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Local Ecologies and Global Science

Discourses and Strategies of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

University of Amsterdam c.l.kwa{at}uva.nl

The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), a large international research programme, served to set the research agenda of a number of environmental sciences around the issue of global warming and global change. This paper examines the impact of the interdisciplinary cooperation within the IGBP on ecology and the ecologists’ response. Ecology was an integral part of the IGBP from the beginning, yet it was sometimes in uneasy cohabitation with the other sciences involved. The issues of global warming and global change posed opportunities and challenges to ecology. They posed opportunities because an important cause emerged, with promises of exciting new (space) technologies and new funds for the environmental sciences. They posed challenges, because by aligning itself to sciences that study the earth system as a whole, ecology was invited implicitly to bracket its focus on the specificity of local ecosystems, that is, to give up ecology’s traditional focus on field studies of plant and animal communities. My aim in this paper is to place the opportunities that global change research offered to ecology in the context of changes within the field that were already underway. Power relationships between disciplines did not give ecology an upper hand vis-à-vis the other earth sciences, but ecologists were able nevertheless to redefine subtly the notion of the global.

Key Words: earth sciences • global change • history of ecology • interdisciplinarity • National Aeronautics • Space Administration

Social Studies of Science, Vol. 35, No. 6, 923-950 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0306312705052100


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