For over a century, New York's Residential Heat and Hot Water Code has controlled the distribution of heat in New York City. Established in 1918 by New York's Department of Health, it mandated that all residential and office spaces in the city be heated to sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit at all times. Changes to it in the ensuing years sought not only to protect New Yorkers' health but reflected pressures in New York's fuel economy, which experienced periods of shortages and a transition from anthracite coal to oil that started between the two World Wars. Consequently, the standardization of sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit reflected shifting assumptions about health and the "right to heat" for different communities over time, and the practical need to ensure affordable fuel for the city's population. The Heat Code, accordingly, played a crucial role in shaping energy consumption in New York and helping to formulate an "invisible energy policy"-that is, a policy developed in non-energy fields, such as health and housing, that alters energy usage in important but inconspicuous ways, with important consequences for the environment and for social justice.

In 1950, a group of scientists and public figures, based in Hawaii and England, launched a transnational "restoration project" to save the nēnē or Hawaiian goose from extinction. Scrutinizing this project highlights how endangered species were valued as part of a historically contingent process that reflected and linked the interests of different groups. People did not undertake the restoration project simply because they realized the nēnē were endangered, but, instead, they sought to rescue it at the "eleventh hour" in order to legitimize the new conservation organizations that they helped establish after the Second World War. They also engaged with broader political and socioeconomic concerns to justify the restoration project, publicly framing the nēnē as a valuable asset that benefited Hawaii's tourist economy and push for statehood. Disputes over the reintroduction of geese bred in England highlight how the nēnē were valued in complex and sometimes contradictory ways, with unforeseen consequences for both the restoration project and its animal subjects. This case study ultimately draws our attention to the inherently biopolitical nature of modern conservation, by showing that there is no simple trajectory from endangered life to valued life.

One of the most important achievements of the US era of canal building in Panama was the successful control of yellow fever, a disease that had plagued the region for centuries and had undone the French canal building effort two decades earlier. Indeed, many US commentators depicted the successful control of yellow fever as a form of tropical conquest. This essay argues, to the contrary, that yellow fever control was a process of reengineering urban Panama and of disciplining an urban Panamanian population that was largely immune to yellow fever.

This article reconstructs land cover patterns in Depressionera Kansas from historical aerial photos and compares the locations of crop fields to areas of submarginal land identified in modern digital soil survey maps. The analysis argues that New Deal land retirement programs overestimated the degree of bad land use because they lacked the basic science to make comprehensive assessments. The findings demonstrate that the misuse of land unfit for cultivation was relatively rare across the central plains but especially in the Dust Bowl region.