Survival Science: Crisis Disciplines and the Shock of the Environment in the 1970s1

The 1970s mark a critical departure point in the history of science. The rise of the environmental crisis prompted not just new avenues of scientific inquiry but also the integration of scientific expertise into complex interactions with politics and society. This paper investigates the history of the new ‘crisis disciplines’ that emerged in response to explicit fears that the world was on the verge of ecological collapse. Crisis disciplines – a term coined by the conservation biologist Michael Soulé – engage in the urgent and reactionary pursuit of solutions to pressing environmental problems and the evidence scientists bring to bear on their work. Crisis disciplines involve acting ‘before knowing all the facts’, and therefore constitute ‘a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information’. Combined, diverse crisis disciplines constitute a new kind of ‘survival science’, which emerged in the 1970s.