Description:

Join the Colloquium in International Security Studies for a presentation by Megan Black. A historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Black will present “AMAX on Spaceship Earth: Multinational Malaise at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment.” In June of 1972, the executives from the multinational mining company AMAX, Inc, became mere observers to the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. This paper reflects on the UN conference, a known origin of international environmental governance, from a new angle, asking what corporate leaders perceived in the debates unfolding in Stockholm—in official halls and in the streets—and how they responded with a plan to protect business as usual.

Black is a historian of U.S. environmental management and foreign relations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is author of The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power, which analyzes the surprising role of the U.S. Department of the Interior in pursuing minerals around the world—in Indigenous lands, formal territories, foreign nations, the oceans, and outer space. This work garnered four prizes in different subfields, including the American Society of Environmental History, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Western History Association, and the British Association of American Studies.

This event is open to the Yale community; lunch will be provided. Please email kaete.oconnell@yale.edu to receive the reading materials for this colloquium.