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Home
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> teg
> Issue 27
> TEG Issue 27: Ecology as Science by Mohan Wali
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Electronic TEGPublished in TEG news issue 27, Spring 2001, by the British Ecological Society. Ecology as Scienceby Mohan Wali This is an extract from larger article Ecology today: Beyonds the Bounds of Science published in Nature and Resources Vol 35 (2) June 1999 p 38-50. Prof Wali is a Professor of Ecology at Ohio State University. The article provides an overview of ecology as a scientific discipline in its own right and as an approach within the broader scientific fabric. The article also addresses the burgeoning metaphoric use of the term 'ecology' by non-scientists. Only a small portion of the article is presented here 'ecology as science'. We are grateful to Professor Wali for allowing us to dissect his article in this way and to Dr Malcolm Hadley from UNESCO for permission to reproduce the article form the UNESCO journal 'Nature and Resources' where the complete article appears. The full use of terms he considers can be consulted on the world-wide web: http://www.ag.ohio-state.edu/natres/Wali/eco-words2.htm The formalisation of the word ecology, as even many non-ecologists now know, was derived from the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel's use of öikologie in 1866 (oikos meaning house, and logos meaning discussion or study of). McIntosh states that the first use of the word, ecology, in its current Anglo-American mode without the diphthong oe, came in 1893 at the "Madison Botanical Congress... acted on the recommendation of a Committee on Terminology of Physiology". And it was in the same year, as McIntosh notes, that Louis Hermann Pammel's book, Flower Ecology appeared. Yet, as I note later, ecology and ecological, respectively, also appeared in their contemporary form in the writings of Patrick Geddes in 1880 and of George Bernard Shaw in 1886. However, observations on how plant communities change over time (i.e. ecological succession) were numerous even before the formal scientific terms appeared on the scene, beginning with the Greek philosophers Hippocrates and Aristotle. Around 300 BC Theophrastus recorded spatial and temporal variations in the vegetation of river floodplains. Later examples included William King's study of changes in the 'bogs and loughs of Ireland' in 1685, the earliest clear record of changes in forest tree species by Georges Louis Leclerc (1742) and the now classical study The Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne by Gilbert White (1789). A.Dureau de la Malle did a careful study of the French vegetation for many years and published it in 1825. Other pioneering studies came from Alexander von Humboldt (1850) based on his observations of German and other landscapes, from Henry David Thoreau in 1860 in what may be considered the first true ecology textbook, Plantesamfund (in German), in which he formulated the 'laws of succession'. One of the first modern, and perhaps the most cited, elucidations of ecological succession came from the University of Chicago ecologist Henry Chandler Cowles (1899). Cowles described in detail the natural changes in plant life following patterns of dune migration in areas around southern Lake Michigan (for pre-1900 development of the concept of ecological succession see Table 1). 
Cowles' study, as Sir Arthur Tansley noted, "brought before the minds of ecologists the reality and the universality of the process [of ecological succession] in so vivid a manner as to stimulate everywhere - at least in the English-speaking world - that interest and enthusiasm for the subject that has led and is leading to such great results". Yet it is Frederick Clements, who spent most of his working life at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and began publishing his ideas in early 1900's, who is remembered as the grand philosopher of ecology. Despite the numerous criticisms piled upon him, Clements was the first ecologist to offer a comprehensive theory of plant succession using a scientific methodology "that was compelling in both its order and logic". Furthermore, "at the simplest level, the mechanisms outlined by Clements in 1919 remain valid today". The social aspect of ecology was a distinct focus of much of the ecological research in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (I refer here specifically to the communal relationships among distinct assemblages of plants and other organisms in natural systems, as opposed to contemporary linguistic constructs which will be noted later.) Two relevant examples include the 1928 treatise Pflanzensociologie by the eminent and very influential plant ecologist, Josius Braun-Blanquet, who wrote clearly of such concepts as sociability, fidelity, gregariousness and constancy of plant species in his synthesis of plant associations (or community types), and Charles Elton's seminal 1927 book, Animal Ecology, which was concerned primarily "with the sociology and economics of animals". Significantly, Elton also considered that ecology should be included "... in the training of young zoologists" for this science more than any other would be "more able to offer immediate practical help... in the present parlous state of civilisation". For their part, sociologists found much to learn from the ecological understanding of organisms in nature and relation to human social systems. Indeed, it was the Scottish biologist, Patrick Geddes who, to the best of my knowledge, first used the term ecology in an interdisciplinary context in 1880 in his illustration of the proper placement of disciplines (Figure 1). 
Geddes' concepts of social ecology and their importance were developed further from 1925 on in a series of papers and books by Radhakamal Mukerjee. Mukerjee "kept pace with the developing discipline of scientific ecology", not only by studying the ecological and socio-economic changes in the Indo-Gangetic plain and other areas of India, but also by coming to learn of the recent developments in ecology at the University of Chicago. Ecosystem, another commonly used eco-term, is of more recent vintage and was introduced by Tansley in 1935: "The fundamental concept is the ecosystem, which a particular category among the physical systems that make up the universe. In an ecosystem the organisms and the inorganic factors alike are components which are in relatively stable dynamic equilibrium" (emphasis in the original). Although many ecologists have provided their own definitions of the ecosystem, I believe that the following two definitions were the most (and only) substantive additions to Tansley. Lindeman recognised the trophic-dynamic relationship in their space-time relationship and E.P.Odum clearly noted the exchange of materials between the biotic and the abiotic components. However, the overall significance of the ecosystem concept in recent studies of the environment has not been lost. As Cherret notes, the ecosystem ranked first on the list of the 'most important concepts in ecology' (with ecological succession a close second) in a survey of the members of the British Ecological Society. The science of ecology has come a long way since its pioneering decades of the late 1800s and early 1900s with the rich theoretical bases laid by Cowles, Clements, Tansley and others providing a sound foundation for modern ecological research. Many of these early tenets are still being tested in applied situations, improving our understanding of ecological structure and function of the environment. Researchers have made particularly strong advances towards the incorporation of mathematical precepts into descriptive ecology, paving the way for the formulation of ecological models that capture the dynamics of natural systems. I provided the pre-1900 background only to illustrate the ferment in natural history that was taking place as prelude to the formal science of ecology. For a treatment of the development of concepts in ecology, particularly in this century, the scholarly work of McIntosh is highly recommended. But all of the early ecologists, and in large measure many ecologists today, can be considered to be classical naturalists, field botanists or zoologists, interested in ecology for ecology's sake. Thus, the field of ecology has remained embedded largely in the traditional botany and zoology departments in academic institutions, bringing with it isolation that has often extended to the language used by ecologists to communicate their ideas and research. It is only recently that new disciplinary configurations have emerged and it is my hope that these new alignments will be robust, not just the fads of the times. Few of the new terms, however, could be considered to further the cause of the science of ecology beyond the narrow boundaries of the discipline itself. New terminology, some of which does not make sense, continues to be added to the literature with every passing publication deadline. For example, although it is hard to imagine ecology without environment and environment with ecology, yet there are now books with such titles as Environmental Ecology. As if not wishing to be left out, the soil scientists have also joined the chorus with such titles as Environmental Soil Science, Environmental Soil Chemistry and Environmental Soil Physics. There has even been a claim that ecology originated elsewhere than the traditional biological fields. Perhaps this trend of coining new terms by scientists stems from a tendency to elevate reductionist science to obtain peer recognition, a practice that seems unlikely to wane in the near future. The full reference list can be obtained from the original article Prof Wali | ||||||
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