The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific

Abstract

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.