Gary Belovsky <> John Haught <> Stuart Pimm <> Larry Rasmussen <> Elspeth Whitney

Eugene Cittadino

Ecology and American Social Thought
Abstract

     Despite roots that go back to antiquity, ecology as we know it came into existence as a science in the 1890s. It found modest institutional support, mainly in the U.S. and Britain, during the first three decades of the twentieth century; it expanded quietly in organization, personnel, techniques, range of topics, and theoretical structure during the 1930s; and it came into its own after World War II. In the postwar period its expansion was slow at first and then increasingly more rapid, owing to the dual effects of dramatic internal developments, some inspired by war-born research and some simply extensions and elaborations of prewar work, and the strong external impetus, after the mid-1960s, of the burgeoning environmental movement. Since the subject matter of ecology is not individual organisms but interrelationships, the science from its beginning drew heavily upon concepts, models, and metaphors from other fields, within and outside the sciences. It is not only a highly derivative science but also one which by its very nature relies upon language fraught with meaning beyond the sciences. At the same time, ecological science, regardless of the origin of its ideas, has been called upon throughout its history to address issues of broad social concern.
     Early ecology in America reflected the social environment of the turn of the century period, that is, a self-consciously Christian social reform spirit coupled with belief in an evolutionarily progressive, integrated social organism. Whether we look at varieties of succession and climax theory among plant ecologists or studies of animal social organization, the focus was on communities of organisms that behaved as goal-directed, integrated units in equilibrium with their natural environments. The underlying teleological element of much theoretical ecology smacked of a revived form of natural theology, still evident today in various appeals for the preservation of biodiversity. Whatever the implicit values reflected in ecological theory, the ecologists themselves self-consciously stressed the utilitarian value of their science, particularly in association with its potential applications to agriculture and forestry. Despite growing public interest in nature preservation at the turn of the twentieth century, ecologists did not throw in their lot heavily with the preservationists. Where they did promote preservation of natural areas, they emphasized the scientific value of maintaining reserves of pristine nature so that experts could discover the laws and principles that lay hidden therein.
     Social theorists began applying ecological concepts to studies of the human community early on. In the 1920s a group of University of Chicago sociologists adopted an ecological perspective on urban community dynamics and spatial patterning which they chose to call "human ecology," a research program that served its participants as a kind of antidote to the rampant biological determinism spawned by the eugenics movement, but which came under fire from other sociologists for its environmental determinism and its somewhat loose transfer of concepts and terms from the biological to the social sciences. Just as later applications of ecological knowledge to social settings would span the ideological space between Garrett Hardin and Murray Bookchin, applications in the 1920s and 1930s ran across the political spectrum, from the very conservative geographer/environmental determinist Ellsworth Huntington, second president of the Ecological Society of America, to the liberal social critic Lewis Mumford. In the early 1920s Huntington made a strong but unsuccessful appeal to the Society to place human ecology high on its agenda. Ecological knowledge, meanwhile, worked its way more subtly into social thought during the 1930s and 1940s, through the efforts of various geographers, environmental historians, and regional sociologists.
     Although post-World War II ecology increased in sophistication, made use of new sampling methods and quantitative techniques of all sorts, and drew heavily upon concepts and metaphors borrowed from engineering and the physical sciences, many of the earlier implicit values persisted. No matter how sophisticated the mathematical model, population ecologists expected equilibrium conditions to prevail under ideal circumstances, ecosystems were supposed to undergo a natural process of development whereby they achieved something close to a steady-state with regard to energy flow, and, within limits, disturbed systems were expected to restore balance and harmony "naturally," a quality that was somehow a result of the increased pathways for the flow of energy and information, a virtue of the very diversity of such natural systems. Although those underlying assumptions have come under attack from within ecological science, particularly during the past three decades, they reflected, once again, a kind of theistic view that served the purposes of the earlier and more strident versions of environmentalism: modern industrial society had sinned against the natural order, and we were all paying the price.
    Applications of ecological knowledge to environmental problems found their way into postwar social and political analysis long before Earth Day. Several works in the late 1940s and early 1950s focused on issues relating to overpopulation, pollution, and the exploitation of natural resources, framed within a conservative Cold War rhetoric that would seem strange to later environmentalists. A more scholarly and reflective assessment of environmental issues by social theorists was provided by the 1955 International Symposium on Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth at Princeton, New Jersey, where over seventy participants discussed everything from human alterations of the ancient environment to the recent effects of radioactivity from nuclear bomb tests, often framing their analyses within the language and concepts of ecological science. About the same time, cultural anthropologists, inspired by postwar ecosystem ecology, began applying ecosystem concepts to studies of hunter/gatherers, treating these self-sufficient human populations as harmonious components of equilibrium systems. By the late 1960s, when the environmental movement began to gather steam, the framework was thus set for the elevation of the primitive hunter/gatherer to the rank of ecologically noble savage, an idea that has been slow to die despite compelling studies to the contrary.
     With the advent of environmentalism, ecology came to serve not only as the source of expert knowledge necessary for curing environmental ills but also as the scientific underpinning for a new social order. The new national environmental awareness created all sorts of opportunities for the expansion of ecological science and drew many more people into the field, but it also placed unreasonable demands on a science that was, and still is, incomplete, fragmented, pluralistic, and lacking in broad, consistent, unifying principles. Ignoring, or unaware of, the limitations of scientific ecology, social theorists on the political left, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, saw ecology as the scientific basis for a critique of capitalism, industrialism, imperialism, modern technology, and reductionist science. Social ecologists, bioregionalists, deep ecologists, and ecofeminists alike shared an uncritical acceptance of ecological ideas and concepts, treating the science not as the complex and malleable discipline that it is but as a font of reliable knowledge, consistent insights, and even moral lessons. Elements of the earlier Christian reform spirit, along with a kind of neo-Puritanism, pervaded the environmental movement. An ecological perspective, equally uncritical, found its way gradually into mainstream economics and political theory as well. In recent years, as the science of ecology itself has come under the scrutiny of both internal criticism and postmodern analysis, identifying proper applications to social issues has become more and more problematic, to say the least. The new models that prevail in contemporary ecology, models of directionless systems continually in flux, fit in well with the current managerial ethos, but their moral implications, not to mention their broader theological implications, are certainly less clear.