UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title A Member of the Food Chain?: Quantifying Primary Productivity from Nazi Germany to the International Biological Program, 1933-74 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1hz8t97m Author Lawrence, Adam Christopher Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles A Member of the Food Chain?: Quantifying Primary Productivity from Nazi Germany to the International Biological Program, 1933-1974 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Adam Christopher Lawrence 2015 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION A Member of the Food Chain?: Quantifying Primary Productivity from Nazi Germany to the International Biological Program, 1933-1974 by Adam Christopher Lawrence Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 Professor Soraya de Chadarevian, Chair A Member of the Food Chain?: Quantifying Primary Productivity from Nazi Germany to the International Biological Program, 1929-1989, tells the story of primary productivity, one of the fundamental measurements of the ecological and earth sciences today. Primary productivity is used in biology to refer to the aggregate photosynthetic production of the plant life of a particular region. Thanks to the rule of thermodynamics, most scientists have regarded the ability of plants to produce carbohydrates using carbon dioxide, water, and solar energy as foundational to all life throughout the twentieth century. Yet the history of the theory and methods used to quantify primary productivity is more complex than the straightforward and seemingly apolitical nature of the idea might initially suggest. This dissertation charts the genesis of this quantified measure from laboratory plant physiology, through agricultural science in National Socialist Germany, to postwar Global Ecology in the US. ii The dissertation of Adam Christopher Lawrence is approved. Theodore Porter David Sabean M. Norton Wise Hannah Landecker Soraya de Chadarevian, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2015 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Bio............................................................................................................................................................v Chapter 1..................................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 2.................................................................................................................................................34 Chapter 3.................................................................................................................................................81 Chapter 4...............................................................................................................................................125 Chapter 5...............................................................................................................................................152 Bibliography..........................................................................................................................................207 iv BIO Adam Christopher Lawrence 1982-Present BA in English from Humboldt State University, 2004 MA in History from the University of Idaho, 2006 MA in History from the University of California- Los Angeles, 2009 PhD Candidate in History from the University of California- Los Angeles, 2015 LANGUAGES German French RESEARCH & TEACHING FIELDS History of Science and Technology History of Biology Modern German History Environmental History v Chapter 1 Introduction: The Vicissitudes of Productivity I suspect...that we are indeed trapped in these things and they will work themselves out with a relentless logic. -Robert Whittaker, 19691 Introduction We inhabit a world where the scientific disciplines dedicated to studying the functioning of this planet are increasingly given over to cynicism, nihilism, and despair. Eschatology in some form or another has existed for a long time across a multitude of human societies. The explicit codification of eschatology within a range of natural scientific professions is a recent event. It has occurred against a political and social backdrop of unprecedented wealth accumulation, population growth, energy use, economic expansion, 1Robert Whittaker. \Evolution of Diversity in Plant Communities". In: Brookhaven Symposia in Biology (1969), pp.196 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION environmental destruction, and mechanized slaughter. There are many places in the history of the twentieth century's phylogenetic tree of scientific disciplines and their fundamental concepts and methods one could look for evidence of this change. There are many different points where the relationship between this change in the natural scientific view of the human future and the vast social, economic, and technological changes of the twentieth century might be detected. Rather than choosing a particular discipline to inspect, this study charts the genesis of a particular concept, cutting across a range of disciplines. That concept is \primary production." This is an idea that runs like a red thread through twentieth century ecology, agronomy, economics, geography, oceanography, and demography. Although many scientific disciplines factor into the story of primary production, and are dealt with in this dissertation, the highly heterogeneous, and relatively young, science of ecology is central. Generally, the complex behavioral and chemical interactions of individual organisms with each other and their environment is the discipline-specific focus of ecology. Reproductive interactions are generally treated as part of evolutionary biology and, most specifically, population genetics, especially in the pre-war era of primary concern to the present study. Drawing boundaries around the discipline of ecology is about as easy as demarcating where one ecosystem ends and another begins, which is to say, nearly impossible, and demanding of some rather arbitrary cuts. However, the type of ecology that invented the ecosystem, then turned its attention to quantifying it, is central to primary production's story. Two national scientific communities are fundamental to the genesis of this concept. They are those of Germany and America. Given the fundamental role these two would-be global empires played both scientifically and geopolitically in the last hundred years, it is not surprising to find primary 2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION production's history within theirs. Thus, the genesis of the scientific concept of primary productivity, and the methods for measuring it, not only tells us something about the rise of rational eschatology in the modern age. It tells us something about the intersection between science and the economic, political, and military violence which enabled the expansion and contraction of both these empires. To this end, the present study makes four interrelated arguments about science and society in Germany and America over the past 100 years. The example of primary production, the evolution of the concept and its measurement, serves both as a source of evidence for these arguments, and a focusing device for the overall narrative. This is a version of twentieth-century history where the emergent scientific understanding of man's role in the planetary system as an essentially antagonistic, destructive, and exploitative one takes central stage. The author's own opinions on mankind's place in nature and the probable near-future of our world and our global society are irrelevant here, of course. The Science(s) The ecosystem was usually defined as the biotic community plus the physical and chemical variables with which it interacts. The community was usually defined as the interacting array of plant, animal, and microbial populations in a given system. Populations are monospecific groups where the possibility of interbreeding is not limited by any geographical or behavioral factor. Central to all of the widely varying approaches to ecology was this hierarchical nesting of population, community, and ecosystem, from the most narrowly to the most broadly defined. From the standpoint of physiology, the functioning of an individual organism's metabolism and vascular system was the focus. From the standpoint of evolution, the population was the primary unit of focus, with 3 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION the community and ecosystem being simply aspects of the changing environment which shaped the conditions of selection. From the standpoint of ecology, however, it was the system as a whole, and how it changes on timescales shorter than those traditionally of interest to evolution, but longer than those of interest to physiology, that was the primary focus. What constitutes a system, and how movement within that system is defined and characterized was a central question of the nascent sciences of ecology and macroeconomics in the twentieth century. That the former discipline came to understand "production" as both limited by insurmountable upper barriers, and fundamentally limiting of both biological and economic growth, while the latter came to understand "production" as but one component of a larger, and hypothetically infinite, category called "growth," is neither a scientific, political, nor petrochemical coincidence.2 Nor is it a coincidence that the movement of energy came to define