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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Bryant, William. "Whole System, Whole Earth: The Convergence of Ecology and Technology in Twentieth Century American Culture," American Studies, University of Iowa, May 2006.
Ecosystem ecology incorporated cybernetics after World War Two, resulting in a model of nature as whole system, a self-organizing entity maintaining itself in dynamic equilibrium through circuits of information feedback. During a time of mounting technological threats to the global environment, this cybernetic model of nature made possible a new discourse in which nature and new whole systems technologies, especially information technologies, could be understood as compatible, even co-evolutionary, based on the same fundamental organizing principles. This dissertation examines the development and implications of this whole systems discourse, from its origins in thermodynamic models of biosphere and ecosystem in the early twentieth century, to its rise to prominence in the information economy of the nineteen-nineties. At the core of this examination is Stewart Brand, whose publications, beginning with The Whole Earth Catalog in the nineteen-sixties, brought a cybernetic whole-systems model of technology and nature into broader cultural arenas and imbued it with countercultural dreams of remaking civilization. In the sixties and seventies, this model served as a way to salvage hopes for a future in which both ecological survival and technological progress were possible. Unmoored from Brands human-centered values in the eighties and nineties, however, the techno-ecological whole system became a means for justifying unrestrained technological adventurism in an expansionist, unregulated global economy. This dissertation demonstrates how post-war constructions of ecology and technology were mutually formative. By examining cybernetic whole systems models of machines and nature in relation to one another, this study enriches the scholarly engagement with both technoscience and the history of post-war ecology and environmentalism in the U.S.
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