I. Ecology as Scientific Form of Conservation

A. Human ecology arises in cities out of concern for unsanitary effects on human health. Plant and animal ecology is influenced by rapid transformation of Great Plains agriculture and campaign against predators.

B. Factors stimulating development of science of ecology

1. Population: Population growth in cities continues. Kansas, eastern Colorado, and Texas panhandle are settled after return of rains in 1900.

2. Market: Industrial expansion continues in cities, with concomitant environmental pollution. Capitalist agriculture on the Great Plains after 1900, with a boom period stimulated by the need to increase wheat production during World War I. Collapse of Wall Street (1929), the Great Depression, and dust bowls of the 1930s follow. In eight Great Plains states in 1899, 54 million acres of wheat and cotton were harvested; in 1919, 88 million, in 1929, 103 million.

3. Technology: Smokestack industries, automobiles, electric streetcars; oil- and coal-powered equipment, and machinery are used in cities. Gasoline-driven tractors, combines, trucks used on Great Plains farms.

4. Social Relations: Immigrants and black migrants employed as wage laborers in cities experience brunt of unsanitary conditions and are treated as causing them. Arkies and Oakies lose farms and escape Great Plains during Dust Bowl years; many migrate to California. Public health associations and sanitation commissions are set up to deal with effects of environmental pollution on human health and the urban environment. Bureau of Biological Survey (C. Hart Merriam) sets bounties for predators in 1907, followed by extermination program in 1915, with ensuing ecological disruption. Great Plains Committee assesses ecological damage and creates policy on plains, launches grassland conservation programs, and mandates that regional plans for land management should follow ecological constraints.

5. Attitudes: Ellen Swallow defines human ecology as "the study of the surroundings of human beings in the effects they produce on the lives of men" (1910). Human activity produces pollution. Frederic Clements's organismic ecology assumes the plant community is a living organism, vulnerable to disruption or death by technologies such as those that caused the Dust Bowl. Arthur Tansley's and Raymond Lindeman's economic ecology, based on physics (thermodynamics), assumes the ecologist is the manager of the natural environment; beneficial management increases economic productivity; exploitation lowers it. The "harvest of useful tissue" (Kenneth Watt) should be optimized, production maximized, and stability maintained. Chaotic ecology undermines the idea that humans can predict and manage the ecosytem. Black ecology focuses on human health in inner cities, with a goal of improving living conditions for minorities.

1. Contrast the assumptions underlying the scientific approaches to ecology of Ellen Swallow, Frederic Clements, A. G. Tansley, and Nathan Hare.

2. How does Henry Gleason challenge Clements' concept of organismic ecology? Compare Gleason's arguments for shifting plant associations with those of Pickett and White on patch dynamics. What assumptions about nature underlie these approaches to ecology?

3. How do Raymond Lindeman and Eugene Odum expand on Tansley's concept of the ecosystem. What assumptions about nature underlie their approaches?

4. Describe the role that Clements' organismic ecology played in government's response to the catastrophic 1930s "dust bowl." Which agencies were boosted most during this period? Are similar events likely to have the same effect today?

5. Compare Gifford Pinchot's utilitarian conservation ethic with Aldo Leopold's land ethic (i.e. examine Leopold's A-B cleavage). On what kinds of assumptions does Leopold's ethic rest? Do you agree with the thesis that Leopold's land ethic is the best foundation for a contemporary ecological view?

6. What problems do the different approaches to the science of ecology discussed in this chapter raise for environmental historians? For resource managers? For policy makers?

7. How do metaphors such as organism, machine, and chaos when used by scientists affect the resulting science? How do they affect popular culture? What ethical assumptions about the behavior of humans toward nature are implied by these metaphors? Can science ever rid itself of metaphor?