Selcer The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment

How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-0-231-54823-6
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

Reihe: Columbia Studies in International and Global History

In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But the internationalists found hope in the idea of world government. In The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment, Perrin Selcer argues that the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth”—the idea of the planet as a single interconnected system—exemplifies this moment, when a mix of anxiety and hope inspired visions of world community and the proliferation of international institutions.

Selcer tells the story of how the United Nations built the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible. Experts affiliated with UN agencies helped make the “global”—as in global population, global climate, and global economy—an object in need of governance. Selcer traces how UN programs such as UNESCO’s Arid Lands Project, the production of a soil map of the world, and plans for a global environmental-monitoring system fell short of utopian ambitions to cultivate world citizens but did produce an international community of experts with influential connections to national governments. He shows how events and personalities, cultures and ecologies, bureaucracies and ideologies, decolonization and the Cold War interacted to make global knowledge. A major contribution to global history, environmental history, and the history of development, this book relocates the origins of planetary environmentalism in the postwar politics of scale.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Selcer, Perrin

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Internationale Organisationen und Institutionen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Science, Global Governance, and the Environment
1. Behind the Burlap Curtain
2. Conserving the World Community
3. Men Against the Desert
4. The Soil Map of the World and the Politics of Scale
5. Locating the Global Environment
6. Spaceship Earth in the Age of Fracture
Conclusion: The View from a Utopia’s Ruins
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Selcer Perrin :

Perrin Selcer (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. He has published articles in Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, the British Journal for the History of Science, and Current Anthropology.Perrin Selcer is an assistant professor in the History Department and Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan.