Where and When the West Ran Out of West

Kvaløya Conversations
News from the Western Frontier

When the West ran out of West

The natural history and unnatural geography of Rational Progress



In the 20th Century, Western Civilization ran its geographical course to the edges of its own world in the Arctic North and the West at California’s Pacific coastline. These frontiers compose an edge where the West ran out of West.

After a brief celebration of economic paroxysm in the after-war years, the 21st-Century view over the Pacific Ocean is overwhelming: the weight of five millenia on our backs, ahead the open Ocean. Underfoot the ashes of displaced cultures, the foundations of our own well-being, work like poisons on the soil, the seas bereft of fisheries, our own progeny tainted. This would be a moment for historical reflection, a moment to look back upon the advance of the West and ask whither to step next.

In April and May, 2008, three prominent historians of science, technology, urbanism and progress will converge on the Arctic island of Kvaløya, Norway, to conduct a sustained reflection on the path of the West, its frontier and where the future may lead at this pregnant geographical moment. Americans mirrored on the contested waters of the Barents Sea, we will bring up the news from those frontiers where the West struggles to maintain its pace.

David Noble, celebrated author on the history of rationality, technology, education and knowledge, will frame the stage.

Iain Boal, historian of technics and social organizer, Guggenheim Fellow from Berkeley, California, will lead us into the headwaters of the scarcity stories that feed the nomadic way of life of Western (agri-)culture.

Gray Brechin, key Berkeley author in the history of urbanism and the concentration and expoliation of natural resources, will chart the latest versions of the constructed paradise.

Ignacio Chapela, Associate Professor at Berkeley and Visiting Scholar in the Norwegian Institute of Gene Ecology, Tromsø, invites and converses.



Individual contributions:

Noble:
15 April, 2008
Beyond the Promised Land: five millenia of a half-storybook.

Boal:
20 April, 2008
Darwin without Malthus: on scarcity, nature, geography, and knowledge making under conditions of spectacle.

Boal-Noble:
20 April, 2008

Brechin:
20 May, 2008
Urban Power – Earthly Ruin: ecological costs and concentration in the civitas’ geography.

Additional opportunities for conversations will emerge. Please come, and please keep an eye on http://www.blogspot