Book Talk | The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World
This event is a virtual discussion that will be live-streamed via Youtube. Guests can pose questions via Twitter and Youtube.
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you for a book talk for The Power of Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World featuring the author Peder Anker.
What is the source of Norway’s culture of environmental harmony in our troubled world? Exploring the role of Norwegian scholar-activists of the late twentieth century, Peder Anker examines how they portrayed their country as a place of environmental stability in a world filled with tension. In contrast with societies dirtied by the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, Norway’s power, they argued, lay in the pristine, ideal natural environment of the periphery. Globally, a beautiful Norway came to be contrasted with a polluted world and fashioned as an ecological microcosm for the creation of a better global macrocosm. In this innovative, interdisciplinary history, Anker explores the ways in which ecological concerns were imported via Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, then to be exported from Norway back to the world at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Peder Anker’s teaching and research interests lie in the history of science, ecology, environmentalism and design, as well as environmental philosophy. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Dibner Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and been a visiting scholar at both Columbia University and University of Oslo. He is the co-author of Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014) together with Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim. He is also the author of From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press 2010), which explores the intersection of architecture and ecological science, and Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which investigates how the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Professor Anker’s latest book explores the history of ecological debates in his country of birth, Norway: The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became and Environmental Pioneer for the World (Cambridge University Press, 2020).