In the late 1960s the University of Oslo became an influential hotbed for ecologically informed policies and philosophies. This article discusses the way in which a group of ecologists came to engage the founder of Deep Ecology Arne Næss, the co-author of The Limits to Growth (1972), Jørgen Randers, the Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development Gro Harlem Brundtland, and the famed peace researcher Johan Galtung. Their ecological views grew out of a culture in which nature was understood not as a place of work but in terms of outdoor vacationing.


"Buckminster Fuller as Captain of Spaceship Earth," Minerva, 45:4 (2007), 417-434.

Buckminster Fuller’s experiences in the Navy became a model for his ecological design projects and suggestions for the global management of ‘Spaceship Earth’. Inspired by technocratic ideas of the 1930s, Fuller envisaged, in the 1970s, an elitist world without politics, in which designers were at the helm, steering the planet out of its environmental crises.


“Graphic Language: Herbert Bayer’s Environmental Design,” Environmental History, 12:2 (2007), 254-279.

Environmental debates are greatly indebted to artistic communication. This article discusses the work of the former faculty member of the German Bauhaus school, Herbert Bayer, who introduced modernist imagery in relation to globalization, conservation values, and maps dealing with environmental concerns in the United States. His Romantic defense of environmental design demonstrates that the humanist legacy of modernism has made more constructive contributions to the history of environmental debate than its critics have been willing to admit. Bayer’s global humanism and environmental designs created a visual language of colors, images, symbols, and dynamic illustrations that aimed at harmonizing human relationships with the natural world.

“Bauhaus at the Zoo,” Nature, 439 (23 Feb. 2006), 916.

This article argues that modernist designers in the 1930s found inspiration in the life sciences.

“The Closed World of Ecological Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture, 10:5 (2005), 527-552.

This article explores how and why imagined and real environments in space came to serve as models for ecological design of earthly landscapes and buildings in the 1970s. It claims that life in space came to represent the peaceful, rational, and environmentally friendly alternative to the destructive, irrational, ecological crisis down on Earth. Spaceship management aimed narrowly at the biological survival of astronauts, an ethic which also came to dominate ecological design proposals on board Spaceship Earth. The result was a design programme which was at the expense of a wider aesthetic and social understanding of the human condition. The article reviews the work of leading ecological designers of the period, such as Ian L. McHarg, John Todd and the New Alchemists, Alexander Pike and John Frazer, Brenda and Robert Vale, Ken Yeang, Phil Hawes, and others. It situates their projects in the perspective of ecological research methods of the period and puts forward an understanding of their thinking in the context of space exploration. Today's challenge is to escape the intellectual space capsule that ecologists have created for environmentally concerned architects.

“The Bauhaus of Nature,” Modernism/Modernity, 12:2 (2005), 229-251.

This article examines the history of architecture based upon ecological principles. The point of departure is the architectural debate in London in the 1930s in which former faculty members of the Bauhaus school engaged with ecologists with regards to the methods of designing in harmony with nature. László Moholy-Nagy, for example, developed a design methodology inspired by the ecologist Raoul H. Francé which sought to copy nature’s workshop. This “bio-technique” (or bionics) became the methodology for his design in London and later for the New Bauhaus school in Chicago. Berthold Lubetkin was inspired by similar ideas in his design of the penguin pool at the London Zoo. The geometric order of the pool reflected promising new mathematical research tools in biology, as well as a social concern for the health and evolutionary survival of the human species. Some of the same concerns were apparent in the visionary ecological design for the film Things to Come (1936) written by H. G. Wells. Inspired by the Bauhaus style of architecture and city planning, the film portrayed an environmentally friendly ecotopia based on the science of human ecology. This article offers a history of architecture inspired by social studies of science and patronage methodology.


“The Ecological Colonization of Space,” Environmental History, 10:2 (2005), 239-268.

This article claims that the prospect of space colonization has been of significant importance with respect to ecological debate, methodology and practice. Cabin ecological research of the improvement of submarines and underground shelters serves as the background for understanding the emergence of the “carrying capacity” concept adopted by the space program of the 1960s. Ecologists involved in space research aimed at constructing cabin ecological systems for spaceships that were subsequently used as models to understand Spaceship Earth. Space colonies came to represent the rational, orderly, and wisely managed contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill managed Earth. Human environmental and moral space was to be reordered according to the ideals of cabin ecology and the astronaut’s life in outer space. Despite criticisms of the managerial ethics of space colonization in the mid 1970s, cabin ecology and space technology have became important tools for ecological management. Biosphere 2 was built in Arizona as a prototype for future colonies on Mars, for example. It currently serves as a model for how humans should live within Biosphere 1 (the Earth). The challenge of today is how to get out of the intellectual capsule that ecologists have created for environmentally concerned humanists.

“A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes,” Philosophy and Geography, 7:2 (2004), 261-266.

The first defense of animal rights came in the form of a joke on human rights. As a reaction against the new ethics of the Enlightenment Thomas Taylor (1758-1835) ridiculed rights for men and women by arguing that these would eventually lead to the absurd idea of giving rights to brutes, and perhaps even plants and things. The idea of human rights should thus be abandoned. This article is revisiting this argument to address the question of whether granting moral status to animals, plants, and even landscapes eventually makes hard-won human rights into a joke.


“The Economy of Nature in the Botany of Nehemiah Grew,” Archives of Natural History, 31:2 (2004), 191-207.

Historians of natural history often point to early modern promoters of the mathematical and mechanical as a key shift in understandings of the organic world.  This article visits the natural philosophy of one of the chief supporters of this view of nature, namely the first curator of plants at the Royal Society, Nehemiah Grew. This article sets his work within the material world of patronage, medical and mathematical tools, laboratory life, and finally his views on human virtues, health and the role of women. It reads Grew as a religious informed natural philosopher whose understanding of the economy of nature hails the wisdom of the Creator and the possibility of gaining spiritual and medical health from studying the language of the book of nature. The quest to understand nature’s language was about tempering the human will and arrogance so that one could appreciate the Lord’s creative power in the world. As representative of the Royal Society’s promotion of empirical and mechanical research, Grew mobilized excitement for botany with an ethos of showing nature’s economy respect.

“The Politics of Ecology in South Africa on the Radical Left,” Journal of the History of Biology, 37:2 (2004), 303-331.

The South African ecologist and political activist Edward Roux (1903–1966) used evolutionary biology to argue against racism. During the cold-war, he transformed his communist beliefs into advocacy for scientific rationalism, management, and protection of nature against advancing capitalism. These pleas for saving the environment served as a vehicle for questioning the more risky issue of evolution and racial order in society. The link between ecological and political order had long been an important theme among the country's ecologists and politicians alike. The statesman Jan Christian Smuts' holistic theory of evolution and racial order inspired the nation's ecologists to sanctify an ecologically informed racial policy. This idealist informed methodology stood in direct opposition to the materialist approach to ecology of Roux. These methodological debates reflected differing political support from within the Union Party and people on the radical left, respectively. Ecology was of concern to politicians because understandings of the order of nature had direct implications for the racial order of the South African society.

“The Philosopher’s Cabin and the Household of Nature,” Ethics, Place and Environment, 6:2 (2003), 131-141.

The etymological origin of ecology in the human house is the point of departure of this article. It argues that oikos is not merely a vague metaphor for ecology, but that built households provide a key to understanding the household of nature. Three households support this claim: the cabins of Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Arne Næss. This article suggests that their views on the household of nature stand in direct relationship with their respective homes. They also have a distant epistemological bird's-eye view of nature seen from homes which were located - imaginary or real - on a mountaintop.

“The Context of Ecosystem Theory,” Ecosystems, 5:7 (2002), 611-613.

 
Arthur George Tansley's paper "The Temporal Genetic Series as a Means of Approach to Philosophy," published here for the first time, provides the philosophical context for the development of his ecosystem theory. His rejection of idealist reasoning, his concern with ethics, and his long standing interest in Freudian psychology as well as mechanistic reasoning comprised the intellectual underpinnings for his thinking on systems and ecosystem theory.

”The Dream of the Biocentric community and the Structure of Utopias,” with Nina Witoszek, Worldviews, 2 (1998), 239-256.

This paper examines the ideal of community as imagined by Arne Naess and the Deep Ecology Movement. In particular the authors address such questions as: Is pluralism of lifestyles reconcilable with the main ideas of the biocentric community? Is liberal justice possible within it? And how realistic is the proposal of education towards a ‘biocentric identity’? The analysis shows that, while the deep ecological vision is by no means ‘fascist’ as some of its critics insist, its inconsistencies, silences and omissions point to an incomplete project which has a dystopian conclusion written into its scenario.