This is a new, ecological age, and its universal religion will probably become like [Gerd Heinrich's], that of nature on a global scale. Our moral choices will be informed by that vision of the whole, which is greater than all of us humans combined. Individually, we are like cells of a giant organism, the earth's biosphere.
Biogeochemistry, Gaia, and Earth system science are versions of biosphere ecology. Global warming might be considered a biosphere pathology.
Pre‐biogeochemistry
Part 63 of this series begins with very early studies into what we would now call biosphere ecology. Photosynthesis is a very important component of this history. During the 400s C.E., Rufinus of Aquileia translated from Greek into Latin pseudo‐Clement's Recognitions, a conversation between a skeptical father and his Christian sons. One question raised was “Does not the rebirth of seed from earth and water and its growth into plants for the use of man sufficiently demonstrate the workings of the providence of God?” (translated in Howe :409). One son responded: “When they are sown, the earth, by the divine will, pours out upon these seeds the water it has received…” (in Howe :410; Egerton ,b:208). The son then proposed seeds be planted in a known weight of dirt, with nothing added but water. After the plants have grown, they can be weighed and the dirt again weighed. The dirt will be seen to have lost no weight, and so the plants’ substance clearly came only from water.
German scholar‐diplomat Nikolaus (or Nicholas) von Cusa (ca.1401–64) in 1450 wrote Idiota de staticis experimentis, which included an account of pseudo‐Clement's experiment (Hoff , Howe , Hofmann ). To the previous account, Nikolaus added “by the operation of the Sunne” (translation in Hoff :108). He also suggested weighing the seeds or seedlings before the experiment and afterward to burn the plants to determine their dry weight. These first two accounts are presented as hypothetical, though at least the first account would have to have had a real experiment as its basis in order to be confident of the results.
Leonard K. Nash compiled a case history of experimental science, Plants and the Atmosphere (1957), in which Belgian physician Johann Baptista van Helmont (1577–1644), who coined the word “gas” (Partington :index, Pagel , Hill :xv–xvi) and English aristocrat Robert Boyle (1627–91), active member of the Royal Society of London (Partington :index, Hall , , Hunter ), conducted actual experiments (van Helmont using a willow tree), which seemed to indicate that plants grew from water alone, since their experimental plants used an insignificant amount of dirt, as weighed before and after their experiments (Nash :328–335). Boyle, a “skeptical chemist,” used distilled water, but even so, he wondered whether the glass container might have lost any substance into the water and then into the plant (1661).
Enlarge this image.(a) Nikolaus von Cusa. (b) Johann Baptista van Helmont. (c) Robert Boyle. Wikipedia.
Their conclusion was soon undermined by studies on plant anatomy by Italian medical professor Marcello Malpighi (1628–94) (Adelmann , Belloni ) and English physician Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712; Metcalf ). Malpighi's study was conducted in 1675 and published in 1686, and Grew conducted his in 1676, yet published in 1682 (Nash :435). They discovered that plant leaves have pores (stomata) that allowed air to move in or out (Nash :335–336).
Another Englishman of that period, John Evelyn (1620–1706), who was a member of the Royal Society of London, as were Boyle, Grew, and Woodward, focused upon practical issues (Avignon ). One of Evelyn's books was Fumifugium, or, the Inconveniences of the Aer, and the Smoak of London Dissipated (1661). In it, he “proposed removing certain trades and planting a green belt of fragrant trees and shrubs around the city” (Avignon :495). These sensible recommendations would have ameliorated the problem to the extent the city implemented them. But Londoners were used to the smoke, and they only got around to doing something about it after the Great Smog of 1952, which killed 12,000 (Flannery :38). In Sylva, or, a Discourse of Forest Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions (Evelyn ), “Evelyn argued that the excessive humidity of Ireland and North America was due to excessive rain and mists attracted by their dense forests” (Fleming :27). In this case, he suggested that cutting the forests would cause better climate, benefitting human health (and be useful to the British Navy).
English naturalist John Woodward, M.D. (1665–1728), had an early interest in botany that later faded while his interest in paleontology grew (Eyles , , Levine ). He carried out in 1691–92 “Some Thoughts and Experiments concerning Vegetation” (1699). He conducted a controlled experiment, in which he grew common spearmint of the same size in three containers, containing spring water, rainwater, and Thames River water. He concluded that impurities provided important nutrients. He discovered, but did not name, transpiration (1699:208): “The much greatest part of the Fluid Mass that is drawn off and convey'd into the Plants, does not settle or abide there, but passes through the Pores of them, and exhales up into the Atmosphere.” However, that discovery led him to mistakenly conclude (1699:221): “Water serves only for a Vehicle to the terrestrial Matter which forms Vegetables; and does not in itself make any addition unto them.”
Woodward also reported (1699:209) that in America, the early settlers were annoyed by the humidity, but after they cut down the forests, “the Air mended and cleared up apace: changing into a Temper much more dry and serene than before.” John Evelyn was undoubtedly pleased when he read that.
The 1600s was also when meteorology received a significant boost by the invention of meteorological instruments, led by Italian investigators. Galileo let the way by developing the telescope and assisting with development of microscopes. Rain gauges and wind (weather) vanes predate the 1600s, but it was the barometer and thermometer that developed in Italy were key instruments for the origins of meteorology (Middleton :3–80).
At this point in our history, more recent sources supplement Nash's account. I know of no other science that has as many historical resources as specialists who study photosynthesis. Advances in Photosynthesis and Respiration is the name of a collection of 22 monographs published by Springer, 1994–2006, with presumably more to come. Especially noteworthy is Volume 20: Discoveries in Photosynthesis (2005), edited by Govindjee, J.T. Beatty, H. Gest, and J.F. Allen. For our purposes, the most important of its papers is by Govindjee and David Krogmann, “Discoveries in Oxygenic Photosynthesis” (1727–2003) (2005). Other papers will also be cited.
A later English clergyman Stephen Hales (1677–1761) conducted more sophisticated plant physiology experiments than ever before, published in his Vegetable Staticks (1727) (Partington :112–123, Guerlac , Allan and Schofield , Govindjee and Krogmann :64–66). Hales was at Cambridge University during the time of Newton, and he absorbed the importance of measurement in science. He conducted experiments on blood pressure, using two horses and a deer, before he turned to plant physiology. Van Helmont and Boyle were first to conduct quantitative studies on plant physiology, but at a simple level. Hales was influenced by his previous studies on animal physiology, and he went far beyond those predecessors. He studied what is now called transpiration, and he invented the pneumatic trough for his studies (Parascandola and Ihde :353–357). He also observed that the pores in leaves let air in and moisture out. Nash (:340–342) quoted Hales’ 122nd experiment, which was a controlled experiment. He believed he had demonstrated that air is important for plant growth. However, he could not distinguish one kind of air from another. He also concluded that water is important for plant growth.
Enlarge this image.(a) Stephen Hales, age 82, by J. McArdell after T. Hudson. (b) Illustration of plant physiology experiments. Hales .
As science gathered momentum during mid‐1700s in western Europe, old verities, such as air and water as elements, were no longer assumed to be true. Parisian Antoine‐Laurent Lavoisier (1743–94) was son of a solicitor who acquired wealth through inheritance and then through marriage (McKie , Guerlac :67, , Hill :xvii–xviii). He received an excellent science education and became the leading chemist in Europe (Partington :363–494), until his life was cut short by a guillotine during the French Revolution. His interests, however, were quite broad and also included physiology, geology, economics, and social reform. He was both a skeptic and a careful experimenter, both of which traits were displayed in his 1770 memoir (published 1773) on the nature of water and experiments that proved the impossibility of changing it into earth. Lavoisier also showed that he had mastered all the relevant literature and built upon achievements by Hales and others. Nash (:344–350) discussed this memoire and rendered passages into English. Lavoisier's many chemical inquiries culminated in his revolutionary Traité élémentaire de Chimie (1789, English 1952). He established a definition of an element as a substance that persists through chemical reactions and cannot be reduced to more fundamental substances.
Englishman Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) was son of a small‐town cloth dresser or finisher and was a studious boy (Partington :237–296, Schofield , , ). He studied to become a minister, and did, but in the Unitarian Church, not the Church of England. He also opened a school, and he had broad intellectual interests, perhaps as broad as Lavoisier's, though not in all the same subjects. He began scientific research on electricity and optics. Only in 1769, when a fourth edition of Hales’ Vegetable Staticks appeared did he become interested in air and began reading chemical works. His first publication in this new direction was lengthy: “Observations on Different Kinds of Air” (1772). He collected air from an enclosed mouse and enclosed plant and tested the airs (Nash :350–358, Gorham :203). When only a mouse was enclosed, the air became poisonous, killing the mouse and extinguishing a candle. However, when a plant was enclosed with the mouse, the mouse survived and the candle remained lit. The plant also did well in air that had killed a mouse. He showed his experiment to a visiting American friend, Benjamin Franklin, who commented that animals eat plants, and in turn, animal wastes provide fertilizer for plants (Nash :355, Drouin :7–8). Priestley was busy with various endeavors and did not resume work on this research until 1774, when he announced a new discovery: he heated what we call mercuric oxide and released a new gas which he called “dephlogisticated air” (oxygen) within the context of an older theory of combustion (Partington :256–263, Hill :xvii–xviii). In it, a candle burned more brightly than in ordinary air. In October 1774, he visited a group of French scientists, including Lavoisier, and told about his discovery. Later, Lavoisier repeated Priestley's experiment and obtained the same results, but with a different explanation (Guerlac :75). It became one of the stepping stones to Lavoisier's scientific revolution. Ironically, Priestley was radical in his religion and politics, which drove him to American for his last years (Jackson :254–321), but scientifically, he was too conservative to accept Lavoisier's new chemistry. Even so, one science historian has argued that Priestley's understanding differed from traditional phlogiston theory (Holmes ).
In spring 1778, Swedish apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–86) published observations that challenged some of Priestley's early discoveries (Nash :358, Boklund ). Priestley then repeated those experiments and could not obtain some results previously published (Nash :358–369).
Dutch physician Jan IngenHousz (1730–99) had graduated from the University of Louvain in 1753, then spent four years at universities of Leyden, Paris, and Edinburgh (Nash :369–384, 409–419, Partington :278–280, Van der Pas , Magiels , Hill :xxi). Afterward, he returned to his hometown, Breda, on the coast. At other times, he would live in England and in Vienna. He investigated this puzzle of plants and gases in summer 1779, conducting over 500 experiments (IngenHousz 1779). He discovered that green plants only purify air in sunlight, and that at night they render air noxious, as animals do. It was the first of his 19 publications on plants and the atmosphere, 1779–1798 (listed in Magiels :390–391). Ingenhousz's biographer concluded that he deserved credit for discovery of photosynthesis (Magiels :359).
A Swiss pastor (until 1769) and librarian (after 1769) and naturalist, Jean Senebier (1742–1808) took the next step (Nash :385–388, Partington :280–283, Pilet 1975b, Hill :xix–xxi). His early interest was animal physiology and later plant physiology. Nash found that in 1783–88 Senebier published over 2100 pages on plants and the atmosphere. In 1782, he denied that plants rendered air noxious at night, but by 1788, he changed his mind. He showed that [using modern names] carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants that are producing oxygen and that the amount of oxygen produced is about equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed.
Other British scientists also conducted chemical experiments. In 1783, two of them, Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) and James Watt (1736–1819), conducted an experiment that indicated that water is composed of two different substances (Partington :344–348, McCormmach , Dorn ), a timely discovery: “It was two discoveries, of oxygen and the composition of water, that formed the experimental basis of Lavoisier's new oxidation chemistry…” Lavoisier initiated his chemical revolution in 1785 (Partington :440–452).
Enlarge this image.(a) Jan Ingenhousz. (b) Jean Senebier (c) Nicolas‐Theodore de Saussure. All, Wikipedia.
The Geneva chemist and plant physiologist, Nicolas‐Theodore de Saussure (1767–1845), was a son of prominent Genevan scientist Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99), who had investigated geology, meteorology, and botany (Nash :420–434, Partington :283–284, Carozzi , Pilet ,b, Drouin :8–10, Hill :xxi–ix). The father tutored the son, who became his father's assistant. Nicolas‐Theodore began publishing articles on plant physiology in 1797, followed by his widely appreciated Recherches chimiques sur la Végétation (French in 1804, German in 1805, English in 2013). It was the first textbook on plant physiology. Unlike Priestley, Ingen Housz, and Senebier, he was unencumbered by the obsolete phlogiston theory of combustion, and he readily accepted Lavoisier's oxygen theory (Nash :420–433, Partington :283–284). He also followed Lavoisier's example of rigorous experimentation. His English translator, Jane Hill summarized his contributions (Hill :xiii): that water is incorporated into the dry matter of plants; that plant carbon is derived from the carbon dioxide of the air, not from humus or soil; that the minerals in plants are absorbed from the soil, not created by a vital force; and that minerals are essential to plant growth.
Hill also summarized his nine chapters (2013:155–159).
Global questions
Scotsman James Hutton (1726–97) was son of prosperous Edinburgh merchant who died when James was three (Eyles ). The family, however, remained well‐off and James attended the University of Edinburgh, where he seemed most interested in chemistry and other physical sciences. He then studied medicine and earned an M.D. in 1749, with a thesis entitled De sanguine et circulation microcosmi. He never practiced medicine. He had inherited a farm and decided to become a farmer. However, Scottish farming was not very productive, so he toured English farms for about a year in 1752–53, followed by similar tours in Holland, Belgium, and northern France, during several months in 1754. He farmed for 14 years before renting out his farm and returning to Edinburgh in 1767. He associated with leading intellectuals in Scotland and England, including Joseph Black, Adam Smith, and James Watt. When the Royal Society of Edinburgh was founded in 1783, he was one of its first members and was quite active in its affairs. He had been thinking about a theory of earth history for a number of years and in 1785 presented a 28‐page “Abstract of a Dissertation… concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability.” It was about processes at work, with no data to illustrate them (Hutton ). He then spent a decade expanding it into his two‐volume Theory of the Earth (1795). Joseph Black claimed that Hutton had developed his main ideas twenty years earlier (Eyles :579).
In 1795, Hutton developed and used his uniformitarian principle, that the geological processes at work now are key to understanding past geological activity. No more starting history of the world with the Biblical Genesis (though he did not say so). Hutton was perhaps first to think in terms of an earth system (1795:II, 540): “The system of this earth appears to comprehend many different operations; and it exhibits various powers co‐operating for the production of those effects which we perceive.” He began his argument with a fact he stated was widely known: Land was formerly under water. The system which he built upon this fact was that the earth undergoes constant change. The final 27‐page chapter of Volume 2 summarized the arguments in his treatise. He finally asked what forces could effect these changes, and on that, he had no answer.
Hutton's treatise was understandable, but not reader‐friendly. He became friendly with a younger man, John Playfair (1748–1819), who was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh (Challinor , Dean ). Playfair had become interested in Hutton's work, and after Hutton died, Playfair wrote Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802). Playfair had published capable contributions to mathematics, but he is most remembered for his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, the first part of which (pages 4–140) summarized Hutton's treatise. The second part (pages 141–528) consists of his own contributions, guided by Hutton's teachings.
Parisian biologist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) is remembered primarily for his theory of evolution, published in 1801 and 1809 (Landrieu , Burlingame :589–590). However, he had broad interests, one of which was discussed in Hydrogélogie (1802, English, 1964). It was part of his larger concept of terrestrial physics, which included meteorology, geology, and biology, which, however, he never completed. Like Hutton, he was a uniformitarian, but came to that perspective independently of Hutton, whose work he never studied. In Hydrologie, Lamarck sought to answer four major questions. The first three were geological, but the fourth was: “What are the general effects of living organisms on the mineral substances which form the earth's crust and external surface?” (1964:16, 78). His discussion began with his understanding of chemistry, which does not resemble modern understanding, nor would contemporary chemists have found it mainstream (Lamarck 1964:78–85). It is unlikely that Lamarck had absorbed much knowledge of Lavoisier's chemical revolution. Next, Lamarck stated: “The organic action of living organisms continuously creates combinations of substances which would never have existed otherwise.” This sweeping claim is too broad, since living organisms produce carbon dioxide, as do inanimate processes, such as fire. Nevertheless, he was calling attention to a subject worthy of investigation. However, contemporaries who tried to read his book would likely not have continued to read as far as page 78, where this statement is.
Food chains and webs
An unnoticed step toward a biosphere concept was the development of understanding of food chains and food webs (Egerton 2007b). A biosphere is a global food web; yet, before one could conceive of that, an understanding of local food webs was needed. Hyperparasitic food chains were discovered during the 1600s (Egerton , 2006a), and English naturalist Richard Bradley (d. 1732) generalized the concept, without naming it or providing a specific example (Bradley , part 3:60–61): … Insects which prey upon others are not without some others of lesser Rank to feed upon them likewise, and so to Infinity; for that there are Beings subsisting, which are not commonly visible may be easily demonstrated…in a microscope.
Bradley published this in a popular, not a scientific, work (Egerton 2006b, :71–74), where English satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) read it and turned it into verse (1733:lines 341–344): So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey. And these have smaller yet to bite ‘em. And so proceed ad infinitum.
Swedish naturalist and professor Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) was one of the most important contributors in 1700s to what we call ecology (Egerton 2007a, :80–84). He published a series of essays, some of which had one of his student's name attached, for having defended it for a doctorate degree. Sometimes a student contributed to writing his dissertation. Most important for this discussion was “The Economy of Nature” (Latin 1749, English 1775), which included two specific food chains (1775:114): …the tree‐louse lives upon plants. The fly called musca aphidivora lives upon the tree‐louse. The hornet and wasp fly upon the Musca aphidivora. The dragon fly upon the hornet and wasp fly. The spider on the dragon fly. The small birds on the spider. And lastly, the hawk kind on the small birds. In like manner the monoculus delights in putrid waters, the knat eats the monoculus, the frog eats the knat, the pike eats the frog, the sea calf eats the pike.
Linnaeus believed God designed nature, and that such food chains ensured that no species became too numerous to be supported by its food species. The economy of nature was Linnaeus’ name for the balance of nature (Egerton :335–337).
Very likely there were discussions of food chains between the times of Linnaeus and Darwin, but they are unknown to me. Darwin, in his Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, may have first published a food web, though a simple one, from barren St. Paul's Rocks in the mid‐Atlantic, where gannets, boobies, and noddy tern nested, the latter building a nest of seaweed (1839:10): By the side of many of these nests a small flying fish was placed: which, I suppose, had been brought by the male bird for its partner…quickly a large and active crab (Graspus), which inhabits the crevices of the rock, stole the fish from the side of the nest, as soon as we had disturbed the birds. Not a single plant, not even a lichen, grows on this island; yet it is inhabited by several insects and spiders. The following list completes, I believe, the terrestrial fauna: a species of Feronia and an acarus, which must have come here as parasites on the birds; a small brown moth, belonging to a genus that feeds on feathers; a staphlinus (Quedius) and a woodlouse from beneath the dung; and lastly, numerous spiders, which I suppose prey on these small attendants on, and scavengers of the waterfowl.
Rear‐Admiral William Symonds read this and told Darwin he had seen St. Paul crabs drag young birds from nests and eat them. Darwin added his information in the second edition of his Journal (1845) (Edwards :34).
In The Origin of Species (1859:73–74), Darwin told a well‐known account of a food chain involving red clover pollinated by humble bees, with field mice eating bees, and domestic cats eating the mice (Egerton ,b,c:51–52). He drew upon H.W. Newman's “On the Habits of the Bombinatrices” (1850–51). Darwin thought mice might decimate the bees, leaving clover unpollinated, if cats did not limit the mouse population. His food chain was later found to be too simple, since honey bees also pollinate red clover (McAtee ).
A remarkable German zoologist, Karl Semper (1832–93), delivered 12 lectures in Boston (1877), which he published in German and English editions, Animal Life as Affected by the National Conditions of Existence (1881). It was the first detailed synthesis of animal ecology, and it included a quantitative, narrative model of a food chain (1881:51–52). He had studied engineering and later physiology (Mayr ), so he was accustomed to thinking quantitatively, when few other biologists were. He explained that when herbivores eat vegetation, due to oxidation there is a loss of organic material; he estimated that 1,000 units of vegetation could produce 100 units of herbivore, and that this ratio was also true when a predator eats 100 units of herbivore, it produces 10 units of a predator. His ratio was also adopted by a more recent zoologist (Pequegnat ), who likely was unfamiliar with Semper's estimate.
A year after Semper gave his Boston lectures, a French professor of sociology at the Lycée de Dijon, Alfred V. Espinas (1844–1922), published Des Sociétés Animales (1878). It was not on food chains or webs, but since social species are involved in food chains and webs, it seems useful to mention it.
Italian zoologist Lorenzo Camerano (1856–1917) grew up in Torino, attended its university, and later taught there (Cohen ). The earliest known diagrams of food webs were two he published (Camerano ). He was primarily an entomologist, and many of his publications were descriptive. His article on food webs was atypical of his publications. J.E. Cohen (:353) suggested that paper shows influence of Darwin's Origen of Species (1859). Cohen had Camerano's food web article translated into English (Camerano ). Camerano's two food web diagrams are like none published later (Egerton ,b:62–63), indicating that they had little influence. They nevertheless indicate progress in the study of food webs.
Illinoian zoologist Stephen A. Forbes (1844–1930) served in the Union Army during the Civil War and afterward attended the Rush Medical College, Chicago, and later Illinois State Normal University, near Bloomington, Indiana (Croker :7–59). He worked for the state in several positions, mainly as a professor and state entomologist, and his writings were a source for American animal ecology (Croker :109–125, Egerton ,b:64–65). Forbes is most remembered for “The Lake as a Microcosm” (1887, 1925, 1977, 1991). Many of his other publications, 1878–88, were on food of fish and of insects (Forbes ), which can be considered studies in short food chains.
The next earliest web diagram I know was by entomologists W. Dwight Pierce, Robert Asa Cushman, and C.E. Hood, in their study of The Insect Enemies of the Cotton Boll Weevil (1912). I am unaware of any later web diagramer having followed their ingenious example (reproduced in Egerton 2007b:54). However, since it was in a bulletin of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it likely was read by other entomologists.
Only a year later, animal ecologist Victor E. Shelford (1877–1968) published Animal Communities in Temperate America, as Illustrated in the Chicago Region (1913), with diagrams of both land and aquatic food webs, having original designs of his diagrams (both reproduced in Egerton 2007b:54–55). Although he grew up on a New York state farm, his two degrees were from the University of Chicago (B.S., 1903, Ph.D., 1907). He was on the Chicago faculty that year; in 1914, he permanently moved to the University of Illinois and became one of the leaders of American ecology (Croker ). Although Shelford later studied marine life, the aquatic food chain in his Animal Communities (1913) was in freshwater.
The earliest known food web diagram for a marine community was by Danish fishery biologist Johannes Petersen (1860–1928), in “A Preliminary Result in the Investigations on the Valuation of the Sea” (1915). He had studied the Kattegat, a shallow bay between Denmark and Sweden about 150 miles long and about 90 miles wide (Schlee :216–219). He attempted to establish its annual productivity, and his diagram resembled no others known to me (reproduced in Egerton 2007b:56). However, his colleague, Harold H. Blegvad (1886–1951) conducted a somewhat similar study, “Food of Fish and Principal Animals in Nyborg Fjord” (1916), and drew a food web diagram similar to Petersen's. English ecologists Charles Elton (Summerhayes and Elton , Elton ) and Alister Harding (1924), both of whom we met earlier (Egerton 2014a:73–75, 2014b:407–411) were soon studying food webs (Dunne :29). Food webs were included in the first detailed ecology synthesis, by Allee et al. (:511–519). Stuart Pimm published an important later synthesis, Food Webs (1982).
This is not a context for a full history of food chains and webs, which I and others have previously published. Mine goes from Richard Bradley to Rachel Carson (Egerton 2007b). These recent studies indicate the continuing and diverse studies on food webs: Joel Cohen et al., Community Food Webs (1990); Jennifer Dunne () has surveyed the history of food web studies from Elton to 2005, though she only focused upon theoretical ideas; and Craig A. Layman and ten colleagues published A Primer on the History of Food Web Ecology: Fundamental Contributions of Fourteen Researchers (2015). More recently, Thomas Ings and Joseph Howes “The History of Ecological Networks” (2018) emphasized food networks. The journal Food Webs began in 2014.
Earth moving
This is a heading of convenience, not of logic, to encompass two very different phenomena being discovered at the same time: repeating irregularities in earth orbits by Milutin Milankovich (1879–1958), now known as Milankovich cycles; and continental drift, by Alfred Wegener (1880–1930).
Milankovich was Serbian, and born in the Austro‐Hungarian Empire (Weart :17–18, 47–50, Flannery :41–42). He attended the Vienna University of Technology, 1896–1902, and earned a degree in civil engineering, and a Ph.D. in December 1904. Later, he became interested in causes of ice ages and read literature on it. He was neither first nor last to study cycles of the earth's movements daily and annually, but he suggested that three long‐term recurring Earth cycles affect earth's climate: (1) variation in elliptical orbit of earth around the sun, completed every 100,000 years; (2) axial tilt of Earth spin, completed every 42,000 years; and (3) axial precession (wobble) of Earth, every 22,000 years. The cause of these irregularities was the gravitational pull of other planets as they orbit daily and annually around the sun. These varying pathways were thought to explain ice ages, which does happen when continental drift leaves large land masses near the poles. He published his Canon of Insolation of the Ice‐Age Problem in Serbian in 1941, with English translation not published until 1969.
Enlarge this image.(a) Milutin Milankovich, featured on a Serbian postage stamp. (b) Alfred Wegener. Wikipedia.
Wegener was from Berlin and studied astronomy at Heidelberg, Innsbruck universities, and earned his Ph.D. at Berlin (Bullen , Schwarzbach ) He then became interested in meteorology and geology. He announced his theory of continental drift in 1911 and later published Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (1915). It became a controversial theory that was only widely accepted during the 1960s. In 1930, he was in Greenland, and on his birthday undertook a journey to the coast and was never seen again. Continental drift, or now, an aspect of plate tectonics, shifts continental climates from its pattern before movement to a different climate after movement. It is caused by internal dynamics of the fluid molten matter in the center of the earth.
Ecosystems
Ecosystems are discussed in part 59 of this history (Egerton ), with earlier, more detailed treatments, being by Hagen (), Golley (), and Coleman (). This part 63 summary places the theory into a sequence of concepts leading to biosphere ecology. An ecosystem is a subset of global ecology in the sense of being a distinct portion that contributes to the whole, while also being influenced by the whole. A forest is an example of an ecosystem; if on fire it contributes, however slightly, to global warming, and a forest not on fire is a CO2 sink. Collectively, ecologists are world travelers, and only some small ecosystems are by now still undescribed. Some ecosystems are rather isolated, such as an oasis in a desert, but others have significant contacts, such as a river flowing into an ocean.
With four historical studies just cited, I only want to add an account of William McShea and William Healy, editors of Oak Forest Ecosystems: Ecology and Management for Wildlife (2002a)—omitted by Coleman (), but mentioned by Egerton (). Apparently, McShea and Healy initiated the project and persuaded 32 other authors to contribute 20 chapters, with editors providing chapters 1 and 22. It is a very impressive collection of reports on North America's Quercus species‐dominated biotic communities. (McShea and Healy [2002b:1] estimated about 50 species live in North America and over 500 Quercus species live worldwide; McWilliams et al. [:13 cited other authorities who estimated 93 species live in USA and Canada and 500–600 live worldwide). Although acorns are important food for about 150 species of birds and mammals, only seven species of birds and ten species of mammals are important agents for dispersing oak acorn‐seeds (Steele and Smallwood 2002:184–185). Three authors discussed management in particular regions: Richard Standiford on California (2002), Peter Ffolliott on Arizona and New Mexico (2002), and William Healy on eastern oak forests (2002).
Biogeochemistry
A historian of biogeochemistry (Gorham :214) identified a paper by French chemist Jean‐Baptiste‐André Dumas (1800–84) as biogeochemistry's beginning (title in translation): “On the Chemical Statics of Organized Beings” (1841). By the 1830s, Dumas was assistant professor at the Sorbonne, promoted to professor in 1841, and soon the leading chemist in France (Partington :337–345, Kapor ). Since Gorham also discussed de Saussure (1991:204), why not assign this achievement to him? The answer seems to be that Dumas discussed the role of animals, as well as plants, and de Saussure did not. Here is a sample of Dumas’ reasoning (1841:338): Have we not proved…by a multitude of results, that animals constitute, in a chemical point of view, a real apparatus for combustion, by means of which burnt carbon incessantly returns to the atmosphere under the form of carbonic acid; in which hydrogen burnt without ceasing, on its part continually engenders water; whence…free azote [nitrogen] is incessantly exhaled by respiration, and azote in the state of oxide of ammonium by the urine?
Yet, biogeochemistry did not “take off” after Dumas published this paper in French and English.
Eduard Suess (1831–1914) was son of a merchant, born in London; when he was three, his family moved to Prague, and when he was 14, to Vienna (Wegmann ). He attended universities in Vienna and in Prague. Although he never took courses in either paleontology or geology, in 1856 he became Professor of Paleontology at the University of Vienna, and in 1861 its Professor of Geology. His Die Entstehung der Alpen (1875), which was mainly on the genesis and structure of the Alps, in its introduction stated (Suess :3, translated in Smil :1): The plant, whose deep roots plunge into the soil to feed, and which at the same time rises into the air to breathe, is a good illustration of organic life in the region of interaction between the upper sphere and the lithosphere, and on the surface of continents it is possible to single out an independent biosphere.
Vaclav Smil stated that that was the only time Suess used the term in that book, and there is no record of him using it in his magnum opus, Das Antiltz der Erde (The Face of the Earth, 3 volumes in 4, 1883–1909, French, 4 volumes, 1897–1918, English, 5 volumes, 1904–24).
Since global ecology requires an understanding of the relationship between plants and the atmosphere, this part 63 began with early researches on that subject. Govindjee and Krogmann () provided a chronology of photosynthesis from Hales () to 2003. German physician Julius Robert Mayer (1814–78) formulated the first law of thermodynamics (but not under that name), which seems relevant. He was from Heilbronn and earned his medical degree at the University of Tübingen in 1838 (Turner :235). From February 1840 to February 1841, he served as physician on a Dutch ship to the East Indies. At Djakarta, Java, his physiological observations convinced him that motion and heat were manifestations of a force in nature and that this force was conserved in a conversion of one to the other. After the voyage, he returned to Heilbronn and established a prosperous medical practice. He published his observations in 1845, using a Heilbronn publisher. Few scientists noticed his publication, and so he published later articles refining his original discussion (Govindjee and Krogmann :67): He clearly stated that “plants convert light energy into chemical energy” during photosynthesis. This established the ingredients for the complete equation of oxygen in photosynthesis. J.P. Joule (1818–1890) published unkind remarks on Mayer's numerical value of the mechanical equivalent of heat. Mayer attempted suicide and was confined for a period in a mental institution. It was J. Tyndall (1820–1893) who lectured on Mayer's work and brought recognition to it. But then Mayer and Joule were in a controversy over priority of discovery. A fellow German, Rudolf Clausius did not expect to take seriously Mayer's scientific papers, but after he read them, he commented in a letter to Tyndall (17 May 62): “I am amazed at the number of fine and correct ideas that they contain” (in Jackson :169).
Eileen Crist has argued (2004:162) that Darwin's last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (1881), was a pioneering “scientific study about the reciprocal influence of life and environment.” “It was a perfect project for a man with his circle of landed connections. Perfect too for a slow moving country gentleman” (Browne :447). Darwin had actually published three earlier notes on this subject ([1837] 1840, 1844, 1869), one note before his book on corals (1842) and two afterward. He worked hard on his collections from the Beagle voyage after returning home in October 1836, and in 1837, he needed a vacation and visited his uncle, Josiah Wedgewood, who showed him in a pasture where years before cinders and pieces of brick had been scattered and by 1837 were a few inches below ground (Stewart :4–10). Wedgewood was convinced that earthworms had by their constant feeding in the soil buried those objects. Despite his overwhelming work on his Beagle collections, Darwin studied the phenomenon and reported on it to the Geological Society of London in 1837, giving due credit to his uncle. Amy Stewart recently discovered a book written by James Samuelson, Humble Creatures: the Earthworm and the Common Housefly (1858), which “quoted liberally from Darwin's early paper on worms” (Stewart :144). Darwin's much later “worm book” had something in common with his earlier books on corals and four volumes on living and fossil barnacles (1851–54). Those earlier books had been on marine organisms, but also on small organisms that modified their environments—corals more impressively than barnacles. All three books are about species in which the impact of any individual is slight, but the impact of the community is quite significant. Crist characterized Darwin's worm book as geophysiological, and his books on corals and barnacles can be considered the same. (Lovelock coined the term geophysiology.) However, terrestrial earthworms move independently, whereas corals and barnacles are, as adults, sessile. Darwin's worm book opened a new field of research and sold very well, but it was quite a while before other scientists initiated worm research.
Enlarge this image.Drawing of a vertical section of a field showing cinders, marl, and pebbles which Darwin argued were buried during many years by earthworms that consume dirt in order to extract food particles before expelling the soil. From Vegetable Mould, edition of 1899:135. Similar to diagram of 1840.
The organized discipline of biogeochemistry began with Russian mineralogist‐geochemist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (or Vernadskii, 1863–1945), who eventually became the first biogeochemist and elaborator of biosphere concept (Fedosayev , Smil :2–13, Levit ). His father was a professor in Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg and edited a liberal economics journal. Vladimir attended St. Petersburg University, 1881–85, and studied mathematics, physics, and mineralogy. In 1886, he became curator of the university's mineralogical collection while studying to become a teacher. In 1888–90, he traveled abroad, studying mineralogy and geology. In 1890, he studied at Moscow University and wrote a master's thesis, On the Sillimanite Group and the Role of Alumina in Silicates (1891), and later a doctoral dissertation, On the Phenomena of Gliding in Crystal Substances (1897). He became a professor at Moscow University in 1898. The St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences elected him an associate member in 1909 and an academician in 1912. In 1917–21, he lived in the Ukraine, and in 1919, he created the Ukrainian S.S.R. Academy of Sciences and became its first president. He was brave enough and secure enough not to remain silent when Communist political hacks attempted to guide science (Bailes ). Only in his last two decades did he turn to what can be called biogeochemistry when he recognized the importance of the influence of living beings and environments upon each other. He began by writing articles on the interactions between life and land, life and sea, and culminated in Biosfera (Vernadsky , , ,b, ). He coined the term biogeochemistry in 1926.
One historian of Russian science summarized Vernadsky's biogeochemical contributions (Weiner :80): [He] pointed out the unique role of each species in the dynamic processes of mineral cycling and energy flow and who posited individual species as performers of unique biogeochemical tasks in the economy of nature. Conditioning the role of a species in this economy, theorized Vernadskii, were the unique biochemical and energy requirements of its members. These requirements, in turn, were determined by the unique “stuff” (biochemical makeup) of these species’ tissues.
English ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903–1991) was son of a mineralogist (at Cambridge University), and he eventually introduced Vernadsky's biosphere concept (available in French translation) to an English‐language audience while a professor at Yale University (Slack :171–173, Egerton :229). The American Museum of Natural History funded Hutchinson's 1940s “exhaustive study” of the biogeochemistry of aluminum (Slack :175). Later, Hutchinson traced different kinds of molecules through their biogeochemical cycles, which he diagramed (Hutchinson :50–51). He was influential both in publications and in students he trained, including Howard T(homas) Odum (1924–2002), younger brother of ecologist Eugene P(lesants) Odum (1913–2002). Howard was an excellent student and became an outstanding scientist (Taylor , Hall , Brown and Hall ). Howard took “the gospel” from Yale to his already notable older brother Eugene (Craige , Cevasco ), who, at the University of Georgia, was busy writing a textbook (published 1953). Eugene absorbed Howard's biogeochemistry and offered to list him as coauthor. Howard declined, feeling that would give him more credit than was due, suggesting instead he be listed as writing two chapters; that was done, and he was acknowledged as having also critiqued the whole manuscript (Craige :40–41). After publication, Howard decided, after all, that his contribution deserved mention on the title page, which was done in the second edition (1959—the edition used to teach me ecology in 1959). Gene Likens commented on this edition (2001:311): “This book reached a generation of ecologists with its clear statement of what an ecosystem is and how it functions. Conceptually, the treatment was very powerful.”
Midwesterner Gene Likens (b. 1935), whom we met before as a student in limnology under Art Hasler, taught at Dartmouth College, 1961–69, and collaborated with Professor of Plant Ecology and Forestry Herman Bormann (1922–2012) (Egerton ,b:83–87). One product of their investigation (centered on Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, New Hampshire) was a multidisciplinary treatise written with three other specialists, Biogeochemistry of a Forested Ecosystem (Likens et al. ). Its chapters addressed hydrology, chemistry, input–output budgets, weathering, nutrient cycles, and northern hardwood ecosystem at Hubbard Brook in relation to other forested ecosystems. Two years later, Bormann and Likens put that achievement into a larger context: Pattern and Process in a Forested Ecosystem (1979).
Soils
Although soils have been examined sporadically since antiquity, Charles Darwin's The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of Worms (1881) was the earliest detailed research into the significance of earthworms for contributing to soil fertility. He cited earlier, less comprehensive studies from the 1860s and 1870s. He was intrigued by the fact that earthworm castings and diggings can bury rocks and other objects over centuries. Later, zoologists and soil scientists studied an extensive fauna in soils, and in 1958, the International Society of Soil Science appointed a Soil Zoology Committee to convene a Colloquium on Research Methods, which assembled authors of 47 papers on Progress in Soil Zoology, July 10–14 at Rothamsted Experimental Station in England. The papers, by British and Continental authors, were later published (Murphy ) and became a valued reference. In the same year, German zoologist Friedrich Schaller wrote a very brief textbook in German, later translated into English (1968), with numerous illustrations (drawings and photographs) but no citations. After more progress, J.B. Cragg, British Nature Conservancy, began organizing a volume of 17 chapters, Soil Biology, and he recruited A. Burges, New University of Ulster, to edit microbiological and botanical chapters, and F. Raw, Rothamsted Experimental Station, to edit zoological chapters. It was published by Academic Press and could be used as a reference, or maybe an ambitious graduate course (1967).
However, it has only been in more recent times that scientific knowledge of soil biology and geology has developed to a point where it became realistic to think of soils as an aspect of biosphere ecology. Two soil ecologists, Daniel D. Richter, Jr., Duke University, and Daniel Markewitz, formerly a doctoral student under Richter, now at the University of Georgia, have synthesized modern knowledge in Understanding Soil Change: Soil Sustainability Over Millennia, Centuries, and Decades (2001). They tell us that (Richter and Markewkitz :69): One of the most extraordinary outcomes of biological evolution has been the co‐evolution of soil and forest ecosystems. Soil and forest ecosystems have been major components of the biosphere for nearly 400 million years, since the Devonian period of the earth's history. While many biological species have long gone extinct, soil and forest systems have managed to sustain themselves over this enormous period, a time that has included widely fluctuating environments, cataclysmic geological events, and massive biological extinctions.
Before forests extended across continents during the Devonian, soil was unstable due to wind, ice, rain, and runoff. Tree roots and tree sizes stabilized soils, and the dead trees were broken down, allowing new growth, by soil bacteria, fungi, and multicellular animals. Since soil science is closely tied to agriculture, soil scientists primarily study the impact of agricultural practices upon soils. That history cannot be described here. Richter has recently turned his, and his research team's attention to strengthening research networks in biogeosciences, discussed below.
Gaia or Not?
More briefly than here, I previously discussed Gaia in part 52, on symbiosis (Egerton ,b:122–124). Englishman James Lovelock (b. 1919) was an independent scientist and independent thinker. He seemed uninfluenced by Vernadsky; his autobiography did not mention him, but did discuss development of thinking on Lovelock's original concept, Gaia (Lovelock ,b:253). Lovelock had not been a good student, because he wanted to learn on his own whatever interested him rather than assignments. After graduating from high school in 1938, he did not go on to a university, but joined a consulting firm (Murray, Bull, and Spencer, Ltd.) as a laboratory assistant (Lovelock ,b:37–39). That was a good environment for his intellectual development, because it included opportunities for inventiveness when solving problems, and he was a talented inventor. He also was interested in the physical sciences explaining the materials and processes with which he worked. Later, he attended Manchester University and graduated in 1941.
A book, Lovelock and Gaia, quoted (Turney :46) a passage from an English science fiction author, Olaf Stapledon, writer of Star Maker (1937), on its protagonist's thoughts about the Earth from space: “It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony, of a living thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as a creature alive…” Turney stated that when Lovelock was growing up, he was fond of science fiction and perhaps read Stapledon's earlier books, and so may also have read Star Maker when published.
Lovelock retrospectively concluded (2000:191): Perhaps the most important event in my life as a scientist was the moment in 1957 when, as a staff member of the National Institute for Medical Research, I stumbled on the electron capture detector (ECD). This simple device that fits easily into the palm of my hand was without doubt the midwife to the infant environmental movement. Without it we would not have discovered that chlorinated pesticides like DDT and dieldrin had spread everywhere in the world.
He equated the environmental movement with concern for pesticides. That was an important component of the movement, but by no means all of it. Michael Lannoo explored a different origin in Leopold's Shack and Ricketts's Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism (2010). Lovelock also used his ECD to discover that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were accumulating in the atmosphere. He did not take the next step of showing that CFCs were destroying the protective ozone layer of our atmosphere. That step was taken by chemists Molina and Rowland (), who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for explaining that, in 1995 (along with Paul J. Crutzen). Lovelock did mention this danger in his first book (1979:40): “There is the alleged threat posed by aerosols to the ozone layer, which if depleted would allow a flood of lethal ultra‐violet radiation from the sun to ‘destroy life on earth.’” Blue‐green algae, he stated, would be resistant to such radiation.
The context of Lovelock having a revelation that sent his research in a new direction was his advisory role at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in September, 1965, when news came in from France that both Mars and Venus had atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide. He then wondered what kept Earth's more complex atmosphere constant (Lovelock ,b:252–253): It came to me suddenly, just like a flash of enlightenment, that to persist and keep stable, something must be regulating the atmosphere and so keeping it at its constant composition. Moreover, if most of the gases came from living organisms, then life at the surface of the earth must be doing the regulation.
What Lovelock is describing here is how a broad‐ranging scientific mind works. Although he accumulated knowledge and expertise in atmospheric science, he did not think of himself as a specialist in any particular science.
He first announced his Gaia hypothesis in 1.5 pages of text + eight references (Lovelock ). The references seem to be supportive of his reasoning and not sources from which he worked to develop his ideas. He argued that living organisms had created Earth's atmosphere, and that if all life died, the atmosphere would decline in existing gases and evolve to a similarity to the atmospheres of Mars and Venus. His scientific agenda became investigating details of how living organisms regulate Earth's atmosphere.
Lovelock needed a biology collaborator. This person was Chicago native Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), who studied cell biology (University of Chicago, B.A., 1957, University of Wisconsin, M.S., 1960, University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1963) and achieved recognition by convincing her peers that cell organelles, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts, were originally bacteria that became imbedded in larger cells, through the process of endosymbiosis (Sapp :index, Wagensberg :12–13, Ruse :169–177, 191–198, Gray ). In 1970, she wanted to consult a scientist who was knowledgeable about the dynamics of oxygen in the atmosphere, and her husband, Carl Sagan, suggested his former colleague at JPL, James Lovelock (Lovelock 2000b:256). They met in Boston in 1971 and discovered they were likeminded. Their collaboration was displayed in two Gaian articles (Lovelock and Margulis , Margulis and Lovelock ).
In his first book, Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, Lovelock stated about early life (1979:29): “early environment of the first photosynthesizers is likely to have been a reducing one, rich in hydrogen and hydrogen‐bearing molecules…. Food for some species of primaevals may have been oxidizing substances.” One would expect him to emphasize the reciprocal gas exchange between plants and animals, with each of their waste gases being essential for life of the other, but I have not found where he did so. In Ages of Gaia, his conspicuous novelty was a hypothetical planet, Daisyworld, inhabited only by black daisies and white daisies and the question, what happened when temperature varied (1988:index)? It was a question which Gaians and skeptics could debate. In a later book, he addressed the question of the relationship between his Gaia theory and the contributions of his most important predecessors (Lovelock , but cited from edition 2, 2000:68): I am often asked what is new in Gaia theory that was not already expressed by the father of biogeochemistry, the Russian scientist, Vladimir Vernadsky, and by the discipline's greatest exponent, G.E. Hutchinson. The simple answer is that biogeochemistry differs from geophysiology in the same way that a platonic friendship differs from a happy marriage. In biogeochemistry, organisms and their material environment are recognized as coexisting and coevolving but still separately, like friends. In geophysiology, the organisms and their environment are so tightly coupled that they constitute a single system, Gaia.
Gorham cited numerous examples that illustrate Lovelock's claim about biogeochemistry (1991:231, 235), including G. Evelyn Hutchinson and V.T. Bowen, A Direct Determination of the Phosphorus Cycle in a Small Lake (1947) and Alfred C. Redfield, The Biological Control of Chemical Factors in the Environment (1958).
Gaia seems to me to be a new version of the balance of nature (Visvader ); however, with its great details, it differs from earlier versions of the balance of nature that were skimpily documented (Egerton ). Lovelock supplemented his initial 164‐page book with several others: The Ages of Gaia: a Biography of Our Living Earth (1988), Gaia: the Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (1991, edition 2, 2000), Homage to Gaia: the Life of an Independent Scientist (2000), and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: a Final Warning (2009). Other authors have taken up Gaia in their own books: Norman Myers, editor, Gaia: an Atlas of Planetary Management (1984), Lawrence E. Joseph, Gaia: the Growth of an Idea (1990), Tyler Volk, Gaia's Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth (1998, edition 2, 2003), Jon Turney, Lovelock and Gaia: Signs of Life (2003). On the other hand, Vaclav Smil's Cycles of Life: Civilization and the Biosphere (1997, edition 2, 2001) cited Lovelock only in passing, for one report: “that DMS [dimethyl sulphide] emissions may help to balance the oceanic sulfur cycle” (p. 168).
Stephen Schneider, an American climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (1945–2010), was born in New York City. He earned three degrees in mechanical engineering from Columbia University (B.S., 1966, M.S., 1967, Ph.D., 1971), then won a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where he studied greenhouse gases, aerosols, and suspended particles in the atmosphere (Howe :97–103). He found that suspended aerosols and suspended particles counteracted the warming caused by CO2. However, aided by new computer power, he and colleagues found that the impact of CO2 was greater than aerosols and particles in the atmosphere. By the end of the 1970s, that became the consensus of atmospheric scientists. Schneider, with Randi Londer, wrote The Coevolution of Climate and Life (1984), which was much longer than Smil's book, and they cited Lovelock, sometimes alone, sometimes with Margulis, a few times as providing alternative explanations; they wrote in a neutral tone, neither supporting nor attacking them. Schneider's own belief was that organisms influence climate without regulating it. Later, Schneider proposed to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) that it sponsor a conference to explore Gaian theory. AGU agreed, and it was held at San Diego in March 1988. Ecologists and microbiologists joined earth scientists to ponder the multidisciplinary aspects of Lovelock's theory. Papers delivered there, updated, appeared in print three years later (Schneider and Boston ). Lovelock had looked forward to it as a fruitful meeting of mind, and was disappointed at the attacks (Lovelock :32–33). The attacks amounted to (Turney :94): “What is true about Gaia is not new, and what is new is not true.” However, all of the papers were not in opposition, and Englishman Jon Turney thought the conference book was a positive contribution. Furthermore, Lovelock had his second Gaia book due for publication in 1988, after the conference, and to a limited extent he was able to respond to some of his critics in Ages of Gaia. The 44 conference papers, prepared by 173 participants, edited by Schneider and Penelope Boston is in large format and is an impressive volume, published by MIT Press. No grand theory or conclusion emerged, but the focus of the conference led to production of important investigations that pushed earth system science to broader horizons.
Also, Lovelock was not a rigid fanatic; he noted criticisms and his thinking evolved. As one of his commentators explained (Turney :111–112): Lovelock, for his part, eventually wanted to contribute to a discussion in which the premise was not necessarily that the Earth is alive, but that some aspects of the Earth's systems bear comparison with a giant organism. That would afford scope for the discussion to turn into a research programme investigating exactly which aspects of Earth work this way.
Margulis disliked the notion that the earth was alive and offered an alternative in her The Symbiotic Planet (1998, quoted in Turney :112): “Gaia is the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth's surface.” Lovelock responded to such alternatives by coining new terms, geophysiology and planetary medicine—neither of which goes as far from his original Gaia concept, as Margulis suggested.
New York University Professor of Biology Tyler Volk (b. 1950), who worked with NASA, borrowed Lovelock's concept, if not exact wording, in writing Gaia's Body: toward a Physiology of Earth (1998). He had participated, in March 1996, in a three‐day Gaia conference at Oxford University. In his book's preface, he hastened to explain (1998:viii–ix): “I will not weave detailed arguments for or against the idea that Earth is alive, that Gaia self‐regulates, and that it is a self‐sustaining organism, or perhaps quasi‐organism.” He considered Gaia simply “the interacting systems of life, soil, atmosphere, and ocean.” But, it has its own operating rules, which are not fully understood. For example, how does Earth maintain its atmospheric level of oxygen at 21 percent? Volk's own research for NASA was on the role life plays in chemical cycles, which research led him to examine Gaian theory. In the northern hemisphere, the absorption of carbon dioxide in deciduous plants varies seasonally, and the amount of it in the atmosphere also varies seasonally. Since humans impact Earth's system through combustion, logging, agriculture, and other ways, there are urgent reasons to understand Gaia better.
The American Geophysical Union cosponsored a second Gaian conference in 2000 with University of Valencia, held in Valencia, Spain. Confidence in the ability of life to stabilize Earth's climate was shaken by recent studies on early ice ages. MIT Press again published the conference papers, which numbered 31, with 55 participants listed (Schneider et al. ). Both Lovelock and Margulis were participants and (separately) introduced this volume. Another conference, on a related theme, met in July 2001 in Amsterdam, sponsored by four international organizations focused upon global climate. Their Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, endorsed by over 1,000 delegates, stated (Turney :139): “The Earth System behaves as a single, self‐regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components.” That encouraged Lovelock to publish in Nature a two‐page summary of progress in his defense of Gaian theory since 1980 (Lovelock ).
Australian mammalogist and environmentalist Tim Flannery provided a sympathetic account of Lovelock's Gaia in The Weather Makers (2005:13–18), stating that his own book is more compatible to a Gaian approach than a reductionist approach.
However, there is a third option which English ecologist Toby Tyrrell explored in On Gaia: a Critical Investigation of the Relationship between Life and Earth (2013). Some of his previous research was on topics which interested Lovelock, for example: “The Relative Influences of Nitrogen and Phosphorus on Oceanic Primary Production” (1999). Tyrrell stated that his arguments were influenced by the Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change. He thought there were three competing hypotheses which explained the relationship between life and the planetary environment: Gaia, a geological hypothesis, and a coevolution hypothesis. Gaia, discussed above, emphasized the influence of life upon the environment. The geological hypothesis depended upon continental drift, volcanic activity, and “fluctuations in mid‐ocean ridge spreading rates” (Tyrrell :8). The coevolution hypothesis focused upon evolutionary relationships between species, such as flowers and pollinators or predators and prey. Tyrrell discussed issues which Lovelock discussed and consistently found that coevolution explained them better than the other two contending explanations. He, therefore, rejected both Gaia and a geological hypothesis.
Simultaneously, a prominent English Darwinian philosopher, Michael Ruse, discussed The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (2013). He provided a brief history of positive and negative reaction to Lovelock and Margulis's Gaia publications; more negative than positive. Then, he recycled discussions from Philosophy 101 for a romp through history, from Plato to Rachel Carson, seeking philosophers and biologists’ thoughts akin to some of Lovelock and Margulis's ideas. Sprinkled throughout are comments from professionals he interviewed, or extracted from their manuscripts in libraries. Most of the ideas he discussed were close to pseudoscience or actually were pseudoscience. Gaian supporters, including Lovelock, tended to modify their claims to keep Gaia relevant. Ruse considered Gaia as having stimulated some research in new directions, but also as running out of steam. However, those two critics have not had the last word. Can symbiosis fit in here? Canadian biologist Jan Sapp apparently thought so in 1991, when he published “Living Together: Symbiosis and Cytoplasmic Inheritance” in Lynn Margulis and R. Fester, eds. Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation (1991). That paper by Sapp was a step toward his monograph, Evolution by Association: a History of Symbiosis (1994). His book did not exhaust Sapp's investigations on the subject, for in 2015 he published “On Symbiosis, Microbes, Kingdoms, and Domains.” At best, however, symbiosis is an indirect support for Gaian hypothesis/theory.
Earth system science
In 1989, Eugene Odum published Ecology and Our Endangered Life‐Support Systems, which he acknowledged was partly an updating of his textbook, but also partly written for a broader audience concerned for our threatened environment. Relevant here is its longest chapter, 5: “Material Cycles and Physical Conditions of Existence,” which updates biogeochemistry, and also devoted 3.5 pages to James Lovelock's Gaia (Odum :59–62), which is also about how much E. Odum discussed his brother Howard's work. He complemented Lovelock without rendering judgment on a limited version of his concept, but did reject the early version (Odum :61–62): “the earth is a superecosystem (but not a superorganism since its development is not genetically controlled).”
In 1997, four ecologists published in Science a survey of human transformations of Earth in four areas: land, oceans, biogeochemical cycles, and biotic changes (Vitousek et al. ). For documentation, they cited 58 references, but about half the references contain more than one source. Their inventory was not only useful at the time to those seeking to minimize damage in one of the four areas, but was also a benchmark against which later surveys could be compared to indicate positive or negative trends.
English ecology professor David Wilkinson estimated (2006:140) that the term Earth system science (ESS) arose at NASA during the mid‐1980s. English Biology Professor John Lawton, Biology Department, Imperial College, London, and also Chief Executive, UK Natural Environment Research Council, explained this new scientific science to a wider scientific world in an editorial in Science (2001). He gave due credit to Lovelock for persuading scientists to venture beyond their discipline boundaries to seek linkages between atmosphere, oceans, land, and biosphere. Although Lawton knew of no undergraduate courses, he could name graduate programs that “nurture this new discipline:” Penn State, University of California at Irvine, University of Maryland, Danish Center for Earth System Science, Potsdam Institute, and ETH in Zurich. There was also an International Geosphere‐Biosphere Program, which he considered underfunded. He considered ESS a vital science for guiding humanity during the 2000s. (In part 59 [Egerton :319–324], I discussed the rise of systems ecology during the 1960s, which is narrower in scope than Earth system science.)
Christian Lévêque, a French fish ecologist and Research Director of the Institut de Recherches pour le Développement, Paris, published a book in 2001, now in English translation as Ecology: from Ecosystem to Biosphere (2003), divided into four parts; part four is entitled Global Ecology. He cited in his bibliography a French translation (1990) of Lovelock's Ages of Gaia (1988). Lévêque's chapter 14 was on “Dynamics of the Biosphere,” headed with a quotation from Vernadsky's Biosphere (in French). Lévêque (:354) stated that interest in biosphere studies arose from concern for human modifications of it.
Appearing simultaneously with Lévêque's French text was Lennart Bengtsson and Claus Hammer, editors, Geosphere‐Biosphere Interactions and Climate (2001), with contributions from 13 European and 6 North American authors (not including European editors). Iain Prentice, “Interactions of Climate Change and the Terrestrial Biosphere” (2001:176–195) concerns conditions that influence exchange of gases; he mentioned “vegetation,” but no specific plants or ecosystems. This book was for practitioners, not introductory students.
On 25–30 May 2003, Freie Universität Berlin sponsored a Dahlem Workshop on Earth System Analysis for Sustainability, with some participants from all around the world, though most were from Germany, with UK and USA also being well represented. MIT Press, in cooperation with Dahlem University Press, published twenty papers from the workshop, Earth System Analysis for Sustainability (Schellnhuber et al. ). Despite this being a young science, its roots were in established sciences, and so it seemed practicable to press ahead with its applications. The workshop volume has twenty reports by forty authors. Its introductory report is by William Clark, Paul Crutzen, and Hans Schellnhuver, “Science for Global Sustainability: Toward a New Paradigm.” Since Crutzen had coined the name Anthropocene (with Stoermer 2000, alone, 2002), that is the name of their new paradigm, and they could already cite a paper (Ruddiman et al. ) that argued that this era began thousands of years ago.
These three authors argue that the scientific revolution they advocate follows in the tradition which Copernicus initiated (1543, not 1530). It is not a crucial matter, but Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) identified as scientific revolutions cases in which a new theory replaced an old theory. They have not presented the Anthropocene as a theory, nor have they identified a theory it replaced. As presented, it seems more appropriate to see the Anthropocene as conceptual progress (which does not make it any less important). The majority of reports in this volume do not invoke the Anthropocene; for example, “Human Footprints in the Ecological Landscape” (Falkowski and Tchernov 2004); but four of them include Anthropocene in their titles, just two years after Crutzen defined it for a broad audience.
In 2006, Professor David Wilkinson, at Liverpool John Moores University, published Fundamental Processes in Ecology: an Earth Systems Approach, which accomplished what British academia has become known for; writing concise textbooks that are nevertheless thorough. Charles Elton set the example in 1927 with his animal ecology textbook. Wilkinson's earth systems approach is organized around processes, including energy flow, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling. Among those whom he thanked for assistance were Jim Lovelock and Tyler Volk, discussed above. His conclusions included this (Wilkinson :140–141): “A Gaian approach is a way of trying to organize a lot of information in a way that allows one to ask interesting, and hopefully useful, questions.” In other words, it can be a heuristic approach without being a theory.
Professor Bruce Clarke, Department of English, Texas Tech University, edited Earth, Life, and System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet (2015), which has some similarity to Schellnhuber et al. (), though with only ten chapters by ten authors. However, no chapter title mentioned either Anthropocene or Earth System, though book title mentioned “system” and one chapter title mentioned systems: “Sustainable Development: Living with Systems” (Oyama ). The author Susan Oyama is a social scientist who discussed “development systems” without biological details, except mentioning DNA. Other authors include scientists from several countries, some of whom are biologists.
Global warming
Prelude: phenology focus
Global warming is primarily an aspect of meteorology. However, before that complex science got under way, an interest in the more easily observable science of phenology arose, about correlating natural phenomena in particular locations with the climate in those places over time. We have already noted John Evelyn's suggested correlation between the extent of forests at a location and that place's climate (Fleming :27). Although no one may have undertaken research on that correlation immediately after he published on it in his Sylvia (1664), his idea was not forgotten, and an English family, Marsham, kept phenological data for over two centuries, 1736–1947 (Sparks and Carey ). Their records were initiated by naturalist Robert Marsham (1708–97), whose estate was just north of Norwich, Norfolk (Sparks and Carey :322). He became a member of the Royal Society of London in 1780, and published his Indications of Spring in its Philosophical Transactions in 1789, with 27 signs of spring. Marsham also corresponded with parson‐naturalist Gilbert White (1720–93), who also kept phenological records (Egerton 2007c).
In 1755, two observers in different countries recorded “calendars of flora:” Benjamin Stillingfleet in England, and Alexander Mal. Berger in Uppsala, Sweden. Stillingfleet compiled his at the Marsham estate, without explaining why the records already being compiled there did not suffice. For Berger, his effort was to obtain a doctorate under Carl Linnaeus's supervision. Berger's dissertation was published separately (1756), but also in a periodical edited by Linnaeus, Amoenitates Academicae, volume 4 (1760), which consisted of dissertations in Latin by his students and by himself. Stillingfleet translated and published eight of those dissertations, with his own contribution immediately following Berger's (Stillingfleet :249–317).
American Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) developed very broad interests in science (Bedini , Thomson ,b, :179–194, Dugatkin ). Owning a Virginia plantation, Monticello, he sought to determine local climate factors for when to plant crops and other related dates. He noted weather in his Garden Book, which he began in 1766, when he noted the opening of purple hyacinth on March 30 (Stoller :175–176). By 1775 his observations became systematic and continued through 1816. In 1780, while France was assisting the United States in their War of Independence, the French ambassador requested of each state information on its features. Jefferson agreed to do so for Virginia, which led to his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), which included in Query VII the state's climate (Jefferson :200–208). Jefferson's instructions in 1803 to Lewis and Clark were undoubtedly the first to implement such research in American exploration. They should observe (Cutright :2): Climate as characterized by the thermometer, by the proportion rainy, cloudy & clear days, by lightening, hail, snow, ice, by the access or recess of frost, by the winds prevailing at different seasons, the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flowers, or leaf, times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles, or insects.
Although not in chronological order, one Thoreau scholar wrote an essay that amounts to a history of phenology from Jefferson to Thoreau (Stoller ). Stoller omitted the 75‐year meteorological records kept by Salem, Massachusetts, resident Edward A. Holyoke (), which was only a record of temperatures, and so not phenological.
Harvard University medical faculty member Jacob Bigelow (1787–1879) also taught botany. In 1817 he corresponded with observers across America (= east of the Mississippi River) and published a table of dates of blooming of peach trees in eleven places, from Alabama to Montreal and Brunswick, Maine, covering 14° of latitude and 17° of longitude (Bigelow ). The difference between progress of seasons in north and in south was about 2.5 months, whereas there was little difference between longitudes east and west. Yale professor of chemistry and geology, Benjamin Silliman (1816–85) was just founding the American Journal of Science, and he included in its first issue (Silliman ) a summary of Bigelow's report, to which he added dates of blooming for London, Valencia, and Geneva for the sake of comparison with American data. Nor was the relevance of such information limited to agriculture. During the first half of the 1800s, a major theory of diseases was that they were caused by unfavorable changes in weather or in the climate of some places (Fleming :13–16).The Meteorological Society of London formed in 1823, but issued no publication until volume one of its Transactions appeared in 1839, in which John Ruskin stated that the Society aspired to organize meteorological observations worldwide. It never managed to do so, but in 1840, it published a rainfall map of England, using data from 52 stations (Fleming :35). The British Meteorological Society was founded in 1850 to establish a uniform national system of stations for regular reports. Afterward, there was so much meteorological study in Britain that later it inspired historical accounts (listed in Fleming :146). In 1863, France established a telegraphic system to forecast weather (Fleming :37). The German state of Palatine‐Bavaria established a Societas Meteorological Palatina in 1781, which lasted until 1795. Other German states also took such actions during the 1800s, notably the Prussian Meteorological Institute, established in 1847, with it expanding to all of Germany after Prussia united Germany in January 1871.
Englishman William Howitt (1792–1879) was son of a farmer, who married a Quaker and adopted that religion. At age 13, he wrote “An Address to Spring” which appeared in the Monthly Magazine. He became a professional author on various subjects. One of his books was The Book of the Seasons; or, the Calendar of Nature (1831).
Massachusetts native Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) lived his entire life in Concord (Walls , , Egerton , :151–156). His mother instilled her love of nature in her four children. At age 11 or 12, Henry indicated his developing outlook in an essay, “The Seasons,” with one paragraph per season (Thoreau :3). He attended Harvard University, and took the natural history course taught by librarian and entomologist Thaddeus William Harris. In 1836, Thoreau read Howitt's Book of the Seasons (1831). The book inspired an essay, in which Thoreau quoted Hewitt's phenological goals, followed by Thoreau's own paragraphs for every month of the year (Thoreau :26–36). In 1836, he began his habit of keeping a journal, which he continued doing for the rest of his life. In 1850, his interest in botany had developed to the point of his recording seasonal observations, to which he soon added comments on birds at different times of the year (Stoller :172–174, Harding :81–85, Taylor ). By 1852, he was aware of other Americans making similar observations and of the Smithsonian Institution coordinating collection of meteorological data (Fleming :41). Thoreau continued recording his phenological observations in his journal until 1858, but he did not send information to the Smithsonian Institution. Some of it appeared in his most famous work, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), which was an autobiographical “back to nature” experience. The rest of it appeared in his Journals and first published in four compiled volumes: Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888), and Autumn (1892).
Thoreau collected phenological data because he thought some insight might emerge from his data. That had not happened in 1858, when he stopped collecting it. However, he was correct in thinking insights might emerge from his data. Aldo Leopold first used Thoreau's data in 1947, and a surprising number of others followed his example, including Whitford (), Stoller (), Nijhuis , Miller‐Rushing and Primack (), Willis et al. ), Primack and Miller‐Rushing (), and Ellwood et al. ().
Coincidentally, Franklin B. Hough (1822–85), who would later become first head of U.S. Forests in Department of Agriculture, also collected phenological data in 1851–59, just when Thoreau was (Curran , , Egerton :10). Hough's data were published in 1864 in a Congressional document. Leopold cited his data (Leopold and Jones :83) without commenting upon this coincidence.
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) was educated at Yale to be a forester, but his main interest was in wildlife management, and in 1928, he left the U.S. Forest Service to study American game conditions for the Sporting Arms and Ammunitions Manufacturers’ Institute (Meine :256). He published his Report on a Game Survey of the North Central States in 1931. He could then use his findings as a basis for beginning his next project, a textbook, Game Management (1933), which established his reputation and helped him become the world's first professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin (Meine :307). He had been fond of the writings of Thoreau since his teens, and his readings would have predisposed him to become interested in phenology. His mother gave him a copy of the first published edition of Thoreau's Journal (14 volumes, 1906) as a wedding present (Meine :16, 128). Although he had begun keeping phenological records in 1935, his interest Increased in March 1938, while studying the sequence of events in natural history of woodcock (Meine :382). In 1945, he decided to organize his phenological observations into a detailed study, assisted by Elizabeth Jones, a botany student (Meine :471–472). He compared his findings, not with those of Thoreau, almost a century before, but with Hough's (Leopold and Jones :121). He found organizing his article to be a more complex challenge than he had anticipated (leading to collaboration with Jones), but publishing it in Ecological Monographs (1947) boosted his standing among ecologists, helping him become elected ESA vice president in 1947 and president in 1948 (Egerton ,b:55).
Phenology records of both Thoreau and Leopold were utilized in subsequent research (on Leopold, Bradley et al. , Wright and Bradley ). More generally, phenology seems to be flourishing; Miller‐Rushing and Primack () was one of six phenology papers in a Special Feature in Ecology (February 2008).
Global warming focus
French mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) was a skillful administrator at an early age, and Napoleon appreciated that talent and made use of it, allowing Fourier to be only a part‐time mathematician, until he was voted a member of the Académie des Sciences in 1817 (Grattan‐Guinness and Ravetz , Ravetz and Grattan‐Guinness :94). His early focus was on heat diffusion, on which he presented a long paper in 1807, and in 1822, he published Théorie analytique de la chaleur (Ravetz and Grattan‐Guinness :94–95, Fleming :55–64). Next, he turned his attention to heating of the Earth and concluded Earth heat originates from three sources (Fleming :60):
- Solar radiation, which is unequally distributed over the year and which produces the diversity of climates;
- the temperature communicated by interplanetary space irradiated by the light of innumerable stars; and
- heat from the interior of the Earth remaining from its formation.
He also explained that heat from sunlight penetrates the atmosphere more easily than heat reflected from the earth, which is now seen as the earliest reference to the greenhouse effect (Nuccitelli :1–2).
Englishman John Tyndall (1820–93) began his career in 1839 as a surveyor and engineer with the Irish Survey, then in 1842 with the English Survey, railroad surveys, in 1847 he taught mathematics and drawing at Queenwood College, where he met Edward Frankland, who persuaded him in 1848 to come to Germany and study mathematics and science (Tyndall , MacLeod , Jackson ). He earned a doctorate in mathematics at Marburg in 1850 (with a dissertation written in German). He then traveled to Berlin and met prominent scientists there. He returned to England, taught two years at Queenwood College and began publishing articles on magnetism and other aspects of physics. He became a prolific author for the rest of his life. He became interested in glaciers and took three trips to Switzerland to study them and published two papers on his findings, in 1857 and 1859 (Fleming :66–74, Weart :3–4). He discovered that in the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen did not block heat from sunlight bouncing back beyond the upper atmosphere, but that CO2 did inhibit heat from escaping (Nuccitelli :3–4). He summarized his findings in a lecture (Tyndall ).
Wilmington, Connecticut native Elias Loomis (1811–89) graduated from Yale College in 1830, and was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy (physics) at Western Reserve College in Ohio, 1836–44 (Newton , Kutzbach ). He later taught at several other colleges before going back to Yale in 1860 for the rest of his life. In 1846, he published an innovative weather map, which was generally adopted for weather predictions (Whitnah :4–8, Fleming :77–78, :50–51). He and an assistant compiled temperature data for New Haven, collected by several observers, 1779–1865, and found that its weather was quite stable (Loomis and Newton ). His A Treatise on Meteorology (1868) was probably the first textbook on that written in the United States. However, there were a few other U.S. meteorologists at that time, discussed by Whitnah () and Fleming (, ).
Modern concern for global warming originated with Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), who studied both physics and chemistry (Snelders , Fleming :74–82, McKibben :7–8, Weart :5–8, Flannery :27, 40, Nuccitelli :5–6). His father was an official at Uppsala University, and that is where Svante began his higher education. However, he did not find there a professor under whom he wanted to study and so continued his studies in Stockholm. In a long career he investigated numerous phenomena, discussed by Elizabeth Crawford, Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect (1996). His contribution to ionic theory won a Nobel Prize in 1903. His investigation of greenhouse effect began with (in English translation) “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” (Arrhenius ,b). In it he reviewed geological evidence of ice ages followed by warming to temperatures comparable to that in the present world. He calculated the CO2 concentrations which he thought would produce ice ages versus more current climate. He next cited the amount of coal produced annually, 500 million metric tons and estimated how much CO2 that amount of coal might yield in combustion. His study was an excellent start for research on global warming.
A fellow Scandinavian Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862–1951) from Christiania (now Oslo), Norway provided the next step (Pihl , Friedman , Fleming :13–75). Vilhelm, while still a boy, began helping his father, Professor Carl Anton Bjerknes, with hydrodynamics research, and the son soon began drawing his own conclusions. He began to study physics and mathematics at the University of Kristiana in 1880 and earned his M.S. degree in 1888. With a state scholarship, he went to Paris and attended Henri Poincaré's lectures on electrodynamics. Afterward, he went to the University of Bonn, in Germany, to become an assistant to Professor Heinrich Hertz for almost two years. They collaborated on important experimental studies. He then resumed his studies in Norway and earned his Ph.D. in 1892, with a dissertation on Elekttricitetsbevaegelsen i Hertz's primaere leder (Movement of Electricity in Hertz's Primary Conductor). In 1893, he joined the faculty of Stockholm's School of Engineering as lecturer on applied mechanics. In 1895, he became Professor of Applied Mechanics and Mathematical Physics at University of Stockholm. At the Stockholm Physics Society, he associated with Arrhenius. In 1898, Bjerknes lectured at the society on the circulation theorem and suggested its application to oceanic and atmospheric phenomena (Friedman :34). He was following closely in his father's footsteps, but applying hydrodynamic and electrodynamic insights to meteorology (Fleming :16–17). In 1904, he published “a landmark paper” (Fleming :24) on weather forecasting as a problem in physics, in Meteorologische Zeitschrift volume 21; Germany had published a professional meteorological journal for some two decades. In 1905, three scientists who shared his interests invited him to come lecture at Columbia University, and also to visit Washington, D.C., Yale, and Montreal. His visit was very fruitful for both him and the North Americans. After he returned to Scandinavia, he applied and received research grants from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which enabled him and three colleagues to publish Dynamic Meteorology and Hydrography (2 volumes, 1910–11).
Eventually, an English steam engineer, Guy Stewart Callendar (1898–1964), who worked for British Electrical and Allied Industries Research Association, collected temperature records from around the world and concluded that world temperature was increasing (McKibben :8, Weart :11, 18–19, Fleming , Nuccitelli :11–12). CO2 levels also seemed to be increasing, by 10% in 100 years, and he concluded that the latter caused the former (Callendar ). Although the atmosphere contained more CO2 than it had when Arrhenius published, scientists generally thought that the sea was a safety asset that absorbs excess CO2.
Toronto native Gilbert Plass (1920–2004) earned his B.S. degree in physics at Harvard University in 1941 and his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1947 (Fleming :121–125, Weart :23–25, Nuccitelli :13–14). His career developed at various institutions in the United States. His main researches culminated in his Infrared Physics and Engineering (1963). Along the way, he studied the infrared spectrum of CO2 and water vapor and concluded that if both CO2 and temperature in the atmosphere continued to increase, it would indicate that the former caused the latter (Plass ). His American Journal of Physics stated (1956c:376): Fifty years ago the carbon dioxide theory was perhaps the most widely held theory of climatic change, but in recent years it has had relatively few adherents. However, recent research suggests that the usual reasons for rejecting this theory are not valid. Therefore it seems appropriate to re‐examine the question of the influence of variations in the amount of carbon dioxide on the climate in order to see whether it can satisfactorily explain most of the known facts about world‐wide climatic change.
He then gave a concise history of past studies, with citations, by Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius, geological implications by T.C. Chamberlin in articles of 1897, 1898, and 1899, and W.H. Cloud on CO2 in association with N and He (1952). Other earlier studies are also cited later in his article.
Seattle native Roger Revelle (1909–91) earned his B.A. degree at Pomona College (1929) and his Ph.D. at the University of California (1936). His scientific contributions and his personality propelled him into scientific prominence (Fleming :122–126, Weart :27–31). By 1957, he was at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and collaborated with chemist Hans Suess on a study of “Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades.” Their review of the literature yielded no definite results, but they did find reasons to fear that the fuel consumption of modern times could cause unfavorable increase in global temperatures, since the capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2 seemed limited. They suggested (1957 as quoted in McKibben :42): “It therefore becomes of prime importance to determine the way in which carbon dioxide is partitioned between the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere and the lithosphere.”
To help with such research, Revelle initiated plans for an International Geophysical Year (IGY) for 1958. He had Pennsylvanian Charles David Keeling (1928–2005), who had studied chemistry at the University of Illinois (B.S. 1948) and Northwestern University (Ph.D. 1953) and had joined the Scripps Institute faculty in 1956—where he remained for 43 years—apply for IGY funding of a research station on the volcano Mauna Loa, two miles above sea level (Fleming :126–127, Weart :index). Keeling invented an instrument to measure the CO2 content in atmospheric samples and received funding for the Mauna Loa station, now run by the Earth System Research Laboratory, NOAH. Keeling initiated data collecting on yearly fluctuations of CO2 levels in March 1958 (Keeling ), which has been ongoing ever since, for more than five decades. It has also provided the meaningful data he, Revelle, and others wanted—the Keeling Curve (Flannery :24–25). In a eulogy after his death, a colleague suggested that it was the most important environmental data of the 1900s (in McKibben :44; see also Flannery :24–26), which is another challenge to Lovelock's claim to have started the environmental movement, though he might reply that his and Keeling's instruments came into use at the same time, but that Lovelock's electron capture detector (ECD) produced significant results before Keeling's instrument did. Keeling and his supporters might agree, but also point out that his data fulfilled expectations from the start, and continued doing so. Weart :38): “Keeling's data put the capstone on the structure built by Tyndall, Arrhenius, Callendar, Plass, and Revelle and Suess.”
American Professor Reid Bryson (b. 1940–2008), University of Wisconsin, was a prominent climatologist when he collaborated with professional writer Thomas J. Murray to publish Climates of Hunger: Mankind and the World's Changing Weather (1977). He commented that the greenhouse effect was a well‐known potential danger, to be caused by increasing CO2, caused by industry and cars (Bryson and Murray :144–152). However, he did not think data were sufficient to declare it an immediate danger, since volcanic eruptions and particulate pollutants from human activity countered the effects of CO2. Equally prominent English climatologist H(ubert) H(orace) Lamb (1913–97) wrote Climate, History and the Modern World (1982), and the five years since Bryson's book appeared had not yielded more decisive evidence.
Enlarge this image.(a) Charles David Keeling, receiving the Medal of Science. (b) The Keeling Curve. Wikipedia.
Iowan James Hansen (b. 1941) studied physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa, where he earned three degrees: B.S, 1963, M.S., 1965, Ph.D., 1967 (Bowen :71–78). He then joined the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and studied the atmosphere of Venus, later of Earth. He served as head of the Goddard Institute in 1981–2013. He and six colleagues conducted a study of “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” in Science, with alarming discoveries (1981:966): The global warming projected for the next century is of almost unprecedented magnitude. On the basis of our model calculations, we estimate it to be −2.5°C for a scenario with slow energy growth and a mixture of nonfossil and fossil fuels. This would exceed the temperature during the altithermal (6,000 years ago) and the previous (Eemian) interglacial period 125,000 years ago and would approach the warmth of the Mesozoic, the age of the dinosaurs.
That estimate would be refined later (Nuccitelli :33–36). In 1988, he was asked to testify before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. On June 23, he testified that “global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And… the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to affect the probability of extreme events such as heat waves” (Hansen ).
In 1632, when Galileo published Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the Catholic Church reacted negatively, and in 1859 when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, many Christians reacted negatively. When Hansen reported his findings to Congress in 1988, there were no religious concerns expressed, but energy companies took notice. Two months after Hansen reported to Congress, he and his research team of seven other scientists published “Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three‐dimensional model.” The Goddard Institute would have had the very latest advances in computer technology, in the hands of well‐educated scientists. Members of Congress, who would never dream of challenging a report from the National Institutes of Health, were willing to parrot skepticism from their paymasters in energy companies of scientific conclusions on such a complex subject. Talking points often came from propagandists also funded by energy companies (Nuccitelli :38). Thus, Hansen's message did not have as much impact as it deserved, yet far more impact than two previous testimonies, which Richard Besel has explained (2013:137): “Hansen successfully accommodated his rhetoric to his non‐scientist audience…” However, one may wonder whether he had not also done this in previous testimonies. I suggest that his having persisted with the same basic message in all three testimonies must have carried some weight, and also the fact that most climatologists were offering similar messages.
However, in 1988, the United Nations also established its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide the world's leading climate scientists with an organization to discuss relevant issues and achieve an impartial consensus on interpreting recent scientific data for member countries. The UN had had earlier experience in coping with acid rain and ozone depletion in the atmosphere (Howe :147–152). In 1995, IPCC filled a dozen pages with its “Summary for Policymakers: the Science of Climate Change,” which fully supported Hansen's conclusions that global warming is real, manmade, ongoing, and potentially catastrophic (In McKibben :55–67). Like all sensible scientists, however, Hansen and his team never claimed either infallibility or that their focus was not on a very complex subject. In August 1998, he and team published “Global Climate Data and Models: a Reconciliation” to clear up a contradiction between two sets of data. Skeptics no doubt smiled, but close scrutiny identified the problem (Hansen et al. :930): “The oversight was failure to account for decay of satellite altitude caused by atmospheric drag.”
For those who appreciated the dilemma of humans behaving self‐destructively by causing global warming with combustion of fuels, environmental education became important. A leader in this response was William E. (Bill) McKibben (b. 1960), son of an editor at the Boston Globe and Harvard graduate. After graduating in 1982, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker, 1982–87, then resigned to become a freelance author. In December 1988, he published a review of four publications on global warming in the New York Review of Books (online), which he introduced with a brief sketch of studies on the subject from Arrhenius to Hansen's report to Congress. It was a first step toward McKibben's The End of Nature (1989), which is now translated into over 20 languages. As a paperback of 220 pages (2006 edition), why was it taken so seriously? Obviously, McKibben is skilled at marshaling arguments, and his reputation was based upon seven previous books.
Albert Gore, Jr. (b. 1948) had parents from Tennessee, but his father was a Congressman, and he grew up in Washington, D.C. during the school year and worked on the family farm near Carthage, during summers. He graduated from Harvard University (1969), joined the Army and served in Vietnam as a journalist. At Harvard he had taken a course under Revelle, which had awakened his concern for the environment. He attended Vanderbilt University Law School in 1974, but dropped out in 1976 to run for his father's former seat in Congress and won (1976). After three terms in the House, he ran for Senate in 1984, where he remained until 1993. In 1992, he published Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit and he also joined Bill Clinton as vice president candidate, and they won. In 1997, while Vice President, he attended a global climate change conference in Kyoto, Japan, where he spoke (in McKibben :127–132) and led the U.S. delegation in signing the Kyoto Protocol (in Howe :255–263, Acot , :118–122). However, Congress never ratified it.
In 1993–98, an encyclopedia of the biosphere appeared in Spain, which Trevor Foskett translated into English, with Ramon Folch as project director, Encyclopedia of Biosphere (11 volumes, 2000). It is very well illustrated, and half of volume 11 is on history of science leading up to biosphere science. It is written for a general (college‐educated) audience. One expects to find it in large public libraries.
After being declared the loser of the 2000 US presidential election by the Supreme Court, Gore began giving illustrated talks on global warming around the world, which he turned into a movie that won an Academy Award. He also published it as a book: An Inconvenient Truth (2006). He won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work. Gore continues to publish on global warming (2007, 2013). Similar to An Inconvenient Truth is Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolf, eds. Climate change: picturing the science (2009), though it has multiple authors, contains more discussion, and has fewer illustrations.
The Dutch physical scientist Paul Crutzen collaborated with Eugenr Stoermer (2000) to announce to colleagues in a professional newsletter (and Crutzen alone in Nature, 2002) that humans were having such a pervasive influence on the global environment that we have gone beyond the Holocene geologic era into an Anthropocene era. The most serious impact of humanity in this new era was, of course, global warming, though generation of pollutants was also a serious danger. Two French scholars have explored the implications of the Anthropocene era from various perspectives (Bonneuil and Fressoz , English, 2016).
A historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, decided (2004) to investigate the fuel industry's claim, which news media largely accepted, that global warming science was still uncertain, with science skeptics still having credibility. (The tobacco industry had used this tactic of skepticism during the 1950s and 1960s to weaken acceptance of public health claims about dangers of smoking.) She examined 928 scientific papers on the subject and found that 75% either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view, 25% took no position on anthropogenic climate change, and no papers expressing skepticism of the consensus.
The discussions after Hansen's testimony to Congress in 1988 had seemed promising, yet, legislatively, little changed. In 2005, he was invited to give a Keeling Memorial Lecture at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. In contrast to Congress, the scientists at the Goddard Center under Hansen had made impressive progress in the intervening 17 years, and so he could be more precise in his evaluation of global warming: a further increase in average global temperature by 1°C would make the Earth warmer than it had been for a million years, and if the warming increased to 2 or 3°C, Earth would become a different planet (quoted in Bowen :4). The George W. Bush Administration was not favorably impressed.
The Ecological Society of America has sponsored almost two decades in planning and construction of 47 terrestrial and 34 aquatic field stations for a National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Sharon Collinge, new Chief Scientist/Observatory Director, states (2018) that nearly 300 ecologists are in deserts, grasslands, forests, and streams, measuring over 180 kinds of data. NEON's web site (
From the start of warnings to the public about global warming, energy industries have feared government responses to limit their operations and pollutions. Their own responses have usually been to find scientists who were willing to announce their skepticism of scientific consensuses on such dangers. That has gone on, more or less, for decades. There is a well‐endowed conservative think tank in Chicago, The Heartland Institute, which sponsored and publicized such skepticism. In 2013, it synthesized its findings in a hefty volume, Climate Change Reconsidered: Physical Science, Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer, authors‐editors. In 2014, it published Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts (same authors). Since 2014, The Institute has published occasionally updated pamphlets. Both paperback volumes, the Institute stated, were published for Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Not surprisingly, NIPCC often challenged judgments of IPCC, as in its more concise Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming: the NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus (Idso et al. ). The Heartland Institute sent me all three volumes gratis.
An ironic recent development led news authors Justin Worland and N.M. Hobbs to explain how “Oil Companies See Green” (2018). Occidental Petroleum (“Oxy”) in Texas now pumps CO2 underground to free up deep oil deposits. Oxy estimates it annually stores as much CO2 underground as Hawaii or Maine emit per year, a nice feat, but not enough to get environmentalists to stop trying to shut down energy companies. So, some companies formed Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), which promises $1 billion to fund other means to reduce greenhouse emissions. If you cannot beat them, join them!
Environmental organizations deserve much credit for this, but Capuchin Franciscan friar Michael Crosby, Milwaukee, also deserves some credit. Since the 1970s, when he took on the cigarette industry, he has bought shares in socially irresponsible corporations so he can attend annual meetings and publicize their shortcomings and demand change (Content ). In 2017, he convinced ExxonMobil to add a climate change scientist to its board of directors. ExxonMobil perhaps thought that by planning, in partnership with Saudi Arabian petrochemical giant SABIC, to invest $10 billion to build the world's largest plastics plant at Portland, a Houston suburb with a large Black community, that it would lessen air pollution from cars, in a time of growing popularity of electric cars (Feltz ). However, residents of the region countered that the proposed facility would be in an area prone to both floods and hurricanes. Plastics pollution of oceans is also an important concern, portrayed in a “60 Minutes” program aired on CBS TV in December 2018, and Renée Feltz (:46) also expressed concern over plastics pollution.
IPCC issued a report on the Paris climate agreement that an increase in average world temperature of 1.5°C (the lowest the Paris agreement would attempt to achieve) would still be disastrous, and is likely to be reached in the next decade (Kolbert ). President Trump responded: “I want to look at who drew it—you know, which group drew it.” This indicates he had never heard of the International Panel on Climate Change. The next day, as Hurricane Michael struck Florida, he flew to Pennsylvania to campaign for a climate‐change‐denying Congressman. Meanwhile, his Administration was attempting to weaken vehicle gas emissions regulations. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then an Appeals Court judge, sided with the Administration, and the Supreme Court declined a further appeal.
Yet, IPPC goes marching on. It published a report in early October 2018 (whether before or after the OGCI statement is unknown to me) written by 91 scientists from 40 countries, which urges strict adherence to the 1.5°C goal and more quickly than previously set (McKibben ,b). Biosphere scientists, of course, have their own say. Two eminent examples are papers of multiple international authorship in 2018 and a third with two English authors: Daniel Richter et al., “Ideas and Perspectives: Strengthening the Biogeosciences in Environmental Research Networks;” Heather Tallis et al., “An Attainable Global Vision for Conservation and Human Well‐Being,” Thomas Ings and Joseph Hawes, “The History of Ecological Networks.” Richter et al. appeared in Biogeosciences, Tallis et al. in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, and Ings and Hawes is in a volume on Ecological Networks in the Tropics (2018). By ecological networks, Ings and Hawes mean food webs, not organizations of ecologists.
Tallis et al. () address an extremely difficult challenge, theoretically attainable, but in practice not at all certain, since it requires a disciplined and cooperative world society. Their goal is a world in which both people and nature thrive. They concede that meat consumption will remain the same as it is now, which I view as rather indulgent. Their scenario depends upon both food and energy production increasing by slightly over 50%, while protecting existing natural habitats.
Conclusions
Global ecology is a synthesis of many specialties within ecology and related sciences, such as meteorology. Therefore, it depended upon maturity of those specialties and related sciences to the point when they could contribute to the larger endeavor. This history begins with the question, what makes plants grow? We now say that question is within plant physiology, but the interchange of plants and their chemical environment is clearly important for global ecology. Its history is traced here from 400s A.D. to 1804. During the 1700s, plant growth understanding came to depend upon chemical understanding.
Toward the end of the later 1700s, global questions interested James Hutton, and slightly later, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. However, aside from Hutton's friend, John Playfair, they had no immediate followers, because scientific progress was not far enough along for others to consider global research.
Studies of food chains and food webs, like plant growth studies, began as isolated studies during early 1700s and became relevant for global ecology only after it achieved some maturity during early 1900s.
A convenient category, Earth Moving, bears some similarity to my Global Questions category, in that it only contains two scientists, but these two, living a century later, have more definite theories. Milankovich's theory tied Earth climate to three long‐term motions of Earth around the Sun in addition to its daily spin and annual movement around the sun. Wegener's theory was called “continental drift” when announced, but later was also called “plate tectonics,” since many Earth movements were smaller geographically than a continent.
Ecosystem studies are obvious steps toward global ecology, since global ecology is a collection of all ecosystems, though it would be impractical to take this as an approach to studying global ecology. Biogeochemistry was a new science during the 1800s, with Dumas and Suess representing progressions toward it. Mayer's studies on plants converting light energy into chemical energy during photosynthesis was a version of the first law of thermodynamics, and seems relevant here, though others turned his insight into a general law. Darwin's worm book was less obviously a step in this direction, since it lacks chemistry. However, Crist argues his book provides an example of geophysiology, though not the name.
Russian geochemist Vernadsky formally organized biogeochemistry into a formal science and publicized it. Americans built upon his foundation: Hutchinson, E. Odum and H. Odum. Astro‐geochemist James Lovelock led global ecology in a new direction in 1970s–80s, which he named Gaia. He placed greater emphasis upon life's effects on Earth and its environment than did biogeochemistry. Whether Gaia was hypothesis or theory was debated. Gaia attracted attention from scientists in several fields, symposia were held, and those who still valued it by the 1990s usually viewed it as a point of view rather than a theory.
A distinction between biogeochemistry and Earth system science may be difficult to find, and where does a multi‐author book, Geosphere‐Biosphere Interactions and Climate (2001) fit? David Wilkinson organized this ecology textbook around Earth system science. His concept of it focused upon processes, including energy flow, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycles.
The most controversial aspect of biosphere ecology, by far, is global warming. Although, as in other sciences, disagreements arise about how to interpret scientific data, most of the controversy has arisen from outside science, from determined energy company‐funded smoke screens which have allowed legislators to discount alarms from “an inconvenient science” (modifying Gore's book title). However, by 2018, energy companies realized they cannot keep that charade going indefinitely, and their Oil and Gas Climate Initiative has promised to donate $1 billion to research combatting global warming.
Acknowledgments
Dr. Jean‐Marc Drouin and Dr. Anne‐Marie Drouin‐Hans for J.‐M. Drouin's pdf copy of paper on plant physiology and for their comments on this part of my history. Prof. Emeritus Stanley A. Temple for a copy of Ellwood et al. (). Jennifer Dunne for a copy of her paper on food webs (2006) and for reference to Layman et al. (). Dr. Thomas C. Inge for a copy of his and Joseph E. Hawes’ paper on history of ecological networks (2018). Professor Daniel D. Richter for a paper by him and his coauthors on environmental research networks.
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