ABSTRACT
The paradigm shift, in short, lay entirely in the eye of the beholder. Sudden concern about the owl derived not from ecological calamity but from a new interpretation of how nature ought to behave. Once society embraced a teleology that demanded balance, then actions such as logging took on new meaning. What had previously been seen as ordinary and even beneficial was suddenly perceived as an ecological catastrophe. Quite unconsciously biologists accepted this notion, thereby transforming their discipline from science to metaphysics, promoting a foreboding of doom, and provoking a political crisis which ensured, as Kuhn put it, that contending parties would "finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion, often including force." Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all.
