Matthew Johnson ​

The Lakeview No. 1 gusher was one of the largest oil spills in the United States’ history. In eighteen months, 9.4 million barrels of oil gushed from the well, more than twice the 4.4 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and more than ten times the 900,000 barrels of oil spilled at Spindletop, a famous gusher in Texas, in 1901. ​

​During the first half of the twentieth century, oil spills of such magnitude were not mourned as environmental disasters but celebrated as harbingers of oil wealth and material progress. The Lakeview gusher may have been short lived, but oil production in nearby oil fields was enduring. 
 
Lakeview No. 1 sits atop the Midway-Sunset oil field, the largest among a series of giant oil fields that were discovered in West Kern County between 1889 and 1911. The discovery of these oil fields set off a huge boom in commercial oil production that made California one of the most prolific oil producing states. In 1893, California was producing only 470,000 barrels of oil per year, but by 1910 the state was producing 73 million barrels of oil per year and its production accounted for more than one fifth of total oil production worldwide. During the following decade, California became the leading oil producer in the United States and Midway-Sunset alone was responsible for half of the state’s oil production. Oil companies erected thousands of wooden oil derricks across West Kern County and by 1923, California’s oil fields accounted for a full quarter of oil production worldwide. ​

​The West Kern oil fields remain some of the most productive oil fields in the country. In 2016, California ranked third in oil producing states, behind Texas and North Dakota. Midway-Sunset is the largest oil field in California, producing 24.7 million barrels of oil in 2016. The top five oil fields in California are from West Kern County and in 2016 these five fields alone accounted for 52 percent of California’s oil production. ​

​The site of the Lakeview No. 1 gusher and the Midway-Sunset oil field are testaments to this distancing. Except for the plaque commemorating the well and the message board that recounts the site’s history, the dusty depression of the once-prolific gusher is otherwise indistinguishable from the surrounding desert. More noticeable from Highway 33 is the forest of oil pumps that stretches as far as the eye can see in some places. But I grew up in California and know few other Californians who have ever driven down highway 33 and fewer still who would recognize the name Midway-Sunset or the historical importance of the West Kern oil fields. ​

​In 2014, my family and I visited the oil fields. As I stared out the window at the industrial landscape of steel pipelines and oil pumps unfolding across the desert in front of me I struggled to reconcile how this foreign and forbidding landscape was at the heart of a standard of living I have come to take for granted. After visiting the site of the Lakeview No. 1 gusher and stopping to take photos of the Midway-Sunset oil field, we concluded our trip at the Western Kern County Oil Museum in Taft. The local chapter of the American Association of University Women established this amazing museum in 1974 when it rallied to save the last of Kern County’s wooden derricks. The site has a wealth of information about the history of the oil industry, both local and worldwide. ​

​Skies raining blood, clouds catching fire, and beasts running amok—a surreal mix of fact and fantasy, the kind of which only a malnourished graduate student could conjure up before drifting off to sleep in a cold, dim library.
 
The Ottoman scholar Katib Çelebi (d. 1657) would beg to differ. The setting for these disturbing images, he reported in his chronicle Fezleke, was Hungary in late June 1619, soon after the breakout of Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. The story is loaded with enigmatic symbolism that I dare not explain, at least not today. Below is a rough translation of the Ottoman text based on the version found in Mustafa Naʿima’s (d. 1716) chronicle, whose prose in this passage is a bit clearer than Çelebi’s.

 
We can all agree that the story doesn’t make ecological sense. The sky, needless to say, doesn’t rain cannonballs, regardless of how much they weighed. We can also agree that the mental stability of Katib Çelebi, one of the most accomplished Ottoman intellectuals of his time, is beyond question.
 
If our premise is true, what do you make of the story?
 
Faisal Husain is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University’s Department of History. He recently defended his dissertation, “The Tigris-Euphrates Basin Under Early Modern Ottoman Rule, c. 1534-1830.”

For my purposes, Mueller's interactions with the Mediterranean world included frequent dispatches of eucalyptus seeds to Algeria, France and Italy, and interchanges of scientific information, in both private letters and published journals, with institutions of science. Scholars of North Africa will find complete runs of the Bulletin de la Société d’Agriculture d’Alger (image, right) and the Bulletin Agricole de l’Algérie-Tunisie-Maroc, alongside mycology journals and numerous volumes of Linnaean societies from across the European continent. Other topics with rich potential for further study include the social and bureaucratic histories of pre-Federation Australia, the exploration of Australia, Oceania and the Antarctic, networks of exchange in the Indian Ocean and the British Empire, German colonialism in Africa and Australasia, and Mueller's engagement with the theory of evolution. 

Further reading:

• Home, R.W., et al. Regardfully Yours: Selected Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, vols. 1-3. Bern: Peter Lang, 1998-2006.
• Maroske, Sara. “Australian and Indian Plants: Making Connexions in Global Botany.” Historical Records of Australian Science 23, no. 2 (2012): 107-119. ​

Jackson Perry is a PhD candidate in history at Georgetown University who studies the transformation of modern Mediterranean environments. His dissertation examines the introduction of the Eucalyptus tree genus to the Mediterranean region in the nineteenth century.

In the 1850s, Californians experienced the state’s natural environment primarily through work. In was the gold rush then and the northern Sierra Nevada foothills were overrun with miners. Although many Californians associate gold mining with human labor, the largest and most productive companies harnessed the mountain’s rivers to mine for gold. Mining companies built networks of reservoirs and canals that diverted water to hydraulic cannons which then blasted the water against mountainsides. As entire hillsides washed away, a mercury-lined sieve sitting in the center of the valley attracted gold. By the mid-1870s, a hydraulic mine at North Bloomfield, near present day Nevada City, became the largest gold mine in the state. The landscape at North Bloomfield was so scarred from the water cannons that French miners reportedly compared it to the Battle of Malakoff, a bloody episode in the Crimean War (1853-1856). 

Historian Andrew Isenberg argues that hydraulic gold mining had a staggering environmental cost and encouraged a host of other industries such as logging, ranching, and urban growth, which also degraded the nonhuman environment. In the 1850s and 1860s, the government overlooked such costs because gold mining was lucrative. However, in the 1870s and 1880s, a coalition of farmers and railroads helped pass legislation that put a stop to hydraulic mining, which was sending torrents of mercury-infused sediments downstream to inundate fields. In 1884, California courts banned hydraulic mining because of its environmental impact and the North Bloomfield mine closed shortly thereafter.
               
​In 1965, roughly a century later, the government declared the old gold mine a state park. The transition from North Bloomfield gold mine to Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park reflected a change in how many Californians were experiencing nature. 

                 
Last summer I spent time with family and friends hiking and swimming in the Sierra Nevada. Having read about North Bloomfield, I lobbied to stop, and after winding our way through empty mountain roads we arrived at the ghost town. We checked in at the museum, and then proceeded to the ‘diggins.’ I spent over an hour hiking the perimeter of the old gold mine, staring at the weathered cliffs and struggling to imagine how the lush fields I walked through were once hills themselves, and then briefly a watery mess of mud and mercury that quickly disappeared downstream.

Environmental history has given me an appreciation of such sites. Unlike the reservoirs, oilfields, power stations, and landfills I’ve visited, North Bloomfield has no direct connection to my life. Yet, shortly after California’s birth as a U.S. state, it was the center of the state’s most lucrative industry, which attracted capital and immigrants and encouraged commerce and urbanization in Sacramento and the Bay Area.
                 
​Studying environmental history has not changed the fundamental parameters of my relationship with the natural world: my direct experiences with nature remain primarily leisure-based. But it has given me a greater appreciation for just how strange such a relationship is in the long sweep of human history. As I walked through the gravely remains of the North Bloomfield mine, stopping to take photos, I reflected on how utterly different my experience of this space was than those who used it before me. 

Matthew Johnson is a PhD Student at Georgetown University who studies modern Latin American and Caribbean environmental history. His dissertation will look at the social and environmental costs of large hydroelectric dams built by Brazil’s military government in the 1970s and 1980s. ​

Robynne Mellor 

Last fall, I designed and taught a course called The Global Environmental History of the Cold War.  Throughout the semester, the students and I discussed the many ways that the bipolar conflict and the environment interacted between 1946 and 1989, as well as the various consequences of the Cold War that stretched beyond this temporal boundary.  We covered topics ranging from the nuclear fuel cycle and the arms race, to dam building and defoliants associated with Cold War development theory and proxy wars. 

​Throughout the course, I often relied on maps, especially when discussing issues such as “toxic layering” and geographic “sacrifice zones,” as well as how one might visually plot the intersections of Cold War containment and the environment.[1]  These themes, along with Adam Rothman and Dagomar Degroot's maps, inspired me to add a mapping portion to the final class paper. 

The assignment was to choose one aspect of the way that the Cold War and the environment interacted, conduct independent research, and to plot some detail of the topic on a collaborative map with an annotation.  In addition, I asked the students to write an argumentative paper about their chosen topic and, within the paper, to reflect upon what the process and result of mapping added to their understanding.  

As a learning tool, maps and mapping assignments can help students--along with those who look at the map--acknowledge the intricateness, breadth, and variation of the Cold War's relationship with the environment.  The map the students created for the assignment was quite good and their engagement with the project was enthusiastic.

One of the aims of the project was to encourage a broader understanding of the conflict.  The history of the Cold War is often confined to diplomatic and political spaces, but a global mapping project shows how the conflict affected regions outside of these traditional areas of focus.  

Students were largely interested in aspects of the nuclear cycle and the space race, and focused predominantly on the activities of the two main Cold War powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Even so, their work incorporated many regions of these countries often left out of traditional Cold War narratives, along with frequently-overlooked areas such as northern Canada and the Pacific Islands.

There was an unforseen issue with using a terrestrial map, however.  As my students quickly pointed out to me as we discussed potential topics, there was no way to map the Cold War’s effects on the extraterrestrial environment.  When examining the environmental history of the Cold War period and beyond, this project made it clear that a map of the world does not fully convey interactions between humans and their environment.  I learned that I need to add more about the Outer Space to the course, and the mapping project, along with the student's work, helped to change my thinking. 

In addition, this mapping project detracts somewhat from the interconnectedness of the Cold War's effects, and their sometimes global scope.  For example, it is difficult, if not impossible, to render effectively on a map the consequences of atmospheric testing.  The structure also leads to a one-sided narrative, with the form encouraging students to focus on how humans impacted nature.  It is much more difficult to plot the dynamism of the environment and its role in Cold War history. 

The map and the idea behind it is useful beyond the classroom, as well.  As environmental historians, we often try to view history irrespective of political borders.  The ability to zoom out and examine the global impact as a whole helps to better conceptualize the scale of historical moments such as the Cold War.
​
My vision for this map is for it to be added to continually.  There are many complex layers that the topic “the global environmental history of the Cold War” encompasses.  To fully understand the true impact of the Cold War on the environment (and vice versa) I wold like to move forward with this same map, and have students (and possibly others) build upon it.


[1] For more on dam building and containment, see Richard P. Tucker, “Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers: American Strategic Interests and the Globaal Soread of High Dams in the Early Cold War” in Environmental Histories of the Cold War, eds. J.R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 139-163.  For more on “toxic layering” in a Cold War context, see Magadalena E. Stawkowski, “‘I am a Radioactive Mutant’: Emergent biological subjectivities at Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site,” American Ethnologist 43, no. 1 (2016): 144-157.

Robynne Mellor is a PhD Candidate at Georgetown University who studies the intersection of environmental history and the Cold War.  Her dissertation is comparatively examines uranium mining in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union.