The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific

• Published in: Cultural geographies Vol. 20; no. 2; pp. 167 - 184
• Main Author: DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE 01.04.2013; SAGE Publications; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Atolls; Audiences; Bikinis; Closed ecological systems; Cold War; Colonies; Commissions; Conservation; Constitution; Constitutions; Ecological effects; Ecological history; Ecological modeling; Ecology; Ecosystem models; Ecosystem studies; Ecosystems; Experiments; Fallout; Island life; Islands; Laboratories; Laboratory tests; Marine ecosystems; Marshall Islands; Metaphor; Micronesia; Modernity; Motion pictures; Myths; Nuclear energy; Nuclear radiation; Nuclear testing; Nuclear tests; Nuclear Weapons; Oceania; Radiation; Radioactive wastes; Research subjects; Terrestrial ecosystems; U.S.A; Wetland ecology; Marshall Islands; ISEW, Caroline I., Micronesia; I, Central Pacific, Pacific Ocean Is; aerial vision; Howard T. Odum; ecosystem ecology; Marshall Islands; cold war; island isolation; radioactive fallout; nuclear; Eugene P. Odum
• ISSN: 1474-4740; 1477-0881
• DOI: 10.1177/1474474012463664

This article explores how the concept of ecosystem ecologies, one of the most influential models of systems thinking, was developed in relation to the radioactive aftermath of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Islands. Historian Richard Grove has demonstrated how tropical island colonies all over the globe served as vital laboratories and spaces of social, botanical, and industrial experiment in ways that informed modernity and the conservation movement. I propose a similar relationship between the militarized American island colonies of Micronesia and how their constitution as AEC laboratories contributed to both atomic modernity and the field of ecosystem ecology. This was enacted through metaphorical concepts of island isolation and distributed visually by Atomic Energy Commission films that upheld an aerial vision of the newly acquired atolls for an American audience. Finally, the myth of isolation is also at work in the ways in which Marshall Islanders exposed to nuclear fallout became human subjects for radiation experiments due to the idea of the biological isolate.