13.1 THE EMERGENCE OF ECOLOGY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
    1910 - 1985

    Listen to Podcast of these Slides

    2. Ernst Haeckel
    • Oikos: household.
    • 1866: "Science of the relations of living organisms to the external world."
    • 1869: "The body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature. Study of the complex interrelations [in] the struggle for existence."
    • 1873: Oekologie.
    3. Ellen Swallow Richards
    • Vassar College, 1871; MIT: special student in Chemistry. MIT Instructor.
    • Ellen Swallow, 1892, U.S.: "oekology."
    • Ellen Swallow, 1910, "human ecology" in Sanitation in Daily Life.
    • 1910. Honorary doctorate, Smith College.
    4. Ellen Swallow's MIT and Marine Biological Laboratories
    • 1876, Women's Science Laboratory at MIT.
    • 1881, Women's Education Association funds laboratory in Massachusetts for marine study.
    5. Frederic Clements
    • Plant Succession, 1916.
    • Organismic characterof community and ecology.
    • Bio-ecology,1939 book.
    • Human ecology,1935.
    • "Environment and Lifeon the Great Plains,"1937.
    • Impact of dust bowl on policy.
    6. Primary Succession
    • Ponds and lakes are invaded and filled in by the surrounding ecosystem.
    • Clements: The process of development is alike for the individual organism and the plant community.
    7. Secondary Succession
    • Reinvasion of agricultural field by forest ecosystem.
    • Crabgrass; tall grass; pines; pine forest; hardwood; mature (or climax) forest.
    8. Dust Storms of the 1930s
    • Black blizzard over Prowers County, Colorado, 1937, 2 views of the same storm.
    • Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979).
    9. Great Plains Dust Bowl
    • Drought years and dust storms, 1931-7.
    10. Dust Bowl Homestead
    • Elkhart, Kansas, abandoned in 1935 drought.
    11. Dust Bowl Refugees
    • Cimmeron County, Kansas: family on relief, 1934.
    • Tracy, California: drought refugees, 1937.
    12. The Great Plains Committee
    • 1936, Committee meets with farmers in Scott City, Kansas.
    • Lewis Gray and Rexford Tugwell propose regional planning and a new ecological order in the U.S. that follows nature.
    13. Paul Sears
    • Deserts on the March, 1935.
    • The Great Plains needs a resident ecological advisor.
    • "Ecology—A Subversive Subject," Bioscience, July 1964.
    14. Economic Ecology
    • James Malin (1893-1979), Grasslands of North America, 1956.
    • Carl Sauer (1889-1975), U.C. Berkeley Geographer, human origins of Great Plains; fire; man.
    15. Economic Ecology
    • Henry A. Gleason (1882-1975). "The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association" (1926).
    • "An association is not an organism, scarcely even a vegetational unit, but merely a coincidence."
    • "There is no inherent reason why any two areas of the earth’s surface should bear precisely the same vegetation."
    • "Every species of plant is a law unto itself."
    16. Economic Ecology
    • Arthur G. Tansley (1871-1955). "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts" (1935).
    • "The weakness . . . of Clements is . . . that vegetation is an organism."
    • "In an ecosystem the organisms and the inorganic factors alike are components which are in relatively stable dynamic equilibrium."
    17. Questions for Discussion
    • Could the dust bowl of the 1930s have been avoided?
    • Is ecological science needed to manage disasters such as the dust bowl?