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Silent Spring

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Silent Spring Silent Spring Chemical, Biological and Technological Visions of the Post-1945 Environment Friday 1st March 2013, 11.30am – 7pm Humanities Research Centre (Berrick Saul Building), University of York 11.30 – 11.45am Delegate Registration, Coffee and tea (BS/008) 11.45 – 11.50am Introduction (Sophie Jones and Catherine Spencer) 11.50 – 12.20pm Greens vs. Science? Alice Bell, University of Sussex 12.20 – 12.40pm Eco-Activism, Hollywood Style: The Role of Popular Films in Raising Environmental Awareness David Kirby, University of Manchester 12.40 – 1.00pm Discussion (chaired by Catherine Spencer) 1.00 – 1.45pm Lunch 1.45 – 2.05pm The Underlying Horror of the English Countryside Isabella Streffen, University of Sunderland 2.05 – 2.20pm Discussion (chaired by Sophie Jones) 2.20 – 2.30pm Comfort break 2.30 – 3.00pm Nuclear (South) Polarity Fabienne Collignon, University of Sheffield 3.00 – 3.25pm ‘Of What Disaster is This the Imminence’: ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ and the Christian Apocalypse Benjamin Madden, University of York 3.25 – 3.45pm Discussion (chaired by Stephanie Lambert) 3.45 – 4.00pm Coffee and tea 4.00 – 4.20pm Thinking Through Environments from a Liquid Perspective Hannah Boast, University of Sheffield/York 4.20 – 4.40pm ‘The Horrible Global Mess this Little World is in’: Lee Bontecou’s Plastic Flora and Fauna Jo Applin, University of York 4.40 – 5.00pm Discussion (chaired by Karina Jakubowicz) 5.00 – 5.10pm Comfort break and re-location to the Treehouse for discussion 5.10 – 5.25pm Interdisciplinary Transitions Siân Beynon-Jones, University of York 5.25 – 6.30pm Roundtable discussion 6.30 – 7.00pm Wine reception 1 Abstracts and Speaker Biographies Alice Bell: Greens vs Science? As with the biologist Julian Huxley’s role in the founding of the World Wildlife Fund the year before Silent Spring’s publication, Carson’s book is endemic of the way science’s ability to look carefully at the natural world alerts us to the negative impacts humans have had on it. To borrow a phrase from sociologist Steven Yearley, there is “elective affinity” between science and the greens. However, as Yearley himself would be keen to stress, this doesn’t mean it’s a simple relationship and fights over GMO research last May as well as on-going disputes about nuclear power have only developed the green movement’s reputation for “bad science”. It might be tempting to see a clean split between “modern” (or “bright”) greens who embrace new technologies and Romantic tree-hugging hippies, suspicious of the shiny new world the Industrial Revolution promised. But behind the Frankenfoods mask, green critique is often less “anti-science” and more a hopeful attempt at harnessing the power of science for social good. Rather than wave terms like “luddite” “anti-science” “bright green” or “neo-green” around to find ever more ways to distinguish themselves from one another, scientists and environmentalists would do well to think about what they have in common and what they may learn from one another. Alice Bell is a research fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, focusing on public engagement with science and technology. She also blogs about science policy for the Guardian, is climate change editor at New Left Project and co-runs the Brain Train podcast. David Kirby: Eco-Activism, Hollywood Style: The Role of Popular Films in Raising Environmental Awareness Starting in the early 1970s filmmakers, scientists, and environmental groups found Hollywood movies to be an effective means to raise public awareness of environmental issues. There are three key elements behind environmental activists’ belief that movie depictions can stimulate the public into political action: 1) that high profile nature of Hollywood movies can effectively “alert the public” about a potential disaster, 2) that movies graphically visualize ecological disasters in such a way that the public will be frightened into trying to prevent these disasters, and 3) that a film’s impact depends critically upon the plausibility and credibility of its disaster scenario. In this talk I will examine how filmmakers hire environmental scientists as consultants in order to make sure their films are “real” enough – in narrative, representation and dialogue – so that the films serve as an asset and not a liability for their environmental causes. Films to be examined include No Blade of Grass (1970), The Omega Man (1971), Z.P.G. (1972), The China Syndrome (1979), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). I will show how environmentally active filmmakers and their science consultants act as “Ghosts of Christmas Future” like in Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol. They present audiences with bleak visions of the future in these movies, while still indicating that the public has the power to see that this future does not come to pass if they pay attention to these environmental issues. I will also discuss how the larger environmental community reacted to these films, including concerns about using fictional endeavours as public service announcements. 2 David A. Kirby was an evolutionary geneticist who left bench science to become Senior Lecturer in Science Communication Studies at the University of Manchester. His experiences as a member of the scientific community have informed his internationally recognized studies into the interactions between science, media, and cultural meanings. His book Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema demonstrates scientists’ impact on cinema and how these texts have subsequently affected real world science and technology. He is currently working on a book titled Playing God: Science, Religion, and Cinema, which examines how cinema served as a battleground over science’s role in influencing morality. Isabella Streffen: The Underlying Horror of the English Countryside Orange Herald, Violet Club, Yellow Sun, Blue Streak. The names are reminiscent of tubes of oil paint or jars of pigment. But they are all code names for military projects in the UK during the 1950s, many of which were concealed in top-secret rural bases like RAF Spadeadam. How have contemporary artists responded to the revelation of these once-classified schemes, their hidden locations, and the threatening presences that they engendered? From the wilds of Orford Ness to the archives of the Library of Congress, via hard-boiled eggs and mysterious swamps, this talk proposes a short, illustrated introduction to some twenty-first century artistic practices that reflect on the twentieth century’s fall-out. Isabella Streffen is an artist and postdoctoral research associate at Sunderland University's Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss. She works across media examining and responding to fundamental problems of politics, perception, technology and narrative. Recent projects include residencies at the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Hadrian's Wall, the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Library of Congress; and exhibitions and temporary public realm performances/events in Europe and the US. Her doctoral research at Newcastle University focused on military visioning technologies and strategies and their use in fine art practice. Fabienne Collignon: Nuclear (South) Polarity This paper is concerned with the emergence of proto-cybernetic gadgets and specimens in Antarctica. Its starting point is that the cold war was literalised at the South Pole, which also operates as a shadowy double of the overtly militarized Arctic. What happens in Antarctica is a secret assimilation of space into the American cold war perimeter by way of weapons technology, most notably through the gyrocompass (which develops into the black box navigation systems for ballistic missiles) and the man-machine amalgamation. This assimilation and emergence are traced at hand of exploration narratives (Harold Ponting; Douglas Mawson; Richard Byrd) as well as science fiction stories (H.P. Lovecraft; John W. Campbell, Jr.) that precede the cold war, but whose forging of a superman-specimen anticipate the conceptualisation of Antarctica as a cold war space. The South Pole operates as zone of rehearsal for super-power merging: the explorers become prototype cyborgs whose “explorations” point towards the containment culture, epitomised in the gyrocompass/black box technology, of the cold war. Fabienne Collignon is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is particularly interested in American techno-culture and machine aesthetics. Her work to date focuses 3 mainly on cold war dream weapons and their implantations in the land. She has published articles in Textual Practice, CTheory, Configurations and Orbit. Benjamin Madden: ‘Of What Disaster is This the Imminence’: ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ and the Christian Apocalypse The last two decades of scholarship on Wallace Stevens have seen an effort to reassess his poetry in the light of literary criticism’s embrace of historicism. One outcome of this approach has been the consensus that the poems of Stevens’s late collection The Auroras of Autumn, despite their dense and abstract style, are immanently concerned with the aftermath of the Second World War. “The Auroras of Autumn,” the title poem of the collection, is typical: the calamity of war is just one of many kinds of apocalypse present within. However, historicist criticism of this particular poem has been limited compared with others. One exception is Charles Berger’s 1985 Forms of Farewell, which makes a conjecture that I intend to expand on here: that the central metaphor of the poem, the auroras, attempts to figure for the advent of the atomic bomb. Berger’s idea has been resisted by readers for whom Stevens’s “abstract” style militates against any of his diffuse images being read in a specific light. But Stevens’s work needs to be situated against the new discursive field of the nuclear age. By doing so, we can appreciate “The Auroras of Autumn” as a powerful account of nuclear apocalypticism, and a model of the politics of the commonplace with which Stevens opposed it.
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