As a nascent science in the early twentieth century, ecology sought to understand the physical and biological environment holistically. Thinkers such as Frederic Clements and Henry Chandler Cowles posited a notion of an organismic environment and the orderly advancement of ecosystems into a penultimate ecological state of stability and community. However, the end of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the way that ecologists perceived and understood nature. Ecologists in the 1980s and 1990s rejected the organismic model posited by Clements and instead offered a model of unpredictability, chaos and individualism. Daniel Botkin sought to repudiate the old order of ecological thinking by emphasizing fluctuations and individualism instead of communalism and stability:
“Wherever we seek to find constancy we discover change…we find nature undisturbed is not constant in form…Nature undisturbed by human influence seems more like a symphony whose harmonies arise from variation and change over every interval of time…always in flux, changing over many scales of time and space, changing with individual births and deaths, local disruptions and recoveries, larger scale responses to climate from one glacial age to another.”[1]
Botkin railed against the immutability of a holistic, climactic stage of nature and instead emphasized the constant variations of nature and man’s inevitable role in the manipulation of nature. Botkin averred that the communalism and immutability of nature espoused by Clements precluded society from utilizing technology to improve and intervene in nature. This new incarnation of ecology embraced the use of technology to rectify and improve nature, a radical departure from the ideal climax state that once guided the field.
The sea-change in ecological thinking has two very important implications for environmental science. First, Botkin’s emphasis on technology prevents the lay-public from becoming involved in the solutions to the world’s environmental problems. The reliance on advanced technological solutions empowers technocrats to devise methods that often cater to their own parochial, scientific interests. This can lead to unfeasible and oftentimes zany solutions that prove to be completely unworkable in real world. Furthermore, it undermines the democratic process and prevents everyday citizens from taking positive steps to curtail their own personal effects on the environment. Second, it suggests that the science of ecology may be motivated by more than just the scientific questions. In Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, prominent historian Donald Worster suggests that ecologists were apt to superimpose the popular economic or political ideology of the time onto the behavioral aspects of nature.[2] The infiltration of science by ideology negates the benefits of using objective inquiry and in managing the environment is negated. If ideology direct the avenues of scientific analysis, then the scientific enterprise becomes warped and a mere extension of the political sphere. This seems to beg the question: Is there an objective science and can we use it to more effectively manage the environment?
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