Benson, Etienne S
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Publication Introduction(2017-01-01) Benson, Etienne S; Braun, Veit; Langford, Jean M; Münster, Daniel; Münster, Ursula; Schmitt, SusanneSpecies categories are not simply an invention of the human mind. Plants, animals, fungi, and viruses engage in "species making" by mingling and separating.1 Yet, at the same time, the boundaries that define or differentiate species are not simply "natural"; they are actively made, maintained, politically charged, and fashioned to serve some needs more than others, inviting new essentialisms even as they alert us to important differences. Like other rubrics for organizing social worlds—race, ethnicity, gender, age, ability—the concept of species and the alternative classifications it invites are complicated and controversial. Whether wild or domestic, pet or pest, such categories are subject to temporally fluctuating human motives, shifting values, and cultural diversities.Publication Movement Ecology and the Minimal Animal(2016-01-01) Benson, Etienne SAmong ecologists, movement is on the move. Over the past decade or so, a growing number of researchers have begun to focus their attention on how and why individual animals move across landscapes through time. Research programs come and go, and there is no way of knowing how long this new filed of movement ecology will retain its promise or what new forms it might take. Nonetheless the emergence of this approach to studying animals and landscapes can tell us something about the way scientific practices and conceptions of the animal are changing in an era of Big Data and of growing concerns about the impact of humanity on global ecological processes.1Publication The Urban Upwelling(2015-11-01) Benson, Etienne SIn late September 2015 a video began circulating on social media under the hashtag #pizzarat. As of early October, it had garnered more than seven million views on YouTube—sufficient evidence of cultural relevance to make not only meme-happy sites such as BuzzFeed and Gawker take note, but also mainstream media such as the New York Times, CNN, and NPR. The 14-second video, shot by comedian Matt Little, showed a rat dragging a slice of pizza down the steps of a Manhattan subway station. Responses to the video varied. Some interpreted it as evidence of poor sanitation, while others admired the little rodent's pluck and perseverance, seeing him or her as "a symbol of the ultimate New Yorker."1Publication Minimal Animal: Surveillance, Simulation, and Stochasticity in Wildlife Biology(2014-01-01) Benson, Etienne SThis article discusses the problematics and potentialities proposed by the "minimal animal" an animal that is nothing but a stochastic pattern across a blank page. The minimal animal was not an invention of the 1960s, but the tracking systems and digital computers that first became available during that period both broadened its reach and changed its character in significant ways.Publication Author's Response(2013-01-01) Benson, Etienne SOn a humid summer evening in 2006, I joined a small team to search for turtles in the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, which stretches along parts of the Concord and Sudbury Rivers outside of Boston. The team consisted of employees of a local environmental consulting company hired by the town of Concord a few years earlier to study and protect the refuge's population of Blanding's turtles, which had been declining since the 1970s. During the nesting season, employees of the company monitored the turtles' movements, recorded causes of mortality, and set up protective fences around egg-laden nests, which were sometimes plundered by raccoons and dogs. Their monitoring work had revealed that many female Blandings turtles never even got to the point of laying eggs; instead, moving away from the wetlands in search of dry ground, they were crushed by cars on the roads surrounding the refuge. Like most such refuges, Great Meadows was intimately connected to the landscape that surrounded it.Publication Paparazzi in the Woods: Hidden Surveillance Cameras are Making the Wilderness Less Wild(2008-08-14) Benson, Etienne SNext time you go for a hike, keep an eye out for the hidden cameras. The first sign that you're under surveillance might be a plastic or metal case, about the size of a hefty hardcover book, strapped to a tree or the whirr of the film advancing.Publication Environment between System and Nature: Alan Sonfist and the Art of the Cybernetic Environment(2014-09-01) Benson, Etienne SThis paper examines the role of systems thinking in environmental(ist) art and activism through a close reading and contextualization of Army Ants: Patterns and Structures (1972), an installation by Alan Sonfist, one of the leading figures in U.S. land art and environmental art of the 1960s and 1970s. It challenges a commonly held retrospective understanding of "environmental art" as being inherently about bringing nature into art (or into the gallery) by showing how important systems thinking, which blurred the natural-cultural divide, was to Sonfist and other artists of the time. It suggests that these two understandings of the environment -- one focused on nature, the other on systems -- were both allied and in tension, and that the unexpected technical problems faced by Army Ants can be attributed at least in part to a failure to acknowledge those tensions. Similarly, the paper suggests, the legacy of glossing over these different understandings of the environment has been at the root of broader conceptual problems with environmental art and activism.Publication A Centrifuge of Calculation: Managing Data and Enthusiasm in Early Twentieth-Century Bird Banding(2017-01-01) Benson, Etienne SBeginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyaways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues that the success of the bird-banding program depended on a fragile balance between the centripetal effects of national coordination and the centrifugal effects of volunteer enthusiasm. For various reasons, efforts to maintain this balance were largely abandoned by the Bird-Banding Office from the late 1930s onward. Nevertheless, the first two decades of the national bird-banding effort provide an example of how a "citizen-science" project that generates "Big Data" can produce significant scientific results without subordinating the enthusiasms of volunteers to the data-collecting needs of professional scientists.Publication Autonomous Biological Sensor Platforms(2011-01-01) Benson, Etienne SLate in 2010, the Journal of Geophysical Research printed a report under the title "Narwhals Document Continued Warming of Southern Baffin Bay."1 The research described by the report was heavily promoted by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which had partially funded it, and the story was picked up by a number of newspapers and blogs, one of which praised the narwhals as "excellent field techs."2 Who were these narwhals? How had they gotten into the business of not merely responding to or communicating among themselves about Arctic climate change but actually documenting it?Publication New Media and New Publics: An Example with Polar Bears(2013-09-12) Benson, Etienne SEtienne Benson is a historian of science, technology, and environment in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. In this guest post he describes his interactive web-based map plotting publicly available government data about who has applied for polar bear trophy import permits, and its implications.