Our history

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) celebrated its centennial in August 2015. In addition to inviting synthetic articles for its journals and the ESA Bulletin , commissioning videos, and helping to organize events for the largest annual ESA meeting ever, the ESA ’ s Centennial Planning Committee and subsequent Centennial Implementation Committee (full disclosure: I was a member of the former but not the latter) discussed with Frank Egerton the desirability for a booklength history of the society itself. Professor Egerton is a wellknown historian of ecology, and his longrunning and still ongoing series of articles in the ESA Bulletin on the history of the discipline highlights his deep engagement with, and careful thought about, the nuanced history of ecology, ecologists, and their interaction with the policy analysts and decision makers outside of the academy. In opening his Centennial history , Egerton writes that his “purpose has been to write an evenhanded, accurate, and interesting history” (p. xvii) that can be thought of “as a conversation with earlier colleagues” (p. xviii). Through a series of 38 “ecoSketches” of prominent ESA members, Egerton relates a history of ESA through the lifestories of a handful of the thousands of ecologists who have created the scientifi c discipline and intellectual culture within Society. The subjects of these ecoSketches include some of ESA ’ s founders and pastpresidents, individuals whose writings have had lasting infl uence on the fi eld, and a few who pushed the discipline from academics into the public arena. The genderbalance of individuals chosen for profi les refl ects the history of the discipline: all but three are men (the exceptional 10% are E. Lucy Braun, Jane Lubchenco, and Margaret Davis). But the integration of the ecoSketches into the main text—offset as full pagewidth textboxes—is uneven. Their placement breaks up the main narrative, their stories don ’ t consistently cohere with it, and there is no obvious ordering to them (Egerton asserts on p. xviii that they are ordered chronologically by birth dates, but such ordering only occurs in the fi rst chapter). At the same time, the ecoSketches are the most engaging parts of this slim volume. Science—and Ecology is no exception—is done by people working with other people, communicating results to still more people. Whether we escape to our remote fi eld stations to study obscure organisms in pristine sites; work to describe, conserve, and protect “natural” areas; or spend endless hours coding and recoding abstruse simulation models, our work is still a human endeavor. So I relished the stories of the ecologists from Forrest Shreve (whose rarelyremembered or cited M.Sc. work on the morphology and development of the northern pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea is close to my own intellectual heart) and Victor Shelford (founder of the ESA and coeditor with Shreve of Naturalist ’ s guide to the Americas [1926; Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, Maryland]) to Margaret Davis (whose many thoughtprovoking but ultimately incorrect yet eminently testable hypotheses and theories spurred remarkable developments in paleoecology) and Jane Lubchenco (who has done more, in my opinion, than any other ecologist to bring Ecology into the halls of power). Their lives, even encapsulated in single paragraphs summarizing their curricula vitarum , are interesting, engaging, and worth retelling and remembering The longer narrative history unfortunately pales in comparison. Egerton has done a yeoman ’ s job slogging through the obscure nooks and crannies of the ESA Bulletin , combing the Book Reviews published in Ecology , and examining the ongoing run of Frontiers for clues to the complex machinations behind the evolution and development of the ESA. The result reveals little that is new but has the virtue of putting it all in one place. We relearn of early fi eld stations and centers of ecology, and the classic academic genealogical trees of G. Evelyn Hutchinson and Howard T. Odum are reprinted yet again (it would have been easier just to point the reader to the much more informationrich academictree. org). The alphabet soup of programs spawned with ESA involvement, including the IBP (International Biological Program and its successor INTECOL (the International Association for Ecology), NIE and TIE (the proposed National Institute of Ecology and, as implemented, The Institute of Ecology), LTER (Long Term Ecological Research), SBI (Sustainable Biosphere Initiative), NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network), and SEEDS (Strategies for Education in Ecology, Development, and Sustainability) are described in degrees ranging from a sentence or two to dozens of pages. The haphazard, adhoc nature of the organization and development of ESA (which is by no means unique among scientifi c societies or other professional groups in this regard) is mirrored in the choppy writing, rough transitions between paragraphs, and unnecessary repetition of random facts and events. The text is also marred by more than a fair share of errors that should have been caught by a copyeditor, proofreader, or indexer. A few examples include: dropped direct objects (e.g., in the ecoSketch of Herb Bormann, Egerton writes “he discovered that the Duke forestry had methods of measuring them not being used by ecologists.” [p. 84]); the J. J. Andrews Experimental Forest rather than the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest (p. 88); INTERCOL for INTECOL (p. 97); an incongruent number of LTER sites (27 in Figure 5.4 on p. 122 vs. 26 on p. 172) and ecoSketches (37 in the Introduction, p. xviii vs. 38 in the book); and misspelling of the names of Cooper Award winners Stephen Hubbell and Glenn Motzkin (p. 212). In these days when we value rapid publication over considered prose, publishers have laid off copyeditors, and indexing is a vanishing art, errors like these proliferate like mushrooms after a midsummer rain. After the mushrooms fruit and wither, however, the hyphae remain. It will be from such interacting webs that new developments in ecology, and new directions for the ESA will emerge. Frank Egerton has done ESA a great service in pulling together all of this information about the history of the society in one place. Ecologists should read the book Book Review