{"id":19102,"date":"2026-04-23T08:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T12:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/?p=19102"},"modified":"2026-04-22T15:22:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T19:22:16","slug":"madison-jones-publishes-new-book-about-the-rhetoric-of-science-in-an-ecological-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/uncategorized\/madison-jones-publishes-new-book-about-the-rhetoric-of-science-in-an-ecological-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Madison Jones publishes new book about the rhetoric of science in an ecological age"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KINGSTON, R.I. – April XX –  Inventing Ecosystems: The Rhetoric of Science in an Ecological Age <\/em>by Madison Jones, assistant professor of professional and public writing<\/a> and director of the DWELL Lab<\/a>, is a new book <\/em>that explores the hidden histories and powerful ideas behind the concept of ecosystems, revealing how this scientific model has shaped the way we understand and interact with the natural world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inventing Ecosystems<\/em> developed over 10 years of research and examines how ecological science adopted information and communications theories from World War II-era technocracy, and how rhetoric scholars then borrowed those ecological metaphors; creating a problematic loop that naturalizes technology and obscures political consequences. The book challenges technocratic thinking (particularly relevant in the age of artificial intelligence) by examining historical paths through which systems-based thinking entered ecology via funding from the nuclear industry, and argues for interdisciplinary collaboration between rhetoric and ecology to address the fundamental problem of scale in environmental communication. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBoth rhetoric and ecologies have something to gain from one another, being in interdisciplinary conversation. It’s not really about correcting rhetoric or critiquing ecology. It’s really about how these two disciplines can come together and learn from one another,\u201d said Jones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howard Odum and Eugene Odum pioneered ecosystems ecology after World War II, borrowing from information and communications theories developed for wartime intelligence needs. The U.S. prioritized communications and information theories as central wartime strategies, which then shaped how ecologists conceptualized environments. Ecology moved into an “informatic or energetic” framework, naturalizing the idea that environments function like electrical circuits or systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This framework was heavily influenced by technocratic perspectives. Technocracy was a political movement seeking to replace capitalism and currency with energy units, where all products and labor would be valued by their energy cost (production energy, education energy, transportation energy). This worldview imagined society as a system where people receive energy credits and must use energy “perfectly in line with the machine.\u201d Technocratic thinking shaped how early ecosystem ecologists conceptualized inputs and outputs of environmental systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSam Altman’s comparison of AI power consumption to the resources required to raise and educate humans is a contemporary example of technocratic logic\u2014conflating human and machine from an energy-systems perspective,\u201d said Jones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary culture\u2019s instant gratification mindset (further amplified by the internet) conflicts with long-term ecological thinking\u2013which extends to thinking about ecological issues in a social and environmental context. For example, the atomic bomb during World War II. The Odum. brothers received their initial funding from what is now the nuclear industry, which fell under the Department of Defense and U.S. military. They were interested in learning about radiation and what happens to environments when exposed to radiation. Because of their technocratic background, they centralized the study of energy flow as the way ecology is thought of now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bikini Atoll, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Marshall Islands, was the site of numerous US nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958 by the Odum brothers. The indigenous population was displaced in 1946 and remains unable to return permanently due to lingering high radioactivity in soil and food, particularly coconuts. Scale and time has made this experiment a one-time event because of the ethics around exposing a community to fatal chemicals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen we think about energy as information\u2013if we start to collapse these things, we forget that ecology came of age with the detonation of the atom bomb. And in this age that we live in today, everything is at our fingertips, but we\u2019re not really thinking through the material impacts of all that energy and information that we have,\u201d said Jones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, scale is the central problem Jones identifies. Ecologists understand that defining an ecosystem requires creating arbitrary boundaries in space and time that allow study, but does not reflect true interconnection and long-lasting effects. For example, URI\u2019s North Woods ecosystem; where does it stop and campus start? In the winter when roads are freezing and salt is required for the safety of the campus community, Flag Road could be considered a boundary where to stop laying down salt. However, salt applied to the road during ice storms inevitably infiltrates North Woods, creating environmental problems down the road. On a temporal scale, a one-year study of tick populations in North Woods only takes a small slice of time as researchers are unable to conduct 10,000-year studies. Regardless, long-term effects matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat we’ve come to realize is that everything is connected, but that also means that we can’t easily demarcate these systems. And so, we like to think of systems as these closed units, but there are no closed systems on this planet, \u201c said Jones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The implications for the rhetoric of science and technology measures must shift to a place in which human beings stop taking on this self-created managerial role of our ecosystems.   Inventing Ecosystems <\/em>provokes big questions around this idea, and how we can reconfigure our long-term relationship to the environment to benefit generations of life to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inventing Ecosystems: The Rhetoric of Science in an Ecological Age is available for <\/em>download<\/em><\/a> <\/em>now.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inventing Ecosystems: The Rhetoric of Science in an Ecological Age is available for download now.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5153,"featured_media":17862,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19103,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19102\/revisions\/19103"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/artsci\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}