the region’s fish, shellfish, and cetacean populations, both for the subsistence use of individual citizens as well as for export to Caribbean and European markets. It argues that the modes of oversight developed during the colonial era came to serve as the basis for fish, mollusk, and cetacean management efforts in future centuries, as well as for structuring current debates about how new uses of marine resources, such as capturing offshore winds for the generation of electricity, should be regulated by the state.

"Backwater" tells the story of the expansion of slavery along the Red River of Louisiana with attention to the questions and concerns of environmental history. The essay's central character is a phenomenon called the Great Raft, a one-hundred-mile morass of tangled driftwood trees, shrubs, and silt in the middle of what should have been the Red River's main channel. The Raft influenced the lives of all parties involved in the transformation of the Red River into cotton country. Native polities, emigrant planters, slaves forced to emigrate, Indian agents, creole traders, steamboat captains, and inventors all had their lives shaped by the Raft.  

For the most part, the histories of these many actors on the leading edge of plantation slavery have been told separately. Histories of Indian Removal focus on politics either within Indian nations or in U.S. policy. Histories of slaves and slaveholders tend to focus on the plantation without asking how plantation spaces were made in the first place. Histories of technology focus on coteries of inventors, often removing them from the political and material worlds in which they worked. What these separate narratives share, however, is a story of environmental transformation. "Backwater" brings these actors together through the Raft and through an 1830s federal project to "permanently" remove it.

We regret to announce that this program has been cancelled and will not be rescheduled.

In 1876, Julius Wolff arrived in Eastport, Maine, to try his hand at producing a domestic sardine that could compete with the European imports. He successfully canned 600 cases of sardines, which quickly sold in the New York market for up to $12.00 a case. Although Wolff tried to keep his new business venture a secret the profits were undeniable and new sardine factories quickly sprung up in Eastport, Lubec, and Robbinston, Maine. By 1899 sixty-eight plants in Maine produced 1,170,568 cases of sardines. The sardine factories were in such fierce competition with one another in acquiring herring fish from the local weir fishermen that they were forced to pay extremely high prices for their catches. Weir fishermen maintained high prices for their catches by selling them via an auction system that directly pitted competing canneries against one another. Because weir fishermen controlled the access to the base material of production, juvenile herring fish, independent of the canneries' management they could exercise a considerable degree of economic power. Although not formally organized into a cooperative or union, these weir fishermen in Downeast Maine still yielded a similar style of control as those formal organizational structures in such a way as to protect their shared interest and to ensure continued local profitability.