Atomic Fauna: What Animals Tell Us About the Nuclear Age

Welcome to a seminar with Paul Josephson, environmental historian at Colby College, Maine, USA, who will talk about animals in the Nuclear Age. 

Paul Josephson studies the environmental history of the 20th century, particularly in the former Soviet Union. His research focuses on the impact of large-scale technological and industrial projects on local populations and ecosystems.

Animals have their own long, involved stories to tell about the atomic age. They challenge some of the very ways in which civilian and military nuclear systems have been considered relatively safe and ecologically sound.

Many analysts, industry spokespeople and environmentalists today advance nuclear technologies as “green” by which they generally mean carbon neutral. But artificial borders, hierarchies and taxonomies concerning the place of animals in the natural world have wrongly separated animals, and by extension humans, from nature.

These artificial boundaries enable the blurring of arguments about whether nuclear technologies operate safely and cleanly, and prevent a complete evaluation of the environmental (dis)advantages of the nuclear enterprise.

How do large-scale technology and industrial projects affect local people and ecosystems?

Welcome to the guest lecture and seminar discussion at Accelerator, Stockholm University.

The event is a collaboration with the EHL, the Stockholm University Environmental Humanities Network  and Accelerator . The seminar will be the first seminar of this spring's open seminar series in Environmental Humanities at Stocholm University. You can see the rest of seminar series here .