Environmental History -- Eleventh Class: History of Science

This week in my Environmental History course (ERST-CAST-HIST 4670H), our focus was on the history of science and the environment.  We took a broad view of the history of science: how we examine scientific knowledge itself, the evolving relations between science and other forms of knowledge (such as Indigenous knowledge and citizen science), changes in scientific practices over time, and the political roles of science.

But the core of the class (and it's an ambitious discussion, so we'll be continuing it next week), was how one studies the history of science.  As I've tried to do throughout the course, I wanted to keep a focus on the practice of history: working out how it's done, so that the students will be equipped to do their own historical research in the primary sources.

So I broke down the practice of studying history of science in terms of the kinds of evidence that are available.  These include the scientific literature, unpublished material (letters, reports, proposals, etc.), interviews, and research materials (such as field sites and lab equipment).  And we worked through the research techniques involved in using each of these kinds of evidence.

To make the discussion practical and concrete, we focused on one scientist: Ian McTaggart-Cowan -- one of the most influential of all Canadian ecologists, and the subject of two recent books, by Briony Penn and by Ronald Jakimchuk, R. Wayne Campbell, and Dennis Demarchi -- not quite biographies, but really useful sources on his life and work.

Some other sources also make him McTaggart-Cowan an ideal subject for exploring the study of the history of science: an interview by Alan MacEachern, which provides a model of interviewing technique; and the online collection of field notebooks, photos, and other materials assembled by the University of Victoria.  I also drew on some letters by or about McTaggart-Cowan that I collected from the national archives quite a number of years ago.

To make it a workable exercise, I focused our attention on one specific episode in McTaggart-Cowan's life: his study of wolves and other species in the Rocky Mountain national parks in the early 1940s, in the context of the active debate going on at that time about predator control, and specifically, of wolves.

So we began with a short review of the history of changing ideas about wolves as predators.  The point was to consider how these ideas have many layers, and reflect many economic, social, and cultural factors, both immediate, and buried in time.  A second point was the necessity in studying the history of science of understanding just what the people you are examining were thinking about -- in other words, to get inside their minds -- in this case, debate about whether wolves in the parks should be controlled.

So we worked through several kinds of research materials: published literature (an article by McTaggart-Cowan in the Canadian Journal of Research, 1947); several letters from 1943 that set out the decision-making process that led to McTaggart-Cowan being hired to do a study; the MacEachern interview with McTaggart-Cowan, which gave great insights into his motives and field experiences; and a look at the field site itself (the Rocky Mountains), and McTaggart-Cowan's work there, as described in his field journals.

This class was a bit of an experiment: to see if one could do a detailed "methods" workshop, studying primary sources with a class of 50 students.  I think it worked quite well -- and much of that was due to the efforts of MacEachern and the University of Victoria to put really useful research materials online.