We’ve explored the origins of modern biology, the earth sciences, and even the sciences
of outer space.
Now it’s time to put these disciplines together.
Starting around 1900—but picking up during the Cold War—scientists looked beyond individual
species and ask questions about how whole systems of living and nonliving things change
together over time.
Where geneticists looked to model evolution in the laboratory, these nature-focused, systems-thinking
scientists looked to bring laboratory-style research—meaning reproducible and empirical—into
the literal field.
It’s the birth of ecology and earth systems science!
[Intro Music Plays]
As with other “modern” disciplines, ecology
has lots of roots in different places and times, but it became a formal science in the
late 1800s and early 1900s.
The detailed, wide-ranging, and data-driven work of Darwin, Wallace and others inspired
other life science researchers to travel and observe the complexities of the living world.
And Darwin’s German hype-man, biologist Ernst Haeckel, coined the
word ecology, This means the study of the oikos, meaning home—or, metaphorically,
the environment.
Haeckel introduced popular readers to many environments in his masterwork of scientific
illustration, Art Forms in Nature.
But okay—what exactly would doing a science of the environment look like?
It would involve studying life and the nonliving things that affect life like water and soil.
Mediating between living and nonliving things are nutrients like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen,
which cycle in and out of organisms in different ways.
So early ecologists tended to include both life scientists like Haeckel and earth scientists;
as well as those studying evolution, like geneticists working on flies, and those studying
landscapes, like botanists.
Botanical gardens remained key places to conduct research, as did natural history museums that
collected bones, fossils, and preserved specimens in jars.
Bones could be compared to bones, leaves to leaves, and so on.
Mexican-American Ynes Mexia started fieldwork at the age of fifty one… and went on to
collect more than 150,000 wild botanical specimens, at least five hundred of which were new species.
And her work is still being processed!
Meanwhile, Russian-Ukrainian polymath Vladimir Vernadsky pioneered ways
to analyze nature holistically.
One was geochemistry, or using the methods of chemistry to understand minerals.
Another was biogeochemistry, which analyzes living and nonliving processes.
Vernadsky promoted a new mode of ecological thought: what is life?
At the highest level of analysis, it’s the whole observable-by-humans planet!
The nonliving, or abiotic, dimension of the earth is the geosphere, which cradles and
interacts with the biosphere.
Vernadsky even proposed another level: the noösphere, or totality
of human thought, which he imagined cradled by and interacting with the lower levels.
Vernadsky also pioneered radiogeology, the study of radioactive elements in the crust.
Aaand he worked on the Soviets’ atomic bomb.
Because sooooo many scientists worked on weapons.
Around the time that Vernadsky worked, ecology
became a discipline.
English botanist Arthur Tansley first obsessed over ferns, and later all plants.
He wanted to map all of the different types of vegetation across England, and he thought
other botanists should want the same.
So he founded clubs to map plant types.
And in 1913, Tansley organized the first professional society of ecologists, and he became the first
editor of the Journal of Ecology.
In terms of epistemic work, Tansley is remembered for one word: ecosystem.
See, scientists are pretty into units.
Tansley reframed the study of nature: instead of groups of individual living things—say,
some birds in some trees—it’s the study of dynamic interactions between living and
nonliving things in one area.
Tansley’s rival was American botanist Frederic Clements.
His epistemic contributions similarly involved what ecologists should study.
Clements argued that plant formations are best studied as units called communities.
A plant community is not just like a living organism: it is an organism!
It’s born, grows, eats, and dies.
And Clements focused on how an area’s climate determined which plants will grow there.
For example, a pond dries up over and becomes first a meadow, then a forest.
This was a version of an older concept, ecological succession, how the makeup of groups of organisms
in areas change over time.
But Clements championed his own, highly deterministic “climax community” version of succession.
Tansley haaated this, arguing that nature is messier than Clements described in his work.
Tansley and Clements fought about ecology from 1905 until World War Two.
But both agreed that ecologists should promote conservation, or working to actively maintain
the health of nonhuman environments.
Conservation has its own history.
But ecology as a way of making knowledge has always been tied to conservation as an ethos
or practice—a way of doing something in the world.
This isn’t a “technology” in the same way the lightbulb or computer is.
But the practice of conserving ecosystems is as important as lighting up cities or making
sicc memes.
To name just two wins in conservation, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt created the National
Park system in the first decade of the 1900s, helping preserve vast areas of forest, desert,
and other wilderness.
And in 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act helped radically lessen the threat humans
present to dolphins, seals, and whales in U.S. waters—although the threat remains.
But early ecologists didn’t have all the
tools they needed.
For many of those, we can thank English-American polymath George Evelyn Hutchinson, his student,
Howard T. Odum, and Howard’s older brother, Eugene.
Take us there, Thoughtbubble! After World War Two, they established ecosystem
ecology as a richly quantitative discipline.
They took Tansley’s essential insight and ran with it, showing how to model the processes
at work in a given ecosystem.
All three men used experiments to generate mathematical models tracing the flow of energy
from nonliving sources, into primary producers like plants, primary consumers like herbivores,
and then into meat eaters and the eaters of dead things—fungi and bacteria.
And he was the first to use very small amounts of radioactive particles as tracers to map
how particles move in a pond, including how plants take up radiation.
The Odums went on to develop this radiotracer-as-tool technique further, which is used today to
study how water moves and how pollutants move through environments.
They also helped establish radiation ecology, which studies the effects of radioactive materials
on living systems.
The Odums researched ecosystems from coral reefs in the Pacific to riversheds in Georgia.
Eugene Odum taught at the University of Georgia, in fact, from 1940 to 2002.
He pushed all biology students to study ecology—which got a big laugh in the forties, but is now
part of the common sense of the life sciences.
Of course you have to study how weather, plants, animals, and soils relate!
And Eugene deftly summarized, with some help from his bro, much of their work in the book
Fundamentals in Ecology in 1953.
This book unified ecology, offering a range of useful techniques to all budding plant
scientists, animal scientists, and rock scientists.
For years, it was the only textbook in ecology.
And, revised, it’s still used as a textbook in many classes today!
Thanks ThoughtBubble! The Odums’ work encompassed observational
and empirical methods, some of which were focused on specific parts of ecosystems.
But the Odums were also pioneers of a sub-discipline of ecosystem ecology,
confusingly called systems ecology.
This is the holistic study of complex living systems as systems—including the interactions
among their nonliving inputs, their boundaries, how they adapt to new conditions, how they
interact with other systems, and the unpredictable, emergent properties they exhibit.
Inspired by Hutchinson’s work on feedback loops, Howard modeled how energy flows within
ecosystems.
He borrowed concepts from thermodynamics and computing in his work on systems ecology.
You could say the Odums were trying to understand ecosystems as really complex, but not random,
machines.
In fact, in the 1960s, they applied multiple times for money from NASA to engineer self-regulating,
closed ecosystems of algae and plankton—a whole biosphere in miniature.
These would serve as life-support systems for astronauts.
They based their proposals on their study of the energy flows of the coral atoll Enewetak
in the Marshall Islands.
Alas, NASA thought their plans were too complex, and the Odums returned to earthly matters.
The question of life in space intrigued scientists
modeling the relationships between energy, chemicals, and organisms.
In the 1960s, NASA hired English scientist James Lovelock to build instruments to analyze
the atmosphere of Mars—and look for signs of life.
Lovelock thought about why Mars’ atmosphere has certain properties, different from ours,
and what that means for the evolution of life.
He arrived at the Gaia Hypothesis, named after the Greek earth goddess.
This says the earth’s biogeosphere is self-regulating, within broad limits: living things, air, rocks,
and water interact in complex ways so that living things can stick around.
This was a hugely controversial claim!
It suggested a self-awareness to the earth.
But Lovelock’s evidence for a regulatory function between what’s in the atmosphere
and oceans and what’s alive, breathing that air or water, is pretty convincing.
And he picked up major support from revolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis.
She discovered that some of the tiny organs inside cells—like cells’ power stations,
mitochondria and chloroplasts—used to be free-floating bacteria that evolved to live
entirely within larger organisms.
This idea, endosymbiosis, was also huge controversial—not because it was too touchy-feely, but because
it seemed to have nothing to do with the work of Darwin!
But Margulis also demonstrated lots of evidence.
So biologists and ecologists were confronted with complex systems over here,
superorganisms over there— communitiesall the way up, and all the way down in scale.
Today, this shift is captured in the name of the meta-discipline that applies systems
thinking across many sciences: earth systems science.
This means understanding how living and nonliving processes relate, and looking at the entire
earth as one very big—but not infinite—house.
This is a house we humans can wreck.
And—we hope—repair.
So just as the life sciences had to scale up to ecosystems and then the entire earth,
they also had to take into account how humans affect ecosystems and earth systems.
A new branch, human ecology, developed.
If that all sounds a bit like what Vernadsky said a hundred years ago—you’re right!
Human thought, nonhuman life, rocks, water—all connected.
Or, as Eugene Odum wrote: “the landscape is not just a supply depot but is also the
oikos —the home—in which we must live.”
Next time—we’ll move from studying nature to controlling it… and losing control.
It’s time for the Green Revolution, pesticide pollution, and the birth of environmentalism.
Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula,
Montana and it’s made with the help of all this nice people and our animation team is
Thought Cafe.
Crash Course is a Complexly production.
If you wanna keep imagining the world complexly with us, you can check out some of our other
channels like The Art Assignment, Nature League, and Scishow Space.