Climate and Coexistence in Twentieth-Century Ecology

This presentation is part of a longer history of the science of human susceptibility to atmospheric change, from the policing of bad air in the eighteenth century to our own era of anthropogenic climate disasters. This history explains why climate science has failed to serve climate justice. Yet this outcome was not inevitable: the science of the atmosphere was more multivocal in the past than we tend to remember. Alternative visions came from women working on the margins of the scientific community, who were able to identify the biases and dangers of mainstream science and model more ethical approaches to investigating the nexus of climate and life. The lecture considers the career of the ecologist Margaret Strickland Collins (1922–96), who dedicated much of her career to understanding why some species of termite are more resistant to dry conditions and extreme heat than others. Most of Collins’s contemporaries took as a matter of faith that animal populations are naturally balanced and argued that the only mechanism capable of stabilizing populations was competition within or between species. Her mentors at the University of Chicago argued instead that population stability was not necessarily a result of competition; stabilization could arise from cooperation in the face of a threatening climate. As a Black woman and civil rights activist, Collins questioned what her mentors counted as evidence of “cooperation” among both termites and people.

Deborah R. Coen is a Professor of History and the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. Her research focuses on the modern physical and environmental sciences and on central European intellectual and cultural history. She earned a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Before coming to Yale, she taught for ten years in the History Department at Barnard College and was Director of Research Clusters for the Columbia Center for Science and Society. At Yale she is also a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Humanities Initiative. Her books include: Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007), The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (2013), and Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (2018).

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