The International Hydrological Decade&the Geopolitics of the Earth Sciences

Joins us virtually for a GHIL Lecture by Etienne Benson (MPIWG Berlin) as part of our summer series on environmental history.

Organizing Knowledge for Planetary Development: The International Hydrological Decade (1965–1974) and the Geopolitics of the Earth Sciences

Over the course of the twentieth century, various branches of the Earth sciences—including geology, meteorology, oceanography, and hydrology—adopted methods, models, and styles of work borrowed from physics. The rise of geophysical approaches in the Earth sciences coincided with what some historians call the Great Acceleration, a period when human impacts on planetary systems increased exponentially. These two developments were mutually reinforcing, with new forms of knowledge facilitating new forms of resource exploitation and vice versa. This lecture describes this process through the example of UNESCO’s International Hydrological Decade (1965–1974), with particular attention to the role of Cold War conflict and North–South tensions in shaping the agenda of hydrology as an Earth science in service of development on a planetary scale.

Etienne Benson is a historian of environmental movements and the environmental sciences. Since 2022, he has been a Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he leads the Department ‘Knowledge Systems and Collective Life’.

About the series

Climate, Risk, and Governance from the Middle Ages to the Anthropocene

This year’s summer lecture series examines how societies have understood, managed, and monetized environmental change. Drawing on approaches from environmental history, historical climatology, and science and technology studies, the series spans a wide chronological range, from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. Fourteenth-century English weather records feature alongside early modern flood politics, Cold War hydrology, and the valuation of monsoon risk. Taken together, these perspectives highlight the diverse ways in which environmental knowledge has shaped—and been shaped by—political, economic, and scientific practices.