History of British Ecology: The Story from Silwood Park

I reviewed recently The Silwood Circle: A History of Ecology and the Making of Scientific Careers in Late Twentieth-Century Britain for a history of science journal.  The review will likely appear in a year or so.  It's an interesting account of the history of recent British ecology.  The "Silwood Circle" refers to a loose network of ecologists, spanning several countries, but centred on the Silwood Park campus of Imperial College London.  Beginning in the 1960s this campus became a major centre for ecological research.  In telling its history Hannah Gay takes the ecologists' point of view: examining how they understood research problems, why they saw them as important, and how they tried to solve them.  Much of the book is a kind of collective biography, with profiles of key ecologists.

Although I've studied several of these ecologists, including Robert MacArthur, Robert May, Buzz Holling, E. O. Wilson and others, much of this account was new to me.  My main focus in British ecology has been on plant ecology (Arthur Tansley and friends), animal ecology (Charles Elton and company), and nature conservation, particularly by the Nature Conservancy (see here for my most recent paper).  In contrast, The Silwood Circle focuses on ecologists who took a self-consciously theoretical approach: building models and conducting field experiments that aimed to generate general principles about populations and their interactions, rather than an understanding of particular habitats or species.  It's a bit like Sharon Kingsland's Modeling Nature, but updated and with an English accent.

Here's a few key lessons from this book, relating to the history of ecology:

�      The importance of other disciplines, including physics, in provoking intellectual change in ecology.  In particular, Robert May (originally a physicist) pushed ecologists to use theoretical models, resetting their research agendas.

�      The importance of specific places in encouraging scientific collaboration, with real impacts on the content of the science.  Woods Hole is one such place; Elton's Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford was another; and Silwood Park was too.  Ecologists came to work, discuss, play, and, of course, sort out who were the insiders.

�      The public role of ecology has reached much further than through its links with environmentalism and conservation.  For example, studies of insect ecology were tied to new developments in agriculture.  Some ecologists applied ecological techniques to epidemiology, with big impacts on knowledge about infectious diseases.  And some ecologists, like May and Richard Southwood, made it to the very top of the pile of British scientific advising.