History of ecology
Important figures and movements include Shelford and the ESA, National Environmental Policy act, George Perkins Marsh, Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen A. Forbes, and post-Dust Bowl conservation.
[11][12] In the early Eighteenth century, preceding Carl Linnaeus, two rival schools of thought dominated the growing scientific discipline of ecology.
Reid suggests "Linnaeus can fairly be regarded as the originator of systematic and ecological studies in biodiversity," due to his naming and classifying of thousands of plant and animal species.
He exposed the existing relationships between observed plant species and climate, and described vegetation zones using latitude and altitude, a discipline now known as geobotany.
Warming's aim was, through the study of organism (plant) morphology and anatomy, i.e. adaptation, to explain why a species occurred under a certain set of environmental conditions.
Based on his personal observations in Brazilian cerrado, in Denmark, Norwegian Finnmark and Greenland, Warming gave the first university course in ecological plant geography.
Through its German edition, the book had an immense effect on British and North American scientists like Arthur Tansley, Henry Chandler Cowles and Frederic Clements.
After observing the fact that life developed only within strict limits of each compartment that makes up the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere, the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess proposed the term biosphere in 1875.
Suess proposed the name biosphere for the conditions promoting life, such as those found on Earth, which includes flora, fauna, minerals, matter cycles, et cetera.
[8] Thus, he attributes the first use of the word to the French naturalist Adolphe Dureau de la Malle, who had described the vegetation development after forest clear-felling, and the first comprehensive study of successional processes to the Finnish botanist Ragnar Hult (1881).
With his two famous papers in the late1950s, "Closing remarks",[36] and "Homage to Santa Rosalia",[37] as they are now known, Hutchinson launched the theoretical ecology which Robert MacArthur championed.
It was brought in by Stanley Auerbach, who established the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory,[38] to trace the routes of radionuclides through the environment, and by the Odum brothers, Howard and Eugene, much of whose early work was supported by the Atomic Energy Commission.
Just two years after the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, ecosystem ecology was trumpeted as THE science of the environment in a series of articles in a special edition of BioScience.
They were resisted by a number of traditional ecologists, however, whose complaints of "intellectual censorship" of studies that did not fit into the hypothetico-deductive structure of the new ecology might be seen as evidence of the stature to which the Hutchinson-MacArthur approach had risen by the 1970s.
The Wakulla conference was organized by a group of dissenters led by Daniel Simberloff and Donald Strong, Jr., who were described by David Quammen in his book as arguing that those patterns "might be nothing more than the faces we see in the moon, in clouds, in Rorschach inkblots".
A reviewer of the exchanges between the two camps in an issue of Synthese found "images of hand-to-hand combat or a bar-room brawl" coming to mind.
Null models, admittedly difficult to perfect, are in use, and, although a leading conservation scientist recently lauded island biogeography theory as "one of the most elegant and important theories in contemporary ecology, towering above thousands of lesser ideas and concept", he nevertheless finds that "the species-area curve is a blunt tool in many contexts" and "now seems simplistic to the point of being cartoonish".
Humans greatly modify the environment through the development of the habitat (in particular urban planning), by intensive exploitation activities such as logging and fishing, and as side effects of agriculture, mining, and industry.
Besides ecology and biology, this discipline involved many other natural and social sciences, such as anthropology and ethnology, economics, demography, architecture and urban planning, medicine and psychology, and many more.
In particular, it argued that the ensemble of living organisms has jointly evolved an ability to control the global environment – by influencing major physical parameters as the composition of the atmosphere, the evaporation rate, the chemistry of soils and oceans – so as to maintain conditions favorable to life.
[98] This vision was largely a sign of the times, in particular the growing perception after the Second World War that human activities such as nuclear energy, industrialization, pollution, and overexploitation of natural resources, fueled by exponential population growth, were threatening to create catastrophes on a planetary scale, and has influenced many in the environmental movement since then.
[101] Ecology in subject matter and techniques grew out of studies by botanists and plant geographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that paradoxically lacked Darwinian evolutionary perspectives.
[104] Victor E. Shelford, a leader in the society's formation, had as one of its goals the preservation of the natural areas that were then the objects of study by ecologists, but were in danger of being degraded by human incursion.
Interest in the environment created by the American Dust Bowl produced a flurry of calls in 1935 for ecology to take a look at practical issues.
It was sociologist Lewis Mumford who brought the ideas of George Perkins Marsh to modern attention in the 1955 conference, "Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth."
[116][117] Silent Spring was also the impetus for the environmental protection programs that were started in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and passed into law just before the first Earth Day.
The controversy, whose history has yet to receive adequate treatment, lasted through the 1970s and 1980s, ending with a voluntary certification process by the ESA, along with lobbying arm in Washington.
[131] Ecology became a central part of the World's politics as early as 1971,[132] UNESCO launched a research program called Man and Biosphere, with the objective of increasing knowledge about the mutual relationship between humans and nature.
These terms were developed during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where the concept of the biosphere was recognized by the major international organizations, and risks associated with reductions in biodiversity were publicly acknowledged.
In Kyoto, most of the world's nations recognized the importance of looking at ecology from a global point of view, on a worldwide scale, and to take into account the impact of humans on the Earth's environment.
