BIO:

I am a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Amsterdam. My PhD project explores the study of Earth's own history in the Low Countries from 1740 to 1840. This period saw the establishment of geology as an independent discipline, concerned with the study of 'deep time'. My dissertation aims to show not just how the notion of deep time was developed, but also why it became the focus of learned debate. I seek to understand what kind of particular political and cultural attachments it emerged with, how the materiality, social relationships, and imaginations of a particular place shaped knowledge that became part of today’s geological sense of time. What kinds of engagements with nature made the imagination of a deep past possible? How did Enlightenment ideas about religion, cosmology, epistemology, human history, and the utility of nature filter into the concept of deep time as it emerged from the imagination of European naturalists? How did they come to distinguish between the 'shallow' time of human history and the immeasurable depths of Earth's past?

My dissertation explores these questions in the Low Countries—the modern Netherlands and Belgium. I use this geographical lens to chart the ways in which particular natural and cultural landscapes gave rise to different ways of thinking about the ancient past.

My research is funded by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

In addition to my research, I've taught several courses. Most recently, I co-designed a honours course in the History of Environmentalism for the UvA's Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies. In 2019-2020, together with Wouter de Vries (VU), I curated the exhibition 'A Look Inside the Earth' (Kijken in de Aarde) for Teylers Museum in Haarlem, displaying the way in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors imagined and depicted the insides of our planet.

My interests range from early modern intellectual and environmental history to more recent histories of science, environmentalism, and environmental politics.

Robbert Striekwold: The Roots of Marine Environmentalism: Economics and Ecological Considerations in 19th Century Dutch Debates on Overfishing

BIO 

Currently I’m a PhD student in the project “A New History of Fishes” at Leiden University and Naturalis Biodiversity Center, where I study 19th century Dutch fish collections and their histories. Before that I studied biology and history & philosophy of science at Utrecht University and Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Both fields come together in this project, which combines a historical approach with elements from biology. I’m also curator of the palaeontological collection at a modest geological museum in Laren and, perhaps inevitably, became a rather avid natural history collector myself. 

ABSTRACT

In recent years a fair amount of studies on the environmental history of fisheries have been produced, but they tend to concern themselves with reconstructing the past state of particular fish stocks. Moreover, studies on the history of environmental thought on fishing tend to focus on the 20th century, when the environmental movement began to turn its gaze to the marine realm. In this paper I look at the way in which environmental thinking entered discussions on Dutch marine fisheries during the second half of the 19th century and attempt to unearth some of its roots. 

Fishing has long been an important sector of the Dutch economy, as it was for the other nations around the North Sea. Especially the herring industry, the largest of the Dutch fisheries, was a source of national pride, and from the 17th century onwards governmental regulations were put in place to protect it from foreign interference. Every aspect of the industry was tightly regulated, including the dates and locations at which the fleet could fish for herring or other species, in order to (supposedly) maximize efficiency and quality. 

During the 19th century, increasing pressure on North Sea fish stocks led to debates surrounding the possibility of overfishing. There were no unequivocal signs of it actually happening (except in the case of whales), and strongly worded arguments were made both ways, but the root question was always that of efficiency: what measures would lead the fisheries to produce a stable economic output? This topic was treated extensively in Dutch parliament during the 1850s, when it was discussing a bill (passed in 1857) that would liberalize the herring fishery to allow Dutch fishing to compete more effectively with foreign fleets. Economically this was a rather successful move, but it did increase fishing in the North Sea, which raised further concerns about the state of North Sea fish stocks. 

During the final decades of the 19th century, the discussion began to take on a more environmental flavour. The possibility of overfishing was generally (though by no means universally) accepted, even in fast-reproducing species, though evidence of actual overfishing was still equivocal. Most importantly, the prime motivation behind the condemnation of overfishing moved into the environmental realm as people began to see the destruction of a fish stock as something that is bad in and of itself, not just because of the repercussions for the fishing industry. However, the differences remained subtle, and proposed measures (like the prohibition of certain indiscriminate fishing techniques, or leaving certain species alone while spawning) were imported directly from earlier discussions on fishery economics. All the ingredients for this environmental thinking about fishing were thus developed in the context of 19th century debates concerning efficiency, revealing some of the ways in which environmentalism is rooted in economics. 

Antonio Chamorro Cristobal: A Dual Food Regime in Ecuador: The post-Green Revolution Environmental Legacy (1960s-2020s)

BIO

Antonio Chamorro Cristóbal has a PhD in Andean history from FLACSO Ecuador. His these was "Agrarian Modernization in Ecuador through the national Agrarian Research Institue (INIAP)". He received his Master of Science in Organic Agriculture from Wageningen University & Research Center.

ABSTRACT

The spread of industrial agriculture during the Anthropocene, specially since Cold War as geopolitical security dispositive, points to the need for a broader debate about contemporary issues such as Food Sovereignity,Climate Change, Land change use, Urban migration, Food disorders, Human Health and Environment.

The effects of the 1960s Green Revolution, a geopolitical cultural and technological dispositive to promote agrarian modernization in developing countries, allowed the connection between spaces of production and consumption, but ignored local particularities and had socio-environmental costs for rural sectors, who were partly excluded, becoming urban poor. The global food supply chain model, based on the integration of small farmers as cheap labour through contract-farming in agri-bussiness corporative chains, had socio-economic, environmental and health implications.

In Ecuador, this process took place since 1950s with the Andean Mission of United Nations, named Land Reform in 1964 when the Military Board took the control of the program. Land Reform (1964-1994) promoted the disintegration of the colonial hacienda in the Ecuadorian highlands, allowing peasants to access small pieces of land, however, once the families further enlarged, faced limit resources for their social reproduction. This process followed in the coast, and since 1978 in the amazon region, where the agricultural frontier increased through the legalization of lands. In the highlands the paramo ecosystem got over pressured due to the lack of lands, affecting the water reserves. In the amazon region became a drive for deforestation, first lead by cacao and grazelands, and since 1990s by oil palm, which nowadays competes locally with food staples. As a result of this, peasants increased their relation with urban spaces, something reflected in agro-biodiversity and diet changes. Thus, agrarian modernization allowed the maintenance of dual agricultural systems, one linked to agro-bussiness, and the other to small farmer production for self consumption, moreover it provides goods for urban poors.

The Ecuadorian food regime shows the state inability to integrate social and environmental diversity. This has materialized in farmers´ unequal access to economic (credits) and natural (land and water) resources. The Citizen Revolution (2007-2017) improved peasants integration as labour force in the agri-bussiness sector by increasing their salaries, strenthening the food chain corporative structure, but not resolving the agrarian question. In addition, the migration to urban settlements – indigenous peasants now live between rural and urban spaces- has meant the arrival of urban cultural practices to rural communities. The peasants are exposed to processed food with low nutritional value, high content of low quality carbohydrates and sugars. Food patterns from the deprived urban classes incorporated as a result of a change in life style, so processed food coexist with traditional foods in the daily diet. The cash revenues from migration allowed the access to economic resources - some family members remained in the community, while others migrate nationally or internationally- contributing to agricultural and diet diversification. These historical trends show that the relation with the environment evolved integrating urban and distant international spaces, besides it has increased indigenous political leading role since 1990s.

Olav S.F. Hofland: From Farm to Fork and Back Again: Recycling Food Waste as Pig Feed in the Soviet Union during the Late Twentieth Century

BIO

Olav S. F. Hofland graduated from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 2016 and has a special interest in the history of food in the Soviet Union. His master thesis on the Soviet discourse on domestic cooking was awarded the IISH-Volkskrant prize in 2017. Currently, he is a fourth-year PhD researcher at the European University Institute, where he works on a doctoral thesis about the socialist foodservice industry (obshchestvennoe pitanie) in the Soviet Union, during the era of de-Stalinization (1953-1964).

ABSTRACT

This is a paper about how pigs and planners in the Soviet Union confronted the problem of food waste during a period of peace and relative prosperity. After the end of the Second World War, fattening pigs became an important policy objective for Soviet leaders as they attempted to improve the country’s battered agricultural sector. More pork on the table was perceived as an indicator of a rising standard of living for Soviet citizens. As such, the way in which pigs were fed became an object not only of politicians’ speeches and decrees, but also of a broader societal discussion that found expression in a vast array of media, ranging from newspapers and satirical magazines to scientific publications.

Food waste was to be one of the resources to fatten Soviet pigs on. When First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev launched a set of agricultural reforms with a speech in February 1954, he lamented that the different types of food waste produced in individual households, the foodservice sector and the food processing industry were badly utilized as a potential fodder. His rationale was economical, straightforward and, we could argue, crudely environmental. If government and party organizations would do better at collecting the many millions of tons of food waste produced in cities and process it into a pig fodder, he argued, many hundred thousands of tons of grain—in short supply at the time— could be applied to feeding the population. Heeding Khrushchev’s call, officials struggled to 2 develop new policies, methods, organizations, and propaganda campaigns that aimed at closing the circle between farm and fork.

This paper presents the outlines of a project studying how food waste generated in the Soviet consumer sector—that is, in individual households, work-place canteens, restaurants and shops—was collected, processed, and fed to pigs. It focusses on a timeline ranging from the early 1950s, when Khrushchev launched his agricultural reforms, to the early 1980s, when Leonid Brezhnev’s administration presented its so-called Food Program. The project relies on a wide array of archived documents as well as on published sources, including specialized literature and journalism aimed at a general audience. It draws on sociologist Zsusa Gille’s concept of “food waste regime” to describe the Soviet execution of the idea to feed food waste to pigs as a complex problem that involved economic, political, social, and biological aspects. This paper argues that Soviet efforts to bring table scraps and kitchen waste back to the farm provides us with a historical case of how a modern, industrialized state first formulated the problem of food waste and then attempted to resolve it by implementing elements of cyclical agriculture on a grand scale. As such, the project aims to make a historical contribution to current, ongoing discussions on the problem of food waste, discussions from which historians have remained largely absent.