The man’s clothing seems more appropriate to the office than to the field (or the lab, for that matter), but I suppose the rolled sleeves indicate that he is “at work.”

I don’t think you could find a clearer illustration of the twentieth-century effort to bring lab-like instrumentation and rigor to field biology. Of course, most biologists didn’t approach the “lab in the field” with such literal-mindedness.

According to this account by Bill Amos, the Nikon H, which was only on the market for a few years, was based on a field-microscope design from the 1930s.

Click the image for a larger version with legible text.

Science under Scrutiny: How Endangered Species Protection Reshaped Twentieth-Century Field Biology

Since the 1970s, studies that involve attaching radio-tags to whales and other wild animals have been subject to rigorous ethical and environmental regulations. Photograph by Brandon Southall. Courtesy U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Scientists played a central role in the emergence of a movement to protect endangered species from extinction in the twentieth century. This movement, in turn, reshaped scientific practices, communities, and personas and reoriented research toward new goals. Among other things, vast databases of species were constructed that both reflected the state of the art in biological knowledge and helped to determine the future paths of, and legal constraints on, biological research. Endangered species became objects simultaneously of intense epistemological interest and of special ethical care. This entanglement of ethics and epistemology, social movements and scientific knowledge, is the subject of ongoing research affiliated with the Sciences of the Archive project in Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

In 1986, a young biologist from the University of Cambridge proposed a new method for studying the genetics of the killer whale population of the Pacific Northwest: using darts fired from a crossbow to collect small pieces of tissue from free-swiming orcas. Although the scientist duly applied for and received a research permit from the U.S. government, as required by law, the study never took place. Instead the scientist and the government agency that issued the permit became embroiled in a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace, which argued that the risks of darting outweighed its benefits. Faced with a court injunction, the scientist abandoned his plans. Biopsy darting would eventually be used for research on orcas, but it would remain controversial, particularly in areas such as the Pacific Northwest with resident orca populations, strong environmental movements, and economically significant ecotourism industries. Most studies of killer whales would continue to rely on less invasive techniques.

This episode is an example of a much broader phenomenon in the history of biodiversity science in the second half of the twentieth century: the reshaping of knowledge-making practices by ethical and environmental concerns. We know very little about how and why such concerns became embedded in the work of field biologists in the late twentieth century, or why episodes such as the one recounted above—in which methods seen as legitimate within the scientific community were rejected or reshaped by environmental and animal rights activists—became increasingly common.

This research project is motivated by the idea that this ethical-epistemological entanglement has shaped both what we know about and what we view as an ethically acceptable relationship to other forms of life. Building on existing studies of research practices and material culture in the laboratory and the field site, it seeks to highlight the increasingly central role played by ethical concerns, public scrutiny, and laws, regulations, and standards in late-twentieth-century scientific practice, particularly in the United States. It does so through archive-based studies of the work and thought of individual scientists and organizations as they evolved over time in response to new concerns about species survival and animal welfare, as well as through in-depth study of the regulatory process, which reflects changing mores and expectations.

The project consists of several strands, each concerning a different aspect of this ethical-epistemological entanglement. One strand addresses the ways in which views of scientists’ responsibility for the protection of endangered species have changed over time, generating new roles for scientists as well as for the general public and government regulators.

In the United States, concern about the survival of endangered species can be found as early as the turn of the twentieth century, along with worries on the part of scientists that such concern—manifested in bag limits, wildlife refuges, and other restrictions on the killing of certain species—might constrain their ability to produce new knowledge. But a significant turning point can be identified in the 1960s and 1970s, when a host of new environmental protection laws were enacted and older laws were strengthened or enforced with new intensity.

Biologists played central roles in justifying and formulating these new laws, but they were unable to control them completely, often finding that rules that had seemed acceptable on paper became burdensome in practice. This strand of the project traces their efforts as well as those of environmentalists and animal rights activists to reshape the regulatory system in their favor, with each group claiming that they had the best interests of animals and the environment at heart.

Conservation biologists were hardly the only ones during this period to become subjects of heightened scrutiny because of the risks and harms of their research practices, nor were they the only ones to struggle with the formal, bureaucratized regulatory systems that resulted and with the interests groups and members of the public that contested them. In the second half of the twentieth century, as government support of science expanded dramatically, research in numerous disciplines came under new forms of regulatory control. This development was so general, affecting fields as different as physics and psychology, that it cannot be tied to scandals arising within any single discipline or to the concerns raised by any particular social movement.

Biopsy darting is now a commonly used technique, but it remains controversial, particularly when used to study whale populations that are closely observed by tourists and local residents. Photograph by Wayne Hoggard. Courtesy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A second strand of this project therefore attempts to explain the rise of regulatory approaches to managing risky scientific practices during this period across a wide variety of disciplines and to determine what remained common and what changed according to discipline. In March 2012, a workshop on Regulating Research was held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science to bring together experts in the history of the formal regulation of scientific practice in both the United States and Europe. The discussion addressed empirical studies of such diverse fields as anthropology, archaeology, biomedicine (including both human and animal subjects), chemistry, and field biology as well as more general theoretical contributions. Ongoing work is examing the specific ways in which regulatory regimes have dealt not solely with the risks identified by scientific research but also with those risks directly produced by it.

While one goal of this project is to explain the emergence and development of a regulatory regime for science, another is to use the regulatory record itself as a new source of historical evidence. The regulatory record includes both the issuance of new regulations and decisions on particular cases and offers a unique source of insight into changing research priorities and ethical concerns. This record is particularly rich in the United States, where a strong faith in the value of transparency, tied to skepticism toward centralized government, led to the publication and dissemination of documents that in many other nations have remained internal to the regulatory process.

A third strand of this project therefore uses permit applications and other regulatory notices as a source of information about changing practices, research orientations, and social networks within conservation biology. For the most recent period, these notices are available in electronic form that can be automatically processed to extract meaningful patterns, such as the geographical distribution of researchers and field sites, the species and taxa that have received the most attention, and the kind of research methods that have been proposed. In combination with the qualitative historical work described above, this data allows for quantitative measures of the changing character of conservation biology over time.

In sum, this project concerns the ways in which social values and norms come to shape knowledge-making practices. It seeks to show how ethical concerns, embodied in formal systems of rules and regulations, have shaped what it is possible to know, and particularly how enviromental and animal welfare concerns have reoriented the work of field biologists in the past half-century. Among other results, the project has shown how changes within conservation biology were part of a much broader regulatory turn in the governance of science, and how the rise of regulation helped produce a new political self-consciousness among field biologists. Current work is focused on determining the epistemological impact of these shifts, i.e., how the goal of biodiversity conservation has shaped what we know about living things and ecosystems, including the complex, politically significant databases of endangered species that have been built since the mid-twentieth century.

This project has been conducted within the framework of the Sciences of the Archive project in Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, under the direction of Lorraine Daston, and in close relation to its working group on Endangerment and Its Consequences, led by Fernando Vidal, now at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Software for extracting and mapping information from regulatory documents has been developed in collaboration with Dirk Wintergrün and the Information Technology team at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

One is the brainchild of Joanna Radin, who invited myself, Susanne Bauer, Andi Johnson, and Geof Bowker (as discussant) to think about “The Science of the Baseline” (Thurs., Oct. 18, 4pm, Solbjerg Plads: SP213). My contribution is a meditation on numbers and time in the conservation of everyone’s favorite polar predator:

Floating nature: beyond the baseline in biodiversity conservation
In the early twenty-first century nature seems to have pulled free of its moorings like a hot-air balloon caught by a sudden gust of wind. No longer rooted in what were perhaps always illusory certainties — divine providence, universal law, ecological equilibrium — it now presents itself as an artifact that emerges over time and in relation. Like a freely traded currency, its value is backed by nothing but a collective promise. Baselines continue to serve as ballast in environmentalist arguments for restoring ecosystems and wildlife populations to their „original“ states, but their intellectual heft is on the wane. What good is a baseline when the world it describes has already disappeared, can never be restored, and may never have existed in the first place? This paper examines the changing fate of the environmental and environmentalist baseline with respect to the conservation of polar bears from the 1960s, when a boom in trophy hunting led to concerns about the survival of the species, to the past few years, when the threat of climate change has led to the designation of polar bears as „vulnerable“ and „threatened“ by international conservation organizations and national environmental agencies. Recent discourse around the endangered polar bear exemplifies a new relationship to time and to nature: the forgetting of past nature as no longer relevant in a world reshaped by human action, the fear of future nature as unpredictable and potentially monstrous. In this floating world, ecological baselines continue to appeal even as they evanesce.

Should be fun. I’m also excited about a second panel for which I’ll be serving as discussant — actually the first half of a two-part extravaganza organized by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Natasha Myers around the subject of “Affective Ecologies” (Sat., Oct. 20, 9am, Solbjerg Plads: SPs13). Sadly Natasha won’t be able to make it to Copenhagen, but she and Maria have lined up a stellar group of people working on dogs, cheese, smells, birds, dirt, and other lively, affecting things, including Heather Paxson, Dimitris Papadopolous (presenting with Maria), Peter Hobbs, Kelly Ladd, Astrid Schrader, Jens Lachmund, and Stefan Helmreich (as discussant for the second panel: Sat., 11am, same room as the first).

a bird caught by a “camera trap” on bumpkin island

In the summer of 2008 I was lucky enough to be able to collaborate on an artistic experiment on camouflage and surveillance on one of the islands in the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area. It’s hard to believe that was almost four years ago. On the principle that late is better than never, I thought I’d attempt to describe what we did and why it turned out to be such an exciting experience/experiment.

The Camoufleurs project was initially dreamed up by historian of science Hanna Rose Shell and architect Dan Hisel, who successfully proposed it to the coordinators of the Bumpkin Island Art Encampment, then in its second year. At the time, Hanna was in the process of writing what would turn out to be a fascinating book about the history of camouflage. Dan had also been studying the history of camouflage and teaching his students about its relevance to architecture.¹

Dan and Hanna had decided to combine their interests by constructing camouflaging “ghillie suits” out of materials found on the island (Hanna) and building a “blind” out of reflective Mylar (Dan). Like the projects of the other artists’ groups who would be spending five nights camped out on Bumpkin Island within sight of the Boston skyline, Camoufleurs would give visitors a new perspective on the Boston Harbor and on the place of art in public spaces. It would raise questions about visibility and invisibility, surveillance and secrecy, nature and culture.

When Hanna told me about Camoufleurs, I was struck by the project’s resonance with my own research on the surveillance of wildlife. Even though my focus had been on wildlife radiotracking,² I’d also been thinking a lot about the recent rise of cheap, ubiquitous “trail cameras” or “camera traps,” which are used by scientists, hunters, and wildlife enthusiasts to capture images of elusive animals.  I suspected that these motion-activated cameras had a greater impact on the animals they were meant to photograph and on the humans who resided in or visited the landscapes where they were deployed than many of their users were willing to admit, at least on the record.

the blind at dawn

I was already in the process of writing an argumentative piece for Slate to try to raise the visibility of the camera-trapping issue, and I was intrigued by the possibility of engaging the questions I was posing in that piece in a more visceral, experimental, unpredictable way. I wanted to get my hands dirty.³

constructing a ghillie suit

Surveillance was the logical complement of camouflage, an effort to make visible what had been hidden. What if I put some camera traps of my own on Bumpkin Island? How would the presence of hidden cameras change visitors’ experience of nature and art on Bumpkin Island? How would it intersect with the questions about visibility and invisibility raised by Dan’s and Hanna’s interventions? Could I find some way to link the questions I had about the surveillance of animals to the surveillance of humans, without suggesting that the questions were exactly the same?

Hanna and Dan both seemed excited about the possibility and graciously invited me to participate. The lack of funding put a limit on my technological ambitions, but for about $100 I was able to order two bare-bones trail cameras from Cabela’s, the hunting and outdoor sports megastore.

caught while adjusting one of the “traps” (video)

During our five-night stay on Bumpkin, I spent most of my time helping to construct the blind, weaving my own ghillie suit, swimming off Bumpkin’s dock after the last ferry had left the island for the night, and enjoying the spontaneous community that emerged among the artists camping on the island. But I also took the time to place and re-place the two camera traps at the site where we were constructing the blind, near Bumpkin’s highest point, and at a few other, more secluded locations.

Without a computer to download the images to, I had no idea whether the cameras were capturing anything of interest. I very quickly realized that my near-total ignorance of what kinds of animals were on the island and where they were most likely to be found was a serious flaw in my plan. Too busy thinking about the cultural big picture, I hadn’t taken the time to do my biological homework.

dan and hanna leaving the blind

I have to admit that when I got back to the mainland and looked through the hundreds of images and video clips the cameras had recorded, I was pretty disappointed. Except for the cameras that I had set up immediately at the site of our construction of the blind, which captured innumerable photos of myself, Dan, Hanna, and the rest of the team as well as a number of visitors, most of the shots seemed to consist solely of dirt, rocks, and plants. I could only speculate that the cameras had been triggered by animals or people that had moved past the infrared beam too quickly for my low-budget equipment to react.

It was fun, in a theoretical way, to think that I had a collection of photos taken a second or two after some anonymous creature had passed by, but a lot less fun than an actual photo of one of the coyotes reputed to visit the island from time to time would have been.⁴ Even a bird or a mouse or two would have been some consolation.

a rodent overexposed by the camera’s flash

Actually, it turns out that the cameras did capture a bird or a mouse or two. I just hadn’t looked closely enough, or if I did, I was too focused on those coyotes to recognize the value of what I had. Looking at the photos now, a few years later, it’s a thrill to see even a blurry glimpse of a bird or the silhouette of an unidentified rodent. It makes me curious to know more. What kind of animal was it, exactly? What was it doing and where was it going when it was caught on camera? How had it reacted to the sound of the camera’s shutter or the light of its flash?

I find something poignant in these brief, almost accidental photographs of animals going about their business: hints of lives that resemble our own in some ways but which remain alien to us no matter how much technology we use to peer into them. Looking back from the distance of a few years, that pretty much sums up how I feel about camera traps. They’re capable of producing amazing images that ultimately remind us of how little images alone can do. Like other forms of intensive surveillance of the natural world, they can produce an extraordinary amount of “data,” but I doubt that it’s data that we’re missing most sorely at this historical juncture.

a night-time visit to the blind

I’m not sure whether any of these ideas came across to visitors to our installation on Bumpkin Island, but I do know that everyone involved in the Camoufleurs project came away invigorated. There was something very gratifying about the way that our projects intersected with and built off of each other, both because and despite of their differences: Hanna’s ghillie suits, blending the human figure into the natural landscape through careful artifice; Dan’s blind, reflecting the experience of invisibility back on itself; my cameras, creating an atmosphere of aleatoric surveillance.

It was a kind of experiment in collaborative work across the borders of art, technology, and science that I wouldn’t mind trying again. For more on the Camoufleurs, including some photos of higher quality than my trail cameras were capable of acquiring, check out this 2009 blog post by Dan Hisel.

1. The Bumpkin Island Art Encampment ran for five years, from 2007 to 2011. In 2008, it was cosponsored by the Boston Harbor Island Alliance, the now-defunct Berwick Research Institute, and Studio Soto. Descriptions of that year’s projects can be found in the 2008 Bumpkin Island Art Encampment pamphlet (pdf). Photographs by the Boston Globe’s Mark Wilson are available at “Artists Bring a History Lesson to Bumpkin Island.” For Hanna’s and Dan’s writings on camouflage, see Hanna Rose Shell, Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconaissance (Zone, 2012); Dan Hisel, “Camouflage, or the Miscommunication of Architecture,” blog post, Temptation by Space, 1 Sept. 2009 (originally written in 2002).
2. Etienne Benson,  Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
3. Etienne Benson, “Paparazzi in the Woods,” Slate, 14 Aug. 2008. On the history and ethics of photographing and filming animals, see Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film, rev. ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009); Jean-Baptiste Gouyon, “The BBC Natural History Unit: Instituting Natural History Film-Making in Britain,” History of Science 49 (2011): 426-451 (paywall); Brett Mills, “Television Wildlife: Documentaries and Animals’ Right to Privacy,” Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2010): 193-202 (paywall); Brett Mills, “Why We Should Consider the Privacy of Animals,” Guardian, 30 Apr. 2010;  Randy Malamud, “Eadweard Muybridge, Thief of Animal Souls,” Chronicle Review, 27 June 2010. See also John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking (Pantheon, 1980), 3-28. On the question of the impact of camera traps from a wildlife manager’s perspective, see Michael L. Gibeau and Cam McTavish, “Wildlife Imaging: Not-So-Candid Cameras,” Wildlife Professional 3, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 35-37.
4. I was told that the coyotes, as well as an occasional deer, reached Bumpkin using the tidally available sand bridge from the nearby town of Hull.

“The Pensioner in Gray” was first published in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas in 1908 (Vol. 36, No. 1, Nov. 1908, p. 11) and later reprinted in Our Dumb Animals (Vol. 45, No. 9, Feb. 1913, p. 142), the magazine of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “Dumb” here meaning voiceless, of course. Its author was Marian Longfellow, cousin of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

If you have ever been approached by an importunate urban squirrel, you should recognize the situation, though I suspect the thoughts that ran through your head were not exactly those of the poem’s speaker.

The Pensioner in Gray

Thou little pensioner in gray,
Who, dauntless, now dost bar my way,
With tiny paws upon thy breast
And eyes that challenge and arrest,

Prithee what wouldst thou have of me,
Thou denizen of forest free?
Who all day long in sun or shade
Thy home in wildwood ways hast made.

Yet in the city’s busy mart,
‘Neath college spires of lore and art,
Here on the path dost sit and wait
Under the elm trees at the gate.

Had I a dole to give thee, dear,
Who are so wild, yet without fear,
Gladly would I that proffer make,
For thy sheer courage! thy bright sake!

But, little pensioner, my hands
Are empty spite of thy demands.
I can but offer thee a verse
That shall thy pretty ways rehearse.

Then, little pensioner in gray,
Meet me, I pray, another day,
And I will strive thy grace to find
Where Cambridge streets ‘neath elm trees wind.

– Marian Longfellow

I’ve been thinking about this issue off and on over the past couple of years in the context of endangered species research. It’s clear that scientific research is essential to conservation, but it’s also clear that scientists often want to do things to members of endangered species that are otherwise prohibited by law, and for good reason. Capture or kill them, for example. That means some way has to be found to reconcile the needs of science with the protection of species.

I touched on this issue in my book Wired Wilderness in 2010 and in an article in the Journal of the History of Biology that came out around the same time. Now I’ve taken another stab at it in an article coming out imminently in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (downloadable here), under the snappy though possibly misleading title, “Endangered Science”.

The article isn’t so much about the threat that conservation regulations pose to science as about the fact that some influential biologists have perceived them to be a threat and have mobilized politically to fight them. What I wanted to do this time around was place these scientists’ concerns within the broader context of anti-regulatory, anti-government activism in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. That is, to normalize questions about scientific freedom and autonomy by suggesting that scientists were, in an important sense — though certainly not in all ways — just another professional group seeking to protect its prerogatives from external interference, at a time when the regulatory functions of the U.S. federal government, particularly in the environmental arena, were becoming intensely politicized.

For me, there’s a personal side to this research interest that has only became clear to me recently, though in another way it’s been obvious all along. A while back, after I finished my MA in psychology at Stanford — more precisely, after I dropped out of the PhD program — and before I started my PhD in history and science studies, I worked for a year at the American Psychological Association. I had some great colleagues there, but I also got a distasteful introduction to professional politics: the constant effort to tell only those stories about one’s field that will keep the most degrees of freedom open for members of the profession (in this case psychological researchers and clinicians).

There’s nothing dishonorable about that effort, just as there’s nothing dishonorable about factory workers trying to make sure their wages and working conditions are as good as possible. The difference, perhaps, and what made it distasteful to me, is that scientists often claim to be aiming (and only aiming) for something higher — for truth, for objectivity, for the betterment of mankind. Those claims aren’t false or trivial, but they aren’t the whole story either, and if we pretend they are, we’re missing something big.

By looking at exactly how the rhetoric and mechanics of the regulation of science work, I (and many others) think we can learn something profound about the special place of science in contemporary society, and how that place is changing. To get at the big picture requires more than just situating one’s narrow interests in a broader context, though. It requires actually comparing and contrasting regulatory and ethical developments in the sciences across a wide range of disciplines and national contexts, something that is beyond the reach of any single scholar.

In order to get a glimpse of that bigger picture, I’ve organized a workshop on “Regulating Research” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science on March 16-17 that will bring together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars to compare notes on the regulation of research in biology, archaeology, chemistry, ecology, anthropology, and other fields. The workshop program is available here. All the sessions are open to the public with pre-registration, so if you’re in Berlin and want to check it out, just send me an email.