Our history
Our history
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我们的历史
作者：
Allan A. Pacey
美国生态学会 (ESA) 于 2015 年 8 月庆祝了其百年诞辰。除了为其期刊和《ESA 公报》邀请综合文章、委托制作视频以及帮助组织有史以来最大规模的 ESA 年度会议活动之外，ESA 的百年纪念规划委员会和随后的百年纪念执行委员会（全面披露：我是前者的成员，但不是后者的成员）与 Frank Egerton 讨论了对学会本身编写一本书的历史的渴望。埃格顿教授是一位著名的生态学历史学家，他在《欧空局公报》上发表的关于该学科历史的长期且仍在持续的系列文章凸显了他对生态学、生态学家的微妙历史以及他们与学院之外的政策分析师和决策者的互动的深入参与和仔细思考。在开启他的百年历史时，埃格顿写道，他的“目的是写一部公正、准确和有趣的历史”（第 xvii 页），可以被视为“与早期同事的对话”（第 xviii 页）。埃格顿通过一系列 38 个著名 ESA 成员的“生态草图”，通过数千名生态学家中少数人的生活故事讲述了 ESA 的历史，这些生态学家在学会内创造了科学学科和知识文化。这些生态草图的主题包括欧空局的一些创始人和前任主席、其著作对该领域产生持久影响的个人，以及一些将该学科从学术界推向公共舞台的人。入选个人资料的性别平衡反映了该学科的历史：除三人外，其余都是男性（例外的 10% 是 E. Lucy Braun、Jane Lubchenco 和 Margaret Davis）。但是，ecoSketches 与正文的集成（作为全页宽文本框的偏移）并不均匀。它们的位置打破了主要叙述，它们的故事并不一致，而且它们没有明显的顺序（埃格顿在第十八页断言它们是按出生日期按时间顺序排列的，但这种排序只出现在第一章）。同时，生态草图是这本薄书中最吸引人的部分。科学（生态学也不例外）是由人们与其他人合作完成的，并将结果传达给更多的人。我们是否逃到偏远的野外考察站去研究原始地点的不起眼的生物体？致力于描述、保存和保护“自然”区域；或者花费无尽的时间编码和重新编码深奥的模拟模型，我们的工作仍然是人类的努力。因此，我很喜欢从福雷斯特·施里夫（Forrest Shreve）（他关于北方猪笼草瓶子草的形态和发育的硕士学位论文与我自己的知识心很接近）和维克多·谢尔福德（Victor Shelford）（欧洲航天局创始人，《自然主义者美洲指南施里夫》[1926；Williams & Wilkins，巴尔的摩，马里兰州]的合编者）到玛格丽特·戴维斯（Margaret Davis）的生态学家的故事而津津有味。 （其许多发人深省但最终错误但明显可检验的假设和理论刺激了古生态学的显着发展）和简·卢布琴科（在我看来，她在将生态学带入权力殿堂方面所做的工作比任何其他生态学家都多）。他们的生活，即使是用单个段落来总结他们的课程，也是有趣的、引人入胜的，值得重述和记住。不幸的是，较长的叙事历史与之相比显得相形见绌。埃格顿做了一份自耕农的工作，费力地翻阅《欧空局公报》的不起眼的角落和缝隙，梳理《生态学》上发表的书评，并检查正在进行的《前沿》，以寻找欧空局演变和发展背后的复杂阴谋的线索。结果几乎没有透露什么新内容，但具有将所有内容集中在一处的优点。我们重新了解了早期的野外观测站和生态学中心，G. Evelyn Hutchinson 和 Howard T. Odum 的经典学术谱系树再次重印（如果将读者引向信息更丰富的academictree.org，会更容易）。 ESA 参与催生了一系列计划，包括 IBP（国际生物计划及其后继者 INTECOL（国际生态学协会）、NIE 和 TIE（拟建的国家生态研究所和已实施的生态研究所）、LTER（长期生态研究）、SBI（可持续生物圈倡议）、NEON（国家生态观测站网络）和 SEEDS（生态、发展和生态教育战略）可持续性）的描述程度不等，从一两句话到几十页不等，ESA 的组织和发展的随意性、临时性（这在这方面在科学协会或其他专业团体中绝非独一无二）反映在断断续续的写作、段落之间的粗糙过渡以及不必要的随机事实和事件的重复中。一些例子包括：丢弃直接物体（例如，在 Herb Bormann 的《ecoSketch》中，Egerton 写道“他发现杜克林业有生态学家没有使用的测量方法。”[第 84 页]）；J. J. Andrews 实验森林而不是 H. J. Andrews 实验森林（第 88 页）；INTERCOL for INTECOL（第 97 页）； （第122页图5.4中的27与第172页上的26）和ecoSketches（引言中的第18页与书中的第38页）；库珀奖获得者斯蒂芬·哈贝尔（Stephen Hubbell）和格伦·莫茨金（Glenn Motzkin）的名字拼写错误（第212页）。在当今，当我们重视快速出版而不是深思熟虑的散文时，出版商已经解雇了文案编辑，索引是一门正在消失的艺术，错误。然而，在蘑菇结出果实并枯萎后，菌丝会像仲夏雨后的蘑菇一样繁殖，生态学的新发展和欧空局的新方向将会出现，欧空局将所有有关社会历史的信息汇集到一起，生态学家应该阅读这本书。
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