Humans as Components of Ecosystems: The Ecology of Subtle Human Effects and Populated Areas

380 Pages·1993·19.409 MB·English

by  Mark J. McDonnell, Steward T. A. Pickett (auth.), Mark J. McDonnell, Steward T. A. Pickett (eds.)

Humans as Components of Ecosystems
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Mark J. McDonnell
Steward T.A. Pickett
Editors
Humans as Components
of Ecosystems
The Ecology of Subtle Human Effects
and Populated Areas
Preface by Gene E. Likens
Foreword by William J. Cronon
With 59 Illustrations
Springer
Mark J. McDonnell Steward T.A. Picke«
Bartlett Arboretum Institute of Ecosystem Studies
151 Brookdale Road Mary Flagler Cary Arboretum
Stamford, CT 06903-4199 Millbrook, NY 12545-0129
USA USA
Text preparator: Marjory Spoerri
Acquiring editor: Robert Garber
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Humans as components of ecosystems : the ecology of subtle human
effects and populated areas / Mark J. McDonnell and Steward T. A.
Pickett, editors : preface by Gene E. Likens ; foreword by William
J. Cronon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-387-98243-4 ISBN 978-1-4612-0905-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4612-0905-8
1. Human ecology — Congresses. I. McDonnell, Mark J.
II. Pickett, Steward T., 1950-
GF3.H86 1993
304.2—dc20 93-10444
Printed on acid-free paper.
First softcover printing, 1997.
© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. in 1993
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Production managed by Bill Imbornoni; manufacturing supervised by Jacqui Ashri.
Camera-ready copy supplied by the editors.
987654321 SPIN 10576833
ISBN 978-0-387-98243-4
We dedicate this book to the memory of
Julie C. Morgan,
friend and humanist.
Cary Conference, 1991. 1. James E. Ellis; 2. Stephen B. Baines; 3. Joseph S. Warner; 4.
H~l~ne Cyr; 5. Paul A. Bukaveckas; 6. Gary M. Lovett; 7. Martin Christ; 8. David R. Foster;
9. Peter R. Jutro; 10. Peter J. Richerson; 11. David L. Wigston; 12. Richard J. Borden; 13.
Alan R. Berkowitz; 14. Ray J. Winchcombe; 15. John Aber; 16. Robert G. Lee; 17. Robert
H. Gardner; 18. William R. Jordan III; 19. Lindsay R. Boring; 20. Stuart E. G. Findlay; 21.
Edward A. Ames; 22. Charles D. Canham; 23. Dan Binkley; 24. Fredric H. Wagner; 25.
Michael L. Pace; 26. Kimberly E. Medley; 27. James F. Kitchell; 28. James T. Callahan; 29.
Orie L. Loucks; 30. Robert Howarth; 31. Stephen W. Pacala; 32. Gene E. Likens; 33. Forest
Stearns; 34. Nels E. Barrett; 35. Jane V. Hall; 36. Juan Carlos Castilla; 37. Emily W. Russell;
38. Michael Williams; 39. Wolf Dieter-Grossmann; 40. David L. Strayer; 41. David R. Foster;
42. Kathleen C. Weathers; 43. Mark J. McDonnell; 44. Kathryn Lajtha; 45. Bertrand Boeken;
46. Robert J. Naiman; 47. Stephen Boyden; 48. Frank B. Golley; 49. Steward T. A. Pickett;
50. Christine R. Padoch; 51. Andrew P. Vayda; 52. Eduardo H. Rapoport; 53. Dolors Vaqu~;
54. Bill L. Turner II; 55. Mark Nelson; 56. Margaret M. Carreiro; 57. Richard S. Ostfeld; 58.
John E. Hobbie; 59. John H. Lawton; 60. D. Alexander Wait; 61. Edward P. Bass; 62. Linda
Leigh; 63. Frank N. Egerton; 64. Jonathan J. Cole; 65. Nina M. Caraco; 66. Clive G. Jones;
67. Richard V. Pouyat. Absent from photo William Robertson IV.
Foreword: The Turn Toward History
The past two decades have seen an exciting convergence among the many
intellectual disciplines that study relationships between human beings and
the natural systems they inhabit. Scholars and scientists who in the past
would have had little to do with one another have come to share a growing
awareness of the inadequacies of their own particular fields, and have
sought to rectify those inadequacies by reaching out across disciplinary
boundaries to explore perspectives other than their own. One reason for
this convergence of interests has of course been the complexity and
dramatic scale of contemporary environmental problems, which are more
than ready to defeat any simple-minded theories or methodologies that offer
too facile an explanation of their causes. But another reason is less obvious,
and perhaps even more interesting-the growing sense that to understand the
role of human beings in promoting ecological change one must turn to the
past and develop a much more historical sense of how such change occurs.
This turn toward history has not come easily to all the fields that have
participated in it. In ecology, a long tradition of viewing historical change
as abnormal, as "disturbance, - dates back to the first generation of Ameri
can ecologists, when Frederic Clements postulated that the tendency of
natural systems was to progress through a series of stages toward a stable
state called the "climax- which would persist indefinitely unless something
intervened to disrupt it. Although Clements ian ecology did have a time
dimension-the succession of pre-climax community types that would
gradually prepare the way for the stable state to come-the teleology of the
system (like the Hegelian dialectic which was one of its intellectual roots)
was toward stasis, what we might call "the end of history.- Clements'
climax and the definitions of ecological "community- on which it rested
soon underwent a withering critical assault from scientists like Gleason and
vii
viii William J. Cronon
Tansley, but the ahistorical legacy of his approach long outlived his own
theories. For over half a century, the bias of American ecology was to try
to describe and analyze natural systems in their ·pristine state,· as they
would have existed in the hypothetical absence of human activity and long
term historical change. Even after World War II, when Clementsian
approaches were no longer driving the major research agendas of the field,
attempts to create a more dynamic ecology were usually conducted on such
constrained geographical and historical scales-the interactions of a few
species on a few acres over a few seasons or at most a few years-that the
problem of long-term historical change remained on the back burner.
Ecologists continued to view the human modification of ecological systems
mainly as a source of disturbance, a factor to be controlled and eliminated
from scientific analysis if they had to acknowledge it at all.
The many problems with this ahistorial bias of ecology began to become
apparent by the 1960s. One source of change came from the allied field of
palynology, whose researchers had been carefully assembling a body of data
since at least the 1930s that irrefutably showed ecological stability to be an
illusion, at least on extended time scales. In the long run, even the apparent
continuity of the assemblages that an earlier generation had confidently
labeled as ·climaxes· proved indefensible. Another new perspective came
from the earliest long-term ecological research sites, the most influential of
which, Hubbard Brook, took as its starting point the dramatic and inten
tional human manipUlation of an entire watershed. The result of Bormann
and Likens' clear cutting of a small New Hampshire valley was to demon
strate that the aggregate behavior of a "disturbed· system was far more
dynamic and complex than had been previously appreciated. Only empirical
observation over an extended time could even describe such behavior, let
alone explain it. No theory that lacked a serious time dimension could do
justice to an event like the cutting of the Hubbard Brook forest, for the
answers to its riddles were inextricably bound to its history, and could only
be explored by adopting historical modes of analysis. Hubbard Brook also
mirrored on a very small scale the vast human manipulation of earthly
ecosystems which in the wake of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and
the first Earth Day in 1970 became the obsession and battle-cry of the
modern environmental movement. Despite the discomfiture that many
ecologists felt about the misuse of their science by the new popular
movement, a growing number of them nonetheless responded by trying
more seriously to include anthropogenic change as a legitimate part of their
research. All of these tendencies have encouraged ecologists to recognize
that their field, like geology and evolutionary biology, is a genuinely
historical science, with analytical problems and approaches that are unavoid
ably different from those of less time-bounded fields like physics or
chemistry.
This turn toward history has occurred in other fields as well. The first
generation of anthropologists shared an analogous bias to the first genera-
Foreword: The Turn Toward History ix
tion of Clementsian ecologists, seeking to describe ·primitivew tribes in
their ·pristinew state, inhabitants of an eternal ·ethnographic presentW in
which historical change began to occur only after tribal societies had been
·disturbedw by intruding Europeans. The validity of such approaches came
under increasing attack as anthropologists began to acknowledge the
dynamics of non-western cultures, and collapsed altogether as colonialism
faded in the years following World War II. Although some bias toward
static theory persists in anthropology as well as ecology, the field has
become far more historical over the past two decades, and practitioners of
ecological anthropology have made real contributions to our understanding
of the ways human and natural systems interact in long-term cultural and
ecological change.
Geography is another field with much to offer our study of long-term
environmental change as it relates to human beings. Unlike ecology, it has
never been without a historical component, although historical geographers
have often felt beleaguered in their efforts to defend time to their col
leagues as an analytical category co-equal with space in their analyses. Like
ecology, geography also underwent a long period during the 194Os, 1950s,
and 1960s when the dominant nomothetic approaches and abstract models
showed little interest in taking the time dimension seriously. Only as the
limits of such models and approaches began to be apparent, and as
geographers responded to the same external pressures that were influencing
ecologists, did the importance of a more historical perspective seem
compelling.
Examples of this turn toward history could be gathered for virtually all
of the disciplines that are now making serious efforts to study long-term
environmental change as it relates to human cultures and behaviors. Even
the field of history itself, which can hardly be accused of having ignored the
importance of time in its arguments and narratives, went through several
decades in the post-war period when the human relationship to nature
moved to the extreme margins of its analyses. The reasons for this indiffer
ence to natural context were complicated. In part, it reflected a powerful
reaction against what many scholars saw as the excessively materialist
explanations of human behavior-Marxist and non-Marxist alike-that had
held sway with an earlier generation of scholars. In the 1950s, historians
tried to assess the causes of social, economic, and political change by
appealing mainly to human ideas and human culture, not to the changing
human relation to nature. But the subsequent growth of environmentalism
and a new effort to try to integrate materialist and idealist modes of
explanation reversed this tendency as well. By the 1970s a new subfield of
·environmental histor1 had emerged and was starting to offer powerful
arguments for why one could not hope to understand the human past if one
wrote out of one's story the non-human past.
And so the time now seems ripe for all these different disci
plines-ecology, history, geography, anthropology, and others-to acknowledge
x William J. Cronon
that their intellectual journeys have been carrying them toward a common
path. Clearly, no single one of these perspectives is adequate by itself to the
task at hand. But the fact that our work seems increasingly to point toward
common questions suggests how much we have to learn from one another
if only we can scale the walls that separate us so as to start working
together on the problems we all find fascinating. For this reason, I'm
immensely heartened by the publication of Humans as Components of
Ecosystems. Not only does it make a compelling case for the need to study
anthropogenic ecological change, but ~t implicitly demonstrates that a
historical approach can serve as a bridge that can link our various disci
plines. All those disciplines will benefit if this book helps erode the
boundaries between them. With luck, future historians will eventually
recognize this volume as an important early step toward creating a genuine
ly historical ecology and a genuinely ecological history.
William J. Cronon
Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History,
Geography, and Environmental Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
January 1993