Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture

This volume examines the expanded governmental funding of scientific research and technological development for the institutional and intellectual organization of life sciences in the 20th century. It studies the history of natural historical investigations of insects in the light of the growing institutional organization of the agricultural sciences in the United States and Canada, exploring how this context has shaped the emergence of economic entomology and ecology - two quite different but related disciplines. This study is facilitated by following economic entomologists' and ecologists' changing ideas about different pest control strategies, chiefly chemical , biological and integrated control, The author then follows the efforts of one specific group of entomologists, at the University of California, over three generations from their advocacy of biological controls in the 1930s and 40s, through their shifting attention to the development of an integrated strategy in the 1950s to their final establishment of integrated pest management in the context of big biology during the 1970s.