Thursday, Jan 16
5:00 – 6:30 PM,
Buchanan Tower 1112
Robert Brain, Professor of History
https://history.ubc.ca/profile/robert-brain/ | https://sts.arts.ubc.ca/dr-robert-brain/
“A Cold War Quest for Soil-Less Food: Warren Weaver and Rockefeller Foundation Techno-Futurism”
In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III convened an advisory meeting of distinguished experts in energy, soil, demography, food, economics, and reproductive physiology in Williamsburg VA to contemplate solutions to a perceived global crisis of soil, food, and population. This came at a time, before the large-scale availability of synthetic fertilizers, when there was growing concern that worldwide degradation of soils and growing population would outstrip the carrying capacity of the planet. As Osborn put it in Our Plundered Planet (1948), humankind had become a “geologic force,” resulting in an imperiled “earth-home.”
In response to this coming crisis, the Williamsburg meeting participants explored various approaches to creating “soil-less food” – from unicellular algae to direct methods of photosynthesis, as well as recent methods for converting waste into consumable energy. In this STS colloquium Professor Brain will examine the epistemological, scientific, and political quest for soil-less food in this early Cold War U.S. context, with reflections on both eighteenth century debates on cornucopianism versus limits between Condorcet, Malthus, and Godwin, and the tribulations of recent Silicon Valley initiatives for cellular agriculture and synthetic foodstuffs
