“What We Need is a Crop Ecologist”: Ecology and ... · “What We Need is a Crop Ecologist”: Ecology and Agricultural Science in Progressive-Era America MARK D HERSEY. Though

© the Agricultural History Society, 2011DOI: 10.3098/ah.2011.85.3.297

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“What We Need is a Crop Ecologist”:

Ecology and Agricultural Science in

Progressive-Era America

MARK D. HERSEY

Though they are often seen as foils for each other, ecology and agricultural science co-evolved. With shared roots in late nineteenth-century botany, ecol-ogists and agronomists fostered important connections during the Progres-sive Era that have been largely overlooked despite a number of finely nuanced studies of ecology’s origins. But if “applied ecology” once effec-tively meant agriculture, over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century the relationship between ecology and scientific agriculture grew strained. Agriculturists narrowed their focus to increasing yields, and ecolo-gists sought to establish their discipline as a distinct theoretical science and so distanced themselves from its agricultural applications. By the end of World War I, the process of disciplinary specialization was well underway. In time the two disciplines diverged so completely that the once vital connec-tions between them were obscured and forgotten.

Over the past decade, agricultural sustainability has become some-thing of a cause célèbre, as is evidenced by the fact that Michael Pollan, a journalism-professor-cum-agribusiness critic, could boast of four books on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously in January 2010. Pollan and others of his ilk, of course, are as concerned with human health

MARK D. HERSEY is an assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University. He earned his PhD in environmental history at the University of Kansas and has published articles on agricultural topics in the Historian and Environmental History . His first book, My Work is that of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver, was recently published by the University of Georgia Press. He would like to thank Kevin Armitage, Alan I Marcus, Ryan Schumacher, Donald Worster, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their comments and suggestions.

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as with larger environmental issues. Nevertheless, the heart of their critique of contemporary agriculture is fundamentally an ecological one: the rationalization of agriculture to maximize production has led to a number of related problems—an overreliance on chemical inputs, con-solidated corporate farms, and decidedly limited monocultures, to name but three—that redound to the detriment of the natural environment and ultimately will prove not only unhealthy but unsustainable. 1

In calling for an ecological agriculture that relies on local sunlight to feed local communities, Pollan and his fellow locavores have highlighted the disjuncture between ecology and agronomy in contemporary thought. From the time ecology first emerged as a familiar term during the envi-ronmental revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, it has in effect served as a foil to conventional agricultural science. Scientists like Wes Jackson, probably the best-known pioneer in the field of ecological agriculture, have worked well outside the mainstream—with little support from the USDA or land-grant universities. Indeed, when Jackson and Jon Piper argued in 1989 that “the full range of benefits arising from blending ecol-ogy with agriculture is unforeseeable,” it seemed novel. Certainly the edi-tors of the journal Ecology thought so in publishing the article aptly titled “The Necessary Marriage between Ecology and Agriculture.” 2

But in many ways the notion of a self-consciously ecological agricul-ture was not at all new. Indeed, it has roots that stretch back to the emer-gence of ecology as a distinctive scientific discipline. In fact, scholars might well talk about the co-evolution of ecology and agronomy over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even if they have yet to do so.

Historians, of course, have not neglected the science. On the contrary, they have produced several impressively nuanced studies that examine ecology from a number of important angles. And some of these scholars have suggested that ecology and agricultural science were connected in important ways during the Progressive Era. In his study of the rise and fall of the Clementsian school of plant ecology, for instance, Ronald Tobey pointed out that Frederick Clements’s training at a land-grant school necessarily shaped his research in ways that alternately integrated or responded to agriculture, which helps explain the close relationship between the Clementsian school and range management. Even so, for the most part these studies have sought to understand ecology as either a

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cultural phenomenon or as a theoretical rather than applied science and so have downplayed the connections between the science and agronomy. 3

Probably the two best examples in the case of the former are Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas and Gregg Mitman’s The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 . Worster, whose monograph was the first serious scholarly examination of ecology’s past, grouped ecological ideas into “arcadian” and “imperial” impulses to explain how the science burst seemingly so suddenly onto the scene during the environmental revolu-tion. Mitman’s work was in some ways less ambitious, but he too was principally interested in ecology as a cultural phenomenon. In tracing the history of the Chicago school of animal ecology, he drew important con-nections between the political ideologies of the early twentieth century (especially the era’s emphasis on cooperation) and the research paths undertaken by some of the nation’s leading ecologists. Not surprisingly, agriculture proved tangential in both accounts. 4

More accounts of ecology’s development have focused on its theoreti-cal underpinnings. In The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory, for instance, Robert McIntosh distanced himself from Worster, dismiss-ing Nature’s Economy as an analysis of “retrospective ecology.” Seeking to correct a narrative that conflated ecology “with diverse historical con-cerns with the relation between humanity and the environment,” McIntosh emphasized the establishment of a “self-conscious ecology” as a scientific discipline with clearly identified concepts and a firmly entrenched theoretical framework. The discipline’s early connections with agriculture as the most obvious application of the science merited little more than a perfunctory dismissal. 5

Sharon Kingsland similarly privileged ecology’s theoretical founda-tions in The Evolution of American Ecology: 1890–2000, centering her study on two privately funded centers of botanical research: the New York Botanical Garden and the Carnegie Institution’s Desert Botanical Laboratory. In her view, “the New York Botanical Garden served as mid-wife for the emergence of ecology in the United States,” not because much original ecological research was being done there during the Progressive Era (it was not), but rather because in furthering the profes-sionalization of American botany, it legitimated the field. Thus, the


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“embryonic field of ecology . . . benefited from everything that the Garden undertook.” For its part, the Desert Laboratory, she persuasively argued, served as an important “nucleus around which the discipline of ecology could form,” a nucleus on a par with the more noted midwestern institu-tions like Clements’s University of Nebraska and Henry Cowles’s University of Chicago. The Desert Laboratory was distinctive inasmuch as it “was the only purely research organization among this group.” As ecology’s theoretical development was of primary significance to her, its agricultural applications were essentially immaterial. Consequently, while she acknowledged that in the early stages of the science’s develop-ment “agricultural experiment stations operating in conjunction with land-grant colleges also dealt with ecological subjects,” their contribution was minimal since the scientists at such places “were often overwhelmed by the need to work on practical problems.” 6

There is thus little indication from the otherwise impressive literature on ecology’s origins and development that the science was ever closely associated with agriculture. To be sure, the connections between the two were too numerous and obvious to be entirely overlooked. McIntosh, for instance, acknowledged the agricultural interests of a number of leading figures in the first generation of ecologists, even if he dismissed them, maintaining that “agricultural scientists and ecologists . . . did not develop strong ties”—hardly a surprising conclusion given his interest in how ecology ultimately developed. Likewise, in his history of the ecosystem concept, Joel Hagen hinted at the rift that would eventually obscure the vital connections between agronomy and ecology of the Progressive Era, when he noted that, “critics sometimes dismissed plant ecology as a glori-fied agricultural science.” Nevertheless, the early connections between agriculture and ecology have received short shrift—an ironic turn of events since what most of the first generation of American ecologists were doing as they sought to define their field was agricultural research. 7

The connections between agricultural science and ecology were born in the discipline of botany, which in the late nineteenth century was just coming into its own. Botany, of course, was linked to agriculture if for no other reason than because farmers deal principally with plants. Conse-quently, land-grant colleges usually required students pursuing an agri-cultural education to take botany courses. In part because of the


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proliferation of agricultural colleges, botanists increasingly saw agricul-ture rather than medicine as the primary application of their science over the course of the late nineteenth century. But chiefly this shift in empha-sis was due to the fact that botanists recognized that agriculture provided a convenient justification to appeal for governmental funding on practi-cal grounds. 8

The passage of the Hatch Act in 1887—a landmark piece of legislation that funneled federal money into land-grant colleges for research con-ducted at agricultural experiment stations—contributed to botany’s rapid development in the 1890s. Prior to its passage, the natural sciences were not especially well funded. When Harvard botanist William Farlow first considered a career in botany during the late 1860s, for instance, his men-tor Asa Gray steered him to medicine since there were more opportuni-ties in that field. For that matter, while agricultural colleges required students pursuing an agricultural education to take a course in botany, they did not furnish their botany instructors with much equipment. When Charles Bessey—a leading botanist and one of the patriarchs of ecology—began teaching at the Iowa Agricultural College (IAC) in 1871, for instance, he had one compound microscope at his disposal. The IAC was not unique; as late as the 1860s, even Harvard did not provide micro-scopes to botany labs for students’ use. 9

The Hatch Act, then, provided much needed funding to America’s botanists, the more so given American botany’s importation of German laboratory methods, and the science began to flourish as a number of its branches—including phylogeny, cytology, mycology, and plant pathol-ogy—developed rapidly. By 1892 the number of American botanists had grown sufficiently large as to prompt them to separate from zoologists to form their own section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The following year, they organized the Botanical Society of America.

At the same time, the science of ecology was beginning to develop as a subfield of botany. It might seem ironic that botanists voted to separate from zoologists just as ecology began to develop, but early on, botanists viewed ecology as a branch of botany, much like they did mycology or cytology. (As late as 1936 ecologist Walter P. Taylor pointed out that “according to a student of plants, ecology is perhaps very little more than a branch of botany.”) Indeed, a similar movement was afoot in


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zoology and forestry, and consequently, a debate ensued as to “whether ecology represent[ed] a scientific field or a point of view.” This debate notwithstanding, ecology’s central tenet was already clear in the 1890s; organisms and their environment are interdependent. Thus, it is no coin-cidence that the modern English spelling of “ecology” (rather than oekologie, œcology, or similar derivations) was agreed upon at the Madison Botanical Congress in 1893—the same gathering of botanists that saw the organization of the Botanical Society of America. 10

If its central tenets were clear, ecology’s scope was considerably fuzz-ier as the debates of the committee charged with clarifying terminology at Madison reveal. In explaining the proposal to attach the term “ecol-ogy” to the relationship between plants and their environments, Albert S. Hitchcock noted that ecology “concerns itself with the adaptive processes of the plant, and with what the Darwinian school has brought forward and made popular,” though he acknowledged that “it is rather difficult to give a definition showing its limitations.” When Bessey asked for a clari-fication, Purdue University’s Joseph C. Arthur described ecology as the branch of botany that “includes a study of the general phenomena of plant development, the plant’s relations to its environment, and its rela-tions to other organisms.” It fell, then, as the University of Minnesota’s Conway MacMillan pointed out, “under the general head of physiology” but centered less on the plant itself than on its relationship with other “organisms and their mutual adaptations.” 11

However vague its scope, ecology was initially a principally descrip-tive science that in many cases amounted to little more than document-ing the species of a given area and speculating about why the flora and fauna were arranged in the proportions they were. It was not until Clements and Roscoe Pound, influenced by the German botanist Oscar Drude, popularized the use of quadrats (square areas of varying sizes in which plants could be counted and mapped) that the science became more qualitative and rigorous. Even then, its reputation for being some-what less than rigorous lingered for a number of years, understandably frustrating its practitioners. 12

Perhaps it was inevitable given the development of ecology as a sub-field of botany and botany’s close relationship to agriculture that ecolo-gists would see their discipline as a kindred field of agricultural science. But in the event, agriculturists were drawn to ecology because they saw


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it as inherently predictive. An understanding of the physiological makeup of a given plant (or animal or fungus, for that matter), along with the knowledge of biological communities in which such plants thrived, would enable ecologists to predict what plants might grow where, what diseases might afflict them, and what competitors (chiefly weeds) might challenge them. If ecology thus offered a veritable panoply of solutions to inher-ently agricultural problems, however, it also tied it to a decidedly practi-cal field that was less interested in knowledge for its own sake than for its economic applications—a connection that would open ecologists to criti-cisms, warranted and otherwise. 13

The early connections between ecology and scientific agriculture are evident in a number of scientists’ work, but they might best be seen in the work of the now obscure Louis Hermann Pammel, a botanist at the IAC. Pammel’s work exemplified the connection between agricultural science and ecology that marked the era. He first distinguished himself as a prom-ising botanist while an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin under the guidance of William Trelease, publishing his senior thesis in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club . At Trelease’s recommendation, Pammel took a position as an assistant to Farlow before following Trelease to St. Louis. After three years at the Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, Pammel was appointed a professor of botany by the IAC, where he replaced Farlow’s first graduate student Byron David Halsted. 14

By the early 1890s Pammel found himself among the vanguard of bot-anists attracted to the emerging field of ecology. He authored several papers and articles that included the term “ecology” or “ecological” in their titles, and in 1893 published a book titled Flower Ecology, making him the first person to publish a book in English with the term “ecology” in its title. The fact that the book amounted to a collection of papers he had “delivered at the meetings of the horticultural societies of [Iowa]” serves as evidence of his early interest in the nascent science. Not surpris-ingly, the book itself reflected the influence of a number of European botanists; indeed, Pammel traced “flower ecology” to Joseph Koelreuter and Christian Sprengel, though it was Darwin who “saw the full import of Sprengel’s observations” and really sparked botanists’ interest in “floris-tic ecology.” It was Anton von Kerner, however, who most influenced Pammel’s analysis as he followed Kerner’s lead in focusing his energies on what he dubbed entomophilous flowers (those pollinated by insects),


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relegating the subject of hydrophilous and anemophilous flowers (those pollinated by water and wind, respectively) to secondary status. 15

Although Pammel saw himself as part of a larger tradition dating back at least to Darwin rather than as a trailblazer, he encountered some of the more problematic issues that would confront ecology over the next two decades. For one, while ecology considered “the external relations of plants,” it clearly went well beyond botany. Pammel conceded, for instance, in his discussion of entomophilous flowers that in “order to fully understand the wonderful adaptations between insects and flowers,” it was necessary to understand the physiology of both—not just of flowers. For another, Pammel found that the science’s most obvious application was in agriculture. Like Darwin, he focused on cross-fertilization, point-ing out that while it sometimes benefited agriculture by making crops hardier and better adapted to local environmental conditions, it also worked to agriculture’s detriment by compromising the purity of vari-etals. But if ecology was not clearly confined to a single discipline (bot-any) and if its most valuable application was in agriculture, its future as a pure science—even as a subfield of botany—looked hazy. 16

Pammel, of course, did not resolve these dilemmas—in fact, he did not recognize them as such—but over the next two decades, they would prove to be among the most vexing confronting the discipline. For Pammel’s part, he revised and republished Flower Ecology as a textbook, titled sim-ply Ecology, in 1903. Like Flower Ecology, his textbook had a decidedly botanical list. “It is a well known fact,” Pammel asserted, “that the plant is dependent on its surroundings. These are its life relations.” The study “of these life relations,” Pammel continued, “is a branch of physiological botany known as ecology”; consequently, its study “should not precede structure or elementary principles of vegetable physiology.” 17

While Eugenius Warming, the Danish scientist whose work is often credited with sparking modern ecology, was not mentioned or cited in Flower Ecology, Pammel acknowledged his work in Ecology . For that matter, Pammel had keenly watched the developments in the field, refer-encing the work of Cowles, as well as a study done by Bessey’s star students, Clements and Pound. His earlier characterizations went by the wayside as he adopted terminology put forward by Warming. Consequently, Pammel divided the “ecological factors” influencing “plant societies” into four categories—the edaphic (soil), atmospheric


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(heat, light, and wind), hydrodynamic (tides, waves, and currents), and biotic (“plant rivalries”)—and enumerated three types of plant societies: hydrophytes (which live where water is abundant), xerophytes (which live in “droughty” places), and mesophytes (which are the most common plants, needing a moderate amount of water). The first twenty-four chapters of Pammel’s textbook discuss how environmental factors like water, wind, insects, and animals aid pollination, cross-fertilization, and seed dispersal, and Pammel concluded the book by drawing out the connections between what he dubbed “plant societies” and the “ecologi-cal factors” to which they had adapted. 18

Several things about the book merit particular notice. Perhaps most striking to contemporary students of ecology is his interest in what today are known as invasive species. Noting that “weeds in their migration have followed well defined lines of travel,” Pammel connected the appearance of weeds with the proliferation of railroads and canals in particular areas. Significantly, however, while (with the British botanist Joseph Burtt Davy) he lamented the fact that “the world’s flora is rapidly changing” and becoming “more uniform . . . under the influence of agriculture and com-merce,” Pammel’s interest in invasive species was not purely, or even pri-marily, academic. Instead, he linked the phenomenon to agricultural science. Understanding the danger posed by inadvertently introduced spe-cies, he believed, was an essential component of scientific agriculture. 19

Indeed, Pammel remained consistent both with his earlier book and his contemporaries in viewing ecology as a practical science. After dis-cussing the co-evolution of bees and flowers, for example, Pammel noted that farmers often complained that they “do not generally obtain a prof-itable agricultural harvest of red clover seed from the first crop of clo-ver.” This, he explained (echoing Darwin), stemmed from the fact that often “there are not enough bumble bees to pollinate the flowers” ini-tially. Recognizing the interdependence of plants and the environments in which they live was an integral part of scientific cultivation. In fact, farmers who did not account for such relations imperiled their chances of success. Put in more contemporary terms, Pammel believed that agricul-ture practiced without regard for larger ecological relationships would eventually prove self-defeating. 20

Pammel was hardly alone, even at his own institution, in considering ecology a vital agricultural science—as vital as plant pathology, mycology,


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and bacteriology, three other areas where Pammel distinguished himself. Even discounting Bessey, whose connection with ecology did not begin until well after he had left Ames, the IAC had a number of scientists that linked ecology and agricultural science. The same Albert S. Hitchcock who introduced the proposed adoption of the term “ecology” at the Madison Botanical Congress, for instance, had come to the IAC as a chemist at the same time Pammel had arrived as a botanist. Persuaded in part by Pammel, Hitchcock transferred his focus to botany, studying under Trelease before moving to Manhattan, Kansas, as the chair of bot-any at the Kansas State Agricultural College and eventually onto the USDA as chief botanist. Arthur L. Bakke, a student and later colleague of Pammel’s, similarly devoted a sizable portion of his early career to questions related to ecology, publishing a bulletin titled “The Effect of City Smoke on Vegetation” from the school’s experiment station. Another of Pammel’s students, George Washington Carver, took this principle with him to Tuskegee in the 1890s, where he initiated a campaign to improve the lives of impoverished black tenant farmers. Rejecting the notion that the progressive farmer was the one who raised the most cot-ton or used the most modern implements, he argued instead that the gen-uinely scientific farmer was the one who had learned to appreciate “the mutual relationship of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms, and how utterly impossible it is for one to exist in a highly organized state without the others.” 21

Others also considered ecology a fundamental agricultural science. At the Madison Botanical Congress, Joseph C. Arthur had contended that ecology was “the phase of physiological botany in which we are espe-cially interested as practical workers, ” his point being that ecology had particular potential as an applied science. Indeed, it was the common practice to link ecology and agronomy in the first decade of the twentieth century. Ecological theory and agricultural practice dovetailed nicely. In a review of a USDA bulletin titled “The Relation of Sparrows to Agriculture,” for instance, Joseph Grinnell noted that the bulletin added “much to our knowledge of the general habits and ecology of sparrows.” 22

Nonetheless, comparatively few botanists were interested in ecology at the turn of the century. At the annual meeting of the AAAS’s Section G, Botany in 1901, only two scholars—Pammel and Clements—presented


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papers with the term “ecology” in their titles. Nevertheless, numbers rap-idly increased, and by 1903 Bernard Fernow exhorted his fellow foresters to follow agriculture’s lead in incorporating ecology and pled with bota-nists to turn their eyes to forests as well as fields. “Agriculture and, still more so, silviculture, are based upon the recognition of the ecological relations of plants,” Fernow began, pointing out that agriculturists could shape their environment to a considerably greater extent than foresters. But “botanists, even those devoted to ecological studies,” had not paid much attention to forests since they had been focused on agricultural concerns. The fact, he continued, that “trees are plants, unique in charac-ter and differently situated, as regards ecological factors, from the low vegetation, has hardly been realized.” Thus, botanists needed to furnish foresters with the “‘silvicultural requirements’ of species, which is and has been for a hundred years his term for ecology.” The time had come, then, for “ecology . . . to direct the practice” of forestry, like it was begin-ning to do in agriculture. 23

Three years later, a reviewer of Clements’s Research Methods in Ecology concluded that the “work should do much towards establishing ecology and experimental plant evolution upon a firmer basis” by mak-ing ecology more rigorous, exact, and quantitative. Arguably more impor-tant, however, was that this development meant that the “time is also not far distant when it will be a simple matter to determine . . . what plants are best adapted to any portion of a single farm, so that agriculture may be carried on under much more precise regulations.” Clements’s mentor, Bessey, seemingly agreed, boasting in 1907 that the “botany boys of the University of Nebraska turn to agricultural phases of it. I delight in it, and think it is just what ought to be.” Indeed, in The Principles of Agriculture, Liberty Hyde Bailey enumerated a number of natural sciences a farmer needed to understand in order to succeed. Among them was ecology. But if the relationship between ecology and agricultural science appeared fairly harmonious, tensions between the two had already begun to mount. 24

In large measure, these tensions arose as a result of the increasing independence of agricultural scientists, who had begun to conceptualize their work as a distinct scientific discipline rather than an assemblage of applied scientists from diverse fields. Chemists, zoologists, and botanists who thought of their work principally in agricultural terms gradually


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came to believe they had more in common with each other than with their home fields. By 1919 they would organize their own section of the AAAS, but even in the early 1910s evidence of this shift was manifest. Pammel, who despite his interest in agricultural applications of his botan-ical work remained a botanist first and foremost, expressed his concern over this trend, which among other things saw institutional resources shift from botanists proper to agricultural scientists. “I do not think the botanists are so much to blame,” Pammel wrote to Bessey, referring to the shortage of adequately trained botanists to fill academic positions, “excepting that they have permitted the economic botanical work to be taken away from them.” 25

The rising tensions, however, did not bring a swift and sudden end to the co-evolution of theoretical and applied ecology. Clements shifted his primary focus from Nebraska’s grasslands to alpine ecology, establishing his Colorado alpine laboratory between Manitou and the summit of Pike’s Peak and applying the systematic analytical methods he had devel-oped on the Great Plains to the Rockies. Even so, his “field of investiga-tion [fell] into four general divisions,” the second of which was “the application of ecological methods and principles to forestry, agriculture and plant pathology.” In fact, in advertising for assistants for the summer of 1913, he sought “advanced students in botany or related subjects, such as forestry and agronomy.” And ecologists continued to publish land-mark works linking agriculture and ecology, notably Homer L. Shantz’s Natural Vegetation as an Indicator of the Capabilities of Land for Crop Production in the Great Plains Area . 26

By the time Bessey addressed the botanists assembled at the annual meeting of the AAAS in December 1912, however, he was hardly alone in expressing his concern about the growing “vagueness to the boundar-ies of the science” that had led “some botanical teachers [to wander] far across the border into . . . the more or less practical applications of bot-any.” His allusion was unmistakably to agriculture. Bessey conceded, of course, that botanists at agricultural experiment stations were doing good work, albeit in a disconnected, idiosyncratic way, and he upbraided those botanists who categorically denigrated the work done by agriculturists at land-grant schools: “It will not do for us to stand aloof, and decry their results as not accurate, and as agricultural instead of botanical”—the more so as “ecology has given . . . a new reason, as well as a new direction


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to field botany.” After all, he reminded them, “No science can hope for support or recognition that does not respond to the demands of its age.” Even so, he encouraged nonagricultural ecologists to strengthen the the-oretical foundations of their field by establishing more field laboratories. “Instead of trying to make seaside conditions away from the sea,” he con-tended, botanists should (and had begun to) “go to the sea.” They needed to do the same for the desert, swamps, and other natural environments where the footprint of agriculture was less evident. Lest there be any confusion, he reminded them that the “work in the field laboratories must necessarily be of the kind now called ecological.” In fact, he told his fellow botanists, “the botany of the future will have much more of ecol-ogy than is common today.” 27

When Cowles addressed the same assembly two years later, he took up the subject of “The Economic Trend of Botany.” Like Bessey, he acknowledged that agricultural research had contributed much to his chosen field, pointing out that the Journal of Agricultural Research had “taken rank with our best botanical journals” and noting that a focus on “what we are accustomed to call pure science” carried with it the faulty implication that applied science was “impure.” However, it was nonethe-less true that “agriculture [was] looming up everywhere as a competitor of botany.” Indeed, “three fourths of our botanical investigation is along economic lines.” Lamenting the fact that agriculture was replacing bot-any in many secondary schools’ curricula, he conceded that even at a pri-vate research institution like the University of Chicago, he and his peers were feeling the effects of a cultural demand “that botany be made prac-tical.” Worse, economic botanists and agriculturists, he complained, had begun to “look with scorn upon the theoretical botanist.” 28

While Cowles acknowledged that he and his fellow botanists needed to “offer more courses in the practical phases of botany . . . to keep bot-any alive and abreast of the time,” he insisted that they continue their work as theoretical scientists as well. “It would be a world tragedy,” he argued, “if theoretical botany should die, or even if it were to be less influential than it is at present.” Perhaps more to the point, he main-tained that the theoretical development of ecology offered practical applications of numerous sorts. He cited, as an example, his service for the US Department of Justice in applying his theory of ecological succes-sion to demonstrate that lumber companies in Arkansas were exploiting


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loopholes in obscure riparian law to unlawfully harvest timber from “lakes” that were not and never had been under water. But the most obvious applications, he believed, were in agriculture. As ecologists stud-ied natural environments, they would almost de facto determine the suitability of particular crops to a given region, sparing agriculturists “countless amounts of time and money” that they often “squandered in agricultural experiment on land whose natural vegetation, if studied, would have directed other uses.” 29

Cowles’s insistence that theoretical and applied botany need not be antithetical, however, was increasingly a minority opinion. In part this was because, while Bessey, Cowles, and other botanists saw agriculture as a competitor, agriculturists pressed their cultural advantage excoriating botanists and ecologists for failing to take up issues salient to agriculture. Agriculturists wanted botany in general and ecology in particular to serve principally as applied sciences. Thus, two months after Cowles’s address, the USDA’s C. V. Piper claimed that in “striking contrast to the chemist, botanists have shrunk from what should be the major applica-tion of their science”: crop production. Piper found it “difficult to dis-agree with [the] proposition ‘that the best scientific foundation for plant industry is a knowledge of plant physiology,’” though he felt obliged “to add that equally necessary is a knowledge of . . . ecology.” But fewer and fewer physiologists or ecologists, he lamented, were interested in agricul-tural problems. Indeed, with “the exception of plant pathology,” he com-plained, “it is exceedingly difficult to find graduates in botany whose training has given them either a taste or a qualification for the innumer-able problems surrounding crop production.” Piper’s praise for chemists and focus on increasing yields spoke to the direction agricultural science was headed, of course, but it was his censure of botanists that spoke to the growing rift between ecology and agricultural science. 30

Predictably, Piper’s critique of botany invited a response by those bot-anists who considered agricultural science something of an albatross to the field. One botanist mocked Piper, arguing that “any effort to define agronomy as a pure science or to accomplish the work of agronomy by conforming it to any given pure science must result in confusion or in begging the question of agronomy entirely.” In contrast to agriculturists, “pure scientists” engaged in research “to develop and enlarge the world’s knowledge, with primary regard for knowledge, not its application.” Thus,


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treating botany, including ecology, as an agricultural science bastardized it. What botanists really needed to do was “to devote themselves to bot-any, not agronomy.” Only by studying “plants, not as crops and as a part of an industry, but as part of a wide world’s life,” could botanists genu-inely aid agronomy by supplementing “the practical knowledge of depart-ments of agronomy.” 31

While the field became increasingly polarized, a handful of botanists continued to search for common ground. Pammel, who enjoyed a consid-erable reputation in botanical circles, contended in 1914 that a “large number of botanical subjects need elucidation . . . especially crop ecology. What crops can be grown together to give the maximum returns for the money invested? It is the business of the ecologist,” he insisted, “to deter-mine these crop relations.” Similarly, W. G. Waterman argued that the “methods of ecology are scientific” but that “its practical applications are found chiefly in the field of agriculture.” Thus, “it is evident that ecology belongs both to botany and to agriculture, and in fact covers the debat-able ground between the two subjects.” For men like Waterman and Pammel, ecology offered a potential bridge between agronomy and bot-any. “Instead of this being . . . the cause of rivalry and even conflict,” Waterman reasoned, “it should furnish a common ground for coopera-tion.” But his hope that ecology could unite agriculturists and botanists ultimately proved hollow. 32

In large measure, this was due to the fact that the debate was carried out in an era of professionalization. Ecologists were seeking to establish their discipline’s viability as a distinct science, and they recognized that hitching its future to agriculture would not stand it in good stead among botanists or any other pure scientists. Seeking to defend a discipline under attack by those who claimed it represented a “point of view” rather than a science proper and regularly criticized for a methodology deri-sively labeled descriptive rather than quantitative, ecologists proved intent on establishing their chosen field’s soundness as a theoretical sci-ence. Thus, it was not entirely coincidental that the exchange between Piper and his critics came in the same year the efforts of a zoologist from the University of Nebraska and a botanist at the University of Chicago culminated in the organization of the Ecological Society of America. 33

Even so, the separation of ecology from agronomy took time, and it was still underway when Pammel addressed his fellow botanists as


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chairman of Section G, Botany in December 1920. He followed in the footsteps of Bessey and Cowles in taking up the subject, “Some Economic Phases of Botany,” though if anything it was even nearer his heart. Having witnessed an astonishing transformation of his chosen field over the course of his career, Pammel traced the development of botany, empha-sizing its connections with agriculture and insisting that agricultural work “when botanical, should find its place under the head of botany.” “What we need,” he argued, enjoining his peers to focus on the common ground between agronomy and ecology, “is a crop ecologist.” Indeed, to Pammel’s mind, theoretical ecology offered plenty of practical applications for agri-culture that did not compromise the purity of the science. Like Cowles, he suggested that studying natural systems could help determine “just what crops can be grown together or what crops are best suited” for a particular soil. And after lamenting that “millions of dollars worth of the very best soil [in the Midwest] are annually carried down the Mississippi,” he pointed out that ecologists could perform “a real service by making a study of the movement of water in the soil and its relation to plant growth.” For that matter, he argued, the work of ecologists could enable farmers to understand the broader consequences of draining lakes to increase farmland and perhaps persuade them to limit the land they brought into production. 34

While his proposed limiting of agricultural production placed him well outside the mainstream of agronomy, Pammel believed that an under-standing of the tenets of ecology opened new avenues to farmers, even as it closed others. Sowing wildflowers that were adapted both to the soil and to honeybees along weedy roadsides, for example, would permit farmers to supplement their incomes with the sale of honey. More signifi-cantly, perhaps, ecological research could help farmers control weeds. “How much do we know about the mechanical interference of weed roots and the agricultural crops?” he asked his peers. “So far as I know,” he continued, pointing to an area where theoretical and practical botany might be profitably combined, “there is absolutely no data on the sub-ject.” If ecologists pursued such research, then farmers might reasonably look to theoretical botany for answers to this problem instead of turning to legislation in a largely futile attempt to regulate “injurious weeds.” 35

But drawing a connection between theoretical botany and the increas-ingly economic emphasis of agricultural research proved an anathema to


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ecologists bent on securing the legitimacy of their chosen field—a legiti-macy that would be called into question by emphasizing its application. And however courteously they may have listened, virtually none of Pammel’s fellow botanists heeded his concluding plea to “enter more vigorously into the exploitation of fields of agronomic work, ecology and taxonomic work, as it is related to horticulture and agriculture.” 36

Over the course of the 1920s, ecology and botany drifted along increas-ingly divergent evolutionary paths. When the inaugural issue of the jour-nal Ecology was published in January 1920, Barrington Moore, the journal’s first editor, could still reasonably maintain that, “all agricultural research, except breeding, is ecology . To garner successful harvests it is necessary to know the relation of the cultivated plant to its environment.” But Moore’s declaration spoke to the world from which ecology had emerged rather than the direction in which it was heading. By 1924 Trelease could claim that “botany . . . has disintegrated as a whole.” Specialization in the discipline had separated agriculture from botany, and many of botany’s subfields from one another; the discipline had wit-nessed fragmentation by specialization. To Trelease’s mind, “every fun-damental step in plant breeding is botany . . . whether called fighting weeds, in agronomy, or reseeding the woodlot, in forestry, every ecologi-cally grounded procedure is botany,” and, in essence, virtually every agri-cultural specialization ultimately rested “on botanical discovery brought about . . . by botanical investigations.” Unfortunately, however, neither agronomists nor botanists thought that their work overlapped in more than a tangential manner. Botany, then, had “suffered through the segre-gation of its application.” 37

The most powerful currents of agronomy during the early twentieth century, which favored rationalizing production along the lines of an industrial model, had little use for ecological principles. The chief concern of many who supported agricultural reform in the early twentieth century was for increased productivity to lower the rising costs of food and fiber. Since the pressing concern of agronomists was increased yield, tech-nological and chemical solutions offered more tangible rewards than ecology—or the insights gleaned from a theoretical science of any kind. 38

Even at Iowa State College (ISC), agricultural education shifted toward training chemists and technicians rather than botanists, as the school added courses on gas engines and tractors during the 1910s.


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Keeping up with the trends of agronomy dictated that they do so. And by the 1920s any suggestion that increased production was not the ultimate end of scientific agriculture invited swift criticism, as ISC’s Dean of Agriculture Charles F. Curtiss discovered when, in the late 1920s as farm revenues were falling, he criticized the push for mechanization. Complaining that the use of tractors “tends to impoverish the soil,” leads to overproduction, and “displaces an important outlet for farm grains [in contrast to horses and mules, tractors do not eat corn],” Curtiss pre-sciently concluded that farmers who mechanized their production would end up paying “more for gasoline and [taking] less for corn.” 39

His implication that the depressed agricultural market of the 1920s was due in part to mechanization, however, was met with categorical denunciation by the American Society of Agricultural Engineers, which responded with a three-page indictment of Curtiss’s position, claiming that Curtiss was making a “most specious and fallacious kind of argu-ment” and maintaining that “Curtiss’s statement, ‘Horse power is, in the last analysis, the economical power on the farm’ is absolutely contrary to the facts.” Tellingly, Curtiss’s critics argued that the “more workers any nation can have making labor-saving equipment and the fewer workers using such equipment, the better for the nation and the individual citi-zen.” As agronomy increasingly turned toward technological fixes, how-ever, ecologists had less to offer them and less interest in doing so. 40

Thus, over the course of the 1930s, when the work of scholars like Arthur Tansley, Clements, and Victor Shelford ushered theoretical ecol-ogy into its own, and men like Paul Sears, Walter Taylor, and Aldo Leopold found in ecology the undergirding philosophy of what would develop into the modern environmental movement, “applied ecology” came to mean conservation rather than agriculture. Of course, ecologists had long been concerned with questions of conservation. Pammel’s worry at the proliferation of invasive species, not only in the United States but else-where in the world, offers evidence to that end. And by the second decade of the twentieth century, he had become arguably the leading voice of Iowa’s conservation movement: corresponding with William T. Hornaday about matters of conservation, lamenting the fact that “many most inter-esting places have been destroyed because we as a people lacked interest in the things out of doors,” and fighting to keep bridges and dams out of state parks. 41


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Pammel was hardly alone. In 1919 the Ecological Society of America (ESA) endorsed the Save-the-Redwoods League. Two years later Pammel introduced resolutions, unanimously approved by the ESA, recommend-ing that the introduction of non-native plants and animals into America’s National Parks be forbidden. In the ensuing years, the connection between conservation and ecology steadily increased. In his 1937 article “What is Ecology and What Good is It?” Taylor noted the connection between the two: “The argument for conservation is immensely stronger if it be remembered that when a normally abundant species becomes scarce or extinct many other forms are somewhat influenced . . . but still more serious, the entire biotic community is affected, and sometimes the inorganic environment as well.” But it was Sears, two decades later, who most succinctly summed up this shift in the meaning of applied ecology when he asserted: “Conservation is an application of ecology in the same sense that engineering represents applied physical and mathematical science.” 42

By the time Sears penned those words, ecology’s early connection to agricultural science had been so completely forgotten that scientists could speak of the “relatively new science of agricultural ecology” in ref-erencing a renewed interest by some in the field. For that matter, critics of American agriculture, like Louis Bromfield and Ralph Borsodi, were justified on at least some grounds in accusing the USDA and land-grant colleges “of teaching the rape of the earth and the destruction of our priceless heritage of land, of impoverishing our rural communities . . . destroying our rural culture, and depopulating the countryside,” by emphasizing industrial-style agriculture in the name of increased produc-tion. To borrow a biological metaphor, it would be reasonable to speak of the speciation of ecology and agricultural science, which despite a shared past in late nineteenth-century botany had remarkably little in common by the mid-twentieth century. 43

The early connections between ecology and agronomy, however, serve as a reminder that Progressive-Era agriculture had some significant “green” impulses. In men like Liberty Hyde Bailey, historian Steven Stoll saw a continuation of the “high-minded husbandry” characteristic of nineteenth-century agriculturists. Of course, a number of vestiges of high-minded husbandry did linger into the twentieth century, but Bailey saw himself not as a throwback agriculturist, but as a forward-looking


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scientist. And he certainly was not alone in believing that scientific agri-culture, of the sort embraced by botanists and ecologists rather than chemists and engineers, offered farmers the prospect of practicing agri-culture in a way that redounded to their benefit without being “mostly destructive,” as he believed it had been. When in The Holy Earth he asserted that a “good part of agriculture is to learn how to adapt one’s work to nature, to fit the crop scheme to the climate and to the soil,” Bailey was in agreement with ecologists like Cowles, Bessey, and Pammel. Indeed, the co-evolution of ecology and agronomy suggests that the agrarian wing of the Progressive conservation movement merits more than a perfunctory nod to Bailey and the Country Life Movement. 44

In the struggle for ascendancy within the community of agriculturists proper, however, the agrarian wing of the field, in which ecological ideas were emphasized, was seriously handicapped. Its advocates found that the most effective line of reasoning to pursue in presenting their ideas of what scientific agriculture ought to look like was to portray them as a practical means of agricultural improvement. By emphasizing the practi-cality of ecology, they conceded the preeminence of practical ends and, in doing so, undermined their position. For in agriculture, practicality has generally been measured by two criteria: yield and profit. Sustainability has not, historically, been embraced as a measure of practicality. As a result, the agrarian wing lost the struggle, and scientific agriculturists came to favor increased production at virtually any ecological cost.

By the 1960s and 1970s the agrarian wing of the conservation movement had all but been forgotten, and critics of scientific agriculture like Rachel Carson and Wendell Berry could hold up ecology as a foil to agricultural science and the notion of biological interdependence as an indictment of scientific agriculture. Consequently, a sentiment arose that has pitted scien-tific agriculture against ecological ideas—a sentiment that has obscured the early connections between the two so completely that even historians have overlooked them. In A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century, for instance, Randal Beeman and James Pritchard placed “the first stages of ecological agriculture” in the New Deal era, with the work of Hugh Hammond Bennett, Sears, and Rex Tugwell. Indeed, they argued that the notion of biological interdependence was “new” in the 1930s and “represented a shift away from old values of the Teddy Roosevelt-Gifford Pinchot conservation era.” 45


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Ecologists and agriculturists were not always at odds. The fact that in the end Progressive agronomy came to favor technological solutions designed to increase production makes it easy to overlook the equally scientific but less industrially minded solutions posed by agriculturists of the era. And it is worth remembering that agricultural science has never developed outside of the context of theoretical science. Given their shared roots in botany, it should not come as a surprise that ecology was part and parcel of agricultural science until ecologists, eager to vindicate their chosen field as a viable and vital science, made their way to alpine meadows, coastal swamps, and otherwise ostensibly natural systems. That retreat, together with the cultural demand for increased production and the embrace of technological solutions by agronomists, left little room for ecology in agricultural science and, in obscuring those vital early con-nections, has left many today wondering if agriculture and ecology can so much as coexist. 46

NOTES

1. http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2010-01-31/paperback-advice/list.html (accessed Jan. 13, 2011).

2. Wes Jackson and Jon Piper, “The Necessary Marriage between Ecology and Agricul-ture,” Ecology 70 (Dec. 1989): 1591–93.

3. Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 60–63.

4. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2 nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gregg Mitman, The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

5. Robert McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–24.

6. Sharon E. Kingsland, The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890–2000 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 5, 63, 97.

7. McIntosh, Background of Ecology, 34; Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank: The Ori-gins of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 15.

8. The classic account of late nineteenth-century botany is Andrew D. Rodgers, Ameri-can Botany, 1873–1892: Decades of Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944). The fullest account of land-grant schools during the same period is Alan I Marcus, Agricul-tural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy: Farmers, Agricultural Colleges, and Experiment Stations, 1870–1890 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1985). For a contemporary’s take on this transformation (and the rise of laboratory botany generally) see, William G. Farlow, “The Change from the Old to the New Botany,” Science 37 (Jan. 17, 1913): 79–86.

9. Farlow, “Change from the Old to the New Botany,” 79; Emanuel D. Rudolph, “History of the Botanical Teaching Laboratory in the United States,” American Journal of Botany 83 (May 1996): 663–65.


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10. Walter P. Taylor, “What is Ecology and What Good Is It?” Ecology 17 (July 1936): 333; Paul B. Sears, “Some Notes on the Ecology of Ecologists,” Scientific Monthly 83 (July 1956): 22; “Proceedings of the Madison Botanical Congress,” Botanical Gazette (Sept. 1893): 353. In 1895 W. F. Ganong objected to the decision made in Madison, claiming that “ecol-ogy” was a misleading choice and that it ought to be termed “phytobiology.” In a rejoinder appearing beneath his letter, the editors of the Botanical Gazette acknowledged “that ecol-ogy has as yet been little used, but it is rather because the subject matter has been little studied in this country than because the word is awkward or unintelligible.” See, Ganong, “The Term Phytobiology,” Botanical Gazette (Jan. 1895): 38.

11. Proceedings of the Madison Botanical Congress: Madison, Wisconsin, August 23 and 24, 1893 (Madison: Tracey, Gibbs and Co., 1894), 35–38. It is in some ways ironic that ecol-ogy was considered a branch of physiology since today physiology is generally considered quite different from ecology, evolution, and genetics. For more on this, see, McIntosh, Back-ground of Ecology, 25.

12. For more on Clements, see, Tobey, Saving the Prairies . For more on quadrats, see, Ibid., 48–75.

13. On the predictive possibilities of ecology, see, H. L. Shantz, “Natural Vegetation as an Indicator of the Capabilities of Land for Crop Production in the Great Plains Area,” Bulletin No. 201 (Washington, DC: USDA, Bureau of Plant Industry, 1911); W. G. Water-man, “Plant Ecology and Its Relation to Agriculture,” Science 46 (Sept. 7, 1917): 223–28; Louis H. Pammel, “Some Economic Phases of Botany,” Science 53 (Jan. 7, 1921); Henry C. Cowles, “The Economic Trend of Botany,” Science 41 (Feb. 12, 1915): 223–29. Tobey rightly pointed out Clements’s desire to “devise methods whereby the federal government could annually predict the carrying capacity of the public domain” for range management. See, Tobey, Saving the Prairies, 205.

14. Pammel’s senior thesis was published as Pammel, “On the Structure of the Testa of Several Leguminous Seeds,” Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club 13 (Feb. 1886): 17–24. For more on the biographical background of Pammel, see, Marjorie Conley Pohl, “Louis H. Pammel: Pioneer Botanist,” The Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science 92 (Jan. 1985): 1–50.

15. Louis H. Pammel, Flower Ecology (Carroll, Ia.: J. B. Hungerford, nd). The date is actually somewhat in doubt. WorldCat puts it in 1890, but Pammel placed the publication in 1893. See, Pammel, Ecology (Carroll, Ia.: J. B. Hungerford, 1903), preface. It was updated at least once, as some editions reference experiments conducted in 1896, but all of the editions I have seen cite sources dated after 1890, making an 1890 publication date unlikely. Indeed, there is no reason to doubt Pammel’s claim that it was first published in 1893. See, Pammel, Flower Ecology, preface, 1–2. See, also, Pammel, “Charles Darwin on the Fertilization of Plants,” Folder 4, Box 27, Louis Hermann Pammel Papers, Iowa State University Archives, Ames, Iowa (hereafter LHPP). Pammel’s chapter titled “Flowers and Their Unbidden Guests” is a clear reference to Kerner von Mariluan’s Die schutzmittel der blüthen gegen unberufene gäste (Innsbruck, Austria: Wagner, 1879).

16. Pammel, Flower Ecology, preface, 21. For a clear example of Darwin’s connection to agriculture, see, Charles Darwin, The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestica-tion, Vol. 1 (New York: Orange Judd and Company, 1868).

17. Pammel, Ecology, preface. Pammel was well connected. Among those he corre-sponded with were Liberty Hyde Bailey, Charles Bessey, W. T. Hornaday, Barrington


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Moore, H. C. Russell, Charles Sargent, and Alfred Russell Wallace. He also was a prolific publisher producing a number of books and nearly seven hundred articles.

18. Ibid., 291–94. Drawing on the assessments of early ecologists like Paul Sears and Arthur Tansley, historians have long stressed Warming’s influence. In Nature’s Economy, for instance, Worster credited Warming with being “the transitional figure with whom ecol-ogy enters its modern, mature stage” (202). McIntosh similarly noted in The Background of Ecology that “Warming’s seminal contributions to plant ecology and the priority of his work Plantesamund are probably the most widely asserted recognition of parentage for plant ecology by his contemporaries and subsequent commentators” (21). Of course, Warm-ing was hardly the only influence on the development of ecology in America; as Tobey emphasized in Saving the Prairies, Oscar Drude played a more significant role in Clem-ents’s conception of ecology than did Warming (whose influence was greater in Cowles’s approach to the science).

19. Pammel, Ecology, 332; J. Burtt Davy, quoted in, Pammel, The Iowa Geological Survey, Bulletin No. 4: The Weed Flora of Iowa (Des Moines: Iowa Geological Survey, 1913), 687. Pammel was not the only member of the IAC staff concerned about conservation. Pammel recalled, for instance, that “Budd had read and frequently mentioned Prof. Marsh’s ‘Man and Nature.’” See, Pammel, “Prominent Men I Have Met: J. L. Budd,” Folder 1, Box 76, LHPP. The passage of the Lacey Act (1900), which granted the USDA regulatory power over the intentional introduction of non-native species suggests that Pammel was not alone in this concern. See, Philip J. Pauly, Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 80.

20. Pammel, Ecology, 53. 21. Pammel wore a number of hats. He was an elected member of numerous scientific

and conservation societies including the British Ecological Society, the Ecological Society of America, the American Alpine Club, the Society of American Foresters, the Society of American Bacteriologists, the National Geographic Society, the National Agricultural Soci-ety, and the very exclusive Botanical Society of America. For Pammel’s influence on Hitch-cock, see, A. S. Hitchcock to Louis H. Pammel, Feb. 22, 1924, Folder 5a, Box 27, LHPP. Arthur L. Bakke, “The Effect of City Smoke on Vegetation,” Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin No. 145 (Oct. 1913): 384–409; George Washington Carver, “A Few Hints to Southern Farmers,” Southern Workman and Hampton School Record (Sept. 1899). For more on Carver, see, Mark D. Hersey, “Hints and Suggestions to Farmers: George Washing-ton Carver and Rural Conservation in the South,” Environmental History 11 (Apr. 2006): 239–68.

22. Proceedings of the Madison Botanical Congress, 37, emphasis mine; Joseph Grinnell, “Review of Bulletin No. 15 of the US Department of Agriculture. Division of Biological Survey. ‘The Relation of Sparrows to Agriculture,’” Condor 3 (Nov.–Dec. 1901): 190.

23. B. E. Fernow, “Applied Ecology,” Science (Apr. 17, 1903): 605–607. 24. G. M. A., “Review of Research Methods in Ecology, ” American Naturalist 40

(Nov. 1906): 805; Charles Bessey to H. L. Shantz, Sept. 7, 1907, quoted in Richard A. Overfield, “The Impact of the ‘New’ Botany on American Agriculture, 1880–1910,” Technology and Culture 16 (Apr. 1975): 175; Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Principles of Agri-culture: A Text-Book for Schools and Rural Societies (New York: MacMillan Company, 1918), 8.


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25. Pammel to Charles E. Bessey, Oct. 24, 1910, Folder 7a, Box 2, LHPP. 26. Frederick E. Clements, “The Alpine Laboratory,” Science 37 (Feb. 28, 1913): 327–28;

Shantz, “Natural Vegetation.” Shantz had been a student of Clements’s at Nebraska. 27. Charles Bessey, “Some of the Next Steps in Botanical Science,” Science 37 (Jan. 3,

1913): 2–4, 10. 28. Cowles, “The Economic Trend of Botany,” 224–26. 29. Ibid., 226–29. 30. C. V. Piper, “Botany in the Agricultural Colleges,” Science 41 (Feb. 5, 1915):

211–13. 31. A. N. Hume, “Botany in Agricultural Colleges,” Science 41 (Apr. 16, 1915): 575–77. 32. Pammel, “Training Modern Botanists,” (Iowa State) Alumnus (May 1914): 5–8;

Waterman, “Plant Ecology and Its Relation to Agriculture,” 227. 33. For more on the formation of the ESA, see, Victor E. Shelford, “The Organization

of the Ecological Society of America, 1914–1919,” Ecology 19 (Jan. 1938): 164–65. 34. Pammel, “Some Economic Phases of Botany,” 13–14. 35. Ibid., 12, 15. 36. Ibid., 15. 37. Barrington Moore, “The Scope of Ecology,” Ecology 1 (Jan. 1920): 4; William Tre-

lease, “The Relation of Botany to Agriculture,” Science 60 (Aug. 1, 1924): 89–94. There were few exceptions, but predictably, Pammel was among them. In “Some Ecological Notes on the Forests of South Eastern Iowa,” Pammel linked trees to soil types, undergrowth, and other plants that grew nearby. The authors drew few distinctions between forest and farm; humans and agriculture were part of the ecological community. Pammel and G. B. MacDonald, “Some Ecological Notes on the Forests of South Eastern Iowa,” nd, Folder 4, Box 21, LHPP.

38. David B. Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrializa-tion of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979); Deborah Fitzger-ald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

39. See, for instance, M. F. P. Costelloe to C. F. Curtiss et al., Oct. 1917, Folder 2; C. F. Curtiss, “Corn vs. Gasoline,” Mar. 30, 1927, Folder 6, Box 1, Charles F. Curtiss Papers, Iowa State University Archives, Ames, Iowa (hereafter CCP).

40. “Dean Curtiss Attributes Agricultural Depression to Use of Tractors, Trucks, and Automobiles,” Farm Implement News, nd, Folder 6, Box 1, CCP.

41. Pammel, Ecology, 332–39, 289; W. T. Hornaday to Pammel, July 8, 1924, Folder 9, Box 7; Pammel, “The Preservation of Natural History Spots in Iowa,” Folder 2, Box 38, LHPP.

42. “Proceedings: Meetings of the Ecological Society of America at Toronto Meeting of December 28, 1921,” Ecology 3 (Apr. 1922): 170–71; Taylor, “What is Ecology,” 335; Sears, “Botanists,” 732.

43. L. W. R. Jackson, “Review of Agricultural Ecology, ” Science 124 (Nov. 23, 1956): 1034; Ralph Borsodi, “The Case Against Farming as Big Business,” quoted in Wes Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture (1980; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 83–84.

44. Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century Amer-ica (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1915), 11.


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45. Randal S. Beeman and James A. Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 22.

46. Paolo Palladino, for instance, has pointed out that theoretical biology was integral to the development of insecticides, see, Palladino, Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885–1985 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996). Sustainability Institute, “Ecology and Agriculture—a Marriage, a Shotgun Wedding, or a Shoot-Out?” The Donella Meadows Archive: Voice of a Global Citizen, http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=agricultureed (accessed Jan. 15, 2011); Jackson and Piper, “Necessary Marriage,” 1591–93.

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