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In the 1890s, several initiatives in American botany converged. The creation of new institutions, such as the New York Botanical Garden, coincided with radical reforms in taxonomic practice and the emergence of an experimental program of research on evolutionary problems. Sharon Kingsland explores how these changes gave impetus to the new field of ecology that was defined at exactly this time. She argues that the creation of institutions and research laboratories, coupled with new intellectual directions in science, were crucial to the development of ecology as a discipline in the United States. The main concern of ecology - the relationship between organisms and environment - was central to scientific studies aimed at understanding and controlling the evolutionary process. Kingsland considers the evolutionary context in which ecology arose, especially neo-Lamarckian ideas and the new mutation theory, and explores the relationship between scientific research and broader theories about social progress and the evolution of human civilization. By midcentury, American ecologists were leading the rapid development of ecosystem ecology. and society in the postwar context, foreshadowing the environmental critiques of the 1960s. As the ecosystem concept evolved, so too did debates about how human ecology should be incorporated into the biological sciences. Kingsland concludes with an examination of ecology in the modern urban environment, reflecting on how scientists are now being challenged to produce innovative responses to pressing problems. The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890-2000 offers an innovative study not only of the scientific landscape in turn-of-the-century America, but of current questions in ecological science.
A sweeping overview of key advances in the field of ecology over the latter half of the twentieth century. For three decades, Foundations of Ecology, edited by Leslie A. Real and James H. Brown, has served as an essential primer for graduate students and practicing ecologists, giving them access to the classic papers that laid the foundations of modern ecology alongside commentaries by noted ecologists. Ecology has continued to evolve, and ecologists Thomas E. Miller and Joseph Travis offer here a freshly edited guide for a new generation of researchers. The period of 1970 to 1995 was a time of tremendous change in all areas of this discipline--from an increased rigor for experimental design and analysis and the reevaluation of paradigms to new models for understanding, to theoretical advances. Foundations of Ecology II includes facsimiles of forty-six papers from this period alongside expert commentaries that discuss a total of fifty-three key studies, addressing topics of diversity, predation, complexity, competition, coexistence, extinction, productivity, resources, distribution, and abundance. The result is more than a catalog of historic firsts; this book offers diverse perspectives on the foundational papers that led to today's ecological work.
For the better part of the last century, "preservation" and "multi-use conservation" were the watchwords for managing federal lands and resources. But in the 1990s, amidst notable failures and overwhelming needs, policymakers, land managers, and environmental scholars were calling for a new paradigm: ecosystem management. Such an approach would integrate federal land and resource management across jurisdictional boundaries; it would protect biodiversity and economic development; and it would make federal management more collaborative and less hierarchical. That, at any rate, was the idea. Where the idea came from—why ecosystem management emerged as official policy in the 1990s—is half of the story that James Skillen tells in this timely book. The other half: Why, over the course of a mere decade, the policy fell out of favor? This closely focused history describes an old system of preservation and multi-use conservation ill equipped to cope with the new ecological, legal, and political realities confronting federal agencies. Ecosystem management, it was assumed, would not demand choices between substantive and procedural needs. Looming even larger in the push for the new approach was a shift of emphasis in both ecology and political science—from stability and predictability to dynamism and contingency. Ecosystem management offered more modest managerial goals informed by direct public participation as well as scientific expertise. But as Skillen shows, this purported balance proved to be the policy's undoing. Different interpretations presented conflicting emphases on scientific and democratic authority. By 2001, when both models had been tested, the Bush administration faulted federal ecosystem management for running "willy-nilly all over the west," and shelved the policy. In this book, Skillen gets at the truth behind these contrary interpretations and claims to clarify how federal ecosystem management worked—and didn't—and how many of the principles it embodied continue to influence federal land and resource management in the twenty-first century. How the policy's lessons apply to our politically and environmentally fraught moment is, finally, considerably clearer with this informed and thoughtful book in hand.
Despite claims to the contrary, the science of ecology has a long history of building theories. Many ecological theories are mathematical, computational, or statistical, though, and rarely have attempts been made to organize or extrapolate these models into broader theories. The Theory of Ecology brings together some of the most respected and creative theoretical ecologists of this era to advance a comprehensive, conceptual articulation of ecological theories. The contributors cover a wide range of topics, from ecological niche theory to population dynamic theory to island biogeography theory. Collectively, the chapters ably demonstrate how theory in ecology accounts for observations about the natural world and how models provide predictive understandings. It organizes these models into constitutive domains that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of ecological understanding. This book is a milestone in ecological theory and is certain to motivate future empirical and theoretical work in one of the most exciting and active domains of the life sciences.
Biodiversity has been a key concept in international conservation since the 1980s, yet historians have paid little attention to its origins. Uncovering its roots in tropical fieldwork and the southward expansion of U.S. empire at the turn of the twentieth century, Megan Raby details how ecologists took advantage of growing U.S. landholdings in the circum-Caribbean by establishing permanent field stations for long-term, basic tropical research. From these outposts of U.S. science, a growing community of American "tropical biologists" developed both the key scientific concepts and the values embedded in the modern discourse of biodiversity. Considering U.S. biological fieldwork from the era of the Spanish-American War through the anticolonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this study combines the history of science, environmental history, and the history of U.S.–Caribbean and Latin American relations. In doing so, Raby sheds new light on the origins of contemporary scientific and environmentalist thought and brings to the forefront a surprisingly neglected history of twentieth-century U.S. science and empire.
A Companion to the History of American Science offers a collection of essays that give an authoritative overview of the most recent scholarship on the history of American science. Covers topics including astronomy, agriculture, chemistry, eugenics, Big Science, military technology, and more Features contributions by the most accomplished scholars in the field of science history Covers pivotal events in U.S. history that shaped the development of science and science policy such as WWII, the Cold War, and the Women’s Rights movement
The paper industry rejuvenated the American South—but took a heavy toll on its land and people. When the paper industry moved into the South in the 1930s, it confronted a region in the midst of an economic and environmental crisis. Entrenched poverty, stunted labor markets, vast stretches of cutover lands, and severe soil erosion prevailed across the southern states. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, pine trees had become the region’s number one cash crop, and the South dominated national and international production of pulp and paper based on the intensive cultivation of timber. In The Slain Wood, William Boyd chronicles the dramatic growth of the pulp and paper industry in the American South during the twentieth century and the social and environmental changes that accompanied it. Drawing on extensive interviews and historical research, he tells the fascinating story of one of the region’s most important but understudied industries. The Slain Wood reveals how a thoroughly industrialized forest was created out of a degraded landscape, uncovers the ways in which firms tapped into informal labor markets and existing inequalities of race and class to fashion a system for delivering wood to the mills, investigates the challenges of managing large papermaking complexes, and details the ways in which mill managers and unions discriminated against black workers. It also shows how the industry’s massive pollution loads significantly disrupted local environments and communities, leading to a long struggle to regulate and control that pollution.
Prior to the Nixon administration, environmental policy in the United States was rudimentary at best. Since then, it has evolved into one of the primary concerns of governmental policy from the federal to the local level. As scientific expertise on the environment rapidly developed, Americans became more aware of the growing environmental crisis that surrounded them. Practical solutions for mitigating various aspects of the crisis - air pollution, water pollution, chemical waste dumping, strip mining, and later global warming - became politically popular, and the government responded by gradually erecting a vast regulatory apparatus to address the issue. Today, politicians regard environmental policy as one of the most pressing issues they face. The Obama administration has identified the renewable energy sector as a key driver of economic growth, and Congress is in the process of passing a bill to reduce global warming that will be one of the most important environmental policy acts in decades. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy will be a state-of-the-art work on all aspects of environmental policy in America. Over the past half century, America has been the world's leading emitter of global warming gases. However, environmental policy is not simply a national issue. It is a global issue, and the explosive growth of Asian countries like China and India mean that policy will have to be coordinated at the international level. The book will therefore focus not only on the U.S., but on the increasing importance of global policies and issues on American regulatory efforts. This is a topic that will only grow in importance in the coming years, and this will serve as an authoritative guide to any scholar interested in the issue.
Exploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, this book reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organizations have engaged in diplomatic efforts to address it. Developing amidst the Cold War, decolonization and a growing transnational environmental consciousness, it asks how this wider historical context has shaped international responses to the greatest threat to humankind to date. Thinking beyond the science of climate change to the way it is received and responded to, Ruth Morgan shows how climate science has been mobilised in the political sphere, paying particular attention to the North-South dynamics of climate diplomacy. The privileging of climate science and the mobilisation of climate scepticism are explored to consider how they have undermined efforts to remedy this planetary problem. Studying climate change and international history in tandem, this book explains the origins of the debates around this environmental emergency, the response of political leaders attempting to address the threat, and the barriers to creating an international regime to resolve the climate crisis.
Indigenous ways of understanding and interacting with the natural world are characterized as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), which derives from emphasizing relationships and connections among species. This book examines TEK and its strengths in relation to Western ecological knowledge and evolutionary philosophy. Pierotti takes a look at the scientific basis of this approach, focusing on different concepts of communities and connections among living entities, the importance of understanding the meaning of relatedness in both spiritual and biological creation, and a careful comparison with evolutionary ecology. The text examines the themes and principles informing this knowledge, and offers a look at the complexities of conducting research from an indigenous perspective.