Energy, Ecology, and the Great World Engine

With the rise of Tansley’s ‘ecosystem’ concept, first proposed in 1935, communitarian and organicist metaphors were superseded as American ecologists developed ecology as a biophysical science grounded in the analysis of energy flows. This chapter traces the complex intellectual pathways linking evolution, energetics, and systems theory to ecology, from the attempts of Lotka in the 1920s to derive an objective theory of economic value from a synthesis of Darwinian evolution and thermodynamics, through the influence of Vernadsky upon Lindeman’s paradigmatic 1942 study of the ‘trophic-dynamic’ aspect of ecology, to the globalisation of ecosystems ecology in the attempt of the International Biological Program (1964–1974) to measure the energetic ‘productivity’ of the Earth. It concludes by considering, from the perspective of the present climate crisis some of the ambiguous political consequences of building a global science of ecosystems upon a conception of energy as the fundamental currency of exchange of the ‘economy of nature’.