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Whole System, Whole Earth: the Convergence of Technology and Ecology in Twentieth Century American Culture

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Whole System, Whole Earth: the Convergence of Technology and Ecology in Twentieth Century American Culture Whole System, Whole Earth: The Convergence of Technology and Ecology in Twentieth Century American Culture by William Bryant Copyright © 2006 William H. Bryant, Ph.D. 2750 Irving Avenue Iowa City, IA 52246 [email protected] ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: TECHNO-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AS COUNTERCULTURAL EXPERIMENTS IN REMAKING THE WORLD, 1960-2000 1 Review of Chapters 4 Review of Literature 14 CHAPTERS 1. THE BIOSPHERE AND THE ECOSYSTEM: CONFIGURING EARTH AS A WHOLE SYSTEM, 1925-1945 22 The Thermodynamic System 24 Entropy and Quantum Physics 29 Vitalism versus Mechanism 31 The Living and the Nonliving 32 Vernadsky and The Biosphere 37 The Ecosystem 44 The Place of People 49 2. THE CYBERNETIC ECOSYSTEM, 1945-1970 56 Cybernetics 58 Ecosystem as Cybernetic System 66 Ecosystems and Cultural Values 73 Ecosystems and Technology 81 Ecosystems and Information Technologies 89 Conclusion 92 3. SEEING THE WHOLE EARTH: THE MISSION TO THE MOON AND THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG , 1965-1970 96 “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?” 98 Photographs of the Whole Earth 100 Reach for the Stars or Return to Earth? 111 Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth 118 4. EARTH AS TECHNO-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEM: SPACESHIP EARTH, SPACE COLONIES, AND BIOSPHERE 2, 1970-1995 135 Limits to Growth? 137 “Spaceship Earth” 139 Space Colonies 150 iii From Space Colony to Ecosphere 160 Biosphere 2 162 Wildness and Control 174 5. LIVE WIRES: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND THE WHOLE EARTH DISCOURSE, 1965-1995 187 Soft Tech 189 Access to Computers 195 Ecology of Mind: Two Cybernetic Frontiers 198 Coevolution 207 Access to Cyberspace 214 Information Ecology 217 The Future of Control 220 6. THE TECHNO-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEM TAKES COMMAND: GAIA, THE NOÖSPHERE, NEO-BIOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION, AND BIONOMICS, 1975-1995 227 The Gaia Hypothesis 228 The Noösphere 240 Out of Control in Neo-Biological Civilization 251 Bionomics 258 “We Are As Gods” 263 7. COMPLEMENTARITY 269 Complementarity 271 General Semantics 273 General Economy 276 Paradox and Wildness 279 Inside/Outside 284 Conclusion 288 BIBLIOGRAPHY 291 INTRODUCTION: TECHNO-ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AS COUNTERCULTURAL EXPERIMENTS IN REMAKING THE WORLD, 1960-2000 This study argues that the global network of information technologies, defining so much of late twentieth and early twenty-first century life, has been framed and legitimated by a countercultural discourse first forged in the nineteen-sixties, constructed around a rejection of modern technological civilization and an embrace of deeply ecological values. At the core of this discourse is Stewart Brand, whose publications, including The Whole Earth Catalog, sought to equip creative, independent-minded individuals with tools and ideas that they might use to build new relations among people, nature, and machines. In response to a widespread belief that modern technological civilization was fundamentally in conflict with the ecological well-being of the planet, Brand identified an emerging order of technology that was compatible, even co- evolutionary, with the natural systems of the planet because based on the same organizing principles. Whereas some of the most powerful technologies of the modern era – nuclear weapons, chemical pesticides, advanced industrial processes – seemed destined to destroy the natural environment, cybernetic “whole-systems” technologies appeared to Brand and others as a source of hope for salvaging both technological progress and ecological survival. Chief among these technologies was the computer, which appealed to Brand, even as early as the nineteen-sixties, as a tool that enlightened, adventurous individuals might use to remake the world. In the Whole Earth “whole systems” discourse, information technologies became tools for a new ecological era. In the nineteen-eighties, as networked personal computers became widely available, the Whole Earth Review , the Whole Earth Software Catalog , the Whole Earth online community, and other Brand- 2 inspired creations played a central role in shaping how these new tools were understood and received among their first and most influential enthusiasts: hackers, deadheads, ex- hippies, and ultimately the libertarian entrepreneurial class of Silicon Valley. As it describes and analyzes this Whole Earth whole systems discourse – this quasi-scientific-quasi-countercultural way of representing the relationship between nature and technology – my study focuses on key developments in twentieth-century science, especially the central role played by cybernetics in molding post-World War II conceptualizations of both nature and technology. Studies of post-war technoscience generally address the impact of cybernetics on biology . Cybernetic organisms – “cyborgs” – have been the representative figure for scholars identifying the many ways in which organic bodies have been interpenetrated by and have merged with post-war technologies and technoscientific practices. 1 My focus, however, is on the confluence of cybernetics and ecology . I argue that the concept of the cybernetic ecosystem has played a crucial role in the development of a discourse in which nature and certain technologies are represented as parallel instantiations of universal laws governing all complex, self- organizing, self-regulating whole systems. The intersection of nature and technology in this ecological domain raises some of the same questions and has resulted in some of the same consequences as the coupling of body and machine: the global reach of technoscience extends into forests and watersheds, ponds and meadows, oceans and atmosphere, just as into the blood and genes of individual organisms. But the intertwining of technology and ecology also generates its own material, conceptual, and cultural effects. An analysis of these techno-ecological effects can contribute to a more complete 3 understanding of the complex interactions among people, nature and technology since the middle of the twentieth century. My study is also distinguished from other scholarly works on post-war nature/culture relations in its emphasis on the traffic between technoscience and popular culture. Scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles and Mark Seltzer have explored science and technology through popular literature, but other cultural forms by and large have escaped notice. 2 Environmentalism, as a social movement, perhaps has been responsible for the greater variety of connections between ecology and popular culture than one is likely to find in regard to many other post-war sciences. My study demonstrates how cultural forms, such as The Whole Earth Catalog and countercultural experiments in alternative living, played key roles in molding broadly-held understandings of nature and technology in the later part of the twentieth century. In fact, I argue, the cultural acceptance of information technologies has depended upon the endorsement of these alternative, ecologically-oriented cultural elements; the cultural reception of information technologies has relied upon a perception of them as a radical alternative to the lumbering, inflexible, resource-depleting, environmentally destructive technologies associated with the waning industrial era. The Whole Earth whole systems discourse hinged on the convergence of a cybernetic “whole systems” model of nature and a cybernetic “whole systems” model of technology. The product of this convergence is what I call the “techno-ecological system.” I examine a number of such systems, most of which bear the imprint of Stewart Brand: the image of the whole Earth from space, the metaphor “spaceship Earth,” the idea of building colonies in space, cyberspace, and others. Brand hoped that such systems 4 might provide a way past the conflict between the technosphere of modern civilization and the biosphere of planet Earth. He envisioned the space inside these techno-ecological systems as “outlaw areas,” where pioneering individuals might forge new, healthier relations with one another, with their environment, and with their own inventions. As we shall see by the end of this study, this whole-systems techno-ecological discourse would eventually come unmoored from Brand’s human-centered values. By the nineteen- nineties, instead of empowering individuals to improve their lives and the health of their environment, the convergence of ecology and technology within a whole systems discourse would serve the purpose of perpetuating a self-justifying doctrine of complex whole-systemness. The discourse of the techno-ecological system would become a means for legitimating the global information economy and unrestrained technoscience. Review of Chapters The first chapter of my dissertation locates the whole system model within the post-Newtonian science of the early twentieth century. Following the quantum revolution, the thermodynamic whole system model was employed in a variety of life and human sciences – physiology, sociology, ecology, and others – as a means for vaulting over the old mechanism-versus-vitalism problematic. The thermodynamic system model provided a way to address complex wholes without either compromising their complexity through crude mechanistic reductionism or resorting to untestable, unempirical vitalist explanations. This chapter looks at the Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky’s use of the whole system model in conceiving of the “biosphere,” in the 1920s. It also examines the British ecologist Alfred Tansley’s formulation of the “ecosystem,” in the 1930s. Both the biosphere and ecosystem represented radical reconceptualizations of the relationship
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