The Progressive Era and Ecological Science
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(1) Handout today: term paper guidelines
Brief discussion of the Edison film of the Czolgosz execution
Significance of their locations of study
Significance of the quadrat method
Significance of the “climax community”
Significance of ecological succession
Significance of organismic metaphor
See also Barbour essay, "Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties," pp. 223-255 in Uncommon Ground
Donald Worster, writing in Nature’s Economy, “Clements’s ecological paradigm is sometimes referred to as the idea of a ‘monoclimax’ because it allowed only one kind of ultimate formation for each of the broad climatic regions of the world” (210, Worster).
Worster says Clements had an “underlying, almost metaphysical faith that the development of vegetation must resemble the growth process of an individual plant or animal organism” (211, Worster).
[SLIDE]: “Thus when Clements drew from this grassland his model of a mature biotic community, he was writing about a world that was shortly to vanish. It had been a unique part of what Americans had looked to as the ‘virgin land’—a phrase suggesting that man’s relation with nature is not only economic and utilitarian but also emotional, mythic, and perhaps sexual, in some deep-working sense. When, one wonders, did the land cease to be virginal? When the bison came to wallow and thunder on its sod? When the Indian set up his tipi? When a plow first worked in its humus? Clements avoided that question altogether with his more objective label for the primeval grassland: the climax community. But whether one talked about the virginity of the grassland or about the climax of the biome, it was clear to Clements, as it had been to others, that the white man was not part of it: he came as a disrupter, an alien, an exploiter” (217, Worster).
Importance of Clements's Research Methods in Ecology (1905)
Influence on Aldo Leopold via Shelford
C. Critics of Clementsian views:
Arthur Tansley
Henry Allan Gleason
Henry Allan Gleason, 1917, “The Structure and Development of the Plant Association,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 44 (10, October): 463-481.
H. A. Gleason, 1926, “The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 53 (1, January):7-26.
H. A. Gleason, 1927, “Further Views on the Succession-Concept,” Ecology 8 (3, July): 299-326.
Arthur G. Tansley, 1935, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology 16: 284-307.
D. Social Influences upon Ecology
Worster writes:
“[T]he issues Tansley raised . . . were far more than a mere semantic quibble [between the organism metaphor and the system metaphor], a fear of the power of words. Fundamental discords in environmental values were sounding and would not easily be quieted. Basically, Clements’s climax ecology looked to primitive nature as a pure state against which the degeneration wrought by civilization could be unfavorably contrasted. By the 1930s, however, at the very peak of its popularity, serious weaknesses in this ecological paradigm were becoming apparent. It had to be granted, for instance, that Clements exaggerated the role of climate as the sole, sweeping determinant of the mature formation. It was also convincingly argued that he insisted too strenuously on his inflexible, monolithic system of community order, a system that nature herself did not always follow.”
Worster explains that “As a boy on the frontier, Clements had seen that primeval climax order firsthand, and this experience was surely responsible for his powerful sense of disjunction between man’s and nature’s worlds. Of course, the distinction between nature and culture had always been emphasized in America. It had been dramatically understood, used over and again in literature and social thought, even made the basis of a national purpose—albeit an ambivalent one, of designating nature by turns as a foe to be vanquished and a redeemer to be praised. But in any case, the image of a wild, untrammeled nature was deeply etched on the American consciousness, far more than could be true for Europeans. And the persistent appeal of this image helped make Clements’s ecology persuasive and even valid for America” (Worster 240-241).
Sequoia sempervirens, the Sequoia redwoods
See Susan Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917-1978 (Univ. Wisconsin Pr., 1983), especially chapter 6, “Evolution and Ecology.”
For images, see also "American Environmental Photographs 1891-1936: Images from the University of Chicago Library," at the Library of Congress: search e.g., for "redwoods" and/or "sequoia"