Paper short abstract:

Epistemic cultures involving the tracing of radioactive isotopes have not only contributed to conceptualizing the environment as a cyclical ecosystem; they also helped to reveal chokepoints of accumulation among indigenous tribes in Alaska and Scandinavia in the 1960s.

Paper long abstract:

With the emergence of radioactive isotopes as part of experimental systems in the 20th century science, practitioners acquired a new space of representation that allowed metabolic pathways to be mapped by spatializing temporal processes as a cycle. Within recent developments in epigenetics, this new epistemic space within molecular biology not only opened up possibilities for rethinking metabolism as a regulatory interface at the level of the body and its molecular politics; it also enabled a “molecularization” of the environment produced in and through experimental models of exposure (Landecker 2011)

This paper draws upon this notion of the “molecularization” of the environment to trace two trajectories: 1) it explores how tracing technologies helped to “molecularize” ecosystems as cyclical, homeostatic systems through an experimental culture that released radioisotopes into surroundings in order to follow them, and 2) how the materialization of radioactive isotopes in Alaska and Sweden in the 1960s instead exposed how the ecology of land-air relations among certain Indigenous groups produced what I call “chokepoints.” Such chokepoints trouble the concept of ecosystem as a harmonious cycle by making visible the uneven and unequal distribution of radioactive isotopes within the “planetary politics” of exposure (Masco 2021) in the wake of above-ground nuclear detonation. Making this exposure public catalyzed acknowledgements of responsibility by scientists and calls for intervention into these communities.