Kurk Dorsey

University of New Hampshire

Wednesday, October 29, 2014  |  12:15 pm  |  Eastwoods Room, Texas Union

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Scholars and diplomats have been studying the Cold War almost since it began, but only a few have considered how the struggle between Communism and the West affected the global environment.  At the very start of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and several Western nations came together in the pursuit of whales and international efforts to regulate that pursuit.  Soviet whaling activities mimicked some of the established methods of Norway and Britain, but in other ways they were unique.  Both the ways the Soviets followed international norms and the ways they cut their own paths in whaling reveal how the Cold War affected the global environment and, ultimately, some reasons why the Soviet Union collapsed and the Western alliance survived.

Dr. Kurkpatrick Dorsey is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, where he specializes in U.S. foreign policy, environmental history, and the history of Canada. He is the author of Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas (University of Washington Press, January 2014), which won the 2013 John Lyman Book Award, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.-Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era (University of Washington Press, 1998), and co-editor of City, Country, Empire: Landscapes in Environmental History (University of Pittsburgh Press, May 2005). Dr. Dorsey received his PhD from Yale University.