Ecologist as Cyborg: The Military Origins of the Subversive Science

Abstract

Systems ecology emerged as one of the ‘cyborg sciences’ resulting from US investments in the military-academic complex of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, the intellectual milieu that produced the digital computer and the Bomb and that reconfigured American economics around the paranoid rationality of game theory. For some, the study of self-adjusting control mechanisms in organisms and machines (cybernetics) promised to unify the sciences. Systems modelling with the new-minted digital computer implied the extension of technocratic control over social and natural systems, even the weather. Proposals for geoengineering in response to climate change date from this period. This chapter outlines the path taken to the consolidation of ecology as the theory of ecosystems, an ambivalent history given its vocation as the ‘subversive science’.