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Arms of Precision and Weapons of Mass Destruction
I am currently researching the spread of nuclear technology in the developing world, which means I have to confront the politics of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Although I support the NPT, as...
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Wikileaks and Information Control
As a historian of science and technology, I am fascinated by Wikileaks. But I’m also guilty of benefiting from it as a scholar, because I’ve used the cables for research in my work, much in the same...
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Are Real-Time Strategy Games ‘Environmental’?
“Nice Guys End Up With Madagascar.” This was the phrase on the back of the box for one of the most addictive strategy games of the late 1980s, Lords of Conquest, by Electronic Arts. I played this as a...
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Roundtable: Quagmire
Vietnam and “the environment” seem to go hand in hand. After all, the experience of the Vietnam War is a fundamental chapter in most narratives of the rise of global environmental consciousness. The...
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Shooting Sprees, Ender’s Game, and the U.S. Military
I’m not sure if it is fascinating or horrifying—perhaps both—to discover that life is like a video game. At least since the Columbine shootings, the Virginia Tech shootings, and certainly into the...
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Our Friend the Atom Goes to Mexico
As Arming Mother Nature goes to press, I’m deeply involved in my next project. This one’s on the promotion of nuclear technology in the developing world. The tentative title is Nuclear Outposts. I...
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Science vs. Technology Smackdown: Have We Survived the 1950s?
On a recent trip to Mexico I had a conversation that totally perplexed me about my academic life and work. An accomplished scholar from Europe asked me if I, as a historian of science, ever considered...
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Buying the Mirage: Are We All Implicated in Newtown?
I find myself trying to explain American gun culture a lot when I am with historians from other countries. These days, with Twitter, Facebook, and this blog, I don’t have to travel at all to interact...
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Where should historians send policy-relevant scholarship?
Here’s a fairly mundane post but on a subject that I could use some advice about. And I imagine it touches on a question that others face. It’s the holiday season and I am in limbo, with time to think...
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Will 2013 be the Year of Environmental Security?
Happy new year, folks. The Mayans were wrong, and I hope you haven’t cashed in the retirement fund. We’re still here. And yet the rhetoric of doom is alive and well, as the lead up to the...
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Roundtable: Wired Wilderness
One of the jarring elements of the blockbuster sci-fi film The Hunger Games was the setting of its quasi-gladiatorial combat. Rather than enter an arena and fight to the death, kids from all over the...
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World War II and the Environment
“World War II was wide ranging in its human, animal, and material destruction, it halted certain political ideologies in their tracks and strengthened others, and entailed the mobilization of natural...
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The Grim Logic of Biological Weapons
Biological weapons are not weapons of mass destruction. They are weapons of widespread death. The recent bombing of a Syrian research facility by Israel has brought into our view once again the future...
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Roundtable: Jørgensen, Making a Green Machine
Who knew that recycling machines could be so controversial? I recently edited another roundtable for H-Environment, and the experience was slightly different from previous ones. I approached Finn...
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Arming Mother Nature Excerpted in Salon
I learned today that a portion (chapter 6, to be exact) of my book Arming Mother Nature has been excerpted on Salon. The excerpt is titled “We Tried to Weaponize the Weather,” which is much more...
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A Dr. Strangelove for All Seasons
Included here is my review of Audra Wolfe’s fine book Competing with the Soviets, which I read shortly after completing my own Arming Mother Nature. I mention this because the gloom I felt after...
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Hydro Power and the Public Good
Driving eastward from Portland, Oregon, in the shadow of Mount Hood, it is easy to get the feeling of entering a gorgeous wilderness, away from human development. On the right, the verdant cliffs and...
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Does Crisis in Ukraine Shatter the Nuclear Order?
Ukraine’s inability to stop Russia from seizing Crimea may sound the death knell for the global nuclear order. For years I have written about the environmental dimensions of nuclear power and nuclear...
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Environmental Battles on the Missile Range
Just west of Alamogordo, New Mexico, the site of the first atomic test in 1945, there is an enormous stretch of land that is off-limits to civilians, known as White Sands Missile Range. Since the...
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