Running on Empty? Anxieties over Resource Exhaustion across Time and Place
Panel - American Historical Association
04.01.2013
Location: AHA 127th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA,
The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society sponsored a panel and comments at the 127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association. The session historicized today's anxieties over energy and resource scarcity by exploring the dynamics and results of previous resource depletion. Paying particular attention to how different groups of people understood and represented the subject over time. The topic allowed for a diverse panel of historians, who attempted to add depth to and improve historic analyses of exhaustion narratives—considered to be an increasingly important task for environmental history in the twenty-first century.
Chair: David Kinkela, State University of New York at Fredonia
Panelists:
- Paul E. Sabin, Yale University “The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and the Gamble over Earth’s Future”
- Andrea E. Ulrich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH) “Peak P revisited: Been There, Done That?”
- Jeffrey T. Manuel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville “Was Scarcity the Mother of Invention? How Engineers Used Worries over Resource Exhaustion to Promote Specific Technological Fixes”
- Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, University of Minnesota “National Decline as the End of the World: The ‘Peak Oil’ Movement in the United States, 2005–10”
Comment: Frank Uekötter, LMU Munich
Panel Report (pdf, 263 KB)