Whole system, Whole Earth: The convergence of technology and ecology in twentieth-century American culture

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 threats to the global environment, this cybernetic model of nature made possible a new discourse on nature and technology. 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, within this discourse, as compatible, even co-evolutionary, with the natural systems of the planet because based on the same organizing principles. This emerging order of technology suggested the possibility of a future in which technological progress and ecological survival were not mutually exclusive.; This dissertation examines the development and implications of this whole systems discourse, from its origins in thermodynamic models of "biosphere" and "ecosystem" in early twentieth-century science, 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.; By the nineteen-eighties, the Whole Earth whole systems discourse had identified cyberspace as the ultimate techno-ecological system for experimenting with new relations among people, machines, and nature. The Whole Earth whole systems discourse, constructed around a rejection of modern technological civilization and an embrace of deeply ecological values, framed and legitimated the global network of information technologies. As this discourse blossomed with the boom in information technologies in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, it lost sight of Brand's original, human-centered values, and came to justify unrestrained technological adventurism and an expansionist, unregulated global economy for their own sakes.; 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.