This event is sponsored by the Badash Lecture Fund

This year's Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Jacob Darwin Hamblin of Oregon State University. His talk will be drawn from his new and acclaimed book Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. The talk will be held November 7, 7:00 pm at the Loma Pelona Conference Center on the UCSB campus. Parking is available in Parking Lot 23 near the UCSB Faculty Club. 

When most Americans think of environmentalism, they think of the political left, of vegans dressed in organic-hemp fabric, lofting protest signs. In reality, the environmental movement-and its dire predictions-owes more to the Pentagon than the counterculture. In his talk, Professor Hamblin argues that military planning for World War III essentially created "catastrophic environmentalism": the idea that human activity might cause global natural disasters. This awareness emerged out of dark ambitions, as governments poured funds into environmental science after World War II, searching for ways to harness natural processes-to kill millions of people. Hamblin explains the history of how the Cold War coincided with and catalyzed the birth of modern environmental science. Along the way, we see how Cold War scientists, driven initially by strategic imperatives, learned to think globally and to grasp humanity's power to alter the environment. 

Jacob Darwin Hamblin writes about the history and politics of science, technology, and the environment. He received his Ph.D. in History at UC Santa Barbara and is now associate professor of history at Oregon State University. He is the author of Oceanographers and the Cold War (University of Washington, 2005), Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Rutgers, 2009), and Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford, 2013).