2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

Christian␣ C. Young Mount Angel Seminary
HSS Abstracts
American Wildlife Organizations in the Progressive Era
The emergence of concern for wildlife protection around the turn of the
twentieth century corresponded with a growing insistence on scientific
expertise. As a consequence, subsequent generations of biologists, game
managers, and historians have generally considered wildlife protection a part
of the Progressive Era nature conservation movement. While the connection
between wildlife protection and American conservation may be undeniable,
the standard interpretation of conservation as a Progressive Era movement
deserves further examination given the relationship between scientific expertise
and wildlife protection. In this paper, I examine that relationship, looking
specifically at the way American wildlife organizations used Progressive Era
rhetoric about science to promote greater participation for scientists in wildlife
protection and policymaking. Scientists themselves often found themselves
in the uncomfortable role of expert without any particular expertise. Rather
than withdraw, however, scientists adopted an approach that has persisted in
conservation and environmental controversies: they issued demands for further
study. This served the dual purpose of justifying their initial involvement and
ensuring their continued authority in debates over wildlife protection, even if
they were not certain how scientific knowledge might contribute expertise. I
will use a number of brief cases to illustrate this trend and suggest its centrality
more generally in the notion of scientific expertise in conservation during the
Progressive Era.
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Suzanne Zeller Wilfrid Laurier University
Elective Affinities:
National Identity and Early Timber Researches at McGill University,
1894-1910
During the 1890s, McGill University became a centre for pioneering researches
in forest sciences. An outgrowth in North America of tension between modern
industry’s voracious appetite for natural resources and a nascent public awareness
of ecology and the need for conservation, forest sciences embraced a broad
spectrum of subfields intertwining physics, chemistry, engineering, and biology.
As they were practised at McGill, forest sciences invited cooperation primarily
between faculty members from the Departments of Applied Science and Botany.
Responses to their published work generated cross-border discussions with
colleagues at American institutions, engaging national identities both directly
and indirectly in complex permutations and combinations from at least 4 different
perspectives: a British “empirical” engineering tradition in timber testing
transplanted by McGill’s dean of applied science, H. T. Bovey (1852-1912) a
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