Political Ecology and the Geography of Science: Lesosady, Lysenkoism, and Soviet Science in Kyrgyzstan's Walnut–Fruit Forest

Abstract

As part of a growing engagement with science studies, political ecologists have worked to theorize environmental science. They have situated science by juxtaposing it with other types of knowledge and have attended not only to science's application but also to its production and circulation. Despite these efforts, science is portrayed in most political ecology as brought to the field site already finished, rather than constructed there through embodied practices designed for use in live scientific debates. I argue that scientists doing science transform the sites in which they work, that political ecologists have not adequately theorized field-based examples of this process, and that help can be found in the geography of science. To this end, I present a historical geography of the Lysenkoist and field-based heredity science that informed a program of forest modification in Soviet Central Asia in the mid-twentieth century. This program, which used horticultural techniques to construct forest-orchards (lesosady) in the walnut–fruit forests of Soviet Kirgizia, entered the landscape into scientific controversies, with ramifications for human–forest interactions in Kyrgyzstan today. Field sciences, like Lysenkoist heredity, have geographies that immerse them in and transform the world. By telling them, political ecologists can better illuminate where and how the doing of science has shaped encounters between people and their environments.