Fascism’s organic-hierarchy politics drove ecology toward mathematical reductionism.

Evidence

Twentieth-century ecology emerged from the intellectual framework historically associated with an organic approach to nature and society. Employing the hierarchical variant of the organic model, ecologists in the early decades of this century used concepts such as “organic community,” “mutual interdependence,” and “evolution toward higher forms” on a hierarchical scale to provide an understanding not only of the organization of bacterial colonies, grassland climax vegetation, and bee and ant communities, but also of human tribal societies and the world economy. They stressed an evolution toward greater cooperation on a worldwide basis and argued that nature could provide the model for an ethic of human sharing, integration, and unity. But the emergence of fascist tyranny based on a centralized organismic model glorifying the father as absolute dictator undermined the evolutionary hierarchical component of their argument, and ecology turned in a mathematically reductionistic direction. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 353

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that fascism’s misuse of organic hierarchy caused ecology itself to abandon its organic roots is a genuinely counterintuitive, weighty historical mechanism — the reaction shapes modern ecology’s reductionism and its later tension with holistic environmental thought.
• XREF: Connected to the body-politic hierarchy claims in ch23 and the reader’s interest in how the scientific revolution shaped ecological thought. — connects to: The organic theory of society took three politically distinct forms — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 338