2. Energy Rhetoric in Odum’s “Silver Springs Study”

This visit to Silver Springs State Park in 2016 was my introduction to the ways that Florida’s springs have long shaped environmental thinking. In fact, Florida’s freshwater springs have inspired budding American environmental imaginations for hundreds of years, as Bartram’s writings would influence British Romantics like S.T. Coleridge and William Wordsworth,³ American Nature Writing through figures like R.W. Emmerson and H.D. Thoreau,⁴ as well as the African American Literary Tradition through writers like Zora Neale Hurston.⁵ Silver Springs was also a tourist destination before the Civil War, and its popularity grew with the invention of the glass bottom boat tour there in the late 1870s, which provided a new technology through which to view the natural world. As Wendy Adams King puts it, “…[u]pon the Silver River’s waters and within the glass-bottom boat, the social significance of America and its landscape is negotiated within tensions among romantic, scientific, and cinematic visions.”⁶ These tensions are also present in the films and television programs that were shot there, such as Sea Hunt, the James Bond film Moonraker, the 1930s and 1940s Tarzan movie series, and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Silver Springs is also home to Fort King, which was an important location during the Second Seminole War, including the infamous Dade Massacre, and was part of the large-scale colonial project of genocide and removal of Indigenous peoples that was used in part to produce Romantic views of “Nature,” a subject that we will return to in the next chapter. King connects this visioning of the natural world as a frame made of “Western myth and Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic ideals.”⁷ The seemingly self-contained dimensions of the Florida springs make them particularly strong candidates to represent a vision of Nature as distinct, and even isolated, from the human world.

Ecology and nature writing both share roots in natural history in the various forms it took across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, Tansley once remarked that apostates of ecology often view the discipline as “the old natural history masquerading under a high-sounding name-and not always very good natural history at that!”⁸ The longstanding racism associated with multiple intellectual traditions in natural history—which sometimes applied human-centered and trophic hierarchies to social and racial categories—persists in shaping and limiting ecological inquiry and contributes to embedded racialized disciplinary environments today.⁹ This inheritance shows up not only in the overt affiliations between the origins of ecology with colonialism, racism, and eugenics—evident in examples like Ernst Haeckel’s enthusiastic support of Social Darwinism—but also in the implicit agonism of ecological concepts like holism and apartheid (Smuts), genes and behavior, and (mis)interpretations of fitness. For example, proto-ecological thought in the early eighteenth century is often organized into the opposing camps of Arcadian/romantic/preservationist (associated with figures like Gilbert White) and Imperial/managerial/pastoralist (associated with figures like Francis Bacon),¹⁰ though Peder Anker shows these distinctions to be generally “false and anachronistic dichotomies” that are better understood as a “tangled web of both imperial and romantic views.”¹¹ To oversimplify, Arcadian thinking sought simplicity and harmony between humans and nature while Imperialism sought dominance and control through the capacity of reason. There exists agonism among these traditions, and these conflicts crop up throughout ecology’s origins and development. Bartram’s work and its wide-ranging influence exemplifies the development of the American ecological tradition from naturalism, which holds subtle distinctions from its development on other continents.¹² Among these divergent practices, there exists a tension between preserving natural environments and controlling their productivity.¹³ The work of figures like Carl Linnaeus, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin helped to propagate the disciplinary shift from what Peter Ayres refers to as “the purely descriptive approaches of the eighteenth century” to Haeckel’s conception of Oekologie as its own discipline.¹⁴ Haeckel attributes Darwin’s work as setting up the model of mechanistic relations between organisms and environments that underpin ecology.¹⁵ These mechanical views of nature reproduced Arcadian and Imperialist agonisms between interfacing with environments and controlling them.

Such frames, tensions, and influences certainly helped shape Howard T. Odum’s famous Silver Springs study, which ran from 1951 until 1956. In this watershed study, Odum first mapped the trophic structure and energy flows of the springs, inaugurating an important moment both in Odum’s career and in ecological science more generally. This study provided the first comprehensive analysis of a natural ecosystem, bringing controlled field experiments together with extensive data collection and cutting-edge quantitative methods to understand, model, and visualize productivity and/as ecological power output moving through a closed system.¹⁶ This research not only advanced the field of ecosystems ecology by emphasizing the importance of energy circulation but also laid the groundwork for understanding the springs as both a natural resource and site of significant ecological and rhetorical value. The crystal clear water, which flowed from underground at a steady rate, provided more than a visual representation of Romantic Nature. As Odum explains, the springs function “collectively [as] a giant constant temperature laboratory” providing a “rare situation [in which] it is possible to compare whole communities in a ready made experimental design.”¹⁷ The steady flow of the spring’s water provided a measurable and observable means to map these energy exchanges, making Silver Springs a key site for ecological study and environmental education. The stable environment provided the perfect conditions for applying systems theory to study the natural world. Today, as the springs are impacted by a host of anthropogenic environmental problems, they no longer offer the same closed system. As such, Odum’s study also serves as a baseline of water quality and productivity along with a follow-up study in the 1980s by his doctoral student Robert L. Knight, who examined the metabolism, productivity, and consumer control structure of the springs.¹⁸ In 2006, these and other studies were compiled into the comprehensive Fifty-Year Retrospective Study of the Ecology of Silver Springs, which documented changes in the ecology of the springs.¹⁹ Since Odum’s initial study, changing environments have drastically altered the ecology and hydrology of Florida’s springs.

As I paddle along the Silver River, I notice Lyngbya, a type of invasive algae, overtaking a native red Ludwigia plant along the river bottom. From high above, the algae resembles a massive cloud of green dust, swallowing everything in its path. My thoughts drift to the many different types of threats facing the ecosystem, from an increase in nutrients in the water, which feed algal growth, to a reduction in discharge rate, caused by changing rainfall patterns and massive groundwater withdrawals, to saltwater intrusion from rising sea levels, to increasing numbers of visitors to the springs, to loss of habitat caused by invasive species. This thought gives me pause and calls for me to reflect on the work that Caroline Gottschalk Druschke and her coauthors have done to investigate the ways that such species are “frequently characterized through xenophobic, militaristic, monstrous, and disease metaphors” and “those metaphors—and language choices more generally—had significant positive and negative consequences for science, management, and the world at large.”²⁰ Rather, the disruptions in ecological systems can be viewed as indicators of the larger health of an ecological community.

Along similar lines, Donnie Johnson Sackey argues in Trespassing Natures: Species Migration and the Right to Space that the massive scale of anthropogenic environmental changes calls for “a new paradigm,” one that can “attend to the social factors that structure beliefs about who does or does not belong and abandon the belief that species invade.”²¹ Sackey unearths the history of the “invasive” metaphor, and he details the ways that place and time constrain views of “flora and fauna [that] are static to the point that we can establish an idea of nativity.”²² Odum’s research, starting with the Silver Springs study, helped establish disturbance ecology as an important research area within ecology, viewing changes to ecosystems over various spatial and temporal scales. As I will demonstrate in Chap. 3, as well as elaborate in Chaps. 4 and 5, these spatial and temporal frameworks are deeply rooted in the colonial history of ecosystems ecology. As indicators of the health of a closed ecosystem, the changes in the number and distribution of different species in the springs have more to show us about human impacts than they do about a particular species of algae. For instance, the excess algal growth is directly fueled by an increase of nutrients in the water, namely nitrogen and phosphorus, which are linked to environmental disturbance caused by development, as well as excessive fertilizer use and failing septic systems. Odum’s Silver Springs study helped record an extensive snapshot of the ecology of the area, and the follow-up studies offer important evidence of its decline and need for protection.

Just as Raymond Lindeman was, in part, inspired to imagine the ecosystem by Freud’s conception of the human brain as an electrical network, so can the excess nutrients in the water help us to imagine the health of the springs at the scale of energy flow. H. T. Odum developed energese, or an “energy systems language,” working with colleagues in El Yunque in Puerto Rico (a topic I will return to in the next chapter). Energese is a modeling language that can be used to produce diagrams explaining how systems function by reducing trophic dynamics to abstract symbols (Fig. 2.1).

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The resulting diagrams resemble an electrical circuit more than they might an environment. Furthermore, the reduction of environments to an energy system language is one of the places where technocracy’s influence on ecosystems ecology is most apparent. As Taylor explains, technocrats sought to replace not only democracy but also capitalism, especially the “price system,” with “equal allocations of nonaccumulable energy certificates.”²³ This focus on energy as the central metric and mechanism for societal control was influential in shaping G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s thinking about ecosystems, which was more fully realized in the work of H. T. Odum, who was his doctoral student at Yale. Taylor details the history of the Macy Conferences, an interdisciplinary series of meetings on cybernetics that ran from 1941 to 1960, in which Hutchinson participated. The role of communications in cybernetics became an important part of the Macy conferences following WWII, where the systems thinking espoused by the group began to have “technocratic implications.”²⁴ Taylor demonstrates that Hutchinson’s “systems approach to understanding nature moved easily into a systems approach for engineering society.”²⁵ Thus, the energy rhetoric of the technocracy movement found purchase in H. T. Odum’s thinking, who had been fascinated from a young age by electrical circuits,²⁶ which he learned about from Alfred Morgan’s The Boy Electrician.²⁷

Energese makes possible the translation of a closed system like Silver Springs into an iconographic series of pictograms, depicting the movement of energy through the various parts of an ecosystem. From this perspective, the algal growth has as much to do with the excess energy in the system (phosphorus and nitrogen) as it does with the metaphors of invasion that both Sackey and Druschke et al. critique. These factors are evidence of larger ecosystem disturbance, rather than simply the intrusion of an individual species on a pristine place. At the same time, trophic mapping also relies on what I refer to as a spatiotemporal slice, which I will discuss further throughout Chaps. 3, 4, and 5, producing a snapshot of the ecosystem in a particular place and at a particular moment in time. By comparing the initial study in 1957 with subsequent studies in 1980 and 2006, the degradation of the springs becomes visible at a larger scale than a single invasive species. Elsewhere, I have discussed the ways that the degradation in clarity has been used as a trope in networked activism projects that bring together art, science, research, and advocacy to help protect Florida’s iconic springs.²⁸ In that study, I argue that, as part of a longstanding tradition of visual rhetoric in environmental politics, these organizations draw “upon the socio-affective circulation […] of springs iconography” in order to “deploy a fluvial rhetoric which engages with [the energy of] place.”²⁹ Building from that work, this chapter seeks to explore how Silver Springs is a site that makes visible the early links between Odum’s research in trophic dynamics, his later application of energese to study ecosystems, and the troubles that this theoretical basis produces in contemporary ecological inquiry. As we import systems thinking into DH/EH, and into RWCS more specifically, we risk importing the rhetoric of technocratic optimism that characterized early ecosystems ecology. As such, it is important to briefly unpack the ways that energy might be characterized as rhetorical, as well as the ways that rhetoric could be said to be energetic.

Energy holds deep conceptual ties to the discipline of rhetoric going back at least to antiquity. In “Energy: Rhetoric’s Vitality,” Chris Ingraham artfully traces the tangled conceptual and etymological threads that together weave both the rhetoric of energy and rhetoric as energy.³⁰ While Ingraham reveals the complex and convoluted nature of energy in rhetoric, he also offers useful ways of mapping this capacious concept onto contemporary rhetorical theory. Similarly, Michael Marder’s Energy Dreams: Of Actuality offers a philosophical account of the “relative and absolute ambiguities of energy,” which add layers of confusion to the “historical predicament of energy today.”³¹ The predicament he describes, energy’s ambiguity, begins with Aristotle and twists its way through premodern European theory to nineteenth-century science, to find ubiquitous application in contemporary discourse, from popular culture to technical science. In modern rhetorical terms, “energy” connotes vigorous or vivid expression. Aristotle distinguishes between energy in Metaphysics in terms of potentiality (or dunamis) and actuality (or energeia). Marder explains how the relationship between potential energy and actualized energy immediately creates confusion, as the modern usage of energy “is the inverse of Aristotle’s.”³² To make matters worse, Ingraham explains how the paradigm shifts between “Newtonian mechanics” and “Einstein’s theory of special relativity […] pivots on fundamentally different conceptions of energy.”³³ As Lindeman developed his ecosystem metaphor out of Freud’s interest in the mind as an electrical network, he invoked this tangled rhetorical tradition between different types of energy and the ways that energy is seen as potential (or stored) and actual (or kinetic).

For our purposes, consider the rhetorical work of energy in Odum’s Silver Springs study, in which he examines how light enters the spring pool where it joins a steady flow of nutrients and other inputs, which are absorbed and metabolized by a wide variety of organisms.³⁴ In this model, we might ask if it is the light (and other inputs) that holds the potentiality (dunamis) to energize the ecosystem, or instead if it is the ecosystem that holds the potential to activate (energeia) the potential energy of the light (the spring system’s capacity). This tautological knot is at the center of H. T. Odum’s concept of productivity, which governs the ways that a “community metabolism is self-regulated.”³⁵ He would go on to develop a “network language” that could represent energy transformations and transfers across different scales with the goal of demonstrating how complex symbiotic systems achieve stability over time.³⁶ As Patrick Kangas demonstrates, Odum’s early work in the 1950s and 1960s with “simple electrical networks” laid the foundation for “the development of Odum’s approach to systems.”³⁷ Kangas points out that while Odum’s “Ohm’s Law analogy” for ecosystems was met with immediate criticism after publication, “Odum modified the analogy to address these criticisms and continued to use passive analogs as ecological models for another decade.”³⁸ He demonstrates that these electrical models were one of the important strains of early work that helped produce modern ecosystems ecology.

The capaciousness of energy presents mirrored problems for both ecology and rhetoric, as the application of different types of energy, in all its potentiality and actuality, creates barriers to general theories of ecosystem, ecology, or rhetoric. In Rhetorical Ecologies, Sid Dobrin and I discuss, and ultimately trouble, the notion of a general rhetorical ecology, building from Erich Hörl’s conception of a “general ecology.”³⁹ While George A. Kennedy’s 1992 article “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric” argues for a general theory of rhetoric as energy, his engagement with the problems of energy ultimately faces the same problems that energy poses for ecosystems ecology.⁴⁰ Odum’s work was criticized for viewing energy as a “one dimensional” or “universal currency in ecology.”⁴¹ Such a focus seeks to reduce organism functions to those of machines or circuits, but ultimately fails because “the types of energy and their spatio-temporal partitioning in real ecosystems are too diverse.”⁴² In other words, energy is too ambiguous and broad to serve as a circulating medium for the ecosystem. This holds true for rhetoric as well, where energy, and its circulation, might serve as too convenient a term for the transmission and transformation of messages. As Ingraham points out, many scholars in contemporary rhetorical inquiry follow similar lines of thinking as Kennedy’s article lays out, demonstrating that his essay has introduced new directions to the field.⁴³ In its most basic sense, Kennedy’s use of energy sufficiently distorts thermodynamics such that it may serve to further obfuscate, rather than clarify, this new paradigm for rhetoric. While energy, like ecology, offers convenient purchase as a metaphor for RWCS, without care it may also support technocratic perspectives.

Throughout the Odum brothers’ careers, but especially H. T.’s later work with energese and the production of an energy systems language, the Odums built from Alfred J. Lotka’s idea of the “maximum power principle,” which attempted to explain Darwinian evolution at the scale of ecosystems and in terms of energy. As H. T. Odum puts it, “…over time a network that draws more resources and uses them better toward maintaining that network will tend to replace designs that have fewer resources with which to work.”⁴⁴ Noting the problems posed by different scales of size and time (which I return to in Chaps. 4 and 5, respectively), he proposes “emergy”—a portmanteau of “embodied” and “energy”—as a “scale-independent measure of work and a useful concept of value.”⁴⁵ Emergy—along with other units such as “emjoule” and “emcalorie”—was first suggested to Odum as a way to combine embodied energy by David M. Scienceman during a visiting appointment at the University of Florida in 1986.⁴⁶ Scienceman is an Australian scientist who changed his name from David Slade in 1972 as part of his work to establish a political movement and party representing science.⁴⁷ Scienceman also suggests additional emergy nomenclature such as “empower, emdollar, embit, energy memory and the maximum empower principle.”⁴⁸ Starting in the mid-1980s, emergy emerges as the basic currency of Odum’s ecosystem. He defines emergy as referring to the holistic amount of energy consumed in the work that supports a system. Odum gives the example of energy moving “from dilute sunlight up to plant matter, to coal, from coal to oil, to electricity and up to the high quality efforts of computer and human information processing.”⁴⁹ Emergy allows Odum to trace the movement of energy through a closed system, be it a cypress dome, the production of information, a coral reef, or geopolitical conflict in Afghanistan (Fig. 2.2).

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These diagrams may evoke for RWCS scholars (or at least those interested in RNM) Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), which similarly maps relations and agency across both nonhuman and human phenomena. As Eugene Odum defines it in his famous textbook Fundamentals of Ecology, “…[a]ny unit that includes all of the organisms (i.e. the ‘community’) in a given area interacting with the physical environment, so that a flow of energy leads to clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity, and material cycles (i.e. exchange of materials between living and nonliving parts) within the system is an ecosystem.”⁵⁰ H. T. Odum extends this thinking further to argue that “energy, ecology, and economics form a single, unified system.”⁵¹ Such a perspective on systems also introduces what philosophers of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) refer to as a “flat ontology,” a model that places all objects on the same agential playing field, challenging hierarchical systems.⁵² For example, in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy Manuel DeLanda explains that “while an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status.”⁵³ This level footing can exacerbate the problems of spatiotemporal scale that are taken up in Chaps. 4 and 5. For now, it is enough to say that the flat ontology of OOO can tend to oversimplify relationality and agency, which Latour responds to with his conception of ANT.

These tensions are similarly present in the technocratic rhetoric of ecosystems. As Taylor explains, “…[t]echnocrats believe they can handle social complexity in a value-free manner, maintaining a distance from specific interests and political details.”⁵⁴ The seamlessness that technocrats believe that solutionism will bring about ignores the messy complexities that spatial and temporal scales introduce to ecological thinking. H. T. Odum explains that Silver Springs is an ideal site for analysis because the literature suggests that the site has not changed since the 1860s.⁵⁵ Yet, this “steady state” locks the place into the kind of spatiotemporal regimes that I discuss later, where time is thought to stand still, or is artificially removed from the equation, and place becomes a symbolic abstraction. At the same time, Odum notes the potential for future disruption of this state by the growth of industry and development, pointing out other Florida springs which have ceased flow.⁵⁶ Yet, while the energy rhetoric that H. T. and Eugene Odum espoused throughout their careers—building from Lindeman’s ecosystem concept—seems to reject the organismal approaches of earlier ecological theories, the influence of Fredrick Clements’ organicism clearly reflects many of the holistic and teleological perspectives. Dana Phillips argues that “Odum’s descriptions of ecology as a discipline have a figurative dimension and a Clementsian flavor at odds with his professed allegiance to the ecosystem concept.”⁵⁷ While Tansley’s “ecosystem” replaced organicist holism with a materialist ontology, its deployment by the Odum brothers carried forward remnants of earlier ecological theories. Reflecting on this conceptual contortion, Phillips remarks that “[Eugene] Odum’s work demonstrates how stubbornly persistent analogies can be.”⁵⁸ Energy rhetoric served to elide the connections of “new ecology” to the older concepts of the discipline. At the same time, this energy rhetoric served to root ecosystems ecology in the atomic age. Eugene Odum writes that “The new ecology is rooted in a solid historical development, but its rise to a front-line position in man’s thinking is a consequence of the exploitation of atomic energy.”⁵⁹ As such, the new ecology is directly connected to nuclear technology and energy at its core.

Along similar lines to ecosystems ecology, contemporary rhetorical scholarship is likewise haunted by the capacious and fraught modern conceptions of energy. Ingraham traces the interwoven threads of energy and rhetoric to Kennedy’s “Hoot,” which argues, among other things, that rhetoric might best be understood as a form of energy exchange, that rhetoric’s energy is “perhaps a special case of the energy of all physics.”⁶⁰ As a decorated scholar of Aristotelian rhetoric, Kennedy was steeped in his energetic theories, and the relationship between potentiality and actuality deeply informs Kennedy’s understanding of rhetorical transmission, which produces a definition that includes nonhumans as capable rhetoricians. He specifically discusses the “complex code of signs” used by animals, giving examples of birds and primates, but he also does not close off this definition to plants, fungi, and bacteria. In broadening the boundaries of rhetoric beyond the human, Kennedy draws from evolutionary and social biology, linguistics, grammatology, and physics. While his focus is on living organisms, he does not discuss how viruses might complicate or figure into his definition. Importantly, Kennedy suggests the “rheme” as a “unit of rhetorical energy.”⁶¹ Mapping Kennedy’s rheme onto Odum’s emergy brings the energetic connections between ecosystems ecology and rhetorical ecologies into clearer perspective. If emergy allowed for a holistic view of ecological systems—one that considers not only the immediate biological organisms in a specific place, but also the broad transformations of energy exchanges that sustain them—so might the rheme allow rhetoric scholars to expand how we imagine and study rhetorical circulation and transformation within networks.

Ingraham connects Kennedy’s work with a paradigm shift in rhetoric, examining the ways that rhetorical ecologies,⁶² circulation,⁶³ and even “kinetic energy”⁶⁴ disrupt prior notions of the “rhetorical situation.”⁶⁵ Essentially, the basic critique of the “situation” metaphor holds that it is too static, simplistic, abstract, and places too much emphasis on the agency of the speaker/author of the discourse, when much of the persuasive capacity of a message is not so simply within a speaker’s control. Specifically, transformation leads to a distributed model of rhetoric that “does not derive solely from an actualized image’s rhetorical design, nor is it a static affair, especially when it comes to […] viral circulation.”⁶⁶ As Ingraham notes, for recent scholars,⁶⁷ energy has become an “organizing concept” in the related concepts of circulation studies and rhetorical ecologies.⁶⁸ Alongside ecology, energy helps rhetoricians characterize discourse through more nuanced means, allowing rhetorical inquiry to better account for the complexity of things like digital networks.

While the shift toward studying ecologies, circulation, and complex systems has undoubtedly yielded a rich subfield within rhetoric—one that continues to grow and thrive—there remains a need to address the problems and concerns that ecology and energy import along with the metaphor. For example, Justine Wells examines how Kennedy’s definition of rhetoric as a “mechanism for survival,” and its function as promoting “the survival of the fittest,” engages with Social Darwinism that centers “whiteness and white supremacy.”⁶⁹ By investigating the genealogy of the ecosystem, this book seeks to decenter such perspectives though a conceptual history with the ultimate goal of bettering ecological and rhetorical inquiry. As such, energy—and specifically the node I identify between the rheme and emergy—indexes one important place to locate overlapping problems and approaches that can help map rhetorical ecologies onto ecosystems ecology, connections and troubles that I take up in the next chapter and develop throughout the remainder of the book. As such, energy rhetoric serves to forward the technomorphic and technocratic rhetoric of ecosystems.

Conceptually, the ecosystem functions less like a metaphor for complexity, circulation, and networks and more like a diagram, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari. In their definition, the diagram’s function is greater than a representation or scaled model. Rather, diagrams are systems of meaning-making. Deleuze discusses the diagram in Difference and Repetition as “a system of multiple, non-localizable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms.”⁷⁰ Diagrams actively participate in the processes, practices, and production of meaning. Byron Hawk and Matthew Halm have each investigated the diagram as a key term for rhetoric, situating diagrammatic rhetoric as a means for resisting treating concepts as metaphors or abstract models. Halm gives the example of plate tectonics, where the metaphor of an earthquake as communication is contrasted with the ways that the “diagram of the mechanism that drives the circulation of tectonic plates can produce an understanding of the mechanism that drives the circulation of rhetoric.”⁷¹ In other words, diagrams not only act as representations, but also rather actively function to generate meaning. Hawk gives the example of virality, which “isn’t just a metaphor for how discourse circulates” but rather functions as “a model for how forces circulate through all kinds of encounters.”⁷² As a diagram, the ecosystem concept participates in the process of making meaning—just as environment, ecology, and Umgebung each generate new ways of thinking.

Throughout their career, the Odum brothers produced numerous figures and illustrations representing a wide array of abstruse ecological concepts. Throughout their body of work, they demonstrate a keen understanding of visual rhetoric and design, and in correspondence with publishers, Eugene Odum expressed a strong interest in how visuals can communicate science to non-specialist audiences. As Phillips puts it, “Odum’s illustrations are best regarded as mnemonic devices and pedagogical aids, and not as ‘realistic’ depictions of the natural world” and clearly “are a poor sort of visual shorthand with which to convey some extremely recondite ideas.”⁷³ As such, he argues that “[e]cosystem modeling seems to be essentially rhetorical, in that the persuasive power of model ecosystems tends to be more important than the accuracy of their details.”⁷⁴ Building from his work, this book argues that ecosystems function as a diagram that has been extremely influential, not only in shaping perceptions of relationships between organisms and environments in the hard sciences, but also in defining and directing inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Yet, such an application further tangles the ecosystem with communications and rhetoric scholarship, as the ecosystem concept is deeply rooted in both cybernetics and information theory, born out of work in communications during WWII.⁷⁵ In many ways, the connections between cybernetics, communication, ecology, and the ecosystem are stacked around contemporary Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication Studies (RWCS) research like nesting dolls, each inside of the other, where communication networks serve as a diagram for ecology, producing the ecosystem, which in turn functions as a diagram for how we imagine digital rhetoric and networks as we play Ring Around the Rosie.

For example, Laurie Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke’s 2018 edited volume Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric positions circulation as an emerging threshold concept for RWCS scholarship, specifically discussing the relationship between ecological rhetorical models and the concepts of circulation, flow, distribution, complexity, and transformation.⁷⁶ These conceptions of ecology within the growing research area of circulation studies can be understood using the ecosystem as a diagram for ecological rhetorical inquiry. Approaching rhetoric through circulation moves beyond drawing metaphoric parallels between ecology and rhetoric. Instead, the ecosystem becomes a functional diagram that actively shapes how DH scholars approach and study rhetorical circulation, such as in metaphors of trends and virality.⁷⁷ By understanding the ecosystem—with its complex history and rich body of knowledge—as a diagram, researchers can approach the dynamic interactions and flows of information within rhetorical ecologies in a more material and process-oriented manner. To further complicate the tangled diagrammatic rhetoric that connects information theory, ecosystems, and communication, the concept is also embedded within and endued with the characterization of the ecosystem as a cybernetic apparatus and machine, a topic richly covered in Thomas Pringle, Gertrud Koch, and Bernard Stiegler’s Machine. Building from Guattari, Pringle focuses on the influence of cybernetics on environmental politics, specifically as it shaped a focus on environmental control and resource management, in which the ecosystem “subsequently becomes the dominant concept for describing biophysical reality as a cybernetic hybrid of nature and machine, otherwise, as an amalgamation of technological and ecological systems.”⁷⁸ Importantly, Pringle invokes Bernard Geoghegan’s work with the cybernetic apparatus⁷⁹ to understand the shift in scientific practices that took place after WWII. Apparatus identifies the ecosystem as more than just a metaphor. Rather, it produces the tensions Pringle identifies between “ecology and economy” that are “later repressed and packaged for use by cybernetic universalism.⁸⁰ Ecosystems present a coherent conceptual model, but as an apparatus it also obscures the sometimes conflicting elements of technology, ecology, and communication systems.

In this sense, the ecosystem as apparatus refers not only to its metaphors of cybernetic systems, its focus on instrumentation, or to procedures from mathematics and engineering, but also to the diagrammatic rhetoric that allowed these components to function together at the conceptual level. By viewing the ecosystem as an apparatus, the diagrammatic rhetoric that allows it to transcend its ecological context and integrate cybernetics, economics, and communications comes into view within the context of the Pacific theater of WWII, a topic I will return to in the next chapter. As Pringle makes clear, the blending of what Hörl refers to as “the nature / technics divide” challenged traditional boundaries between the natural world and the machine, rhetorically reshaping how we understand Guattari’s “three ecologies” (social, mental, and environmental).⁸¹ The diagrammatic rhetoric of the ecosystem apparatus becomes a site where scientific, technological, and social processes converge, emphasizing the entangled role that material and symbolic elements like energy play in the formation of modern ecological inquiry. Ultimately, understanding how the diagrammatic rhetoric of the ecosystem apparatus serves as a framework for management and control both enriches our understanding of the historiography of science and serves as a means of understanding how the ecosystem concept persists in shaping how we conceptualize and realize digital and ecological methods in RWCS and beyond.

In the spring of 1975, a group of beat poets including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder came together with H. T. Odum for a week-long celebration of “Energy and Consciousness,” jointly hosted by the English Department and the Engineering School at the University of Florida (Fig. 2.3). The events featured talks on energy and poetry by Ginsberg, McClure, and Snyder, as well as a panel on energy and consciousness with Odum, Ginsberg, McClure, and the nuclear physicist Henry Gomberg. Odum saw the event as an interdisciplinary “experiment in bridging the gap between science and the arts.”⁸² Featured among the events that took place that week was a tour of an experiment to test the concept of “ecosystem services” that Odum had been conducting in a nearby wetland involving dumping raw municipal waste into a nearby cypress dome in order to test the effectiveness and efficiency of nature-based waste processing, compared to traditional waste treatment practices.⁸³

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This event demonstrates deep connections between ecosystems and the Beatnik movement as part of the development of radical environmentalism in the 1970s. Poets like Ginsberg and Snyder drew upon rhetorical energy in concert with ecosystems in their verse to promote environmental consciousness. At the same time, energy serves to flatten environmentalism by reducing relationality through the rhetoric of systems. Odum’s research at Silver Springs and in wetlands near Gainesville has made important contributions to environmental research and culture. Further, these sites have long participated in the diagrammatic rhetoric through which we construct the so-called nonhuman world. Settler colonial removal of Indigenous peoples, including the Seminole Tribe, contributed to an image of the natural world devoid of human presence, contributing to the Romantic views of the natural world and the frontier wilderness myth that I discuss in the next chapter. Following the developments of communications and nuclear technology in the aftermath of WWII, the natural world was transformed into a cybernetic machine through the ecosystem concept, with the presumption that its electrical flows could be managed and controlled. Odum’s research at Silver Springs was a pivotal moment in ecosystems ecology. His groundbreaking work helped conceptualize ecosystems as dynamic, interconnected systems of energy exchange.

Energy flow, both for ecology and for rhetoric, offers capacious and sometimes fraught metaphors for complex systems. In Energy Dreams, Marder explains that the concept of energy calls for us to develop a “nonviolent framework for thinking about and practically relating to energy without destroying living beings and our planet through its extraction.”⁸⁴ In the period of time known as the Anthropocene, technological and anthropogenic changes have drastically altered environments in a relatively short period of time. Today, the Silver Springs study offers a baseline for understanding how large-scale changes are affecting local environments. Odum’s use of energy as a metaphor for ecosystem dynamics demonstrates deep connections between ecology and rhetoric, revealing a need for interdisciplinary approaches to address the most urgent environmental and communication challenges. This example reminds us that apprehending and addressing systemic problems requires a richer understanding of scientific invention through the perspectives of RWCS. In the following chapters, I build from this study to examine the convergence of ecology, technology, and communication as they present challenges and opportunities for environmental communication and ecological inquiry.