Giving the Planet a Break with Dr. Daniel Lewis

Not just a Lecturer in History at Caltech, Dr. Daniel Lewis is also the full-time Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science & Technology at the Huntington Library. (Photo: Dana Barsuhn)

“My mom used to drag us out in the middle of the night to go watch the volcano when it would erupt. At like 3 am, she’d drag us out, get in our VW Van, and travel up the hill to the volcano,” Lecturer in History Dr. Daniel Lewis explains of his childhood in Hawai‘i. “Right now, it’s erupting in these thousand-foot plumes. Now would be the time to go—it’s mind-blowing.” His time in Hawai‘i left him with a deep appreciation of nature and countless unique stories.

“I tell a story about how I almost went extinct myself when this tsunami hit the Big Island, not six months after we got there. It killed 63 people. My dad worked day and night, sawing off people’s legs and saving people’s lives and losing other lives.”

Dr. Lewis’ CV could double as an extensive review of the most important work in environmental, technological, and scientific history curation in the past three decades. He has worked as the Dibner Senior Curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library since 2006, in addition to working with the Smithsonian, Oxford, Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, and many other institutions throughout his career. These institutions vary in their curatorial culture, particularly in their choice of precautions.

“What was great about being in Oxford was that with the collection I was using, I was completely turned loose to use on my own. I was free to do whatever I wanted with it,” noted Dr. Lewis in contrast to some other institutions’ curatorial standards. “Everything is very carefully individuated in [some parts] of the U.S. You can’t use pens, you can’t lean on the edge of a table with a manuscript there cause you might bend it, you can’t lick your fingers and turn the page… At [one institution], they do this weird thing where they let researchers do their own photocopying. That’s very handy but it just wears the crap out of the materials, because people kind of move fast and it kind of wrecks the material. So the collections have this kind of soft, kind of worn-out feeling to them. In [another place]… they make you wear these white cotton gloves. It’s been shown over and over again that you don’t need to wear gloves when handling paper materials,” he says as he starts to touch the corner of my notepad. “You lose the tactility you need to be able to do this sort of thing,” he adds, flipping through my notepad pages, leaving no creases.

The curatorial community handles vast collections of historically significant works in environmental science, biology, and politics, among other fields. Countless first-hand documents each provide glimpses into a particular point in history, but cumulatively, they can paint a rich picture of a period. For Dr. Lewis, there has to be something predictive about the study.

“History has to be bent towards something, otherwise there’s no… set of outcomes for it. So that we can reach new conclusions, otherwise it’s just antiquarian, static… It’s just a curiosity. History has to be practical… There have to be actionable outcomes. And that’s the case for environmental history in particular because it’s such an urgent topic. There’s so much that we need to tend to, paying attention to the outcomes becomes really important.”

There are plenty for whom history is just a curiosity. “Some people go because they’re just obsessed with the facts. We call the people interested in the Civil War ‘Bullet Counters.’ What they’re really interested in is how many shots were fired in the battle of Antietam, or how many Confederate losses occurred during a particular year in the U.S. Civil War. You know, that’s a kind of antiquarian history that is kind of present-minded.” When Dr. Lewis is on the lookout for new curators, this is something he steers away from.

“One of the things we don’t want when we hire is someone so obsessed with a topic that they can’t get out of it. If we hire an archivist to process letters from literary collections from the 18th century, we don’t want someone so interested in a topic that all they want to do is read the letters and never get the work done. It’s kind of an occupational hazard, if you’re coming into the field and you’re interested in topics that the institution collects. We don’t want someone who’s so interested they’ll get bogged down.”

But environmental history lends itself well to the more future-minded. “Environmental history is designed to help us learn from mistakes we’ve made. If you think about the so-called ‘introduced species,’ and the fact that things have gone wrong. This should be some kind of an object lesson to us about trying to do that in the future.”

Dr. Lewis teaches about ‘introduced species’ out of his 2018 book Belonging on an Island in his History of Extinction (HPS131) course at Caltech. In particular, some birds were introduced to Hawai‘i for their visual and audible beauty, but sometimes with the intent to control pests. The long-run effects of the introduction of these species to new communities is varying and often damaging in unexpected ways. But “Belonging on an Island” wasn’t just about birds: the book touches on what it means to belong in Hawai‘i for humans as well.

“I kind of made [the topics of birds and humans] connect because that’s what seems important about the narrative. The cultural parts are important. When I was writing this book about belonging in Hawai‘i, I really just wanted to write a book about birds and tell historical stories about the people interested in birds. But then I thought, I have an obligation. It was very obligation-driven. I have an obligation to talk about humans here because I can’t just ignore that. Because the topic is so fraught in a place like Hawai‘i. And I did what I think is a really imperfect job talking about the belonging aspect in that book.” He laughs as he tells me: “But I care more about the birds than the people, is the absolute truth of the matter.”

Being a historian, Dr. Lewis has explored various cultures and communities in great depth. With this study comes fresh perspectives on American culture. “This is a very gross generalization, but Americans’ obsession with wealth… [is] overweening. [It’s] just everywhere. So when you go to other places, that isn’t so much the emphasis… I spent a month in Tanzania years ago and climbed Kilimanjaro, which was super fun, and when I got back, I walked into the supermarket and I’m like, why do we need 50 kinds of cereal? That’s so ridiculous; it seems so ridiculous. But after a few weeks, it kind of fades away, and you’re back in your normal life, and it doesn’t seem ridiculous. But things take on a different kind of weight when you’re not distracted by all of these [consumerist] systems,” Dr. Lewis says about the way the U.S. consumes and produces. He is also concerned about the way in which these forces damage our environment. “It just seeps in like a cancer, like some sort of oily substance. And I don’t know if there’s a way out of it.”

I ask him if there are any particular experiences in life that have kick-started this perspective.

“[A book called] Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway… It’s all about how these corporations… have strategies to inject a little bit of doubt into a conversation, whether something is really the way it is. So the tobacco companies did this by saying, ‘Look, here’s some evidence that’s equivocal. Well, it might be that cigarettes aren’t that bad for you—look at this evidence.’ You don’t have to make a watertight case to persuade that something isn’t the way it is, you just have to introduce some doubt into it… George Bush once said he was asked about evolution, and he said ‘teach the controversy.’ There’s [no controversy] about whether evolution or creationism is correct; evolution is the correct version of the story… So the comments like that, the sort of rhetorical ruse, introduce doubt… I thought, ‘That is pernicious.’ That is an example of big corporate interests leaning in hard over long periods of time to persuade or at least interject a notion of doubt into people’s minds about things that are bad for the environment. So that was kind of a watershed moment for me, that particular book.”

His time away from the U.S. was a substantial influence as well. “I think when I was… in my early 20s in Africa… looking back on my life, I think, oh, what was that about? It was about a very different way of living. People in Africa live very very differently… they’re much more resource oriented than we are here… their familial relations are everything, their communal relations are everything, their tribal relations are everything, and they have much more importance in their daily lives than some silly credential, which doesn’t really mean much to them,” says Dr. Lewis as he starts to ponder how he came to these views of the world.

“I think you realize things as you go through your life somewhat belatedly, like, ‘Oh yeah,’” he laughs. “Rather than having an ‘ah-ha’ moment. I think things dawn on you, that’s often how it works.” Even if certain perspectives come with time, Dr. Lewis is aware of others that come fast when travelling. “I mean it’ll kill your prejudices to go to other places, and it’s so good for that, it’s so good for that. Everybody should travel the world, you know. You’re just a better citizen of the world if you understand that things are different elsewhere, and a lot better in a lot of ways.”

Even if there isn’t a way out of it, Dr. Lewis has come to terms with the possible fate of our world.

“[The possible fate of humanity] is not necessarily a bad thing. So I’m writing a book on the history of extinction right now, and one of the last things is what happens in the future after humans are gone. And I find that very interesting indeed. It’s a chance to give the planet a break.”