Wiring the World: A History of the Earth System Concept in the US Earth Sciences, 1982-1989

Earth scientists today tend to view the planet as an integrated system comprised of interconnected components in the air, land, water, and biota. Earth scientists overwhelmingly use one particular phrase to describe this understanding of the planet: the “Earth system.” How did it become possible to conceive of the Earth as a system? When did “Earth system” become a common phrase? What were the principal factors that led to the concept’s later entrenchment? This dissertation addresses these questions by examining the emergence of the “Earth system” concept among US scientists in the 1980s. While the “global” capacities afforded by post-World War II Earth observing satellites and computer modeling may have been necessary for the conception of the Earth as a system, this dissertation argues that they were not sufficient. There is an important sociological component to the history of the Earth system. The Earth system concept has bureaucratic origins that trace to the mid-1980s and the work of a small group of scientists, the Earth System Sciences Committee. This Committee—formed by NASA’s Advisory Council—developed and promoted a research program called “Earth system science” that would take the whole planet as an object of study. Earth system science failed to gain extensive contemporary support, but the committee’s phrase “Earth system” was widely adopted. I argue that the “Earth system” phrase became entrenched despite the failure of the larger project not because it was well defined but because it was vague. By the 1960s, scientists increasingly perceived satellites and global computer models as supporting the idea that the Earth had interconnected parts that required interdisciplinary study. There was, however, little agreement about how to express this imprecise idea. The phrase “Earth system” was vague enough to adequately fill this semantic void. It served as a boundary object between different scientific disciplines, with enough interpretive flexibility to be narrowly defined by specialists while at the same time being broad enough to facilitate interdisciplinary communication. Vagueness, not analytical precision, thus facilitated the early spread and widespread adoption of the Earth system concept and contributed to its later entrenchment in the Earth sciences.

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