Technology and Culture

The attentive sci-fi lover may observe that strewn across Huxley’s Brave New World, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Herbert’s Dune are claims that genes and the environment together shape the forms that life takes. Until recently, however, historians of twentieth-century biology have predominantly focused on attempts to control genetics while overlooking similar ambitions for controlling the environment. David Munns’s Engineering the Environment fills this historiographical gap with a story about how plant physiologists built a facility to predictably control plant growth—the phytotron.

Phytotrons, computer-controlled rooms that created various climatic conditions for studying and optimizing plant growth, are important devices that no one has heard of. Their central premise was that the development of organisms depends on their genes and environment. By creating reproducible climates, plant scientists hoped to predict plant phenotypes. The term “phytotron” stems from the Greek phyto for plants and tron for tool.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, phytotrons embodied the Cold War era’s rationale for controlling science as part of controlling the social order. Increasing technological capabilities yielded knowledge of nature that could be turned to all kinds of practical uses. Paraphrasing Simon Schaffer’s observation that problems of knowledge are embedded in practical solutions to the problem of social order, Munns asserts that technological control over the environment ensured control of food supplies—something the U.S. government considered necessary for holding communism at bay in developing countries.

Each chapter details how specifying and controlling components of the “environment” gave rise to new variables that required control measures. Munns demonstrates how reducing the environment to controllable variables required building technological systems that in turn caused feedback effects between organisms and technology. Control measures for one variable ended up destabilizing controls for others. For example, lamps gave plants light to grow but raised room temperatures to the point that plants dried up. By pursuing more control, plant scientists encountered complexity that defied such control. Emerging from this interplay by the late 1960s, is a cybernetic understanding of the environment as interrelated, undermining the very reductionism that phytotrons relied on.

Munns tells this story by following the suffix -tron. This is a promising method, described by Eric Schatzberg in his Technology: Critical History of a Concept (2018). Munns demonstrates masterfully why new facilities inevitably ended up with names like Climatron, Biotron, and Ecotron. In [End Page 985] the process, we see how other ideas developed alongside and as knock-on effects of setting up and running a phytotron.

Tracking the suffix -tron demonstrates how words acquired new meanings as they travelled, further underlining the value of transnational scholarship. Munns’s chapter on the Australian phytotron diversifies this otherwise American history of controlling environments. Here is a venue not only for writing national stories about phytotrons but also describing how other initiatives related to or changed the international rationale behind controlling environments. For example, one could explore connections between the phytotron in Stockholm and the Swedish-born American plant physiologist Folke Skoog in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Sweden’s foreign policy focused on environmental diplomacy.

Munns could have addressed how the history of phytotrons helps us understand the present-day renaissance of schemes to manipulate and control environments, in particular calls for technofixing anthropogenic climate change. Low-hanging fruit is existing scholarship on other Cold War histories of controlling the climate or environments, for example Jim Fleming’s Fixing the Sky (2010) and Sabine Höhler’s Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960–1990 (2015).

That said, Munns clarifies that computerized biology was part of numerous processes of measuring and managing nature that gave rise to the present-day datafied environment. Satellites in outer space, drones in the sky, buoys in the sea, and sensors spread across fields and forests are all attempts to turn the entire planet into a phytotron. Just...