Abstract
In her controversial recent book, Anna Bramwell traces the roots of the new ecology movements back to a number of distinct elements and idea traditions, primarily in Germany and Britain, in the period between 1880 and 1945 (1). The biological holism, or monism, of Ernst Haeckel and his followers provided ecology with a name; and a number of other traditions, particularly ethology and energy economics, are seen as providing much of the substantive basis for what were to become the formative ideas of “political ecology” in the 1970s. What comes out particularly clearly from Bramwell’s presentation is the fact that contemporary ecology movements have a number of disparate, even contradictory precursors, and that many of the most important sources, as well as contemporary manifestations, are limited to relatively few national cultures. In Bramwell’s words, “the countries where ecological theories have been most prominent are Britain, Germany and North America” (2).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989 ).
Bramwell, Ecology,p. 5.
Andrew Jamison, National Components of Scientific Knowledge: A Contribution to the Social Theory of Science ( Lund: Research Policy Institute, 1983 ).
Some of the most important sources for my own ruminations are Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1979); Sharon Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985); Peter Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism, H-.T. Odum, and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II,” Journal of the History of Biology, 1988, 2; and Chunglin Kwa, Mimicking Nature: The Development of Systems Ecology in the United States. 1950–1975 ( Amsterdam: Department of Science Dynamics [acad. dissertation], 1989 ).
See Andrew Jamison et al., The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness: A Comparative Study of the Environmental Movements in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).
John T. Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. I (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1896 ), pp. 19–20.
This distinction between British and German national styles in science is derived from Merz. For a contemporary application along similar lines, see Jonathan Harwood, “National Styles in Science: Genetics in Germany and the United States between the World Wars,” Isis, 1987, 3.
Mumford’s development, and relation to Geddes, has recently been discussed in a biography, Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); and an interpretative anthology, Thomas and Agatha Hughes, eds, Lewis Mumjbrd: Public Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 ).
Bateson’s philosophy is one of the main formative influences behind the systemic school of family therapy. where it has been shown to be particularly effective.
The influence of Charles Elton’s ecology on the American conservationist Aldo Leopold was direct and significant. Worster mentions that when Elton and Leopold met in 1931 at a conference on biological cycles, Leopold became a “convert to the ecological view of nature and Elton then began quoting Leopold on the need for a ‘conservation ethic”’ (Worster, Nature’s Economy, p. 300).
For discussion of those connections, see Bramwell, Ecology,especially pp. 177–208. Bramwell writes that the return to nature, that was so widespread in German thought in the interwar period, “fitted the mood of 1920s Germany. German nature-based thinking had a practical, social-problem base that it did not have elsewhere in Europe.... On the one hand, there was the desire to escape from the burden of the past; on the other hand a sense of loss so acute as to induce nihilism” (p. 191). The point is that, while all European countries developed a cultural criticism of capitalist and industrial civilization, it was in Germany that the cultural criticism took on such strongly holistic connotations.
See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 ).
For numerous examples, see Lewis Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). See also Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). Of course, the interest in organismic thinking was and is not exclusively German: in the United States, a particularly influential source was Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern War/d, written at Harvard in 1925. It could be argued, however, that even Whitehead was primarily influenced by Germanic thinkers in his later years, and that his move to the United States after the First World War was also a move away from the British cultural and philosophical tradition. In this respect. the United States provided a cultural environment where the British and German “styles” could combine into a distinct organismic view of nature.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory ( London: Allen Lane, 1971 ), p. 9.
On Lotka, see Kingsland, Modeling,pp. 25ff. Lotka, horn in Austria of American parents, first studied physics and chemistry in Birmingham and then was “started on the train of thought that culminated in the Elements of Physical Biology when he attended lectures on physical chemistry by Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig in 1901–1902. He then settled in the United States, where he worked on his theory without any academic appointment until he was ”discovered“ by Raymond Pearl at Johns Hopkins in 1920, As Kingsland puts it. Lotka argued that ”a biological system could be analyzed in the same way that a physical chemist would analyze a chemical system. All of the processes occurring in these systems could be reduced to two fundamental kinds of changes: those involving exchanges of matter between the components of the system, and those involving exchanges of energy. These two types of transfers were really aspects of the same thing: transfers of matter involved transfers of energy. The distinction between the two, he thought, was merely a practical one...“(p. 34).
On Soviet contributions to ecology in the 1930s and 1940s, see Kingsland, Modeling,pp. 146ff.
Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm ( New York: Penguin Books, 1989 ).
Dedication to Eugene Odum, Ecology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963 ).
Ramon Margalaef (Spain). Vito Volterra (Italy). Alexander Nicholson (Australia) seem to have been particularly important contributors.
This terminology is presented in Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach ( Cambridge: Polity, 1991 ).
Kwa notes that systems ecology took coherent shape at the very laboratory whose director, Alvin Weinberg, coined the term ‘Big Science“ (Kwa, ”Mimicking“ p. 92ff).
Worster, Nature ‘s Economy,p. 313.
The quotes in this paragraph are all from Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism”, pp. 214, 218 and 219, respectively.
These transformations are discussed in many places and their recognition was central to the environmentalist literature of the early 1960s, such as Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Lewis Herber’s Our Synthetic Environment, and Barry Commoner’s Science and Survival. For a broader survey of American environmentalism, see Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States 1955–1985 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I987 ).
Kwa, Mimicking,p. 49.
See Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism”, for a detailed discussion of Howard Odum’s development. The concept of technocratic optimism is Taylor’s main term for interpreting Odum’s program.
See Worster, Nature’s Economy,pp. 291–315. He writes that “it is obvious that the rise of a bioeconomic ecology owes a great deal to the larger cultural milieu. To begin with, there is at work here the still vigorous influence of Progressive conservation philosophy... the science has come to reflect the agronomic attitude toward nature that Progressive conservationists preached. How else are we to interpret the prominence of ‘productivity,’ ‘efficiency,’ ‘yield,’ and ‘crop’ in the New Ecology’s vocabulary?” (p. 312).
Thomas Södergvist, The Ecologists: From Merry Naturalists to Saviours of the Nation (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1986), especially pp. 233ff. In Sweden, systems ecology became the centerpiece of official state environmental research policy in the early 1970s: the centralized nature of government policy-making, as well as the effectiveness of the “early warning system” of investigative commissions and bureaucratic reformism made it possible for systems ecology to exert a hegemony over environmental research in Sweden that it failed to achieve elsewhere.
Kwa, Mimicking,p. 55.
Södergvist, Ecologists,pp. 261, 266.
The use of systems ecology as a cosmological dimension of the environmental movement’s cognitive praxis is a theme discussed in Eyerman and Jamison, Social Movements,pp. 66ff. See also Jacqueline Cramer et al.,“The Knowledge Interests of the Environmental Movement and Their Potential for Influencing the Development of Science,” in S. Blume et al.,eds., The Social Direction of the Public Sciences (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987).
For details, see Jamison et al., Making,pp. 24ff and Södergvist, Ecologists,pp. 267ff.
As environmental activism developed into larger social movements in the course of the 1970s, as part of the societal debates about nuclear energy, the two components of systems ecology tended to grow apart. The holistic cosmology grew into a variety of human and social and even “deep” ecologies, which tended to he ever more suspicious and skeptical of the technological wonders of modern industrial society. while the modelling and simulation techniques of systems ecology became a part of the growing environmental control administration. In our writings on environmentalism. we refer to this process as a fragmentation of the original “knowledge interests” of the new environmental movements.
In the course of our comparative work on environmentalism in Sweden. Denmark and the Netherlands. we have noted the significantly different receptions of systems ecology in the three countries (cf. Jamison et al., Making)_ The difference can be seen both in terms of the size of the research expenditure in IBP projects and then in large-scale systems ecology research, as well as in the emphasis given to systems ecology within the overall environmental research policy. For details on Dutch ecology, see Jacqueline Cramer, Mission-Orientation in Ecology (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1987 [acad. dissertation]). and for other international experiences, see Handbook of Contemporary Developments in World Ecology (Westport. Conn: Greenwood, 1981).
These points are a part of the conventional wisdom among Swedish historians of science. They are discussed in English in Jamison, National Components, and in Tore Frängsmyr. ed., Linnaeus. the Man and His Work (Berkeley: University of California, 1983 ), and Tore Frängsmyr. ed., Science in Sweden: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1739–1989 ( Canton: Science History Publications. t989 ).
For further discussion of the postwar Swedish socio-economic context, see Jamison et al.. Making. Chapter 2. While Swedish social democracy certainly pursued a policy of pragmatic reformism, with ambitious programs of social engineering in both research, education, social welfare and infrastructural development, it might be inappropriate to refer to the underlying ideology or vision as technocratic. In Sweden, as opposed to the United States, there was a strong political control or, at least, supervision of technological development efforts, and the powerful labor union federation was particularly influential in these postwar activities. Technocracy in the United States was something different, stressing the apolitical or non-political nature of technology and the need for expert management and authority.
This comes out clearly in our comparison of the anti-nuclear debates in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands in Jamison. et al., Making. I have compared Swedish and Danish policy responses to microelectronics in Hans Glimell, ed., lndustriMrnyelse i Norden (Roskilde: RUC Forlag, 1989). While the Swedes concentrated on applied research and technological development, the Danes focused on diffusion—and assessment—of the new technological innovations.
These images are discussed in Arne Ruth, “The Second New Nation: The Mythology of Modem Sweden, Daedalus. 1984, 2. The entire issue is devoted to Scandinavia and gives valuable reviews of policy trends and orientations.
The influence of John Dewey and the progressive tradition on Gunnar Myrdal has recently been examined in Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990 ).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jamison, A. (1993). National Political Cultures and the Exchange of Knowledge: The Case of Systems Ecology. In: Crawford, E., Shinn, T., Sörlin, S. (eds) Denationalizing Science. Sociology of the Sciences A Yearbook, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1221-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1221-7_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4174-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-1221-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive