Ecologists and the experimental landscape: the nature of science at the US Department of Energy's Savannah River Site

Abstract

Although ecological conceptions of nature remain among the most authoritative in the world today, cultural geographers of landscape have paid little attention to the continuing salience of landscape as an object and scale of analysis in landscape and ecosystems ecology. That this object — a naturalized landscape of dynamic and multi-scalar systems and flows, not fixity — has been constructed, disproportionately, from some of the most technological of spaces, compels us to look more closely at the ways that specific natures circulate to inform general principles and ideas. This article explores how ecologists and other environmental scientists have turned the buffer zone surrounding the US Department of Energy's Savannah River Site, a former plutonium and tritium production plant, into an experimental landscape, with all the proprietary qualities embodied in the latter term. The study brings together a genealogy of the site as a space for scientific ecology with interviews conducted with contemporary environmental scientists based there, focusing chiefly on the work of scientists at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. By investigating the nature of agency, institution building, and representational practices in the making of an experimental, ecological landscape, the article also raises questions about how, at the Savannah River Site and elsewhere, the work of environmental science relates to the productive processes going on around it.