Sara B. Pritchard
Cornell University

This paper develops the 2007 SHOT Program Committee’s “historiography” theme with respect to the integration of STS and environmental history.  My goal is twofold.  First, I analyze how scholars in the historical and social studies of technology have understood and framed “nature” within the field’s three dominant approaches: Hughes’ systems theory; the social construction of technology (SCOT); and actor-network theory developed by Callon, Law, Latour, et.al..  While I highlight the important foundations these approaches laid for the integrated study of nature and technology in historical and cross-cultural perspective, I note some of their conceptual limits.  Second, I propose several analytic tools, which build on this work, but seek to shift the terrain and terms of scholarship.  In particular, I propose the concepts of envirotechnical systems and envirotechnical regimes as ways of understanding the mutual construction of nature and technology in historical perspective.  These concepts draw on major approaches within STS such as the mutual construction of technology, and society, culture, and politics, but as the terms suggest, I advocate granting the same analytic weight to nature as these social categories of analysis.  In other words, if scholars in the social and historical studies of technology have been quick to value “sociotechnical” systems or ensembles, I suggest that we also need to consider the “envirotechnical.”  Focusing on “envirotech” in this way therefore brings questions from environmental history to the social and historical studies of technology while using STS methods to help investigate those questions.