1 - Antecedents of ecology

Summary

Ecology in its early years was sometimes decried as not a science at all but merely a point of view. After nearly a century of trying to erect a conceptual, methodological, and theoretical framework for the most complex phenomena encountered in nature, ecology was familiar only to a relatively small number of academic biologists and applied biologists, range managers, foresters, and fishery and game managers. These shared an overlapping, but not coincident, network of concepts, methodologies, professional associations, publications, funding sources, and concerns about the relations of organisms as populations and communities to their environment. In the wake of widespread recognition, in the 1960s, of the “environmental crisis,” ecology was abruptly thrust into the public arena and widely hailed as an appropriate guide to the relation of humans, as well as other forms of life, to their environment. Strikingly, ecology became a watchword, even in high political circles, just when Paul B. Sears, one of its most articulate practitioners and expositors, described ecology as “a subversive subject” (Sears 1964). Sears's point was that the view of nature derived from ecological studies called into question some of the cultural and economic premises widely accepted by Western societies. Chief among these premises was that human civilizations, particularly of advanced technological cultures, were above or outside the limitations, or “laws,” of nature (Dunlap 1980b).