Since the second half of the 20th century, ecology, the study of organisms and their environments, has been central to global political crises over whether and how to manage species, material waste, carbon emissions, and access to natural resources. Field sciences like ecology have shaped and continue to shape our understandings of other species, human nature, and the physical world. This historical study of the development of ecological science in the US will address how wilderness areas, originally set aside for aesthetic and cultural reasons, were re-negotiated into ecosystem protection areas and how understandings of what an ecosystem is and how it functions effect the management of endangered and invasive species.
One of the most useful functions of the history of science, and science and technology studies, is to make clearer the hidden assumptions that inevitably accompany the construction of frameworks for understanding the natural world. This project is will provide that kind of utility. Results will be published and made available on Cornells eCommons, and shared with the public via a Scientific American blog.
Human intervention in nature is highly contested, yet environmental organizations spend billions of dollars per year on invasive species removal, wetlands mitigation, and other forms of ecological restoration. The dissertation supported by this National Science Foundation STS Dissertation Improvement Grant argues that ecological restoration was a significant idea and a practice in the United States as early as the Dust Bowl, when ecologists developed it to justify the establishment of permanent study sites. But over the following four decades, ecologists repeatedly re-conceptualized restoration’s methods, goals, and objects in response to new technologies and national concerns. Predicted crises as diverse as soil erosion and nuclear annihilation connected individual ecologists, The Nature Conservancy, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Atomic Energy Commission through restoration. Critical for this dissertation was tracing the development of ecosystem ecology. The archival visits that were funded by this National Science Foundation STS Dissertation Improvement Grant revealed important connections among TNC, the USFWS, the AEC, and individual ecologists, including G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Howard T. Odum, Eugene Odum, Paul B. Sears, Edward Deevey, Victor Shelford, and Lauren Donaldson. The archival materials suggests that the rise of ecology, contemporaneous with the Atomic Age, was not a response to nuclear threats to environmental decline, but a precondition for perceiving those threats. Tracing the history of ecological restoration through now-outmoded practices confirms that, far from being predicated on environmental fears about nuclear and radioactive technologies, the rise of ecology as a politically empowered and publicly lauded discipline depended on the technologies of the Atomic Age. The history of ecological restoration, then, twists and turns through the decades between the first atomic detonation and the 1963 signing of Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. As Lauren Donaldson reflected in 1987, "We talk about the environment very positively these days. But thirty years ago, ‘environment’ was a word that had not been coined yet, scarcely." Indeed, terms like "environment," "restoration," and "ecosystem," along with conceptions of ecological threat, never quite stabilize. This history of the decades in which ecologists’ views of nuclear technologies reversed polarity suggests how changing scientific ideas and practices were part of the on-going ecological and political reassessments of what American nature was and what it should be in the future. Such historical understanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and environmental management highlights how science and society shape one another. By interrogating the historical events that restorationists were attempting to undo (e.g. colonization, globalization), and by conceptualizing restoration as an intellectual and cultural movement, this dissertation intervenes in current debates about de-extinction and other proposals for restoration in the Anthropocene.
