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As ESA celebrated its 90th year, and on the occasion of the ESA meeting in Montreal, I was asked to reflect on some of the major changes that have occurred in our professional Society during the last few decades. I decided not to offer a full historical account, but instead and because of first-hand knowledge, I will focus on some of the major changes that have occurred since I was ESA President in 1981–1982. I will discuss briefly six features that have changed dramatically during these 24 years:

1) The general membership has increased from slightly over 6000 in 1980 to more than 9200 currently, and is growing, representing an increase of ~50% since 1980. There were 307 members in 1916–1917. At the end of 2004, members’ affiliations were categorized as 66% academic, 13% government, 5% nonprofit, 6% consulting, and 11% other.

I quote from my President’s Report published in the ESA Bulletin in 1982 for the year 1981–1982:

“Last year when I took this office I suggested that the 1980’s represent a critical period for ecologists, ecology and the Ecological Society of America. This conclusion stemmed from:

― reduced funding for research and jobs

― enormous pressures on natural resources from waste disposal (e.g., toxic chemicals), from land clearing and development (agriculture, forestry, urbanization, mining, etc.), from recreation, air pollution, etc.

― potential loss of ground on environmental regulation

― threat of unthinkable ecological devastation from nuclear war.” (…some problems just don’t go away!!)

Some other major changes that have occurred in ESA since 1980 include:

2) Applied Ecology

There was a huge controversy in the early 1980s about forming a section on Applied Ecology. Great concern was expressed by many members that applied ecology was not appropriate for the ESA! Now, this Section is very active and has become the second largest section in ESA with more than 620 members.

3) The Washington Office

Again, quoting from my report in the 1982 ESA Bulletin: “My top priority was to promote a component of public outreach for ESA, our so-called ‘PRESENCE IN WASHINGTON’.” I appointed Dr. Ralph Good from Rutgers University-Camden to chair the Public Affairs Committee and bring a definitive report about whether we should form an office in Washington, D.C., or not. Ralph and his Committee did a superb job, and again, from the ESA Bulletin in 1982:

“In many regards, today’s annual meeting is truly an historic event. Officers and members of the ESA have been proposing some kind of a voice or presence in Washington for at least 20 years. The topic regularly appears in the reports from Presidents over the last several years. I am happy to report that on 8 August 1982, the Council approved funds and administrative support for a person in Washington to represent the interest of the Ecological Society of America…”. As a result, staff was hired and an office was established.

Today’s ESA Presence in Washington is an active and important part of our Society’s activities. Many ESA Presidents, particularly since 1982, have worked hard to support and advance this agenda for an active ecological presence in decision-making and public policy.

Back to the ESA Bulletin:

“I also report that I made a visit to Dr. John Slaughter, Director of the National Science Foundation, on behalf of the Society. I tried to stress the important role of ecological concepts and data in national affairs. I pointed to the unique position of NSF in supporting research in Systematics, and the value of long-term ecological research.”

1982 ESA Bulletin 63(4)

This brief history is not to indicate what I did in 1981, but to indicate how far the Society has come in only a quarter of a century, and the effective role we currently play in public policy.

Some of the programs we now take for granted, took much effort to initiate. BUT, we can and we must do even better!

The ESA needs to be a clear, powerful, unbiased, and professional voice for ecology in public policy issues (at local, regional, national, and international venues). No longer are environmental problems based only or solved only at local levels (e.g., CO 2 and mercury transported in the atmosphere). We have a critical need for strong scientific leadership at the highest levels, unlike what we have at present. Maybe most importantly, truth and ethics do matter!

4) Sustainable Biosphere Initiative

This program was started in 1992 and now has expanded and been incorporated into the Science Programs Office. The goal of this office is to promote the integration of ecological science into management and decision-making by government agencies and the private sector at all levels. Projects of the Science Office fall into four major categories: Society Activities; Support to Science—Policy + Management; Scientific Conferences; and Publications.

5) Two important new journals were initiated during this quarter century: Ecological Applications (first issue in 1991) and Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (first issue February 2003). These journals have greatly expanded the coverage and reach of ecological issues, and by all accounts are very successful in communicating ecological knowledge. Personally, I am sorry to see less prominent use of Ecological Monographs. I believe that the pendulum has swung too far toward the “Least Publishable Unit,” or how many papers can be obtained from a particular study (Likens 1989). It is interesting to note that Ecological Monographs (5.0) currently has a higher “Impact Factor” than Ecology (4.1). And, Issues in Ecology has been a successful effort to summarize scientific, ecological knowledge on current, major environmental topics in peer-reviewed and nontechnical language, and to point out relationship to policy and management.

6) Education

I was almost totally unsuccessful in providing the leadership necessary to initiate a viable education program for ESA. Members seemingly were not interested in doing more than teaching their various classes and/or supervising their graduate students. An Education Section was established in 1988, and since the early 1990s ESA’s education activities have been innovative, strong, and growing.

All of these six major changes are related in many ways and have made our professional society more relevant, and particularly more popular and attractive, particularly to young scientists, and, I believe, the public.

Major challenges

1) Unfortunately, there is little or no “memory” about the history of ESA’s large and robust progress passed on as the Society’s leadership changes over time. I argued in 1982 for a two-year term for President. I would still make this argument.

2) As the world changes (and currently it is changing very profoundly and rapidly), organizations need to be responsive. Probably never before has there been a time when there was a greater need for a strong, vibrant and aggressive ESA.

3) We need to maintain the highest standards of scholarship and ethics in our science.

Literature cited

Likens, G. E. 1982. President’s report. ESA Bulletin 63(4):361–364.

Likens, G. E., editor. 1989. Long-term studies in ecology. Approaches and alternatives. Springer-Verlag, New York, New York, USA.

Gene E. Likens
President and Director
Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Millbrook, NY 12545

As an ecologist and pest risk analyst, I read with great interest the recent position paper of the Ecological Society of America, “Biological Invasions: Recommendations for U.S. Policy and Management” (Lodge et al. 2006). I work in the Center for Plant Health Science and Technology (CPHST) ‹http://cphst.aphis.usda.gov/›, which provides scientific support for the Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ) program of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) in the USDA. My intent with this letter is to correct what I believe are two errors in the position paper about CPHST/PPQ and how we produce pest risk assessments (PRAs), and to share information about ongoing projects that already address some of the recommendations in the position paper. I hope this fosters the idea that groups like PPQ and the ESA are primarily allies, rather than adversaries, in safeguarding the United States from the threats posed by exotic invasive species. (I apologize in advance for the profligate acronyms: I work in government.)

The first error I would like to correct is the statement, “No USDA or USFWS employee has a job dedicated to evaluating the risk associated with importations of [specific] organisms” (Lodge et al. 2006:23). In CPHST, that is the primary task of the scientific team for Quarantine 37 (Q-37 or plants for propagation) assessments in the Plant Epidemiology and Risk Analysis Laboratory (PERAL). Other PERAL scientists are sometimes tasked with assessments on specific organisms, usually because of special importance (e.g., Caulerpa spp., Phytophthora ramorum) or new interceptions (e.g., pinecones in potpourri from India). Besides organismal assessments, the 40 PERAL scientists assess the risks associated with pathways and imports of commodities, publish new pest alerts and do rapid evaluations, and support domestic response and management programs. Plant PRAs by PERAL are used by decision makers in government and in the Federal rulemaking process.

Secondly, for PERAL, it is not true that PRAs “…rely exclusively upon qualitative, expert opinion”, or that “…protocols rarely meet any of the essential criteria for rigorous risk assessments…” where the listed criteria were peer review, transparency, repeatability, specified uncertainties, and quantitative output (Lodge et al. 2006:26). Every PRA published by PERAL has been peer-reviewed within both CPHST and PPQ. Often, PRAs are reviewed in other relevant APHIS programs, and externally reviewed by stakeholders, non-Federal scientists, and scientists in other Federal agencies. Both our qualitative and quantitative PRAs are transparent: rationales for methods, risk ratings, and results are detailed and referenced; documents are available for review by the public; and contacts and authors are clearly identified. Our PRAs explicitly consider environmental as well as economic consequences of introduction of exotic plant pests. Quantitative PRAs are done if the objectives warrant it and if enough relevant data exists, which is no different from ecological modeling in general. In quantitative PRAs propagule pressure (Recommendation No. 2) is explicitly considered, and the uncertainties for inputs and outputs are always specified (e.g., Griffin 1997, Sequeira et al. 2002, 2004, Caton and Spears 2005, Caton et al. 2006a, b). Besides being good scientific practice, we must follow the criteria above because of possible legal challenges to our PRAs. Finally, PERAL recently completed ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 9001 certification for commodity-based PRAs and evaluations of new pests. This was done to enhance quality assurance and continual process improvement.

I will address one additional problem because it is in my area of expertise, and because I think it points to the complexity of biological invasions and biosecurity efforts. On p. 18, Lodge et al. (2006) make the unreferenced statement that, “Commerce in living organisms usually introduces species at a lower rate than transportation related pathways.” That may only be true for some taxa, such as the aquatic animals they discuss. In contrast, two-thirds of introduced plant species in Australia were escapes from horticulture, with that proportion expected to increase over time (Groves et al. 2005). For the continental United States, estimates are that more than half of all naturalized exotic plants were brought for gardening (Randall and Marinelli 1996, Mack and Erneberg 2002). A less general statement was probably warranted there, but my main point is that pathway risk levels seem likely to depend on such factors as taxa, commodity, geographic origin, and conveyance. Therefore, in agreement with Lodge et al. (2006) (Recommendation No. 1), better understanding of the relative risks presented by different pathways is a priority goal of our organization.

Now I will address the recommendations made by Lodge et al. (2006), but not necessarily because I disagreed with them. Rather, I felt that in some cases they mistakenly gave the impression that Federal pest risk scientists and managers are merely sitting around waiting for help to appear.

Describing “proposed lead organizations” for their first three recommendations, Lodge et al. (2006) wrote each time that “Universities continue to develop…” new tools for analyses and biotechnology. This implied to me a vision in which “government funds, universities research, and then government adopts.” I think that view is unfortunate, and, at least for PPQ and CPHST, inaccurate. Scientists in PPQ work cooperatively with university scientists on many research and analysis projects, often from conceptualization through technology transfer. A selected list of recently completed or ongoing projects in CPHST that are highly cooperative includes the following:

• Agricultural Internet Monitoring System (AIMS) to identify and interdict U.S.-based online pathways for exotic invasive species [with the Center for Integrated Pest Management (CIPM) at North Carolina State University (NCSU)]
• Annual prioritization of species for the Cooperative Agricultural Pest Survey [with many state agencies, universities, and private organizations]
• Applying remote sensing technology for detection of exotic invasive plant pests [e.g., emerald ash borer, with Michigan State University; Asian long-horned beetle, with Clark University]
• Computer diagnostics for quarantine mites (exotic Acarines) [with Colorado State University and the University of Alberta]
• Creation of a global weed prioritization model for potential invasiveness in the United States [with the Weed Science Society of America]
• Modeling United States metropolitan areas as hubs of human-mediated pathways of invasive species [with Michigan State University and the U.S. Forest Service]
• NCSU/APHIS Plant Pest Forecast (NAPPFAST; ‹www.nappfast.org› system for climate- and weather-based risk mapping [with CIPM-NCSU]
• Pathway prioritization project (Lodge et al. (2006: Fig. 2)) [public and Federal scientists coordinated by the National Invasive Species Council]
• Predicting the atmospheric transport of soybean rust from South America into the United States [with NCSU and Penn State University]

Regardless of who conceived of these projects, all groups have benefited. We value those collaborations, but often develop tools and technologies ourselves. Examples include enhanced lures for early detection of pests, and improved diagnostic tests for detection and identification of pests. I urge ESA members to view PPQ more as a possible partner in biological invasions research and development than just as a potential source of funding. In particular, PPQ scientists and managers may often have the best, most current information about what pest threats may be emerging, what important statutory changes are forthcoming, what topic areas most need research, what operational issues may need to be addressed, and what challenges likely loom ahead.

One of my colleagues has half-jokingly said that the public only knows what the government is doing about two years after the fact. I am pleased to mention the following selected, ongoing PPQ projects about which Lodge et al. (2006) may have been unaware, that address the two prevention-related recommendations in the position paper:

Recommendation (1): Reduce species in pathways.

• AIMS, for reducing introductions of regulated plant pests and animal products
• Commodity origin by trace elements analysis, to quickly identify mislabeled/smuggled cargo of high risk
• Development of odor-based detection and monitoring systems for exotic pests
• Offshore Pest Identification System (OPIS), to monitor potential emerging pest species and outbreaks
• Proposed revisions to the Quarantine-37 (plants for propagation) regulations, including a new designation for plant species of “Not Authorized Pending Risk Assessment”

Recommendation (2): Institute risk screening.

• Cooperatively developed lists of plant pest species of particular concern (e.g., mites with Acaralogical Society of America, nematodes with Society of Nematologists, insects with the Entomological Society of America)
• Global weed prioritization model, to identify high risk plant species for assessments and possible listing as Federal noxious weeds [trait-based species screening]
• NAPPFAST risk mapping for Phytophthora ramorum, Maconellicoccus hirsutus (pink hibiscus mealy bug), and other pest species. CPHST has compiled insect developmental requirements for over 500 insect species. [environmental matching]

In particular, in this era of internet commerce the development of AIMS was so revolutionary and important that plant and animal protection agencies in several other countries have requested cooperative access to AIMS or help in developing their own similar systems.

I think the position paper could have benefited from including a PPQ scientist as a co-author or reviewer. Besides correcting some errors and highlighting examples of progress being made, one of us could have pointed out that one of the biggest challenges now facing PPQ is the recent transfer of agricultural inspectors at ports into the Department of Homeland Security. Whereas the primary objective of the inspectors used to be preventing introductions of quarantine materials and associated pests, they now also have to work to prevent terrorism. How this change will affect Federal biosecurity efforts in the long term remains to be seen, but it is clearly a significant development.

Our nation faces serious challenges in plant and animal protection, and we appreciate that the ESA position paper will help to raise awareness and improve Federal policies and programs. Simberloff et al. (2005) recently noted that the strongest voice for improving the prevention and management of invasive species problems has always come from scientists, and I believe they meant scientists in its most general sense, i.e., from all types of institutions. I hope this letter demonstrated that PPQ scientists are capable and serious about biosecurity, have been making progress in key areas about which ESA made recommendations, and could be valuable partners for ESA members interested in or researching biological invasions.

Literature cited

Caton, B. P., T. T. Dobbs, and C. F. Brodel. 2006a. Arrivals of hitchhiking insect pests on international cargo aircraft at Miami International Airport. Biological Invasions 8:765–785.

Caton, B. P., A. V. Lemay, H. E. Meissner, and M. K. Hennessey. 2006b. Plant pest risk assessment for direct airline flights from Mexico to Fresno-Yosemite International Airport, California. Center for Plant Health Science and Technology, Plant Protection and Quarantine, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Caton, B. P., and B. M. Spears. 2005. Pest risk assessment for pine shoot beetle, Tomicus piniperda (L.) (Coleoptera: Scolytidae), on quarantine white pine (Pinus strobus). Materials at processors in Maine. Center for Plant Health Science and Technology (CPHST), Plant Protection and Quarantine, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Griffin, R. L. 1997. An example of cooperative risk assessment: scenario analysis for the risk of pine shoot beetle outbreaks resulting from the movement of pine logs from regulated areas. Pages 87–102 in M.A. Kamrin, editor. Environmental risk harmonization: federal and state approaches to environmental hazards in the USA. John Wiley and Sons, New York, New York, USA.

Groves, R. H., R. Boden, and W. M. Lonsdale. 2005. Jumping the garden fence: invasive garden plants in Australia and their environmental and agricultural impacts. CSIRO report prepared for World Wildlife Fund-Australia, Sydney, Australia.

Lodge, D. M., S. L. Williams, H. MacIsaac, K. Hayes, B. Leung, S. Reichard, R. N. Mack, P. B. Moyle, M. Smith, D. A. Andow, and others. 2006. Biological invasions: recommendations for U.S. policy and management [ESA Position Paper]. Public Affairs Office, Ecological Society of America, Washington, D.C., USA. Ecological Applications 16, in press.

Mack, R. N., and M. Erneberg. 2002. The United States naturalized flora: largely the product of deliberate introductions. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 89(2):176–189.

Randall, J. M., and T. Marinelli, editors. 1996. Invasive plants: weeds of the global garden. Handbook No. 149. Brooklyn Botanical Garden, New York, New York, USA.

Sequeira, R. A., M. K. Hennessey, L. C. Millar, T. M. Kalaris, and E. M. Jones. 2004. Importation of avocado fruit (Persea americana Mill. var. ‘Hass’) from Mexico: a risk assessment. Center for Plant Health Science and Technology (CPHST), Plant Protection and Quarantine, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Sequeira, R. A., C. E. Miller, and G. Fowler. 2002. Risk mitigation for tephritid fruit flies with special emphasis on risk reduction for commercial imports of clementines (several varieties of Citrus reticulata) from Spain using a Phytosanitary Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (PHAACP) system.: Center for Plant Health Science and Technology, and Policy and Program Development; Plant Protection and Quarantine, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Riverdale, Maryland, USA.

Simberloff, D., I. M. Parker, and P. N. Windle. 2005. Introduced species policy, management, and future research needs. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 3(2):12–20.

Sincerely,

Barney P. Caton
Center for Plant Health Science and Technology
Plant Protection and Quarantine
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
Raleigh, NC
E-mail: [email protected]

We thank Caton for his informative letter responding to our position paper (which is now in press at Ecological Applications [December 2006]). We would like to make it clear that the position paper was not intended to disparage directly or indirectly the PPQ scientists and other federal scientists who are working hard to improve biosecurity in the United States. We agree fully that federal scientists are valuable partners for ESA members interested in biological invasions, and the position paper is meant to encourage such interaction.

ESA wished to have federal scientists participate as authors on the position paper, but the scientists invited were denied permission by their agencies to co-author a paper that made policy recommendations. Nevertheless, during multiple rounds of written review and revision, the authors of the position paper received and responded to reviews from 17 independent experts, the ESA Public Affairs Committee (twice), and the ESA Governing Board (twice). These reviewers included at least six federal scientists representing at least three federal departments. None of those reviewers raised the objections made by Caton.

Caton’s concerns give us the opportunity to clarify two foundational issues on which we based the specific recommendations of the position paper. First, existing policies (and their implementation) determine the ways in which existing scientific expertise is employed, and determine the topics and goals of research, and applications by federal scientists in particular. While we agree with Caton that there are many talented and dedicated federal scientists, the first two recommendations of the position paper emphasized that existing policies on invasive species do not focus technical and regulatory efforts sufficiently on prevention of introductions.

For example, prohibitions of importation of particular plants and plant pests (by USDA) and animals (by USFWS) are largely reactive. This is dictated in part by policy (established by Congress) and in part by implementation (over which the agencies have some discretion). Thus U.S. practices are based largely on a blacklist approach, such that if a plant, animal, parasite, or pathogen is not specifically banned, it may be imported. Thus, despite the dedicated contributions by many talented scientists with a variety of affiliations that have dramatically increased capacity in ecological risk assessment, species not banned are allowed to enter the country. Similarly, pathways are often regulated only after they have delivered species that have established and become demonstrably dangerous. We believe that regulatory risk assessments are narrowly focused, and often so late in the invasion process that species and the damages they cause are guaranteed to spread geographically and grow over time. Therefore, we strongly support the PPQ initiatives highlighted by Caton, as small steps in the right direction. One of us, for example, has submitted official public comments in support of the proposed changes to Quarantine-37 practices, which would institute screening of some plants proposed for importation. We applaud these improvements under consideration, which would allow the application of recent scientific advances in risk assessment highlighted by the position paper. In addition, however, we re-emphasize the need for changes to higher level policy, rules, and implementation to more adequately prevent entry into the United States of species likely to be harmful. The position paper and other recent reports (NRC 2002) were motivated by this perspective.

Second, U.S. funding for biosecurity with respect to invasive species remains inadequate despite recent efforts to improve coordination and focus priorities within Homeland Security and older agencies. We share Caton’s concern about Homeland Security’s impact on invasive species risk assessment and management. The current inadequacies apply across the board, including research to generate new knowledge that could lead to significant changes in biosecurity policy, development of sufficient scientific support for regulatory action, and maintenance of human capital for surveillance and interdiction. Even if federal scientists had the authority and the desire to conduct more and better risk assessments, such as those advocated by the position paper, the resources are inadequate to support these activities. It is no surprise, then, that scant resources are devoted to links with traditional agricultural sciences, and resources to support collaboration with university ecologists are rarer still. The challenges are large and urgent, and partnerships among scientists in a variety of institutional settings are needed to slow the tide of invaders. ESA supports Caton and his colleagues in USDA and other federal agencies in trying to stem the tide of invasive species. We and other ESA scientists are eager to continue a dialogue with federal agency scientists in the national effort to reduce the damages from invasive species.

Literature cited

National Research Council. 2002. Predicting invasions by nonindigenous plants and plant pests. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., USA.

David M. Lodge
Department of Biological Sciences
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
E-mail: [email protected]

David A. Andow
Department of Entomology
University of Minnesota
St. Paul, MN 55108
E-mail: [email protected]

P. Dee Boersma
Department of Biology
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-1800
E-mail: [email protected]

Richard V. Pouyat
USDA Forest Service
c/o Baltimore Ecosystem Studies
Baltimore, MD 21227
E-mail: [email protected]

Environmental accounting is a rapidly evolving area of management, accounting, and finance. It enables an organization and its stakeholders to evaluate the organization’s performance with both economic and environmental measures (Thayer 1995, Atkinson 2000, IFA 2005). If the market were complete, this would not be necessary, and Milton Friedman’s dictum, “A company’s only responsibility is to increase profits for stockholders” would suffice. However, the flawed and incomplete market we have today, with enormous uncounted costs and incorrectly attributed costs, performs poorly. This should not be a surprise; as British economist A.C. Pigou noted early in the last century, the market will fail unless it includes all costs. Most markets today consider only a small fraction of the total transaction cost, leaving many “externalities” out of the picture (Antheaume 2004, Bainbridge 2004). If full costs were known, many market transactions would not occur, and the environment would be cleaner and safer.

A wide range of environmental accounting approaches and methods are being used to more accurately determine financial performance, to improve operations, and to compare alternative strategies for strategic planning and driving innovation. The governments, nongovernmental organizations, companies, and professional organizations that deal with these issues have adopted very different approaches and perspectives, which remain in their formative stages (Gray et al. 1995, Rikhardsson et al. 2005, Chua 2006). Cultural differences play a clear role in what is considered reasonable or desirable (Mathews and Reynolds 2001). While a growing number of tools are available to facilitate environmental accounting, much remains to be done to make them more useful, inclusive, effective, accurate, and user friendly (Beets and Souther 1999, O’Dwyer et al. 2005). The weaknesses are particularly apparent in discussions of ecological issues such as: the value of nature’s services, ecotoxicity, nutrient cycle disruption, biodiversity, invasive species, habitat fragmentation, and restoration costs (Günther 1997, Karlen et al. 2001, Howarth and Farber 2002). It is an area where the Ecological Society of America can make a contribution, and where active involvement could create funding for new career paths for undergraduate and graduate students and post-docs.

University training still lags far behind the need and slightly behind the demand, with very few opportunities in most ecology, business, or engineering curricula for the integrated approach to accounting demanded by this new field. To succeed with this new approach, we will have to surmount a number of obstacles common to interdisciplinary studies (Baumann 2003, Moore 2005). Revisions to university curricula, continuing education, and more detailed and user-friendly web resources can help improve the value of environmental accounting.

Environmental accounting is increasing in traditional financial and management accounting, policy accounting, and environmental management accounting (Schaltegger and Burritt 2001, Sigma Project 2002, International Federation of Accountants 2005). The growth has been quite rapid, with more than 10,000 sustainability reports now prepared annually worldwide (Rikhardsson et al. 2002). Certified or Chartered Accountants do much of the financial accounting, which includes preparing financial and tax statements and auditing, often focused on investors, lenders, and regulators. Management accounting supports business operations and strategy, and activity-based and enterprise accounting can be used to improve allocation of overhead and more directly link environmental costs to operations. Improved process flow mapping, integrated substance chain management, and material flow analysis better account for inputs/outputs and help identify costly nonproduct outputs. Governments and advocacy groups use environmental accounting to help develop and review the effects of policy, incentives, and regulation on the performance of companies, industries, and nations (Bainbridge 2004). The focus has generally been on management applications, although all fields of environmental accounting are rapidly developing.

Environmental management accounting focuses on collecting and evaluating data on an organization’s environmental performance, often using accounting over the full life cycle of products or policies, from inception to disposal, recycling, or closure. Environmental management tools include: eco-footprinting, material flow analysis, substance flow accounts, environmental accounting information systems, environmental audits, and required reports for regulators, such as the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) in Europe (GRI 2002, Robert et al. 2002, Bringezu et al. 2003, Palm and Jonsson 2003, EMAS 2006). The basic premise of environmental management accounting is that conventional accounting practices and existing operational and financial management within organizations obscure environmental information. By clarifying inputs, outputs, and impacts, environmental management accounting can help companies and organizations develop innovative solutions to changing resource constraints, regulations, and public pressure.

Environmental and social accounting may be included in preparation of company documents for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Corporate Social Responsibility rankings, Social Accountability 8000, the International Organization for Standards Environmental Management Systems 14001, and other environmental and social standards. Environmental accounting also plays a role in a range of new approaches to improved product and service development including: Factor X (Factor 10), the Natural Step, Industrial Ecology, Design for Environment, Cleaner Production, Dematerialization, Cradle-to-Cradle, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Material Flow Accounting, and the Triple Bottom Line (Baumann and Cowell 1999, Rezaee 2000, Robèrt et al. 2000, McDonough and Braungart 2002, Robèrt et al 2002).

The potential benefits of environmental accounting include:

• Improved profitability
• Better decision making
• Discovered opportunities for cost saving
• Discovered opportunities for new processes
• Discovered opportunities for new products and services
• Competitive advantage
• Improved internal reports
• Improved external reports
• Improved employee morale and health
• More accurate and complete costing and pricing
• Reputation building
• Societal benefits
• Environmental benefits
• Improved stakeholder relations
• Reduced risk and liability

The first challenge is deciding what approach to use, at what level, and how best to integrate environmental accounting into current accounting and management systems. There are many alternatives, and a growing number of corporate financial reports and case studies provide some insight into what works, and what needs work (Wallage 2000, O’Dwyer et al. 2005). These studies, and others, generally suggest that proactive environmental reporting improves profitability and reduces risk, and creates a competitive advantage. Software development is underway, but no standard has yet emerged for this complex task. Ideally the software could be easily integrated with existing business management software to provide data and reports useful for financial, management, and policy purposes. These programs would translate the gallons/liters of gasoline consumed into global warming gas cost contributions, the cost of local nitrogen pollution remediation, and the water and air pollution generated in the supply and disposal chain. This will take a concerted effort from ecologists, accountants, software developers, managers, engineers, and environmental scientists. I would suggest an environmental accounting software contest, like the recent, highly successful Defense Advanced Research Projects A robotic vehicle test, where a well-administered $2 million prize brought incredibly fast progress through intense competition and real-world testing.

The second challenge is more fundamental, reflecting our incomplete understanding of the complex environmental systems that we live in and attempt to manage. This is where the Ecological Society of America can make its biggest contribution. Our often profound ignorance of function and structure in ecosystems makes current attempts at full-cost accounting very crude and incomplete. Much more detailed and interdisciplinary long-term ecological research is needed to better understand the external costs of business operations. The Long Term Ecological Research Program should immediately be doubled, with the new program directed at research involving environmental accounting issues. The creation of the National Ecological Observatory Network, NEON, provides another excellent opportunity for needed interdisciplinary, integrated, long-term research and monitoring (NEON 2006). Progress in including more and better ecological science in environmental accounting will not happen without funding, and much of this should be sought from corporate sources. I look forward to the day when there will be as many corporate ecologists as there are corporate accountants (9000 ESA members today vs. 335,000 American Institute of CPA members).

The members of ESA have not been as active in the fields of environmental accounting or ecological economics as we might have hoped, but we have not ignored these issues, either. A recent survey using Google as a crude indicator suggests we are doing better than most organizations, but we have much to do (Table 1). It is also instructive to compare the European accounting organization with the American accounting organization. The European accountants are 300 times more likely to be involved in environmental accounting. This reflects cultural differences, policy failure in Washington, reflecting the power of corporate lobbies, and our failure to push an agenda for full cost accounting.

Environmental accounting is developing rapidly and improving decision-making around the world. Modest investments in improved environmental accounting can lead to significant gains in profitability, corporate image, and reduced liability. Environmental accounting demands new skills, tools, and more integrated accounting across department and division lines within companies and all the company or organization stakeholders. Environmental accounting is also increasingly in demand for policy development by NGOs and a range of levels of government.

If we look outside the United States we can find many excellent examples, ranging down to the city level. Ecology programs, business schools, environmental science programs, health programs, engineering and design programs, and all of our professional organizations need to embrace this new challenge and opportunity (Bainbridge 1985, Gray and Collison 2002, Thomas 2004, Haigh 2005).

The ESA can make its impact by developing a more aggressive campaign to require more detailed environmental accounting in the United States. We should also quickly reshape our educational programs to provide ecologists and environmental scientists with a solid grounding in ecological economics and environmental accounting, and to encourage our brethren in accounting and business to include courses in ecology and environmental science. We can also make a difference by joining and participating in related organizations, such as the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics and the International Society for Industrial Ecology, and the major business organizations, particularly the Academy of Management. The Society could also help by assisting in building pressure to create new Sustainability Citation Indexes to credit researchers and faculty who tackle these important, but time-consuming and challenging interdisciplinary issues (Baumann 2002) and to make research more accessible. One of the weakest points of ecological economics and environmental accounting has been the ecological science, and that is something we can help correct.

Table 1. Hits per search term linked to association title, Google, March 2006.

Acknowledgments

With special thanks to Greg Lorton for review and discussion of the challenges in environmental accounting.

Literature cited

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Web resources

Environmental Management Accounting Research and Information Center ‹www.emawebsite.org›

Environmental Management Accounting Network-EU ‹www.emanu-eu.net›

International Federation of Accountants ‹www.ifac.org›

Global Reporting Initiative ‹www.globalreporting.org›

U.S. Society for Ecological Economics ‹www.ussee.org›

International Society for Industrial Ecology ‹www.is4ie.org›

David A. Bainbridge
Associate Professor
Marshall Goldsmith School of Management
Alliant International University
San Diego, CA 92131
E-mail: [email protected]

Many explorers of foreign lands and seas brought back to Europe plants and animals for authorities to study and describe, but some explorers were also naturalists who published their own observations. Previously (Egerton 1976, 1977) I surveyed contributions by early naturalists to American natural history that might be of interest to ecologists. Now I will go into more detail about fewer naturalists, but before doing so, let us view them within a broader context.

George Basalla (1967) studied colonial science and found that it flourished to the same extent that it did in the mother country. In the New World, the Spanish had a head start in colonization over the British and French by a century; however, since science was not strongly supported in Spain, it developed slowly in its colonies (Verdoorn 1945, Beltran 1970, Egerton 2004b:112–114, de Asúa and French 2005). Science flourished about equally in Britain and France, and therefore one might expect that their colonial science would be comparable. The first book on North American plants was very well illustrated by a Frenchman, Jacques Philippe Cornut (or Cornuti [1635, 1966]), but Cornut found his subjects in Parisian gardens, not in Canada (Dickenson 1998:78–81). Soon, however, French explorers were providing first-hand observations of birds (Allen 1951:503–507, Ainley 1995) and other animals and plants (Chartrand et al. 1987). Especially noteworthy were two physician-naturalists, Michel Sarrazin (1659–1734) and Jean-François Gaultier (1708–1756). Sarrazin first went to Quebec as a surgeon in 1685, later returned to study medicine in Paris, and came back to Quebec as a physician in 1697 (Vallée 1927, Rousseau 1957:152–155, 1969). He became a corresponding member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, and for 20 years he sent herbarium specimens back to Paris; they are still in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle. Sarrazin’s manuscript list of Canadian plants is reproduced photographically by Vallée (1927:257–273). Five of Sarrazin’s letters to Réaumur are also extant and are published by Vallée (1927:217–232). Gaultier made “observations botanico-métérologiques” at Quebec which he sent to the Académie royale des Sciences from 1744 to 1750; they were published in the Académie’s Histoire (Boivin 1974). He also compiled an inventory of the important plants and animals of Quebec in 1749 at the request of the governor-general, Roland-Michel Barrin dela Galissonière, and this was made available to Pehr Kalm (see below). In the rich sugar colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) France even had a learned society (1784–1792), until a slave revolt drove out the French (McClellan 1992).

Various French explorers published travel accounts, often including natural history observations. A good example was the Jesuit professor Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761). He left Paris to teach in Quebec, 1705–1709, and returned in 1720–1722 to explore the Great Lakes and then go down the Mississippi (Hayne 1974). His two volumes of travel accounts were not published until 1744, as part of his Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France (six volumes). The travel volumes were translated into English in 1761 and reprinted in 1923. Noteworthy is his Chapter V, on beaver, which runs to 18 pages in the 1923 edition (Charlevoix 1923, I:139–156), though the last two pages compare beaver and muskrat. His precise anatomical data came from a memoir on beaver anatomy by Sarrazin published by the Académie Royale des Sciences (1704; discussed and partly quoted in Vallée 1927:106–112). Charlevoix’s account seems mostly reliable, excepting his information from the medical and theological faculties at Paris that beaver could be eaten as fish because of its scaly tail.

British military and political victories in America enabled its colonial science to develop more extensively than its rivals. Basalla identified three stages of colonial science: (1) inventory science by Europeans who published their findings in the mother country, (2) colonials educated partly in the mother country conducted similar studies, which were mostly published in the mother country, and (3) independent science, usually precipitated by a political break with the mother country, in which former colonists developed their own science education, institutions, and publications. There was some overlap between stages one and two. For example, the Reverend John Banister (1650–1692) was born in England, but became a colonial naturalist when he settled in Virginia in 1678 (Ewan and Ewan 1970). Yet other European naturalists continued to explore America and returned home to publish their findings throughout the 1600s and 1700s.

In 1585 Sir Walter Raleigh sent an English colony to Roanoke Island, North Carolina, but its members became discouraged and returned home with Sir Francis Drake in 1586. In 1587 Raleigh tried again and sent along mathematician–astronomer–surveyor Thomas Hariot (1560–1621) and also the artist John White (died about 1593) as governor. Hariot later published A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588, 1955) which described the colony’s climate and resources for prospective settlers. White made skillful paintings of Indians, birds, fish, crabs, and insects (Fig. 1). Thomas Penny acquired four of White’s insect illustrations, which were later published in Thomas Mouffet’s Insectorum (1634:61, 88 [98], 112) and in its English translation, The Theater of Insects (1658: 936 , 967, 978.) (I discussed Mouffet’s work in part 12, Egerton 2004a:29–30.) Four of White’s illustrations were also reproduced by Mark Catesby (see below and Raven 1964).

Fig. 1. John White’s painting of purple-clawed hermit crabs (Coenobeta clypeatus) of the West Indies living in borrowed shells of Turritella varigata (upper) and of Natica canrena (lower). Hulton and Quinn 1964, I:70, II: Plate 5. Click on illustration for a larger image.

From acquaintances in Charles Town (Charleston, South Carolina) Lawson learned that James Petiver, whom we met earlier (Allen 2004, Egerton 2005:309, 2006:117), collected natural history specimens, published lists of those received and the names of the senders, and provided some assistance to worthy collectors (Stearns 1953:257–264, 1970:305). Lawson sent him a letter on 12 April 1701 (printed in Lawson 1967:267) telling of his interest in collecting specimens for Petiver. This project was one incentive for collecting the information found in his book’s extensive discussion of plants and animals (Stearns 1970:306–315). Lawson devoted almost 25 pages (1967:96–120) to the trees, shrubs, and vines of Carolina. He was unconcerned about whether they were native or introduced, although most were native. He emphasized their uses but did not limit himself to utilitarian comments. For example, he identified three kinds of honeysuckle—which grew respectively in moist ground, clear and dry land, and in swampy woods—their only use being to beautify nature. His long discussion of the kinds and uses of oak trees included “Turkey-Oak,” whose only known use was to provide food for turkeys.

Aside from his map, his only illustrations were of seven mammals, three snakes, and a turtle shell. The bear is catching a fish, the raccoon is using its tail as bait to catch a crab, and a coiled snake is charming a squirrel out of a tree. He did not explicitly relate his illustrations to his text, which created some ambiguity, since the illustrations are not very precise. What kind of snake is charming which kind of squirrel? And in his illustration (Fig. 2), what kind of cat is attacking which kind of deer?

Fig. 2. An ambiguous cat species attacking an ambiguous deer species. Lawson 1967:128.
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He discussed four kinds of cat—panther, cat-a-mount, wild cat, tiger—which presumably are species now called cougar, lynx, bobcat, and jaguar, and he discussed three kinds of deer—elk, stag, and fallow deer—which presumably are only elk and white-tailed deer. The cat most resembles a bobcat, and the antlers resemble those of elk more than white-tailed deer. Bobcats are known to kill fawns, and also adult white-tailed deer in winter; whether they kill adult elk is less certain.

Lawson discussed 27 kinds of “beasts” (mammals), though his list mentions two sorts of unspecified rats and two sorts of unspecified mice, 129 kinds of birds, 42 kinds of saltwater fish (including whales, porpoises, and dolphins), 20 kinds of freshwater fish, 20 kinds of shellfish, and 22 kinds of “insects,” which were reptiles, with additionally unspecified frogs and worms listed as “insects”; there were no actual insects listed under that heading. Here is a sample of his accounts of birds, on the Carolina parakeet (Lawson 1967:146–147):

Encouraged by Petiver, he intended to write even more on American natural history when he returned there after publishing his book in London. He wrote a rather long letter from North Carolina in 1710 to Petiver outlining his plans (Lawson 1967:269–272), but those plans failed because he was killed by Tuscarora Indians in 1711. However, what he had already accomplished was considerable for the time: “the first major attempt at a natural history of the New World” (Feduccia 1985:8; see also Allen 1951:461–463). His most recent editor devoted more than two pages to a discussion of authors who plagiarized Lawson’s book (Lefler 1967:lii–liv).

Mark Catesby (1682–1749) was from a comfortably middle-class family, and he became interested in natural history through his acquaintance with John Ray (Frick and Stearns 1961:9), who lived not far from the Catesbys. Although not university educated, Mark Catesby became the greatest British natural history explorer of his time (Stearns 1970:315). One of his sisters, Elizabeth, married physician William Cocke; he took her to Virginia, where he developed a successful practice and became a prominent politician. It was convenient, therefore, for Mark to travel to Virginia to collect plants for English patrons and stay with the Cockes (Allen 1951:470–473, Brigham 1998:95–96). He arrived there on 23 April 1712 and did not return to England until October 1719. He was constantly exploring and observing plants and animals under natural conditions, but his only records of his findings were drawings of some plants and animals and the plants, alive or dried, which he sent to his patrons. However, he had been successful in what he had undertaken, and at a meeting of the Royal Society on October 19, 1720 the newly appointed governor of South Carolina, Francis Nicholson, offered Catesby a pension of 20 pounds a year to “Observe the Rarities of the Country for the uses and purposes of the Society” (Frick and Stearns 1961:18, Meyers and Pritchard 1998:6). This time he was committed to making written observations. He reached Charles Town on 23 May 23 1722 and stayed in the Carolinas until January 1725, when he went to the Bahama Islands for about a year before returning to England in 1726.

Upon arriving in South Carolina, Catesby “unexpectedly found this country possessed not only with all the animals and vegetables of Virginia, but abounding with even a greater variety” (Catesby 1985:137). In other words, his earlier experiences in Virginia provided a rich background for his new endeavor. His first year was spent on the coastal plain, where most colonists lived, but he later ventured into the piedmont and mountains with Indian porters and guides. Aside from collecting plants and animals, he enjoyed hunting “buffalo, bears, panthers, and other wild beasts” (Catesby 1731–1743:unnumbered “Preface,” 1985:137). The inventory natural history of the colonial era was never limited to identifying and describing species. His introductory discussion (Catesby 1731–1743:i–xvi, 1985:137–151) described the geography, climate, soil, rivers, and Indians of the Carolinas. He drew upon both his own observations and Lawson’s book, though only acknowledging the latter source when discussing Indians (Feduccia 1985:8). Catesby’s interest in placing species within their natural surroundings was symbolized by his very impressive color plates in The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731–1743 [1729–1747]), the great majority of which have animals and plants portrayed together that are found together in nature. His 220 plates illustrate 109 birds, 33 amphibians and reptiles, 46 fishes, 31 insects, 9 quadrupeds, and 171 plants. Both his birds (Feduccia 1985) and his plants (Howard and Staples 1983) are identified and discussed by modern specialists. Publication of his Natural History was the major project of his life after he returned from America in 1726; it took 20 years to produce the book. He was a self-taught artist who learned how to engrave his illustrations, and he also hand-colored them, with some assistance (Dickenson 1998:148–152). The work appeared periodically in sections of 20 plates plus text, 1729–1747, although the title pages of the two volumes give publication dates as 1729 and 1743. He was invited to the Royal Society to exhibit the first part on 22 May 1729, and he also exhibited later parts at subsequent meetings. It was on the basis of this achievement that he was voted a member of the Society on 26 April 1733 (Frick and Stearns 1961:37–38). All illustrations in Volume I are by Catesby, but he lacked enough of his own illustrations to fill Volume II. He borrowed copies of John White’s illustrations from Sir Hans Sloane and plagiarized four fish (catfish, remora, globe or puffer fish, and gar, on plates 23, 26, 28, and 30, respectively), a land crab (plate 32), the Bahama iguana (plate 64), and the swallow-tail butterfly (plate 97) (Feduccia 1985:6). Also, with the artist’s permission, Catesby based plates 61 and 85 on plant drawings by Georg Dionysius Ehret, and he combined Ehret’s drawings with his own on nine plates (Meyers 1997:23–23, 27, note 83).

In 1768 King George III bought a version of Catesby’s Natural History that was bound in three volumes instead of two and was illustrated not with Catesby’s 220 etched plates but with his 263 actual illustrations, either watercolor or pen and ink. This set is in the library of Windsor Castle, and in 1997 more than 50 of these original illustrations became the foundation for a traveling exhibition that toured five museums in two years. The illustrations displayed also became the basis for a book that reproduces and describes them, and compares the originals to the published illustrations (McBurney 1997).

Catesby’s second plate shows the “Fishing Hawk” (Osprey) clutching a fish it has caught, and his first plate shows a Bald Eagle (Fig. 3) catching in midair a fish it has forced an Osprey to drop.

Fig. 3. Bald Eagle stealing fish from Osprey. Catesby 1731–1743, I: Plate 1.
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His account of the Blue Jay (Fig. 4) is limited to a physical description, but his account of smilax is ecologically interesting (Catesby 1731–1743, I:15)

This plant is usually found in moist places; it sends forth from its root many green stems, whose branches overspread whatsoever stands near it, to a very considerable distance; and it frequently climbs over sixteen feet in height, growing so very thick, that in summer it makes an impenetrable shade, and in winter a warm shelter for cattle. The leaves are of the color and consistence of laurel, but in shape more like the bay, without any visible veins, the middle rib only excepted.

The flowers are small and whitish. The fruit grows in round clusters, and is a black berry, containing one single hard seed, which is ripe in October, and is food for some sorts of birds, particularly this jay.

Fig. 4. Blue Jay on smilax. Catesby 1731–1743, I: Plate 15.
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Catesby described and illustrated the Passenger Pigeon and Carolina Parakeet, which are now extinct, and the eastern subspecies of the Prairie Chicken, called the Heath Hen, which is also extinct, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, which is practically extinct.

Here is part of his account of the Carolina Parakeet (Fig. 5), omitting his description of it, which is longer than Lawson’s, quoted above (Catesby 1731–1743, I:11):

They feed on Seeds and Kernels of Fruit; particularly those of Cypress and Apples. The Orchards in Autumn are visited by numerous flights of them; where they make great destruction for their Kernels only: for the same purpose they frequent Virginia; which is the furthest North I ever heard they have been seen. Their Guts are certain and speedy poison to Cats. This is the only Parrot kind in Carolina: some of them breed in the Country; but most of ‘em retire more South.

Fig. 5. Carolina Parakeet and bald cypress. Catesby 1731–1743:Plate 11
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In Lawson’s account quoted above, he claimed that the parakeet hibernated in winter. Despite John Ray’s dismissal of this notion in the 1670s (quoted in Egerton 2005:306), it remained a popular idea during the 1700s, but was also rejected by Catesby, who had known Ray. Catesby’s skepticism was based not merely on Ray’s judgment; while in the Bahamas he found evidence that when rice-birds (Bobolinks) disappeared from Carolina, they had merely flown south (Catesby 1731–1743, I:14, 1985:126)

In September 1725, lying upon the deck of a Sloop in a Bay at Andros Island, I and the Company with me heard, three nights successively, Flights of these Birds (their Note being plainly distinguishable from others) passing over our heads northerly, which is their direct way from Cuba to Carolina; from which I conceive, after partaking of the earlier crop of Rice at Cuba, they travel over sea to Carolina, for the same intent, the Rice there being at that time fit for them.

This observation was buried in a natural history book where it might not have received wide notice, but he also wrote a more general and detailed article on bird migration, which was published by the Royal Society (Catesby 1747). Catesby’s contributions were important enough to earn him the title of “founder of American ornithology”(Allen 1951:463–478).

Probably the best educated explorer-naturalist who came to America in the 1700s was Pehr Kalm (1716–1779; Fig. 6), who studied under Carl Linnaeus and became a professor at the University of Åbo in Finland (Granit 1973). In 1748, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences sent him to North America to collect useful plants that could survive in Scandinavia. On the way, he stopped in London, visited the Royal Society and met Catesby on 21 April, and visited his home on 23 May, where Catesby advised him on collecting and preserving plants and animals in America (Kalm 1892:17, 51–52, 118–119, Frick and Stearns 1961:47–48). Kalm reached Philadelphia in September and left for home in February 1751. Although his Swedish sponsors expected him to spend most of his time in Canada, he preferred the Philadelphia region. The city was the intellectual center of America, and there was a Swedish colony nearby in New Jersey, where he found a wife. He did journey to Canada twice, in 1749 and in 1750, but his discoveries were more important to natural history than to Scandinavian agriculture and forestry (Skottesberg 1957). This trip was the great adventure of his life, and he spent much of his time afterwards publishing his travel journal and related scientific articles. His Swedish En Resa til Norra America (three volumes, 1753–1761) was translated into German (three volumes, 1754–1764), English (three volumes, 1770–1771), and Dutch (two volumes, 1772). A French travel book (Rousselot de Surgy 1768) was also based largely on Kalm’s book. Two of the three sets of dried plants that he collected are preserved at the Linnean Society of London and at the University of Upsala, and are listed by Juel and Harshberger (1929); the list includes 60 species new to science.

    Fig. 6. Pehr Kalm after he returned from America.
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Kalm’s observations on American plants and animals supplemented those by Lawson and Catesby, being made significantly farther north than theirs. Since I previously discussed some of his observations of ecological interest from his travel book (Egerton 1976:313–314, 1977), here I discuss four of his six articles (one on Pennsylvania’s natural history and climate, two on animals, and three on plants) translated into English. The first article, published in a Swedish journal in 1749, was a letter on his trip from London to Philadelphia and his first impressions of America in 1748. He was very impressed with the greater variety of plants in Pennsylvania than in Scandinavia. The fact that shells were found in rock strata, revealed when wells were dug, convinced him that the coastal plain had once been under the sea and that “the water is subsiding yearly in this part of the world” (Kalm 1943:173). Members of the Royal Society of London had asked him to investigate why plants from North America grown in Europe bloom so late that their seeds seldom ripen. Kalm concluded that the reason was difference in climate (1943:174).

The heat here is usually dreadful during the summer and lasts further into autumn. The months of September and October are neither hot nor cold and tend to be the loveliest of the year…September resembles most closely the month of July in Sweden and October the month of August. There are seldom cloudy days. The winds are rarely strong. The weather is usually calm or the breeze is mild. . . . During these months and late in the autumn, if it can be so called, most plants are at their best.

He obviously considered climatic data as among the most important he should collect, and he included daily weather reports in his book from August 1748 (a month before his arrival) until January 1750 (Kalm 1937, II:738–769).

In May 1749 large numbers of the 17-year locust (cicada) emerged from their subterranean abodes, shed their nymphal cases, and then crawled up trees to await the drying of their wings. A man digging a pit reported the nymphs at a depth of 12 feet. Kalm did not know what they ate underground, but some speculated that they ate dirt. The noise the adults made was so loud that no one could miss their time of appearance. They had previously appeared in 1715 and 1732, but further away they appeared in different years. He left for Canada before they disappeared, but he was told they had stayed about six weeks, then disappeared. While they were abundant, they were eagerly eaten by swine, chickens, forest birds, particularly shrikes, and Indians. Kalm thought this species was probably the same as Réaumur described from France in his Mémoires pour server à l’histoire des insectes, V:Memoir 4. Kalm carefully observed egg-laying (Kalm 1953:140–141):

The insects slit the fine moist bark of small branches with the ovipositor, which later penetrated deep into the branch, depositing eggs or other material. As a result, large numbers of branches dried up. A type of mucus is deposited on the branch by the ovipositor at the time of penetration. Although the bark on the young twigs of nearly all trees may be slit, the insects seem to prefer that of oak and apple. The ovipositor can not penetrate thick rough bark. The year following the infestation, large quantities of branches died and fell to the ground because of this bark injury. I could detect no other damage, but some said entire trees dried up. This might well happen to young trees where all the bark is tender and can be penetrated by the ovipositor. Permanent damage might result if too many young twigs on a large tree were destroyed just before a hot spell, or a long dry one.

It is generally believed that the insect shreds the bark in order to deposit eggs. I can not say for certain if this is the case, although it would seem to be so.

Kalm’s article appeared in a Swedish journal in 1756 and was probably unknown in America or England. One of his Philadelphia acquaintances, John Bartram, independently sent specimens and his own observations on the same species to Peter Collinson in England, who published an article on it in 1764 with an illustration of Bartram’s specimens (Fig. 7).

Impressive as the numbers of this cicada were, the numbers of Passenger Pigeons (Fig. 8) were even more impressive. They had already been described by Lawson (1967:145–146) and Catesby (1731–1743, I:23, 1985:60–62), each of whom reported that they nested farther north than he had traveled. Kalm reported in 1759 that they did nest in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where they were especially abundant in February and March. They appeared in much greater numbers in a few occasional years, including 1729 and 1740, than usual, which Kalm attributed to two reasons (Kalm 1911:58–59):

First, when there is a failure of the crop of acorns and other fruit in the places where they otherwise generally spend the winter, thus rendering their supply of food insufficient to last until the ensuing summer; and second, and chiefly, when an unusually severe winter with abundant and long remaining snow happens to occur in their customary winter haunts, thus covering the ground and making it impossible for them to secure the acorns, beech-nuts and other fruit and seeds on which they otherwise feed at this season: in such cases they are forced to leave these localities and seek their food down along the sea coast where the winters, owing to the sea air, are always milder, and the ground more and earlier free from snow.

Fig. 7. 17-year locust (cicada), Magicicada septendecim. Collinson 1764, 54:65.	Fig. 8. Passenger Pigeon. Kalm 1937:252.

From talking to older persons, he learned that there had once been even more Passenger Pigeons in New Sweden than when he was there, which Kalm attributed to the woods being cleared, more people, and more cultivated land. When he went to Canada in June 1749, he beheld pigeon roosts that were undisturbed by humans.

They were crowded onto trees so densely that they caused even big trees to collapse. He found that the pigeons’ northern boundary was determined by the northern range of oak and beech trees. Kalm listed their food seeds in Pennsylvania in the order in which their seeds matured: maple at the end of May, elm in the beginning or middle of June, mulberries (their favorite) in early June, rye (not favored) and wheat (very favored) in midsummer, buckwheat in mid-September, and acorns in September and later. Beechnuts also matured in September, but they were sparse south of Canada. They also ate the soil at salt springs. They usually remained in Canada until snow covered their food, and returned there when the snows melted.

In the English translation of Kalm’s Travels (three volumes, 1770–1771), the last 30% is devoted to his observations in Canada. On 2 July 1749 the governor of Fort St. Frederic showed Kalm a lengthy inventory on the plants, animals, and minerals of Canada compiled by Gaultier at the request of Governor-General Galissonière, who himself added to Gaultier’s manuscript. This manuscript survives and is discussed by Bonnault (1957) and Rousseau (1966). In Quebec City he met Gaultier on 8 August, and three days later they hiked out of town to collect plants. Kalm was impressed with how seriously the Canadians took natural history.

Kalm reported in a 1776 article that the red mulberry trees (Morus rubra) grew from the Carolinas to Niagara, though less commonly in New York State than farther south. He found they grew in various kinds of soils, and “Scarcely any tree can be found which thrives as well on poor soil as this one,” (Kalm 1950:222). Birds ate the berries and spread the seeds in their dropping—to the disgust of farmers who considered the seedlings as the worst pests in their fields. Kalm observed that when these trees grew in dense forests, they generally did not bear fruit, but the ones at the forest edge bore abundant berries. John Bartram told him that he had a red mulberry in his yard that bore only female flowers until 1750, when it bore many male flowers, but Kalm was skeptical and suspected that Bartram had not observed it closely enough before 1750. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, this species grew leaves in early May and flowered shortly thereafter. In 1750, the berries ripened there by 10 June, but at Albany, not all berries were ripe on 10 July. Mulberries were among the first to lose leaves in the fall, and in Pennsylvania they were bare by 22 October 1750. Severe cold could kill its shoots but not its roots, which send up new shoots in the spring. Passenger Pigeons were fond of mulberries, as were Indians, who ate some while fresh but also dried some and used them later when baking bread. Kalm thought the mulberry leaves could be used to raise silkworms, but Americans thought that would be too much trouble. His articles on black walnut and butternut trees (Kalm 1942) and hickory (Kalm 1945) contain similar information.

Only a few European naturalists managed to come to America, collect specimens and observations, and return home to publish important findings, but the ones who did, including Lawson, Catesby, and Kalm, found a receptive audience among fellow naturalists and the educated general public. Among these three, Catesby’s work made a strong impression because of the 220 color plates (Wilson 1978:123–185), but the plates also made it the most expensive. Consequently, Lawson and Kalm’s books were more widely available. Naturalists had a keen interest in the differences between European and American species, including information on the conditions under which American species flourished. This curiosity encouraged observations on what we call ecological aspects of life histories.

Literature cited

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Acknowledgments

For their assistance I thank Jean-Marc Drouin, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris; and AnneMarie Drouin-Hans, Université de Bourgogne.

Frank N. Egerton
Department of History
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
Kenosha WI 53141
E-mail: [email protected]

With the obvious exception of Charles Darwin, perhaps few biologists match the influence of Rachel Carson on society and on her adopted science. That science was not the marine biology of her popular books, but the previously little-known science of ecology that was transforming itself—and would transform itself in no small part due to Carson’s influence—into the science that has today become a household word. A study committee of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) on the direction of ecology in 1964 credited Silent Spring with creating “a tide of opinion which will never again allow professional ecologists to remain comfortably aloof from public responsibility.”¹

Although ecological histories have begun to incorporate the history of the environmental movement with that of the science, Carson’s work has yet to be fully integrated into the history of ecology. It needs to be part of that history.

Rachel Carson’s training in ecology

Questions about Rachel Carson’s scientific knowledge base arose not just from those in the chemical industry, as was expected, but also from those in ecology. In an important review in Scientific American, Cornell University ecologist LaMont Cole, soon to be President of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), criticized her understanding of the “balance of nature” and of evolutionary processes.²

How much of an ecologist was Carson? And in what field of ecology? Neither question can be answered satisfactorily, but there are fascinating hints.

The transitional and polymorphous nature of ecology during Rachel Carson’s life makes it difficult to target indicators of expertise on her part. There were no courses with any specifically identified ecological content offered at Johns Hopkins University when she attended classes there. However, without actual lecture notes or reading lists, it is difficult to exclude subject matter from a course. Three of the six-member faculty of 1929 in biology were listed as members in the ESA’s first membership directory and would publish in the society’s journal, Ecology, two doing so just prior to and during Rachel Carson’s time there. She therefore had opportunity at Hopkins to be exposed to two venerable parts of ecology: animal and plant physiology.³

Raymond Pearl, who developed the logistic growth equation that is so fundamental to ecology, and in whose laboratory Carson finished her education at Hopkins, was not an ecologist at all, but a human biologist who pioneered the science of demography. Pearl’s logistic equation, a foundation for environmental thought, never found its way into Carson’s works, even by inference. Pearl did, however, exert an important influence on her through his holistic view of biology, in which biological studies served to promote understanding of the human condition. Similarly, Herbert S. Jennings, Carson’s graduate examining committee chairman, was not recognizable as an ecologist, yet a 1965 compendium of ecological literature includes a paper on methodology published by him in 1904. Pearl’s view—with man a part of, not apart from biology—was shared by Jennings.⁴

Given the density of ecologists—avowed or otherwise—at Hopkins, Carson had to have been exposed to ecology, but it was a different sort from the ecology that was to burst out in America after World War II, and that would be proclaimed the science of the environment essentially simultaneously with the publication of Silent Spring. The ideas of Frederick E. Clements, Victor E. Shelford, Charles S. Elton, and Giorgii Gause (and Pearl), which would soon be stirred together with those of others to create a new ecology, left no tracks leading through her graduate experience at Hopkins. That much is evident in examining her works and notes.

First, there is her dissertation, a thorough document of one hundred and one pages of description that strays not a single step away from the physiological development of the fish organ under study. Neither is there a hint of any ecological ideas that had to have been in the air at Hopkins.⁵

Then there is her Woods Hole experience. E. A. Andrews (of her examining committee), Jennings, and Reinhardt P. Cowles, under whom she studied marine biology at Hopkins, were regulars on its summer staff. Carson was twenty-two when she found herself in the setting of a picture-book village by the sea from which fascinatingly equipped research vessels set out. It initiated a lifelong passion in her for the seashore. And until Silent Spring caused her to broaden her contacts, the scientific advice she sought was often from people having a Woods Hole background. She relied on Henry Bigelow, for example, until he advised in a letter to her that he was “too ancient to keep up-to-date or even understand all the new language.”⁶

As impossible as it is to establish what she might have read or heard in lectures while at Hopkins, Woods Hole presents an even greater mystery. Modern ideas of ecology were at least in the air at Hopkins based on evidence presented; there is less evidence for that quality of air at Woods Hole. Shelford, then pioneering animal ecology in the United States, called “that Woods Hole establishment” anti-ecological. Photographs of Woods Hole scientists of those days almost invariably have them posed with microscopes, and a laboratory emphasis was prominent in the topics for seminars and lectures during Carson’s stays there. Shelford’s remark, however, could not have described the Woods Hole of the 1920s when his student, Warder Clyde Allee, who would head what would become known as the Chicago “school” of ecology, was there doing research. Allee would go on to co-author the highly influential text, Principles of Animal Ecology, which came to be known among ecologists as “great AEPPS,” after the authors’ initials.⁷

The Woods Hole “mess” provided ample opportunities for informal interactions. A spirited discussion could have had as much impact on Carson’s thinking as a lecture. There were also the shelves of the Woods Hole library, which held all of the latest in ecology. Unfortunately, both the nature of her discussions and subjects of her reading are lost to us. ⁸

Her early works

Scientists continue their education well beyond their formal school years. After her dissertation, Carson’s books stand as the most direct testimony to her knowledge. They hint at a view of ecology that was typical of her times.

The Sea Around Us lists Ecological Animal Geography as further reading. This is a 1937 translation (and bowdlerization) of a 1924 work by a German animal geographer. The translators, Allee and Schmidt of AEPPS, liberally updated the text with ecological principles and results that were in large part their own. It is not known what Carson absorbed from Ecological Animal Geography. “About a fourth of the book is concerned with marine animals,” she noted.⁹

The marine environment was, after all, her love. Although there are no notes made by Carson extant from Ecological Animal Geography, she probably would have been interested in specific species, their distribution, and their life histories, as is consistent with research notebooks that have come down to us. In preparing Edge of the Sea, she made 23 pages of notes on a paper in Ecological Monographs having to do with the species present in a tidal inlet and their distribution. In the April 1942 issue of the same journal, purchased by Carson as a single copy, parts of a report on the ecology of sand beaches in Beaufort, North Carolina, have been copiously underlined and bear occasional parenthetical remarks along margins. The section titled “Adaptations of Sand Beach Animals” is heavily annotated. It is a “who is who” and “who does what to whom” of that seashore. Unmarked by Carson is the main data table. Unmarked also is a section entitled “Seasonal Progression on Sand Beaches.” Neither did Carson seem to care much for what was written about the plants in the paper. Marine organisms, what they eat and what eats them, appear to have been Carson’s overriding interest in the ecology of sand beaches.¹⁰

Another monograph she requested was on a tidal inlet at Cape Ann, Massachusetts. The dry information in the monograph on the barnacle common in the inlet and its dog whelk predator is impossible to map to Carson’s lively prose on the same subject in The Edge of the Sea. Its title, “A Study in Bio-ecology,” however, has potential links to modern ecology. Bio-ecology was the term used by Shelford and Clements for their attempt to combine animal and plant ecology around the community concept. Recognizing the amorphous nature of ecology as spread through various academic departments, they also saw in the term a way to escape the ambiguous meaning then attached to ecology. Clements had been the champion of the superorganism concept of the plant community, seeing the process of succession to climax as a physiological development to a self-regulating, mature entity determined by the regional climate. Within that concept of homeostasis is the balance of nature concept.¹¹

Under the Sea Wind is classic nature writing, and Carson’s notes for it reflect a concern for writing technique. “What age child do editors prefer to attract?” for example, is no doubt answered in the book by the story of Scomber the mackerel. “Science explains-normal range—When pop. pressure great, many spill into new territory,” “Extremes of production” noted by a figure, and the distribution of plankton into zones, however, are items in her notes that reflect the most current ecology of that time. Carson’s notes and research materials for The Sea Around Us are heavy on physical oceanography and oceanographic research methods.¹²

A paper entitled “The Edge of the Sea,” presented at an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium, was the only purely scientific paper Carson ever gave to a professional academic organization. In it, she pursued questions such as “Why does an animal live where it does?” and “What is the nature of the ties that bind it to its world?” The questions, Carson proposed, showed progress in the science of ecology beyond the mere descriptive and into greater integration with other sciences. Carson almost parenthetically quotes without citation words of W. C. Allee, whom she identified as an animal ecologist at Woods Hole in the early 1930s. Allee was an independent investigator there in 1931, 1934, and 1936, but Carson was there in 1929 and 1932. However, Allee was a member of the corporation in 1932 and might have made a brief appearance. Thomas Park, Allee’s student, arrived in Raymond Pearl’s laboratory as a post-doc in 1933, but Carson’s assistantship in the laboratory had ended in 1931. Whether they met or not, Allee managed somehow to exert an influence on Carson, most likely through her Woods Hole experience.¹³

Silent Spring

It is in researching Silent Spring that the name Charles Elton, a founder of modern ecology, first appears in her notes. His work represents one of the paths to the ecosystem concept fervently promoted by Eugene P. Odum. Although this concept was not initially favored by the Chicago school, it shared the organicism that underlay Carson’s “ecological concept” in Silent Spring. The emphasis on energy and nutrient dynamics in the systems approach of Raymond Lindeman in combination with the radioactive tracer studies of the Odum brothers and others are what allowed an ecological explanation for the decline of raptors due to DDT use.14

Yet it is not Elton’s classic text, Animal Ecology, but his less technical work, The Ecology of Invasions, that Carson makes note of. We know that Carson first became aware of Elton’s popular—it grew out of three BBC radio broadcasts—book on invading species when she was introduced to it by E. O. Wilson while she was already working on the manuscript that was to become Silent Spring. Based on her notes, Carson may not have taken much more from the text than a literary device, although what remained unwritten but in her memory can never be ascertained. “Elton recalls the youth of ecology as a science by saying that only 25 years ago it was in its Neolithic age,” Carson carefully typed, going on to conclude: “One has only to look about to see that, in terms of its philosophy, applied entomology is still in its Stone Age.”¹⁵

For advice on Silent Spring, Carson relied heavily on Clarence Cottam, F. Raymond Fosburg, and Frank E. Egler. Wildlife biologist Cottam and botanist Fosburg described themselves as Carson’s personal friends. They are not likely to have guided her through the science of ecology. In his correspondence with her, the word ecology is not to be found in advice Cottam gave her about wildlife and pesticide issues; some of this advice, such as the relationship between DDT and the decline of Bald Eagles being questionable, is itself questionable.¹⁶

Fosburg is a problematic figure. Although he became an active member of the ESA who urged ecologists to promote their own interests, judging from reprints he provided Carson, his knowledge of modern ecology was superficial, at best. In one, he identifies himself as preoccupied with “human ecology.” In another reprint sent to Carson, he proposes a definition for the term, community ecologist. By then community ecology had been well established as an area of ecological investigation that was absolutely not synonymous with human ecology, as Fosburg proposed for it. In still another reprint, he identifies himself as a systematic botanist having “inclinations toward ecology.”¹⁷

Then there is Egler, a scientific maverick with an ax to grind and a decidedly not dispassionate approach to the science of his choice. A prolific letter writer—they were truly missives, in his case—he waged war against herbicide use, enlisting any and all who might help as allies in his cause and writing off as enemies all those who disagreed with him in any way. “I was once an Assoc. Prof. of Physics,” he announced in a page of correspondence that could instantly be recognized as his from across the room. (His writing style could only be described as early Tom! Wolfish abetted by a recalcitrant typewriter; it let his cantankerous personality show through.) After that wartime appointment, Egler, born to a New York family of apparent means, lived the life of an independent scholar. His longest appointment was with the American Museum of Natural History in New York from 1949 to 1954. He had his own view of ecology and ecologists. “I would sooner trust an intelligent and self-educated layman, than a Ph.D in ecology who is an ‘expert’ in one of the fashionable specialties of the day,” Egler later announced to the ESA membership. This low opinion of academics he had earlier shared with Carson in their correspondence.¹⁸

As in her previous books, Carson also obtained assistance by soliciting advice and reprints from appropriate specialists. For Silent Spring, ecologists E. O. Wilson, Paul Errington, and C. S. Holling are examples. Robert Rudd urged her to present “‘good’ ecology” to the public, which he identified as having biological, chemical, and sociological ingredients, but Carson focused instead in their correspondence on the details of Lady Bird Beetle collecting. She may have already known more than enough “good” ecology. William L. Brown, Jr., to whom she had communicated her hope of preparing a book on what she saw was “a serious threat to the basic ecology of the earth,” sent her reprints on “general evolutionary–ecological subjects” and cautioned her about what he called the “biome concept.” At that time, the biome concept to which Brown referred was that of the Clementsian “superorganism” in which the “balance of nature” could be found in its supposed homeostatic mechanisms. There was no mention of Brown’s suggestion of caution in her reply. Again, it may all have been old news to her, and she had issues on her mind that were more pressing at the time—failing health and the need to master both pesticide chemistry and the physiology of carcinogenesis, for example.¹⁹

Ecology in Silent Spring

In the text of Silent Spring Rachel Carson’s use of “ecology” is spare and more often than not used as “the ecology,” or as a synonym for some more specific concept. (At times she showed a lack of comfort in the use of the term. In a letter to Egler, written well into the writing phase of Silent Spring, she wondered if “ecological history” was an appropriate term.) She equates ecology with “interrelationships” and “interdependence.” The indirect poisoning of robins by insecticides reflects “the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology.” This poetic but careless use of the term is stretched even more in her next sentence, where she begins a discussion of “an ecology of the world within our bodies.” It must be fair to say that the ecologists who reviewed her book were—much like ecologists today—squarely on the side of protecting the environment. Had they not been so, there would have been additional ammunition for pesticide manufacturers to use against Carson’s professionalism.²⁰

The review of Silent Spring written by Ray Fosburg in the journal Ecology was, of course, favorable. Strangely, however, he gave the opinion that the book was not intended to be a scientific report. Frank Egler perhaps sought to correct Fosburg’s gaffe when he reviewed a symposium edited by Fosburg. On the pages of Ecology, he called Silent Spring “‘original research’ in the truest sense of the word.” B. N. K. Davis took Carson to task in the pages of the Journal of Ecology, a publication of the British Ecological Society, for her treatment of carcinogenesis, finding those sections “hypothetical and unconvincing,” but concluded after fact checking that factual errors were relatively unimportant. Davis found that the confidence Carson placed in the “ecological concept” of pest control was “not generally shared,” the only remark having to do with ecology in the review. Ian Baldwin, an agricultural scientist, took umbrage in his review in Science with what he saw as a lack of balance and the “sarcastic and unjustified attack on the ethics and integrity of many scientific workers.” Frits Went, then the Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, praised the book in the AIBS Bulletin, the precursor to BioScience, but took little note of Carson’s use of ecology in it, simply acquiescing in her having equated “ecological” with “natural.”²¹

LaMont Cole’s review in Scientific American was an important one in a number of ways. Cole was then one of the nation’s leading ecologists and one of the first to touch on the practical environmental applications of general ecological principles. In Scientific American he was communicating to a very broad scientific audience. (The journal had not yet changed ownership and turned to the popular science format it has today. It was then an outlet for scientists to communicate their latest and most important results to scientists of all disciplines, as well as the public.) Cole’s review was important enough to be revisited by Paul Ehrlich 17 years later.²²

“As an ecologist,” Cole wrote, “I am glad that this provocative book was written.” He criticized it mainly for its “highly partisan selection of examples and interpretations.” He found errors of fact to be “infrequent, trivial and irrelevant.” He did, however, criticize her use of the idea of a “balance of nature,” an idea his colleague at Cornell, William Brown, had warned her about, calling it “an obsolete concept among ecologists.” He especially took Rachel Carson to task for what he saw was her misunderstanding of the evolution of insect resistance to pesticides, claiming “not for a moment” to believe “that the chemicals are producing superinsects.”²³

The basis for Cole’s latter criticism was an idea older than the science of ecology: that selection—artificial or natural—must be a compromise of sorts. Once called the “Matthew Kermack principle” by J. B. S. Haldane, it was then renamed the Principle of Allocation and credited to an unpublished paper by Richard Levins and Robert H. MacArthur. MacArthur was by then becoming something of a legend, whom a popular writer has called the “James Dean of ecology.” His mathematically oriented evolutionary ecology was then coming into competition for supremacy in ecology with the physico-chemical ecosystem approach of Eugene Odum.²⁴

In explanation, Cole used the example of the sickle-cell trait in humans, in which resistance to malaria results in anemia in the trait’s possessor, fatally so to those having received the gene from both parents. Ernst Mayr would sum up the idea as “virtually all aspects of the phenotype are a compromise between opposing selection pressures” [italics in the original, phenotype in this instance essentially being the expression of an individual’s inherited characters]. An insect that developed resistance to an insecticide would, according to the principle, necessarily have an insufficiency in something else, making the evolution of “superinsects” unlikely, if not impossible.²⁵

Other than a somewhat bizarre treatment in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, in which a number of seminar students at Rutgers University examined “Dr. Carson’s … ecological knowledge,” the reviews above are all that were published in outlets that can be identified as those typically used by professional ecologists. The Rutgers students found her ecology basically sound, but then unintentionally damned the book by calling it “propaganda.” Entomologists were notably silent on Silent Spring in their professional journals.²⁶

Paul Ehrlich’s reexamination of Silent Spring “in light of 17 years’ more experience with pesticides” sheds some light on the posture that Cole was taking “as an ecologist” towards Carson’s use of their science. Ehrlich found nothing in Cole’s review with which to take issue, agreeing that Carson “presented a picture of the evolution of insect resistance that showed she was not intimately familiar with the details of the evolutionary process.” He utterly failed to consider new information on the mechanisms of insect resistance to pesticides that was available to him. There were “superinsects” out there, having resistance not only to DDT, but also to other insecticides to which they had not yet been exposed, with no demonstrable loss of fitness in other respects. Insects in Australia were found to have resistance to organochlorine insecticides, such as DDT, persisting 15 years without any selection pressure for resistance. A simple change in cuticle properties was all the trick took for certain insects. Rachel Carson had this information in front of her while writing Silent Spring, but the idea never appeared in the final version of the book. Ehlich’s suggested revisions to Silent Spring were to place less emphasis on the “balance of nature” and to add that “plants and herbivores are in a ‘coevolutionary race.’”²⁷

Both Cole and Ehrlich must be taken to task, however, for their insistence that Carson represented pyrethrins as simple molecules. The offending passage probably reflected careless writing, rather than careless chemistry. In addition, Cole—and Ehrlich by his silence on it—can be faulted for taking issue with something Rachel Carson never said. This had to do with then current views “of what regulates the size of any population in nature.” As far as Silent Spring is concerned, the issue is something of a red herring. Cole referred to, but did not adequately explain to the reader an argument about density-dependent mortality that cannot be taken up here without this article becoming book length. Cole was taking a stance on a raging debate that is still under dispute. That Rachel Carson had never heard of an argument that in hindsight turned out to be either untrue or irrelevant (or both) cannot stand as an indictment of her science.²⁸

Cole—and then Ehrlich—displayed not errors by Carson, but an ax that had to be ground. Carson’s only ecological transgression may have been in crossing into the turf of the professional ecologist.²⁹

The impact of Silent Spring on ecology

Cole and Ehrlich were not the only ecologists who took a condescending attitude toward Rachel Carson’s science in Silent Spring. For example, reviews of Robert Rudd’s Pesticides and the Living Landscape contrasted Carson’s “bold” and “dramatically” written popular work with Rudd’s “textbook” in which personal judgment is “scrupulously” distinguished from evidence. British ecologist J. M. Cherrett smugly attributed the lack of surprise over Carson’s revelations to Rudd having published on the topic since 1955 in the United States.³⁰

That smugness was not justified. The 1956 position of the ESA was that “on the whole, great care is being exercised by most federal and state agencies” in the use of chemical controls. “Instances in which beneficial animals and plants have been killed are surprisingly few and usually occurred where the applicators failed to follow instructions,” a study committee concluded, a few paragraphs before reporting that Rudd had sent the committee a letter emphasizing the need for more data that could be brought to bear on the issue. Heavy metal pollution was thought to be a greater threat to wildlife than DDT. The following year the conclusion on synthetic pesticides was that “when applied to agricultural crops at the dosages and in the manner prescribed by federal and state authorities, they have caused little or no losses to wildlife,” even though acknowledging fears of conservationists and “others concerned with the preservation of our wildlife” that “such treatments will destroy nature’s balance” and emphasizing the need for thorough ecological studies for large-scale projects. Both reports showed more concern about the losses of natural lands and the damming of rivers, more traditional concerns for the ESA.³¹

In 1961, a brief report by an expanded committee on applied ecology—described as having had “very rough going”—showed concern over adequate water supplies and the fire ant eradication program. In 1964, however, the ESA was sponsoring a well-attended symposium in the hope of allowing ecologists to exchange information on the “increasing problem of pesticide pollution.” Silent Spring was the acknowledged impetus. The same year, the ESA President charged the committee on applied ecology “to formulate an ecological context for the use and conservation of natural resources.” Its findings were not reassuring. Present programs were not providing the factual material needed to avoid future disasters, and students were repelled by ecology’s lack of rigor. Narrow specialization, the kind that presumably missed the warnings given by Rachel Carson, was “a real dilemma.”³²

The committee further concluded: “The biological sciences traditionally served as a refuge for students who found physics, chemistry, and mathematics distasteful and were not inclined toward abstract theory. Ecology went one step further and attracted those who discovered that chemistry was also a requirement for research in physiological fields.” The initial impetus for the study had come from Paul Sears in 1957—out of concern that ecologists were not providing the service to mankind they were capable of—but it did not gather real impetus until February 1964. That impetus was acknowledged by the authors to have been propelled by the publication of Silent Spring.³³

A crisis was brewing in ecology. A number of ecologists in the 1950s, Sears and Egler among them, had been pushing ecologists to take stands on environmental issues. By 1963, instead of just a few voices, a Committee on Public Affairs in the ESA was appointed as “the most important action,” by his own estimate, in that ESA President’s term. Meanwhile, ecology’s persistent identity crisis was coming to a head in the competing points of view of Odum and MacArthur.³⁴

In 1964 BioScience gave space to Stewart Udall to urge biologists to “spread this Gospel” that Rachel Carson had presented. That same year it devoted an issue “to cover the basic concepts and ideas of ecology.” Eugene Odum used it to preach a new ecology based on the ecosystem concept. Pierre Dansereau made the claim that “‘ecosystem ecology’ is the ecology of the future.” Frank Blair blamed the primitive state of knowledge about ecosystem interactions “in part on the modesty of ecologists in seeking financial support for their research and in part on the failure of both ecologists and formulators of public policy to face up to the fact that knowledge of the interactions and interdependencies at the levels of organization with which ecology deals is essential to man’s present and future welfare.”³⁵

The results of all of this heightened activity by ecologists are too many to fully cover in a paper of this length. One was the mistaken impression that Deep Ecology had its roots in the ecosystem concept of Eugene Odum. Another was a drive toward professionalization in ecology that was not entirely compatible with the multifaceted subject that was ecology. Still another was the peculiar identity crisis suffered by ecologists to this day having to do philosophical viewpoints of nature, environmental activism, and the need for a scientific detachment.³⁶

The most important impact, however, may have been on the schism between ecosystem and evolutionary ecology. It is not until passage of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) of 1969, and the fact that the character of the International Biological Program (IBP) began to be apparent, that the exact effects of Silent Spring on ecology became clear. Both were strongly influenced by the book and both resulted in changes to the quietly subversive science.

By having its emphasis changed from human welfare to biomes (in the current meaning of the term) between its 1961 inception and its 1970 funding authorization, the IBP established ecology as Big Science with a big budget. The ecology was ecosystem ecology. Frank Blair no longer had to apologize for the modesty of ecologists in securing funding. The IBP funded ecology because it had the proper image to be the basic science to solve environmental problems. By then ecosystem science had been tied to Rachel Carson’s “ecological concept” through the efforts of Odum, Egler, and others.³⁷

Until that point, ecology had been seen to be weak intellectually, a science lacking in rigor. Ecologists themselves disparaged ecology as “a descriptive science with no real principles.” However, mathematical analysis was every bit as legitimate a path to rigor as energy and nutrient analysis. Ecologists who found mathematics and the physical sciences distasteful found that they could fit their naturalistic studies into the framework being created around the work of Robert MacArthur. Ecology found itself suddenly split into two camps competing for prestige and funding, a situation that persisted into the 1980s.³⁸

Besides being a force in the funding of the IBP, Silent Spring was also a force in the creation of NEPA legislation, an “ecological ‘Magna Carta’” by which ecology was “rather suddenly thrust into a period of great individual and collective opportunity,” in the words of a 1972 address by the ESA President. “Rachel Carson’s book had been published a few years earlier and it was still the major topic of discussion during late 1969 and early 1970,” when much environmental legislation was being enacted, according to an ecologist then serving on the White House staff. A legal and policy analyst concluded in 1972 that: “The courts have, in effect, legitimized ecology.”³⁹

“There was a major sea change in the ESA from the Applied Ecology Committee having little respect before the publication of Silent Spring to becoming very respectable,” is one impression of the shift that took place from an essentially academic orientation in ecology to one of practical applications. Purists then running the Society did not think ecologists should be involved in applied problems. Indeed, a common criterion in the choice of study habitats was their relative lack of influence by man’s activities. Today the Applied Ecology Section has the biggest membership of any section in the ESA.⁴⁰

Conclusion

Circumstantial evidence presented supports the conclusion that Rachel Carson was exposed to ideas of ecology, probably as early as her Johns Hopkins experience, and kept herself up-to-date on the science as it evolved. The condescension shown by LaMont Cole and other ecologists toward Carson’s ecological knowledge can be interpreted as an attempt to protect their professional turf. Time has vindicated Carson on many of their criticisms. Cole, for example, pointed out that honey bees faced a more difficult threat to survival from the old, nonsynthetic pesticides than from DDT. He attributed Carson’s “bias and oversimplification” to “what it takes to write a best seller.” We now know, however, that synthetic pesticides do not exactly lead to peace of mind in the honey bee hive.⁴¹

The grudging acceptance of Carson’s ecological expertise may have had to do with the condition of the science at the time. A science insecure about its status had suddenly found itself promoted to a highly visible role in solving environmental problems before it had developed the body of knowledge and tools to fill that role. Indeed, before it had come to terms with what it actually was as a science. Ecologists were still trying to sort out whether ecology was a general point of view, a specific predictive science, or an arcane set of descriptive terms and data. And if it was on the verge of becoming a predictive science, there was little agreement on what that science would be like. Would it be physiological? Ecosystem oriented? Or would it return to its roots in the working out of evolutionary adaptations? It had not been a time to have what appeared to be an outsider communicating to the public what ecology was.

Ecology was to undergo other wrenching controversies over methodology and identity; Silent Spring merely exacerbated a conflict that had already been brewing between ecosystem and evolutionary ecology. It is a field not without controversy even today, some of which may be traced back to the publication of Silent Spring. In the general terms of its transition from an arcane, academic science of natural environments to one in which more members of the ESA consider themselves as applied scientists, and even theoretical research is often on global issues, Rachel Carson’s influence has been considerable.⁴²

William Dritschilo
Proctor, Vermont 05765
E-mail: [email protected]

Endnotes
1 Richard S. Miller, “Summary Report of the Ecology Study Committee with Recommendations for the Future of Ecology and the Ecological Society of America,” ESA Bulletin 46 (1965): 71.

2 LaMont C. Cole, “Rachel Carson’s Indictment of the Wide Use of Pesticides,” Scientific American (December, 1962): 173–180.

3 The Johns Hopkins University Circular, 1928–1932 (Ferdinand Hamburger, Jr., Archives, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland). “Members,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society 1 (1917): 9, 33, 35.

4 Sharon Kingsland, Modeling Nature (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985), 7. Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 65. Edward J. Kormondy, editor, Readings in Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965). H. S. Jennings, “Diverse Doctrines of Evolution, Their Relation to the Practice of Science and Life,” Science 6 (1927): 19–25.

5 Rachel Carson, The Development of the Pronephros During Embryonic and Early Larval Life of the Catfish (Ictalurus punctatus), Master’s Thesis (John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1932).

6 Biological Bulletin of the Marine Biological Laboratory, volumes 59 & 65 for the years 1929 and 1932, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library. See Lear, Rachel Carson, on her scientific advisors. Henry Bigelow, letter, 14 February 1961, box 17, folder 308, Yale Collection of American Literature, Rachel Carson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library [hereafter RCC].

7 Lear, Rachel Carson, 74. Robert A. Croker, Pioneer Ecologist: The Life and Work of Victor Ernest Shelford, 1877–1968 (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1991), 101. The Collecting Net, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library, 1929 and 1932; Biological Bulletin of the Marine Biological Laboratory, 1929 and 1932, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library.

8 Jane Maienschein, 100 Years Exploring Life, 1888–1988 (Jones and Bartlett, Boston, 1989); E. G. Conklin and Frank R. Lillie, “Community Life,” in Frank R. Lillie. The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratories (University of Chicago, 1944), 170–176.

9 Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (Oxford University Press, New York, 1951), 218. Richard Hesse, W. C. Allee, and Karl P. Schmidt, Ecological Animal Geography (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1937); Carson, The Sea Around: 209.

10 Rachel Carson, notes, box 18, folder 339, RCC. Ecological Monographs 12 (1942) in box 110, folder 2126, RCC.

11 Ralph W. Dexter, “The Marine Communities of a Tidal Inlet at Cape Ann, Massachusetts: A Study in Bio-Ecology,” Ecological Monographs 17 (1947): 261–294. Frederick E. Clements and Victor E. Shelford, Bio-ecology (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1939).


12 Rachel Carson, spiral notebook, box 1, folder 1, RCC.

13 Linda Lear, editor, Lost Woods, the Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (Beacon Press, Boston, 1998), 135 and 144. Information on Allee’s connections to Woods Hole courtesy of Jean Monahan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library. Kingsland, Modeling Nature, 96, on Park in Pearl’s laboratory. Lear, Rachel Carson, 72, on Carson’s dates.

14 Edward Cook, “Raymond Lindeman and the Trophic-Dynamic Concept in Ecology,” Science 198 (1977): 22–26; Chapter 14 in Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, Second Edition, (W. B. Saunders, Philadelphia, 1959). See also Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank, The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1992), and Frank B. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More than the Sum of Its Parts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

15 Charles S. Elton, Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (Wiley, New York, 1958), 13. Lear, Rachel Carson: 332. Rachel Carson, manuscript, box 36, folder 645, RCC.

16 Lear, Rachel Carson: 180. Clarence Cottam, letter, February 26, 1962, p. 4, box 102, folder 1936, RCC.

17 ESA Bulletin 38 (1957). F. R. Fosburg, “Report of the Representative to the National Research Council,” ESA Bulletin 38 (1957): 27–9, “The Preservation of Man’s Environment,” Proceedings of the Ninth Pacific Science Congress, 1957, 20 (1958): 159–160, and “The Community Ecologist,” unpaginated pamphlet, box 41, folder 742, RCC. Sharon E. Kingsland, “Defining Ecology as a Science” in Leslie A. Real, and James H. Brown, editors, Foundations of Ecology, Classic Papers with Commentaries (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991), 1–13.

18 Frank E. Egler, letter, February 1, 1962, box 43, folder 781, RCC. Frank E(dwin) Egler, Biographical Outline, courtesy of John P. Anderson, Aton Forest. Frank E. Egler, “ESA Needs a Code of Ethics and a Certification Program,” ESA Bulletin 53:2 (1972): 3–4. Frank E. Egler, letter, 18 September 1962, box 84, folder 1461, RCC.

19 Robert L. Rudd, letters, 5 May 1958 (and Carson’s reply) and 25 August 1959, box 44, folder 822; Rachel Carson, letter, 5 October 1958; William L. Brown, Jr., letter, 7 October 1958; Rachel C. Carson, letter, 17 October 1958, box 42, folder 767, RCC. Lear, Rachel Carson.

20 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1962): 56 and 81. Rachel C. Carson, letter,
29 January 1962, box 43, folder 781, RCC. Carson, Silent Spring, 189.

21 F. R. Fosburg, “Pesticides and Ecology,” Ecology 44 (1963): 624. Frank E. Egler, “The Exergetics of the Ecosystem,” Ecology 45 (1964): 204. B. N. K. Davis, “Silent Spring,” Journal of Ecology 52 (1964): 448. I. L. Baldwin, “Chemicals and Pests,” Science 137 (1962): 1043. Frits Went, “Silent Spring,” AIBS Bulletin 13:1 (1963): 41–42.

22 See Lamont C. Cole, “The Ecosphere,” Scientific American 198:4 (1958): 83–96.

23 Cole, “Rachel Carson’s Indictment,” 173 and 176.

24 J. B. S. Haldane, “The Relationship Between Density Regulation and Natural Selection,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 145 (1956): 306–308; Martin L. Cody, “A General Theory of Clutch Size,” Evolution 20 (1966): 174; Richard Levins and Robert MacArthur, “Maintenance of Genetic Polymorphism in a heterogeneous environment: variations on a theme by Howard Levene,” American Naturalist 100 (1966): 585–590; Richard Levins, Evolution in Changing Environments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 15. David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 177.

25 Ernst Mayr, Populations, Species, and Evolution (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970), 142.

26 Norman H. Dill, Elizabeth M. Haines, Joan Hellerman, and Robert A. Jervis, “The Spray Around Us,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 90:2 (1963): 149–152.

27 Paul R. Ehrlich, “Paul R. Ehrlich Reconsiders Silent Spring,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October 1979): 34. F. L. Attia, “Insecticide resistance in Cadra cantella in New South Wales, Australia,” Journal of Economic Entomology 69 (1976): 773–774; R. M. Sawicki, “Interaction between the factors delaying penetration of insecticides and the desethylation mechanism of resistance in organophosphate-resistant houseflies,” Pesticide Science 1 (1970): 84–87; V. L. Patil, P. V. Shah, and E. F. Guthrie, “Absorption of Insecticides in Resistant and Susceptible House Flies,” Journal of Economic Entomology 72 (1979): 416–418. Rachel Carson, typed manuscript, box 36, folder 644, RCC. Ehrlich, “Paul R. Ehrlich Reconsiders Silent Spring,” 36.

28 Carson, Silent Spring, 16. Cole, “Rachel Carson’s Indictment,” 178. See Kingsland, Modeling Nature, and Mark A. Hixon, Steven W. Pacala, and Stuart A. Sandin, “Population Regulation: Historical Context and Contemporary Challenges of Open vs. Closed Systems,” Ecology 83 (2002): 1490–1508, on density dependence.

29 But see Maril Hazlett, “’Woman vs. Man vs. Bugs’: Gender and Popular Ecology in Early Reactions to Silent Spring,” Environmental History 9 (2004):701–729, and Michael B. Smith, “’Silence, Miss Carson!’ Science, Gender, and the Reception of Silent Spring,” Feminist Studies 27 (2001): 733–755.

30 Paul F. Elson, “Ecology and Pesticides,” Ecology 47 (1966): 159. J. M. Cherrett, “Pesticides and the Living Landscape,” Journal of Ecology 54 (1966): 842. Paul B. Sears, “Pesticides and the Living Landscape,” Quarterly Review of Biology 40 (1965): 377.

31 Paul R. Needham, “Report of the Committee on Applied Ecology,” ESA Bulletin 38 (1957): 14–19. Rexford F. Daubenmire, Ray F. Smith, and Paul R. Needham, “Report of the Committee on Applied Ecology,” ESA Bulletin 39 (1958): 18–26.

32 Fred R. Cagle, Henry S. Fitch, Vagn F. Flyger, Arthur D. Hasler, William M. Longhurst, Richard H. Pough, Aaron J. Sharp, and Durward L. Allen, “Report of the Committee on Applied Ecology,” ESA Bulletin 42 (1961): 29–31. Gene E. Likens, e-mail to author (8 December 2003). Gene Likens, “Pesticide Pollution of Freshwater Ecosystems,” ESA Bulletin 45 (1964): 157–159. Jack Major, “Reports of Committees: Applied Ecology,” ESA Bulletin 45 (1964): 13–17.

33 Ecology Study Committee, “Summary Report”: 63 and 68.

34 ESA Bulletin 44 (1963): 33.

35 Stewart L. Udall, “A Message for Biologists,” BioScience 14:11 (1964): 17–18. Robert B. Platt and John N. Wolfe, “Introduction,” BioScience 14:7 (1964): 9. Eugene P. Odum, “The New Ecology,” BioScience 14:7 (1964): 14–17; Pierre Dansereau, “The Future of Ecology,” BioScience 14:7 (1964):
22. Frank Blair, “The Case for Ecology,” BioScience 14:7 (1964): 19.s

36 See William Dritschilo, Earth Days: Ecology Comes of Age as a Science (iUniverse, New York, 2004). Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology (Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1995), 120. Egler, “ESA Needs a Code of Ethics and a Certification Program.” (The issue is still not entirely resolved. See Virginia H. Dale, Gary W. Barrett, Alan T. Carpenter, C. Ross Hinkle, William J. Mitsch, and Louis F. Pitelka, “ESA’s Professional Certification Program: Let’s Make It Work,” ESA Bulletin 81 (2000): 255–257.) David Takacs, The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, Maryland, 1996); Pimm, Stuart L., The World According to Pimm (McGraw-Hill, New York, 2001).

37 Chunglin Kwa, “Representations of Nature Mediating between Ecology and Science Policy: The Case of the International Biological Program,” Social Studies of Science 17 (1987): 413–442; Paolo Palladino, “Defining Ecology: Ecological Theories, Mathematical Models, and Applied Biology in the 1960s and 1970s,” Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1991): 223–243.

38 See Hagen, Entangled Bank; James P. Collins, “Evolutionary Ecology and the Use of Natural Selection in Ecological Theory,” Journal of the History of Biology 19 (1986): 257–288; James H. Brown, “New Approaches and Methods in Ecology, Introduction to Part Four,” in Foundations of Ecology, 452–453; Palladino, “Defining Ecology”; Robert P. McIntosh, “Ecology Since 1900,” in Benjamin J. Taylor and Thurman J. White, editors, Issues and Ideas in America (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1976), 353–72.

39 Stanley I. Auerbach, “Ecology, Ecologists and the E.S.A.” Ecology 53 (1972): 205–7. David Pimentel, email to author, 20 January 2002. James W. Curlin, “Courts, Ecology, and Environmental Planning,” Ecology 53 (1972): 373.

40 Likens, e-mail.

41 Cole, “Rachel Carson’s Indictment,” 180.

42 See William Dritschilo, “Bringing Statistical Methods to Community and Evolutionary Ecology: Daniel S. Simberloff,” in Oren Harman and Michael Dietrich, Editors, Rebels in Life (Yale University Press, New Haven, in press); F. A. Bazzaz, “Cooling the Diversity Debate,” ESA Bulletin 82 (2001): 136–137.

ESA’s Public Affairs Committee announces a contest for the best MAMAS (Maxims, Analogies, Metaphors, Anecdotes, Similes) to communicate ecological knowledge

First Prize: Full refund of Memphis Annual Meeting registration
Second Prize: One year ESA membership and online subscription to journals
Third Prize: ESA t-shirt and travel mug
Best Student Prize: One-year ESA membership, includes Frontiers journal

Background:

Explaining the complexity of ecological systems to policy makers and the public is challenging for ecologists. The Ecological Society of America’s Public Affairs Committee is hosting an evening session that will address the use of analogies, metaphors, anecdotes, etc. to explain complex ecological principles. The session will include seasoned ecologists with a flair for using MAMAS, and will center on the best submissions received via this competition.

To participate:

Entries should be no more than one page in length and should feature your favorite Maxim, Analogy, Metaphor, Anecdote, or Simile as it relates to the science of ecology. Please indicate the source (whether it is your own or if it is credited to someone else) and the context in which it has been used effectively (e.g., during a radio interview; before a Rotary Club; in a lecture hall). Submissions should include full name and all contact information. ESA student members are especially encouraged to participate in this competition.

Members of the Public Affairs Committee will presort all entries and the top 10–30 finalists will be highlighted during the Annual Meeting Evening Session, “Ecological Analogies, Metaphors, and Anecdotes” on Tuesday. Prize winners will also be announced.

The Goal:

We hope to create an online database, searchable by topic, which will be available to all ESA members for use in outreach activities. All sources of the best MAMAS will be acknowledged.

Definitions:

Maxims—a pithy statement of general wisdom, e.g. “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
Analogies—comparing similarities between things otherwise unlike, e.g. “hot is to cold as fire is to ice.”
Metaphors—implied comparison, e.g., “All the world’s a stage.”
Anecdotes—Personal experience/story.
Simile—an explicit comparison, e.g., “Her tears flowed like wine.”

Maxims, Analogies, Metaphors, Anecdotes, Similes to Communicate
Ecological Knowledge

 
Here are the winning entries of the MAMAS Contest held by the Public Affairs Committee at the ESA Annual Meeting in Memphis. Richard Pouyat, Vice President of Public Affairs, hopes to organize another one next year with the long-term goal of compiling a lexicon of sorts that all ecologists can access online. The impetus was to better equip ecologists with ways to explain the complexities of ecology and ecological systems to policy makers and the public.

Dear ESA MAMAS Contest Participants:
 
First off, thank you for taking the time to participate in the recently held ESA MAMAS Contest. We had about 20 people submit entries, many of them multiple. The Society’s Public Affairs Committee selected the winners that were announced at the well-attended Evening Session at the ESA Memphis Meeting.
 
It is our hope that this is just the beginning—the Committee plans to organize a similar contest and event for next year’s ESA Annual Meeting. As a contest participant, we wanted to go ahead and share the winning entries and honorable mentions with you today and have reproduced them below.
 
Again, thanks for participating and we hope we see the enthusiasm for this effort continue to grow.
 
Nadine Lymn
Director of Public Affairs
 

Second Honorable Mention:
 
Submitted by Katie Griffith (Ph.D student, University of California, Santa Cruz)
 
Credited to: Dr. A. Todd Newberry (Emeritus Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz)
 
On observing nature:
 
There are two oceans, water and air. We are benthic creatures, crawling on the bottom of the atmospheric ocean. Birds are aerial fish that swim among and over the reefs we call bushes and trees.
  
First Honorable Mention:
 
Submitted by Olyssa Starry, Water Biologist, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
 
On environmental challenges associated with the global nitrogen cycle:
 
Another tool for analyzing scientific metaphors involves investigating how they are reciprocated in science and society (Russell). Think about the social implications of calling N added to the soil “fertilizer.” How do you know when you’ve added enough?
 
 Third Prize:
 
Submitted by Candan Soykan, Arizona State University
 
Credited to: Lee Basnar of the Sierra Vista Herald and/or hydrologist Richard Koehler
 
An aquifer is a bank account:

Rain and snow are deposits, and water uses are withdrawals. Plants, animals, stream flow, and human uses rely on account withdrawals. When deposits exceed withdrawals, life is good. If deposits decline, then so too must withdrawals, or else the account will run out.

  
Second Prize:
 
Submitted by Ryan Utz (student, University of Maryland Appalachian Laboratory)
 
Credited to: Dr. Kyle Hartman, West Virginia University
 
On the challenges of a salmon trying to reach adulthood:
 
Imagine you are in your car and attempting to move from the center of Morgantown to I-68 (the interstate at the edge of town). Now let every traffic light you encounter represent a threshold in your life stage; if you hit it while it is red, you’re dead, but if it’s green, you progress to the next life stage. Only if you move from the town center to I-68 hitting nothing but green lights do you survive to adulthood. Those are the odds faced by a salmon fry; growing to a parr, avoiding fry predators, attaining smolt size, various stages of migration, all of these represent traffic lights. The vast majority of individuals will eventually hit a red light somewhere along the way, but a select few make it all the way and survive to adulthood. An extension of this idea (I may take credit for this) is that environmental conditions can dramatically affect your chances. Driving at night (when lights stay greener longer and traffic is low) or right after a basketball game (when traffic is horrendous) will affect your chances of making it green all of the way. These two scenarios may be likened to absence of predators, and competition due to the overcrowding of your cohort, respectively. One may easily imagine that this idea could be applied to a returning and successfully spawning adult salmon.
 
 
First Prize:
 
Submitted by: Bill Varettoni, (Doctoral Program, Maryland School of Public Policy, College Park)
 
Credited to: Bill Varettoni
 
On species diversity:
 
 In explaining the role of species diversity to my 11-year-old nephew, I told him that all living things, including us, rely on each other for existence. He knew about the food chain, and pointed out that animals could always change their diet to eat something else if their “bug of choice” dies out. I told him that was true to a point. I told him we are all in a giant game of Jenga. You can remove a species here, one there, and maybe get by—but the system will be less stable. But the longer you play the game while removing pieces/species, you are risking collapse.” 
 

Ecological Effects of Gulf Coast Hurricanes: Short-Term Impacts and Long-Term Consequences

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana and coastal Mississippi on 29 August 2005, becoming the costliest and one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history. The impacts of Hurricane Katrina on human communities along the Gulf Coast have been well documented. Initially, the storm produced high winds and storm surges that destroyed many of the coastal towns in Mississippi. Surging waters through the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and along the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain breached levees and caused flooding of all low-lying areas of New Orleans. Four weeks later, on 24 September 2005, Hurricane Rita made landfall in southwestern Louisiana, and while the second storm’s impact on human communities was less than that of Katrina, Hurricane Rita caused appreciable economic damage. Obviously these storms also dramatically affected ecological communities: storm surges of salt water flooded coastal marshes and swamps; winds in excess of 100 mph felled forests; and Lake Pontchartrain itself was stressed as floodwaters were pumped out of New Orleans. A year later it was possible to look back more thoroughly at the ecological consequences of these storms and offer insights into how ecological knowledge might help mitigate damage from future Gulf Coast hurricanes.

This symposium, organized by Colin Jackson (University of Mississippi), Paul Keddy (Southeastern Louisiana University), and Gary Shaffer (Southeastern Louisiana University), focused on the “Ecological effects of Gulf Coast hurricanes: short-term impacts and long-term consequences”.

While the Gulf Coast refers to the United States coastline along the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Texas, the area most impacted by Katrina and Rita was the northern Gulf Coast, which includes the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and this region was the main focus of the symposium. Hurricane landfall on the northern Gulf Coast is hardly a new occurrence. Hurricanes Betsy (1965) and Camille (1969) caused extensive damage and are still remembered by many in coastal Mississippi and Louisiana. Numerous other hurricanes and tropical storms have moved across the region since then, and the recorded impact of hurricanes in this region goes back to at least 1717. During that year a major hurricane was partially responsible for the shift of the capital of French Louisiana from Mobile, Alabama, to a new city located between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain: New Orleans.

New Orleans, Louisiana, and the importance of coastal wetlands in hurricane damage mitigation

When New Orleans was founded, the city was built on ground that was above sea level. However, as the city grew, it expanded into reclaimed wetlands, which as John Day (Louisiana State University) describes, have in some places subsided by >5 m. When tidal surges southeast of the city reached 6 m during Hurricane Katrina, levees in the eastern part of New Orleans were overtopped. Combined with the failure of levees that protect the city from Lake Pontchartrain, this resulted in flooding of roughly 80% of the metropolitan area. Louisiana’s coastal wetlands provided much of the original protection from tidal surges, but these wetlands are disappearing. Day noted that >25% of the state’s coastal wetlands were lost during the 20th century. Much of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands loss has been exacerbated by human activities: the construction of shipping channels such as Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MRGO) and the laying of pipelines and other infrastructure for the Gulf of Mexico oil industry. Channelization of the Mississippi River so that it no longer connects to its delta plain or moves throughout the landscape is one of the major problems. Day suggested that reconnecting the river to its floodplain, through major freshwater diversion efforts, should be a cornerstone of effective coastal restoration, and is vital if the storm buffering capacity of coastal wetlands is to be recovered. The closure, or at least restriction, of channels such as MRGO is essential. Flow in MRGO reached 2 m/s as this channel funneled surging water towards New Orleans during Katrina. Day stressed that the timing of these restoration actions is critically important. With rising energy costs and an increased likelihood for future major storms and sea-level rise with global climate change, if restoration efforts are not made in the near future, it will be too late to save both Louisiana coastal wetlands and the city of New Orleans.

Gary Shaffer (Southeastern Louisiana University) noted that cypress–tupelo swamps are particularly effective at buffering both storm water surges and winds, and if allowed to flourish under favorable conditions, can achieve heights of 10 m in a decade. Analysis of specific habitat loss following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita suggests that swamps dominated by bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) and water tupelo (Nyssa aquatica) were much less severely impacted than other ecosystem types, such as bottomland hardwood forests or open marsh. In some areas the difference is particularly marked, as in the Pearl River Basin in southeastern Louisiana and southwestern Mississippi. This area was directly in the path of Hurricane Katrina, and while bottomland hardwood forests suffered up to 80% wind throw, cypress–tupelo swamps were left relatively intact. Shaffer agreed with Day that efforts to rebuild the northern Gulf Coast must emphasize the role of coastal wetlands in storm-damage reduction. Bald cypress–tupelo swamps are essential in any coastal wetland restoration strategy, as they appear much more resistant to high winds and storm surges associated with hurricanes than freshwater or brackish marsh. That said, cypress–tupelo swamps are not immune to the effects of hurricanes and tropical storms, and are particularly sensitive to saltwater inundation. A few days exposure to salinity levels in excess of 5 ppt can severely stress these systems, often to the point where they may not recover. This is where freshwater diversion strategies become critical. Shaffer estimated that by diverting water from the Mississippi River, along with increasing other sources of freshwater such as treated wastewater, it would be possible to restore several hundred thousand hectares of coastal cypress–tupelo swamp in Louisiana alone. Much of this area is former cypress swamp that has degenerated into marsh or open water due to a combination of saltwater intrusion and extensive cypress logging in the early 20th century. However, with frequent pulses of freshwater these areas could once again become thriving cypress–tupelo swamp and serve as a vital line of defense against future hurricane damage.

Long-term consequences of hurricanes and other disturbances on forests along the Gulf Coast

Bill Platt (Louisiana State University) addressed the importance of considering both the physical effects of hurricanes (high winds) and changes arising from storm surges of saltwater on coastal ecosystems. These two factors are enough to disassemble existing coastal ecosystems and promote shifts in species distributions. Platt suggested that in contrast to inland ecosystems, where hurricanes can stimulate regeneration of the existing plant community, major hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita may spur landward regeneration in ecosystems in many coastal areas. Coastal regions show changes in plant communities over small spatial scales, and moving a few meters inland often provides enough of an elevation change to see a succession from submerged communities to coastal saltmarsh to freshwater marsh to forest. Ongoing sea level rise can shift this spatial distribution landward and inhibit the regeneration of coastal communities. In essence, the high winds and saltwater inundation associated with major hurricanes serves as the catalyst that can push coastal ecosystems into new cycles of development, which are reinforced by long-term changes in the environment associated with global climate change and sea level rise. Platt’s group has been testing these ideas in the Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve along the Alabama Gulf Coast. This site is characterized by transitions from low-lying estuarine marsh to upland hardwood forest and was impacted by high winds and extended storm surges associated with both Hurricane Ivan (2004) and Katrina (2005). Initial surveys show that that recovery is occurring through the growth of plant species that were previously lower down in the coastal elevation gradient, and through colonization by disturbance-following species that were not present prior to Hurricane Ivan. A particular concern is the increased appearance of Chinese tallow (Sapium sebiferum), a fast-growing exotic species that seems particularly capable of invading hurricane-impacted areas. Platt reported that with increased disturbance from hurricanes and tropical storms it is possible that this invasive species may soon become dominant in Gulf coast forest ecosystems.

While Platt’s work addressed the interactions of hurricanes with sea level changes, Heather Passmore, a student of Platt’s at LSU, has been examining the interplay between hurricanes and fire. Lightning-induced fires are a frequent, large-scale disturbance in savanna-forest landscapes of the southeastern United States; ecosystems subject to disturbance from both fire and hurricanes can show changes in species composition and community structure that would be different from those expected for each disturbance alone. Passmore has developed a conceptual model of hurricane–fire interactions that predicts a potential for great variation in these interactions across the landscape. Interactions are much more likely to occur in savannas than in forests, but are more unpredictable in ecotones where these systems meet. It is in these ecotones that Passmore experimentally tested the hypothesis that the effects of lightning-season fires on the structure and composition of the plant community would differ depending upon whether hurricanes preceded the fires. Passmore manipulated two of the major impacts of hurricanes on these systems, canopy disturbance, and an increase in organic matter on the forest floor that would serve as fuel for fires by removing canopy trees and increasing fuel loads. Higher fuel loads resulted in hotter fires, which in turn reduced the overall density and species richness of woody plants in manipulated plots. This strongly suggests that hurricane disturbance results in more locally intense fires in these systems, which can reduce overall hardwood density. Passmore notes that this lower plant density could result in decreased competition and encourage the establishment of pines and other fire-resistant species in savanna–forest ecotones. Over longer time periods, these interactions between hurricanes and fire are likely to result in landscape-level changes in savanna–forest ecosystems along the northern Gulf Coast.

The initial impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on coastal forest ecosystems

Stephen Faulkner (USGS National Wetlands Research Center) agreed that hurricanes have major impacts on the structure and function of coastal forest ecosystems, both in the short and long term. His estimates suggest that >34 × 10 6 m 3 of timber was destroyed or damaged during the combined onslaught of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which affected 450,000 ha in Louisiana alone. Confirming what Shaffer had previously observed, Faulkner asserted that plots in the Pearl River Basin that were dominated by bald cypress–tupelo swamp showed much lower mortality than other areas. These observations are similar to those reported for forests surrounding Lake Verret in southern Louisiana, an area that was impacted by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Faulkner monitored vegetation density and vigor in the Pearl River floodplain at weekly intervals following Katrina and compared the findings to ongoing studies in the same system from 1989 to 2003. Overall, the system now shows below- average vegetation density and health, with the worst areas being the bottomland hardwood forests that were most affected by Katrina. One short-term impact of hurricanes on forest communities is that they generate a large pulse in litterfall. In contrast to the usual litterfall at the end of the growing season, during Katrina this litter consisted of live foliage and likely represented an immense pulse of organic matter to the soil. Hurricanes also promote shifts in forest structure that can change the availability of foraging substrates used by migratory birds, and the impacts of Katrina on Pearl River bottomlands appear to correspond with a shift in migratory bird use from these areas to adjacent upland forests.

Robb Diehl (University of Southern Mississippi) stressed the importance of considering how hurricanes and associated habitat destruction can affect migratory bird populations. Much of the North Atlantic hurricane season coincides with fall bird migration, and major storm systems often develop when bird migration over the Gulf of Mexico is at its peak. Little is known of how hurricanes and major storm systems can affect birds during migratory passage. Diehl raised an important question: Is migratory passage suspended or delayed during major storm events, or is bird migration temporarily shifted to the west to avoid more hazardous routes over the Gulf of Mexico? Such a shift in migratory patterns could allow migrants to potentially take advantage of favorable northern winds to the west of storms, but would result in major shifts in the distribution of birds in coastal landscapes during stopover. Migrants might avoid coastal landscapes immediately preceding and following major storms, which would confirm Faulkner’s observations of shifts in migrants from bottomland forests in the Pearl River Basin to the upland forests situated further inland. Diehl has examined radar imagery that shows birds scattered throughout this landscape for over a month after the impact of Katrina, while up until two days before they were still tightly clustered in bottomland forests. The loss of some vegetation types might be so severe that birds may be slow to return to these habitats even after multiple seasons. Indeed, some bird populations may never return, if the impacts of hurricanes are enough to promote long-term changes in plant community structure.

The future of human communities along the Gulf Coast

While human communities along the Gulf Coast have a long history of being impacted by hurricanes, extensive growth of these communities, coupled with changing sea levels and loss of coastal wetlands, have exacerbated these impacts to the level of those seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Paul Keddy (Southeastern Louisiana University) believes that two processes are responsible for the current state of both New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in general. First, as human populations in the region have grown, settlements that were originally restricted to higher ground have expanded into areas that were historically floodplains and wetlands, necessitating the construction of levees to protect these settlements. Second, this expansion, coupled with increased industrial development, has degraded these wetlands and accelerated the rates of coastal wetland loss. As other researchers in the symposium emphasized, it is these very wetlands that historically have protected both human settlements and Gulf Coast ecosystems from the floods and winds associated with hurricanes. While Keddy was sympathetic to the plight of human populations along the Gulf Coast (and he himself is a resident of the area impacted by Katrina) he asserted that ultimately some of these problems arise from irrational decisions made by the citizens of Louisiana and other states.

Keddy noted that at the federal scale, citizens have elected an administration that encourages and supports the exploitation of ecosystems, while simultaneously denying that global climate change and sea level rise are occurring. More regionally, citizens of New Orleans and other areas of Louisiana have made irrational decisions regarding land use. Keddy emphasized that this is by no means a special case, and that history is full of human irrationality that has led to major ecological consequences. The American dust bowl and the collapse of the Canadian cod fishery are prime examples of situations where rational decisions made by the electorate could have averted or at least minimized environmental disasters. Looking back from a historical viewpoint, Keddy observed that those human communities clearly selected development trajectories that would clearly become catastrophic in the long term. The question arises as to what trajectory the development of the northern Gulf Coast will take in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: one determined by existing policies and tradition, or a willingness of the populace to adapt to the dynamic nature of coastal ecosystems.

Impacts of Hurricane Rita: the forgotten storm?

While the ecological consequences of Hurricane Katrina were addressed in detail by a number of participants, the impacts of Hurricane Rita were less clear. The contrast between the two hurricanes is interesting: Katrina came ashore in southeastern Louisiana and coastal Mississippi, while Rita came ashore in southwestern Louisiana close to the Texas border (encouraging the evacuation of much of the city of Houston). Because of the terrible impacts of Katrina on New Orleans, less attention has been paid to the impacts of Rita, which affected a more rural, less developed part of the coast. Much of this coastline consists of the Chenier Coastal Plain, an area characterized by vast stretches of emergent marsh that includes the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge and Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, some of the most biologically diverse wildlife areas in the US. Immediate impacts from Rita on these areas include the deposition of large amounts of debris from coastal communities and offshore oil rigs, which was washed ashore, and still clogs the bayous and canals of these systems. In Sabine NWR alone, almost 1500 containers of hazardous materials have been identified, potentially containing 350,000 gallons of hazardous liquids and gases. However, these impacts are relatively minor when the effects of long-term flooding and saltwater intrusion associated with Rita are considered.

Andy Nyman (Louisiana State University) has worked on the wetlands that were impacted by Hurricane Rita and has been monitoring the changes in the Rockefeller Refuge. These areas are usually dominated by saltmeadow cordgrass (Spartina patens), and, as with the savanna areas studied by Platt and Passmore to the east, are most frequently disturbed by fire. Nyman notes that fires in the area only have modest impacts belowground, so while early successional genera such as bulrushes (Schoenoplectus) increase after such as disturbance, within a single growing season the community returns to one dominated by S. patens, which regenerates from belowground biomass. Prolonged flooding in the aftermath of Rita appears to have killed both above- and belowground S. patens biomass, so that the typical postdisturbance successional trajectory in these systems has been altered. These effects were likely compounded by severe drought conditions for the first half of 2006. Whether these systems return to their former state, or are further impacted by erosion and future tropical storms, remains to be seen.

Ecologists and Gulf Coast hurricanes: what we’ve done and what we should be doing

The symposium on the impacts of Gulf Coast hurricanes was one of the opening sessions at the ESA meeting, but as the meeting closed, a separate presentation addressed a very fundamental issue that the symposium lacked: Exactly what ecological research has been done on the impacts of hurricanes, and what gaps in our knowledge need to be addressed. Julie Whitbeck (University of New Orleans) reviewed the ecological literature for research on the effects of hurricanes on forest ecosystems. Whitbeck reported that almost 300 scientific papers on the ecological effects of hurricanes on forests were published from 1978 to 2006, almost half of which are research studies on the impacts of specific storms. More than one-fifth of these studies focused on the impact of Hurricane Hugo (1989), largely because it affected the Luquillo LTER site in Puerto Rico. Whitbeck noted that research on the impacts of hurricanes on the continental United States accounts for just 21% of these studies, and only 7% of the publications addressed the impacts of storms on the Gulf Coast. Whitbeck proposed an agenda for ecological hurricane research that would improve our understanding of how these storms have shaped the organization and ecology of hurricane-impacted systems, explore the impacts of hurricanes at different scales, and predict whether current changes in both landscape use and storm intensity are likely to change the impacts of these storms. Instead of reactive studies to the impacts of specific storms, we need a proactive research plan that encompasses a wide geography of sites (both within the United States and worldwide), long-term studies, standardized experimental designs and methods, and collaboration with meteorologists, social scientists, and geologists, among others. Within this proactive framework, Whitbeck suggested that plans should be in place for opportunistic reactive studies when hurricane disturbance occurs at a site. The impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are likely to stimulate ecologists in the Gulf coast region to consider these ideas carefully. However, the development of a research agenda to address the ecological impacts of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, or elsewhere, would also need a parallel funding agenda from federal and state agencies; whether such funding is available remains to be seen.

Colin R. Jackson

Department of Biology
The University of Mississippi
University, MS 38677
E-mail: [email protected]

Progress in science occurs as new theories are developed and subsequently revised in light of empirical data that challenge hypotheses derived from the theories. Scientific theories and hypotheses are developed, and data are collected, by individuals (and collaborative groups); their ideas and results are disseminated to the broader community in publications, both technical and non-technical. Some of these individuals become icons; their work is well known and they achieve recognition for their substantive contributions through extensive citation of their published work. Others are cited rarely, if ever, and they fade into obscurity. At a time when the availability of academic jobs continues to decline, while the number of new Ph.Ds in ecology continues to increase and the Annual Meetings of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) take on the aura of a job fair cum meat market, it seemed timely to ask why some ecologists achieve iconic status for their work, but others are quickly forgotten, even if the latter published the same ideas or data before the former. Further, losing the historical context for our work, and the disappearance from contemporary literature of carefully garnered data and results, can lead to unnecessary repetition of research, slowing progress in the field and wasting scarce resources.

In the symposium, “What makes an ecological icon?” a group of seven ecologists and historians discussed individuals—some well known, some forgotten—who made substantive contributions to the development of fundamental ideas in ecology, including the following: the concept of food webs; invasive species and community assembly; the ecosystem concept; nonequilibrium dynamics; and the value of conservation and preservation. Both during their formal presentations and in the lengthy discussion following the symposium, the speakers also addressed how current norms of scholarship and publication, and mechanics of web-based literature searches and journal-imposed rules for citations inadvertently encourage contemporary researchers to ignore historical antecedents and duplicate past work.

Food webs and invasive species are central topics around which much of contemporary community ecology revolves. Models of how complex networks are structured have reinvigorated theoretical investigations of food web structure (e.g., Pascual and Dunne 2006), and the increasing rates of spread of nonindigenous species provide unfortunate opportunities to empirically test these models as food webs are restructured following novel introductions. If asked, most ecologists would trace the origin of food web theory and studies of invasive species to Charles Elton (Fig. 1). His “food cycle” of Bear Island (Summerhays and Elton 1923; Fig. 2) was reprinted in his 1927 text Animal Ecology. It was subsequently reproduced widely and is often held up as the first food web, although it is pre-dated by similarly illustrative diagrams published by Pierce et al. (1912) and Shelford (1913), among others. Elton’s other influential book, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (Elton 1958) is generally considered to ground most contemporary research into the causes of successful species introductions and the impacts of invasive species. But both food web ecology and invasion biology have deeper roots.

Fig. 1. Charles Elton (1926). Photo used with permission. Click on image for larger view	Fig. 2. Elton’s “food cycle”. From S.V. Summerhays and C.S. Elton (1923).
Fig. 3. Frank Egerton. Photo by Liana J. Cooper (c) The Journal Times (Racine, WI), and used with permission. Click on image for larger view

Frank Egerton (Fig. 3 ), a historian of science whose articles on the History of Ecology have been appearing in nearly every issue of the ESA Bulletin since 2001, traced the development of the food web concept back to the early 18th century and the writing of naturalist Richard Bradley (1718, Part 3:60-61)

This concept was popularized by Jonathan Swift (1733: lines 341-344):

Jonathan Fisher, a fifth-year graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, illustrated more quantitative antecedents to food web research, including an extended discussion of the work of Harold Colton (Fig. 4 ), a student at Penn in the early 20th century, and a faculty member there until 1926. Colton was a founding member of the ESA (ESA 1972) and authored a paper on competition and predation in the rocky intertidal (Colton 1916) that covers much the same ground as more well-known icons of the intertidal (e.g., Menge and Sutherland 1976; see the comprehensive review by Fisher 2005). An abstract of Colton’s paper was published in Science in 1916, and many of his other papers on intertidal biology were widely cited. In modern times, he is better remembered for his archaeological research in the desert southwest (Miller 1991). His work on intertidal food webs, however, is generally forgotten

Fig. 4. H. S. Colton (ca. 1916) from the Museum of Northern Arizona collection (No. 7422). Reprinted with permission. Click on image for larger view

Colton’s work is particularly intriguing because his food web lacks the European green crab, Carcinus maenas, which is now an invasive species in Maine where Colton studied (as well as elsewhere in the United States); trawling the historical literature could provide crucial data that can be used to provide baselines from which to assess the impacts of other current invasions. Jim Carlton, Director of the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program (Williams College and Mystic Seaport) discussed how the baseline requirements of successful invasion—including entrainment, transport, and spread of species during emigration; discharge, survivorship, reproduction, and establishment during immigration—the unification of which in “invasion biology” is attributed to Elton (1958), can all be found in earlier books, notably those by Guthrie-Smith (1921), Clark (1949), and Lindroth (1957). Although Elton’s book is generally considered a foundational text, Carlton illustrated that it was really a selective set of case studies (neither Guthrie-Smith’s, Clark’s, nor Lindroth’s work was even cited by Elton). It was well received because unlike the others, it was short, well-written, and appeared at a time when concern about environmental change was taking off. Elton also popularized his work through radio broadcasts, popular writings, and public lectures. While our results and theories will be more accessible and widely read if our papers are written clearly and concisely, an unfortunate lesson of Carlton’s talk is that selective citation and incessant self-promotion can lead to iconic status, whether or not it is well deserved.

Important work by notable ecological icons may also be forgotten. G. Evelyn Hutchinson (Fig. 5 ) is well known to ecologists; the niche as n-dimensional hypervolume (Hutchinson 1957) and constant size-ratios among competitors (Hutchinson 1959) laid the foundation for a vast amount of ecological research in the 1960s and 1970s that was focused on equilibrium dynamics (both papers were reprinted in Real and Brown’s Foundations of Ecology collection [1991]). Saran Twombly, a program director at NSF and Hutchinson’s last graduate student, explored in detail the roots of nonequilibrium theory in Hutchinson’s work (especially Hutchinson 1953). This work is virtually unknown to contemporary ecologists, although tests of Hutchinson’s nonequilibrium theories pervade the limnological literature (e.g., Reynolds 1980/1984, Sommer 1985). Hutchinson’s relatively obscure style of writing (clearly evident in his 1978 textbook), his uninformative (to search engines) titles (e.g., Hutchinson 1957, 1959), and the tireless promotion by his students of equilibrium theory (e.g., MacArthur and Wilson 1967) together likely led to the disappearance of Hutchinson’s nonequilibrium ideas from the general ecological literature.

Another example can be found in the life and work of Victor Shelford (Fig. 6). Shelford, whose early work on food webs (1913) was discussed above, was the Founding President (1916) of the ESA. Less well known among ecologists is his role 30 years later in the founding of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a role that is now recognized by TNC’s Victor Shelford Award for Science in Conservation (ironically restricted to past or current TNC employees). Sara Tjossem, a historian of science at Columbia University, reviewed Shelford’s career and highlighted the origins of the (still ongoing) tensions within the ESA membership between “basic” ecological science and environmental advocacy. As ESA President, Shelford established (and chaired) a committee on preservation, to carry out an ecological resource inventory of the U.S., and to initiate and carry out action concerned with the preservation of hundreds of natural areas. Part of his motivation was to preserve areas in undisturbed condition as benchmarks for future ecological research. But by the 1930s, the leadership of the ESA had focused the Society’s activities on basic research and removed both political and financial support from environmental advocacy and land protection. In response, Shelford founded the Ecologist’s Union (1946), which was reorganized and renamed in 1950 as The Nature Conservancy.

Fig. 5. G. Evelyn Hutchinson as a student in 1920 collecting the meadow spittlebug, Philaenus spumarius, Cherryhinton Chalk Rt, Cambridge. Both this photo and that of Elton (Fig. 1) attest to the decline in the quality of ecologists’ attire since the early 20th century! Photograph from the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Papers, image 6290; Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, used with permission.

Fig. 6. Victor Shelford (1940). Click on images for larger view

One of Shelford’s students was Eugene Odum, who along with his younger brother Howard (Tom) Odum (a Hutchinson student) are considered the founders of ecosystem ecology, the roots of which can also be traced to Hutchinson’s student Ray Lindeman’s (1942) paper on food webs! Historian Joel Hagen (Radford University) delved into the personalities of the Odum brothers, exploring the cultural and scientific context and timeline of their most influential work, which was in many ways a progressive response to the co-incident ascendancy of rampant individualism in America (exemplified by the work of Ayn Rand [1965], Barry Commoner [1966] and the presidency of Ronald Reagan) and of reductionism in ecology (e.g., Williams [1966] and Dawkins [1976]). Hagen has explored the conceptual roots of ecosystem ecology elsewhere (Hagen 1992); in his symposium presentation he argued that the Odum brother’s broader ideas—of emergy, holism, and social progressivism—have been lost to ecosystems ecology, which focuses more narrowly on cycling of nutrients and energy. Hagen further argued that the ecosystem concept remains marginalized within ecology as a whole. Although many ecologists may dispute this point, the relatively low number of papers on “ecosystem ecology” published in the ESA journals and the continued split between “population and community” ecology and “ecosystems” ecology by federal funding agencies lend credence to Hagen’s argument.

So why are some individuals remembered while others are forgotten? Why are some contributions rapidly catapulted into widely cited paradigms while others remain buried and unread in the pages of our journals? Should current upstarts aspire to iconic status? In his wide-ranging talk, Paul Dayton explored these central questions of the symposium by peering through the lenses of norms of scholarship, the peer review process, and dynamics of citation. A central nugget, attributable to Lamarck (1984 [1809]:404), is that

This sentiment is encapsulated in the well-known maxim, “publish or perish” (which, given the overwhelming flood of literature, would be more aptly stated, “keep publishing or vanish”). But as we have seen, publishing is clearly not enough; others must read what we write and cite it. Scholarship demands that the burden of reading the literature is on each scientist, but reading is also not enough. We not only read the literature, but in our choices of citations, we propagate some ideas and prune others. With a metaphor that would be familiar to most ecologists, David Hull (1988:376–377) suggested that

(This parasitism process is modeled quantitatively by the economists Myong-Hun Chang and Joseph Harrington [2006], using analysis of social networks that are similar to methods being independently developed and used by food-web ecologists [see papers in Pascual and Dunne 2006]. How can we (or should we) reduce the influence of these cowbirds?

New articles in ecology are being published at an ever-increasing rate. More and more, we rely on title and keyword searching of electronic indices and tertiary reviews (such as those found in Trends in Ecology and Evolution or Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics) to keep abreast of the literature in our ever-narrowing subdisciplines. Even the most extensive online databases, such as ISI’s Science Citation Index (Web of Science), do not cover all sources or the temporal span of modern ecology. Many journals, including outlets for new findings as well as review journals, limit the number of citations per article, discourage citing articles >10—15 years old, and/or encourage citation of articles published in the journal to which the paper is submitted (a strategy intended to increase a journal’s impact factor). All of these trends should be resisted. Journals that limit the number of citations per article usually provide options for on-line appendices, in which more extensive citations can, and should, be placed and discussed. Writers of reviews should make it known to journal editors, and especially our students, that ecology’s roots extend back more than a decade. Impact factors are notoriously unreliable (Anonymous 2002), and we should neither concern ourselves with them nor encourage their use in making decisions about publication outlets, much less hiring decisions.

As Jonathan Fisher suggested, we should all try to resurrect unappreciated classics. This can be done by consciously using data from, and appropriately citing, relatively unknown but useful books and papers; try to cite one such paper in each article you write. As Fisher illustrated in his review of rocky intertidal ecology in the early 20th century (see also Fisher 2005), many of these may be in foreign languages, the reading of which poses a problem for students who no longer have to master a second language as part of their graduate education. These can be translated using Google Translate ‹http://translate.google.com›, and if they are in the public domain (as most works >50 years old are), posted on the Web. At the same time, we should (re)read, and encourage our students to read, well-known classic papers, such as those in Real and Brown (1991). Ecologists know that current ecological processes and dynamics are controlled or constrained by land-use history and past ecological events (e.g., Foster and Aber 2004). Similarly, contemporary ecological thought is bounded and shaped by the work of individuals who have come before us. Ecologists would do well to remember George Santayana’s oft-quoted aphorism, “[t]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (Santayana 1905–1906:284). In times of rapid ecological and environmental change, we do not have the time or resources to continually repeat the good work that has already been done.

Acknowledgments

I sincerely thank Paul Dayton, the symposium co-organizer; and Jim Carlton, Paul Dayton, Frank Egerton, Jonathan Fisher, Joel Hagen, Sara Tjossem, and Saran Twombly for their thoughtful contributions to the symposium. Any misrepresentations of their work in this essay are my responsibility.

Literature cited

Anonymous. 2002. Errors in citation statistics. Nature 415:101.

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Aaron M. Ellison, Organizer
Harvard University
Harvard Forest
Petersham, MA 01366 USA

Urban Food Webs: Predators, Prey, and the People Who Feed Them

A prevailing image of the city is of the steel and concrete downtown skyline. The more common experience of urban residents, however, is a place of irrigated and fertilized green spaces, such as yards, gardens, and parks, surrounding homes and businesses where people commonly feed birds, squirrels, and other wildlife. Within these highly human-modified environments, researchers are becoming increasingly curious about how fundamental ecological phenomena play out, such as the feeding relationships among species. While food webs have long provided a tool for organizing information about feeding relationships and energy flows through natural habitats, they have not been applied to urban ecosystems until recently (Faeth et al. 2005).

At a symposium presented at the 2006 Ecological Society of America meeting, 10 speakers assembled to present and discuss “The Urban Food Web: How Humans Alter the State and Interactions of Trophic Dynamics,” in a symposium organized by Paige Warren, Chris Tripler, Chris Lepczyk, and Jason Walker. A key feature of urban environments, as described in the symposium, is that human influence may be encountered in any of the pathways of urban food webs, from bottom to top (Fig. 1). Within this system, humans alter and enhance resources and directly influence vegetative biodiversity and primary productivity. Similarly, at higher trophic levels, humans, both directly and indirectly, extirpate some consumers and predators and introduce other, often exotic ones. This fundamental reshaping of the food web in cities leads to altered trophic dynamics, which speakers at the symposium say are often not predictable even with detailed knowledge of species distributions.

Fig. 1. A generalized model of trophic dynamics in urban vs. non-urban terrestrial systems (modified from Faeth et al. 2005). Humans alter both systems, but in urban environments, human influences are more profound and include (a) enhancement of basal resources like water and fertilizer, and (b) direct control of plant species diversity and primary productivity, leading to strong bottom-up controls. Humans also (c) directly subsidize resources for herbivores and predators either through intentional feeding or unintended consequences of other activities (e.g., garbage, landscape plantings), leading to enhanced top-down control for some taxa and reduced top-down controls on others (see Fig. 2).

Urban systems would appear at first to be driven by bottom-up dynamics, Stanley Faeth stated. His experiments, however, showed that urban arthropod populations on a common native plant species were also strongly influenced by top-down control by bird predators, even in unmanaged desert remnant sites. Doug Bolger and his colleagues observed that top-down controls of predator–prey dynamics in San Diego, California, were not the ones that had been previously predicted (Fig. 2). Specifically, avian nesting success in coastal scrub remnants did not decrease with increasing urbanization, as expected. If anything, some birds performed better in the smaller, more urbanized fragments. Other presenters described similar surprises in empirical work ranging from modern cities and suburbs to ancient, abandoned village sites in the remote Aleutian Island region.

Fig. 2. Putative food web for coastal sage scrub fragments in San Diego, California, from work by Doug Bolger, Jay Diffendorfer, Eric Walters, Michael Anguiano, Dana Morin, and Michael Patten. In smaller, more urbanized fragments raptors increase and snakes decrease, yielding no net change in bird reproductive success. They find a strong connection of raptors and snakes to birds but weak or no connections between mesocarnivores and birds.

Profound influences of humans

To say that humans influence urban food webs is nearly tautological. According to several speakers, however, the profound extent of human influence in urban environments has not yet been fully appreciated by ecologists. Jason Walker showed that plant assemblages in urban sites in Phoenix, Arizona, could not be predicted by any of the factors that affect plant communities in surrounding desert, such as soil nutrients and elevation. Instead, factors such as land use and landscaping design (e.g., mesic vs. xeric) were better predictors of plant assemblages within the urban system. Judy Meyer noted that in urban streams the effects of human development are consistent enough to identify an “urban stream syndrome.” She found that this syndrome is associated with reductions in food web complexity in urban streams, an effect that appears to be greater in neighborhoods of higher property values (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Putative food webs for (a) Keg Creek, a non-urban reference stream in the Georgia Piedmont, and (b) a stream flowing through a neighborhood in Peachtree City, Georgia, with a mean property value of $388,900. The webs were constructed from data on species occurrence rather than gut content analysis (Overmyer et al. 2005). Species were assigned to functional feeding groups and position in the food web based on information in the literature (J. L. Meyer and S. L. Eggert, personal communication).

Covariation in aspects of food web structure and human socioeconomic characteristics was raised by many speakers. Paige Warren and Chris Lepczyk focused on bird feeding by humans, an activity that, as other speakers showed, has broad ramifications throughout the food web. Lepczyk’s landowner survey research showed that the majority of people across a rural-to-urban gradient feed birds, whereas Warren found that neighborhoods vary in the propensity of people to feed birds based on lifestyle characteristics. Furthermore, both Lepczyk and Warren’s surveys found that people intentionally plant vegetation to attract birds and wildlife, including fruit plants, which can both directly and indirectly influence both primary production and consumers. The most striking example of human influence, however, was Nancy Huntly’s work on abandoned village sites in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. She and her colleagues have found consistent differences in plant and animal diversity and community composition within vs. outside of village sites, differences that have remained stable after >1000 years of abandonment (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Aerial photo of an abandoned village site in the Aleutian Islands region. The enhanced productivity of the village site produces the vivid green area. Rounded dimples within the site are house pits, each marking where a semi-subterranean house once stood. Photo courtesy of Herbert Marschner.

A growing picture of urban food webs

Consistent patterns of human influence emerged in terrestrial systems from the disparate studies presented. Strong bottom-up influences were common across the studies; humans commonly subsidize resources, generating elevated productivity. Eyal Shochat presented evidence that the elevated productivity is associated with higher competition for resources, and ultimately, reduced species diversity, in contemporary urban habitats. In the case of aquatic systems, however, basal resources in urban streams are frequently being impoverished. Predator diversity is often but not always decreased in both terrestrial and aquatic systems, and middle trophic level organisms may experience reduced predation. However, as Doug Bolger and colleagues showed, reticulate food web structure and predator compensation make top-down and bottom-up controls difficult to predict (Fig.2 ).

Increased population density and altered behavior of urban-adapted animals complicates the effects of shifting productivity and predator communities. Density-dependent behaviors influence predator–prey dynamics, and altered foraging efficiencies may lead to elevated levels of competition. Tommy Parker described the “urban wildlife syndrome,” a suite of behavioral characteristics exhibited by many animal species that colonize urban–suburban areas. These characteristics include reduced wariness of humans and increased aggressiveness, both of which are highly density dependent in the gray squirrels he studied (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Elevated productivity and human subsidies produced elevated densities of many animal species. In squirrels, high densities lead to low wariness of humans and high levels of aggression. The photo shows squirrels in Lafayette Park, Washington, D.C., where squirrels reach the “highest densities known in the world” according to Tommy Parker, with >40 squirrels/ha.

Human subsidies for squirrels might alter competitive interactions and vulnerabilities to predation. This behavioral syndrome may act as a filter, said Shochat, excluding native species that cannot adapt to the more competitive urban communities. Several questions remain. Does reduced predation risk mediate the decreases in wariness and increases in aggression and foraging efficiency? Or are the altered behaviors simply density-dependent consequences of the increased populations produced by human resources subsidies? Parker noted that several aspects of the urban wildlife syndrome are correlated with resource availability at both habitat and landscape scales. Regardless, it is clear that changes in animal behavior lead to complex responses to altered resource levels.

Differences among studies provide tantalizing questions to be addressed. For example, productivity–diversity relationships differed among the studies, with lower diversity in highly productive habitats within Phoenix and Baltimore, but higher diversity on the highly productive abandoned villages in the Aleutians. Such contradictory findings reflect the broader debate over diversity–productivity relationships in ecology.

Importance of understanding urban food webs

All speakers agreed that altered trophic dynamics in urban environments hold important consequences for conservation of biodiversity, human health, and our broader ecological understanding. Focusing attention on food webs and trophic dynamics can provide insights for conservation biology and environmental management. For example, management to reduce feral cat predation may not have as large an effect as was previously thought on the stability of populations of coastal sage scrub birds (Fig. 2). Furthermore, Meyer noted that urban fishing is an important form of subsistence for many city residents, placing humans squarely within the urban food web. There are immediate human health consequences, she pointed out, for understanding the flow of pollutants through the simplified food webs of urban streams. Finally, Jonathan Chase’s concluding remarks laid out opportunities for enhancing basic understanding of trophic dynamics through the study of urban food webs. Topics raised by the speakers, such as predator compensation, diversity–productivity relationships, and effects of predator diversity on food web dynamics, are generally unresolved issues in ecology. Urban environments offer ecologists places where human influences have produced new combinations of species interactions, changes in food web connectivity, and extreme values of productivity, both high and low. The consequences of these alterations are not simple and require an expansion of empirical and theoretical studies to evaluate the impacts and roles of humans in urban food webs.

Literature cited

Faeth, S. H., P. S. Warren, E. Shochat, and W. A. Marussich. 2005. Trophic dynamics in urban communities. BioScience 55:399–407.

Overmyer, J. P., R. Noblet, and K. L. Armbrust. 2005. Impacts of lawn-care pesticides on aquatic ecosystems in relation to property value. Environmental Pollution 137:263–272.

Paige Warren (corresponding author)
Department of Natural Resources Conservation
University of Massachusetts,
Amherst, MA 01003-9285
(413) 545 0061
Fax: 413 545 4358
E-mail: [email protected]
and
Global Institute of Sustainability
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-3211

Chris Tripler
School of Arts and Sciences
Endicott College
Beverly, MA 01915
and
Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Box AB,
Millbrook, NY 12545

Douglas Bolger
Department of Environmental Studies
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755

Stanley Faeth
School of Life Sciences
Arizona State University,
Tempe, AZ 85287

Nancy Huntly
Department of Biological Sciences
Idaho State University
Pocatello, ID 83209

Christopher Lepczyk
Department of Forest Ecology and Management
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706

Judith Meyer
Institute of Ecology
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602-2602

Thomas Parker
USDA Forest Service, Region 9
Milwaukee, WI 53202
and
School of Natural Resources, Fisheries and Wildlife
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211-7240

Eyal Shochat
Global Institute of Sustainability
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-3211

Jason Walker
School of Life Sciences
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287

Annual Meetings of the Ecological Society of America commence with the Opening Plenary Session, Welcome Mixer, and the Scientific Plenary and Awards Ceremony. These events set the stage for the coming week by introducing the meeting’s theme, familiarizing participants with the local culture, reuniting old friends and colleagues, and honoring recent contributions to the field. However, the oral and poster presentations, symposia, workshops, scientific field trips, and special sessions are so numerous that it is impossible for participants to leave the Annual Meeting with a summary of everything that occurred. In an effort to summarize the week’s events and formally conclude the meeting, the Closing Plenary Lunch was added to the schedule in 2003. The Closing Plenary Lunch features a panel of prominent senior ecologists who provide their insights into what the meeting has meant to them and what we may expect from the future. Questions and comments from participants are encouraged. Participants dine at small tables, with prominent ecologists and ESA leadership serving as table hosts. This is an especially excellent opportunity for graduate students to meet prominent ecologists and ESA leadership on a more intimate level than might otherwise be possible.

The 2006 Closing Plenary Lunch was held at 11:30 am on Friday, 11 August, and featured a panel of five prominent ecologists: Joan Ehrenfeld, Lars Hedin, Alan Covich, Svata Louda, and Steward Pickett. (Osvaldo Sala was also scheduled to speak, but had to leave the meeting early due to increased security measures at U.S. airports). Many of the remarks focused on the meeting theme, “Icons and Upstarts in Ecology,” and the discussions were especially insightful because the panel comprised experienced, senior ecologists who were qualified to comment on changes that they observed in the field. Steward Pickett noted that the theme was unusual because it was provocative, and people actually paid attention to it. Indeed, people did pay attention, and the Closing Plenary featured extended discussions around the definitions of “icon” and “upstart.” Joan Ehrenfeld cited the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines an icon as “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, especially of a culture or movement; a person, institution, etc., considered worthy of admiration or respect,” and an upstart as “one who has newly or suddenly risen in position or importance; a newcomer in respect of rank or consequence; a parvenu.” Steward Pickett stressed that icons and upstarts should not be used to refer to people, because this reinforces the myth that science is done by individuals. Thus, there seemed broad agreement that icons are the ideas, concepts, and approaches that represent the field of ecology, while upstarts are new ideas, concepts, and approaches that offer an alternative and challenge the current icons. Upstarts can eventually become icons themselves, and this cycle of icons and upstarts is the mechanism that drives scientific progress.

Upstart ideas, concepts, and approaches are risky, however, and this unfortunately restricts their prevalence in ecology. Svata Louda pointed out that a scientist has two options upon finding unexpected results. The first option is to somehow make the results agree with existing icons (e.g., discard data or recast the question), or the results can be used to challenge the assumptions of the icons. This can lead to the creation of an upstart, and Louda suggested that this type of risky science be more encouraged at ESA, because it leads to new questions and hypotheses and has the potential for a major advance.

The 2006 Annual Meeting demonstrated a substantial increase in the sophistication of questions and approaches, as noted by Lars Hedin. Questions are being asked, not in isolation but in a broader perspective, and the sessions featured a broad diversity of approaches and a good linking of theory and data. We are also seeing a coming of age of new tools. Stable isotope techniques, for example, were formerly found only in stable isotope sessions, but we are now seeing these techniques being used in sessions focused on a range of topics.

ESA is approaching its 100th Annual Meeting, and there were concerns and recommendations raised by both panel members and participants in the ensuing discussion. Kerry Woods noted that there are many constituencies within ESA that are not represented in the Annual Meeting sessions, ESA journals, or ESA administration, all of which are dominated by large research institutions. For example, David Ehrenfeld suggested that natural history is receiving less attention than in the past, both at the Annual Meeting as well as in ESA journals. However, Program Chair Kiyoko Miyanishi pointed out that the content of both the Annual Meeting and ESA journals are based on submissions from the Society’s constituency, and encouraged ESA members to submit session proposals or manuscripts. There was also discussion on how to better link ecological research with allied fields, such as the geosciences. Lars Hedin pointed out that many of the topics addressed at ESA are also being addressed by groups like the American Geophysical Union. An up and coming challenge for ESA will be to reach out and encourage interdisciplinary collaborations with these allied fields.

Sean T. Michaletz
Department of Biological Sciences
University of Calgary
Calgary, Canada

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