Book dossier

Entomology, ecology, and agriculture

by Paolo Palladino

Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture examines the vastly expanded governmental funding of scientific research and technological development for the institutional and intellectual organisation of life sciences in the twentieth century. It studies the history of natural historical investigations of insects in light of growing institutional organisation of the agricultural sciences in the United States and Canada, exploring how this context has shaped the emergence of economic entomology and ecology - two quite different but related disciplines. This study is facilitated by following economic entomologists' and ecologists' changing ideas about different pest control strategies, chiefly 'chemical', 'biological', and 'integrated' control. The author then follows the efforts of one specific group of entomologists, at the University of California, over three generations from their advocacy of 'biological' controls in the 1930s and 1940s, through their shifting attention to the development of an 'integrated' strategy in the 1950s, to their final establishment of "integrated pest management" in the context of "big biology" during the 1970s. Ultimately, this book is about the lives of scientists in twentieth century science as they have been shaped both by the massive intellectual and institutional structures of science, and by their own will to create something new and more rewarding out of these structures.