Description
Book SynopsisPerrin 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.
Trade ReviewPerrin Selcer shows the persistent attempts by UN-related researchers to produce global citizenship. In the process, he shows convincingly, a global epistemic community was created. Impressively researched,
The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment is highly original. An authoritative study. -- Alison Bashford, author of
Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on EarthThe Postwar Origins of the Global Environment reveals the hidden history of international society’s formative ideas. Before NGOs, before a world community could have moral weight, there had to be a theory of reform that was both widely shared and planetary in scale. Selcer shows how foundational beliefs of globalism—development, conservation, world citizenship, localism, the biosphere—originated among an international community of scientists and activists seeking answers for aggression, disease, and scarcity. Along the way are vivid portraits of iconic thinkers, such as Margaret Mead, Gunnar Myrdal, George Kennan, who often formed unexpected alliances. An absorbing, thoroughly detailed account. -- Nick Cullather, Indiana University, Bloomington
Selcer’s path-breaking study provides an original and thought-provoking account of the origins of global environmentalism within the world of mid-twentieth-century internationalism and its associated movements. His work brims with novel and important insights that will reshape scholarship in international history, environmental history, and the history of science. -- Jessica Wang, University of British Columbia
An engaging microhistory. * Choice *
In these accounts, the environment was a cause for diplomats and scientists, not just wild-haired, Birkenstock-clad activists. In this sense, [
The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment] move environmental history from the periphery to the mainstream of postwar intellectual and political history. * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Provides a useful nonlinear understanding of a commonly overlooked postwar success: the creation of potential energy stored in a transnational understanding of ecology that awaits a receptive political climate for influence and application by technocrats. * Journal of American History *
An insightful book. Selcer has made a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship that links environmental history, the history of science, and international history. * Diplomatic History *
A major contribution to the global history of environmental sciences and politics that lays new ground for
future research. * Isis *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
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
