Bio
Sara B. Pritchard is Associate Professor in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône and coeditor of New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies. Her current research on the history of light pollution and scientific research about this issue has been supported by the National Science Foundation. She is writing a book based on this research, From Blue to Black Marble: Knowing Light Pollution in the Anthropocene.
Memory Effects and Dark Histories: Ecological Light Pollution Research and Nazi Legacies at the LakeLab
Ecologists’ concept of “memory effects” considers how past environments shape current and future ones. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research, I use this concept to radically expand ecologists’ definition of “the environment.” In particular, I argue that contemporary ecological light-pollution field research in greater Berlin can only take place because of the site’s longer naturalcultural history, which includes the crucial role the Nazi regime played in creating the nature reserve in which this field station—the “LakeLab”—is located. Reserve status protected this part of Germany from suburbanization and has therefore limited artificial light at night in the area. Ultimately, light pollution research at the LakeLab in the early twenty-first century is not only entangled with but also indebted to Germany’s “dark history.” This talk unfolds through three parallel, but entwined, narratives: my ethnographic fieldwork, a longue durée history of the site, and Nazi history in the area. The resulting experimental form—which seeks to embody the very theme of this workshop, “Experimental Environments”—uses the ideas of experiment, enclosure, obscurity, and sediments to frame these entangled histories.