Nancy Langston, Environmental Historian

I am now working on two major research projects: a history of adaptive management in northern Wisconsin (funded by a McIntire-Stennis grant and a Vilas Fellowship) and Toxic Bodies, an environmental history of endocrine disruptors.

Toxic Bodies explores the environmental history of endocrine disruptors, with a focus on their potential effects on sexual identity and reproductive health. Although our bodies are certainly shaped by culture, they are also biological ecosystems profoundly subject to environmental degradation, particularly from synthetic chemicals that disrupt hormonal systems shaping the biological expressions of sexual difference. Whatever humans do to the natural world--whatever chemicals we spray on our crops, whatever toxins we dump in the rivers--soon finds its way back inside our bodies, with complex and poorly understood consequences. Toxic Bodies will examine the ways our bodies have become the places where environmental degradation occurs in its most uncertain and troubling forms.

Why are rates of intersexuality and transsexuality increasing in humans, along with reproductive cancers and infertility? Could environmental toxins that mimic hormones be affecting reproductive health? How would we know for certain, given the enormous scientific uncertainty that still surrounds issues of environmental health and sexuality? Can we even raise these questions without suggesting that sexual difference is a birth defect requiring a solution?

The central case study will explore the history of diethylstilbestrol (DES), the first synthetic estrogen and the first chemical to be identified as an endocrine disruptor. Beginning in the 1940s, millions of American women were prescribed DES by their doctors, first to treat the symptoms of menopause and then to reduce the risk of miscarriage. Although no evidence ever showed that it actually did reduce the risk of miscarriage, at the height of its popularity in the 1950s, between 2 to 5 million pregnant women took the drug, exposing their children as well as themselves to much higher rates of intersex and transsexual conditions, reproductive cancers, and infertility. Sons as well as daughters have been affected--nearly 50% of DES sons, for example, exhibit some form of gender variance, particularly trans and intersex conditions.

DES is an environmental issue as well as a personal health issue. By the 1950s, livestock were implanted with DES to promote rapid weight gain, and this was perhaps the critical factor that enabled the development of an industrialized feedlot system, and the many ecological and social transformations that followed. The metabolic byproducts of DES-wastes with potent estrogenic activity--from feedlots and from people made their way into broader ecosystems, exposing a wide range of wildlife to the hormone's effects.

For scientists, DES has become a model for the effects possible from fetal exposure to an endocrine disruptor. Yet it's not at all clear what this model might be telling us. Some researchers interpret the DES story as evidence that endocrine disruptors are a grave threat to human reproduction and sexual differentiation. Others interpret the DES story as evidence of exactly the opposite, arguing that DES shows we have little to worry about. Which perspective is right? A historical approach can help us answer this question and better understand why our problems with endocrine disruptors have developed.

The research in northern Wisconsin examines the history of adaptive ecosystem management, focusing on the changing dynamics between people and forests in northern Wisconsin from 1890s to the 1990s. Northern Wisconsin offers an excellent laboratory to examine the history of adaptive management, for the region has had a dramatic and controversial forest history. David Mladenoff and Michelle Steen-Adams are collaborators on this project.

This project asks: How did cultural ideals affect the ways different groups of people changed the forests in Wisconsin? What visions of the relationship between humans and nature did people bring to Wisconsin forests? How did ecological constraints affect the forests’ responses to human management? How did different groups negotiate conflicts over whose vision of the land would shape the landscape? How do these histories shape opportunities and constraints in forest management today?

We focus on three aspects of northern Wisconsin forest history. First, we are investigating community involvement in the development of reforestation programs in northern Wisconsin. Understanding the history of community relationships to forests in Wisconsin is important for current forest managers, who often fail to understand why local communities can seem so distrustful of them. Local residents fear that foresters are going to reduce access to forest resources, while urban environmental advocates argue that foresters will do just the opposite. When different groups face conflicts over resources, it can be useful for each group to see themselves as part of the same community, at odds on certain issues, but drawing from a common history and headed toward common goals.

Second, we are comparing patterns of reforestation on lands owned by communities with different perceptions of the value of farms versus forests. Our research indicates that different communities in northern Wisconsin had very different perceptions about the relative value of forests versus farms. Did these different cultural values influence forest change, or were these differences overridden by larger market forces? How much did cultural values influence patterns of reforestation? One test of this question is to compare forest change on the Bad River Indian Reservation with forest change on neighboring private lands (to control for biophysical factors, these sites lie within the same soil type). The Bad River Reservation Indians had little use for agriculture and preferred forests to fields, even though reservation agents wanted them to farm. In contrast, nearby neighbors of European descent preferred fields to farms, believing agriculture was a higher use for the cutover lands of northern Wisconsin. Did these different sets of values influence forest change on these similar physical landscape, leading to detectable differences in current forests today?

Third, we are examining whether changing cultural perspectives affected the development of adaptive forest management. We approach this question by examining shifting beliefs about the impacts of forest management on water and watersheds in northern Wisconsin.

With its attention to the changing relationships between nature, culture, and production, environmental history offers a powerful tool for understanding the history of human effects on the forest. If we are to manage and restore forests in adaptive and sustainable ways, we must develop a more historically informed understanding of the relationships between people and nature that shape those ecosystems.