Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology: now re-issued

My first book, Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology is now being re-issued by West Virginia University Press.  It was originally published in 1997 by Yale University Press, so I'm really pleased that the book will be available again for anyone interested in the history of ecology!

I wrote a new preface for this edition, telling how I came to write this book.  I also presented a few thoughts about writing the history of ecology and of recent science: how to study science as an activity done by real people (that is, in terms of the practices of science) and the value of historical comparisons.  Here it is:

Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology

A New Preface

Like ecology, this book was a product of its times.  In the late 1980s I was a grad student in history of science at the University of Toronto, recently arrived from biology (specifically, ecology and limnology).  I studied first ideas about evolution after Darwin, such as those of Alpheus Spring Packard, an American who interpreted cave fauna that lacked eyes and other adaptations to light as evidence of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.  But I soon shifted to the history of ecology, intrigued by the interesting fact that the discipline took early root in the Great Lakes region.  I pursued this by comparing the work of Stephen Forbes (later famous for his 1887 essay on "The Lake as a Microcosm") in Illinois and Jacob Reighard of the University of Michigan.  By the time, though, I had begun my Ph.D. my interests had shifted forward, to more recent debates about ecology and its social roles.  So I turned to the development of ecology since the Second World War.  That work became my dissertation, which, after more years of writing, became Ecologists and Environmental Politics.

At that time few historians had written about ecology.  Frank Egerton had produced several useful studies and surveys, Sharon Kingsland had examined population ecology (and had just graduated from Toronto a few years before), Robert McIntosh had produced a book-length survey of the "background" of ecology, and, most ambitiously, Donald Worster had written a history of ecological ideas.  But I was surprised that hardly anyone (apart from Worster) had paid attention to what I considered one of the central features of ecology: its relation to environmental concerns.  We were once supposed to have entered an "Age of Ecology"; I had also read descriptions of ecology as the "intellectual foundation" of the environmental movement � and even as a "subversive science".  So I wondered about that.  Had ecology become not just a scientific discipline, but a source of guidance � even a conscience � for society?  And if it had, how had that affected ecology itself?

Forming these questions was easy; working out how to answer them took more time.  There were few models.  Worster had presented a synthetic perspective on ecology and environmental values, contrasting Arcadian co-existence and Imperial domination.  Historians of environmental thought viewed ecology mainly as a source of values, with ecologists' social roles interpreted in terms of a few key ideas such as stability, competition, chaos, or cooperation.  Policies that invoked ecology, such as ecological modernization, similarly presented it as a source of essential principles, not a living scientific discipline.

So these perspectives didn't speak to my interest in ecology as something done by real people.  I was curious about ecologists' working life, partly because this was what I'd most enjoyed as a student (especially messing around with boats and sampling equipment).  It also seemed to me that if social considerations influenced ecology, and vice versa, then this should be evident in how ecologists did the practical work of assembling, testing and applying their knowledge.  It should also be evident in where ecologists worked: their results and relevance seemed to have a lot to do with where they located their research � in forests, lakes, a desert, or elsewhere.  I'd also noticed that other disciplines, such as toxicology or chemistry, often seemed more relevant than ecology to environmental concerns � suggesting that there was no necessary link between ecology and environmental affairs.

These notions also reflected the state of the history of science in the 1980s.  Interest was shifting from conceptual developments to practices: that is, how, specifically, scientists construct knowledge in the lab, field, and elsewhere.  From Peter Galison's How Experiments End I learned about the practice and organization of big science.  Martin Rudwick's The Great Devonian Controversy, and Mary P. Winsor's course at Toronto on "The Invention of Biology" taught me that disciplines do not simply reflect how nature is organized, but scientists' choices about how to manipulate nature.  From Charles Rosenberg's No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought I took instruction on how scientists' practices and disciplinary ambitions are refracted through institutions.  In Beauty, Health and Permanence Samuel Hays traced environmental concerns to peoples' life experiences � a view that complemented a focus on scientists' practices.  I also studied political science, science policy, and organizational studies, to understand how scientists work in relation to institutions, funding agencies, and government machinery.

Equipped with these perspectives, my next step was to decide where to study.  I settled on three places: the Nature Conservancy of Great Britain, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in New Hampshire.  I'd known about each, and their importance to ecology, since I was a science student.  British ecologists had in the 1940s urged creation of the Nature Conservancy, as an institution to acquire and manage nature reserves and support their research.  Since the 1950s ecological research had developed at Oak Ridge that emphasized ecosystem study and the laboratory's nuclear mission.  And at Hubbard Brook ecologists supported by the National Science Foundation studied a watershed ecosystem, drawing implications for forestry and other issues.  While all part of postwar Anglo-American ecology, these approaches differed in terms of structure, relations to practical concerns and other disciplines, and � what I found especially interesting � in ideas about landscape, with the British view of nature as including humans contrasting with the American wilderness tradition.

At each institution ecologists formed distinctive ties to local places, with field sites and practices linked to scientific goals and environmental concerns.  These outdoor "laboratories" became places of experimentation.  The Oak Ridge Reservation became a research instrument, with a contaminated lake bed, a forest and other habitats used to study nutrient dynamics and the transport of radionuclides in ecosystems.  Hubbard Brook scientists studied in forests and streams the movement of elements and the consequences of forest cutting and acid rain.  British ecologists used field sites to study forest regeneration and ecological restoration, among other topics.

Each place also exemplified distinctive political and institutional cultures, including specific environmental concerns, as well as ideas about the appropriate role of government and of experts in managing nuclear technology or forests, or conserving nature.  In each case institutions served as gatekeepers between society and ecologists: assembling social factors into particular combinations that influenced the development of ecology (and other disciplines) at each site.  The cultures instilled within each institution shaped ecologists' choices regarding their research questions and practices, and their positions in relation to environmental concerns.  Even within each institution, these choices could be diverse: in no way were they guided by a single vision.  Taking a lesson from Galison's study of big physics, I mapped the divisions of labor at each site: between ecologists focused on just birds, insects or small mammals, and others who studied entire ecosystems; or between those developing practical applications and those preferring to speak mainly to other ecologists.

Working all this out confirmed for me the contribution of historical comparisons to forming a broader understanding while respecting the particularities of place.  I had been surprised to find few examples of comparative history of science, although Jonathan Harwood's study of German and American genetics was a useful model.  (I'd also already seen the value of comparative analysis when I studied the history of ecology in Illinois and Michigan.)  These institutions proved to be ideal for comparison, serving as a natural experiment that conveyed a sense of the diversity of ecologists' experiences during the environmental era.  Later, as I revised my thesis for publication, I added another case: ecological and fisheries research at the University of Toronto.  Canada presented its own political culture of science and environmental affairs, while fish populations and the Great Lakes presented distinctive environmental challenges, enriching the comparative analysis.

So I found that there had been no single relation between ecology and environmental affairs.  Rather, these relations reflected the many local circumstances, demands and choices made by ecologists and by those who used their results.  This corroborated nicely, I thought, William Cronon's comment in his 1993 essay, "The Uses of Environmental History": that there is not One Big Problem called "The Environment," but a near infinitude of relations between people and the world.  Even amidst all the research accomplished over the last twenty years on the history of ecology, field sciences, conservation biology and other topics, this observation has stood up rather well.