Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture by Paolo Palladino

Author:Paolo Palladino [Palladino, Paolo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783718659074
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1996-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Biological Control, Integrated Control, and Ecological Theory

CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL, AND INTEGRATED CONTROL

In the first two chapters, I sought to explain how the great emphasis placed on the practical utility of all work in economic entomology led American entomology to grow, over the first half of this century, into a virtual sub-field of chemistry, and how its Canadian counterpart followed instead a path to disciplinary establishment more typical of the modern life sciences. Then, in the last chapter, I discussed how the different factors and contingencies that led to these developments were reflected in the changing institutional organization of biological control in the United States and Canada. The most active American center for work in this area, the Division of Biological Control in the Citrus Experiment Station at Riverside (which was later expanded to include a branch at Berkeley), was strongly oriented toward the practical development and implementation of biological control programs. By the late 1950s, however, its ties to agriculture became rather looser, especially as it began to employ a younger generation of entomologists more interested in population ecology and the theory of biological control. Yet, these ties never became as loose as those between the federal Entomology Research Institute for Biological Control at Belleville and Canadian agricultural industries. Work in the latter center focused much more definitely on the ecological foundations of biological control than on any more strictly economic problems. In this fourth chapter, I will consider in some detail the relationships between this institutional difference and the ideas of entomologists in Riverside, Berkeley, and Belleville about how to study the ecology of insect populations, and about the significance of the emergent ecological insight for practices of biological and integrated control.

As we have already seen, during the 1950s, entomologists in these American and Canadian centers sought to develop programs for crop protection which would allow the combined use of chemical and biological control agents. If the former were used in a way that minimized any disruption of the native and introduced biological factors controlling the growth of pest populations, they argued, such an approach would eventually reduce the need for chemical insecticides. In this way, the disastrous consequences of the contemporary, ecologically indiscriminate, and economically senseless use of DDT and other powerful insecticides might become just memories of a distant past. However, careful comparison of the different definitions of the integrated strategy articulated during the early 1960s by entomologists in Berkeley and Riverside, on the one hand, and those in Belleville, on the other, reveals that there was very little agreement among them over the exact importance of biological control in the new strategy. While the former group of entomologists attributed to it great importance, the latter (and others closely associated with them) emphasized the need for a number of supplementary tactics, beside the use of natural enemies and insecticides, to develop any effective integrated control program. The rhetoric of this disagreement, a disagreement which involved, at least in part, a central and endlessly controversial theme of ecological

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