Succession, an Ecological Concept

Succession, an Ecological ConceptAuthor(s): Robert E. ParkSource: American Sociological Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Apr., 1936), pp. 171-179Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2084475 .

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SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Volume 1 APRIL, 1936 Number 2

SUCCESSION, AN ECOLOGICAL CONCEPT

ROBERT E. PARK University of Chicago

T HE TERM "succession" seems to have first gained currency and definition as a result of its use in the writings of the plant ecologists. It has not the same wide application in animal ecology,

and where it has been used elsewhere, as it has by sociological writers, it seems to be a useful word but without as yet any very pre- cise connotation. It has been used, for example, in describing the intra-mural movements and shiftings of population incident to the growth of the city and of its various "natural areas."

It has been observed, for one thing, that immigrant peoples ordinarily settle first in or near the centers of cities, in the so-called areas of transition. From there they are likely to move by stages (perhaps one might better say, by leaps and bounds) from an area of first to areas of second and third settlement, generally in the direction of the periphery of the city and eventually into the suburban area-in any case, from a less to a more stable section of the metropolitan region. To these movements, seeing in them the effects of natural tendencies in the life of the urban community, students have applied the term "succession."

In this same sense the term has been applied to the successive waves by which the frontier in America advanced from the Atlantic seaboard westward across the plains to the Pacific coast, each advance marked by a different type of culture and by a different occupational and personality type.

'7I



72 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

First arrivals were the explorers, trappers, Indian traders, and prospectors, with a sprinkling of outlaws. In the next line of advance were land seekers, squatters and frontier farmers bent on establish- ing the first frontier settlements. They were followed finally by a swarm of restless enterprising adventurers of all sorts, among them representatives of a frontier intelligentsia-the men who eventually became the lawyers, politicians, and newspaper men of the booming settlements.'

A similar "territorial succession" may be said to have marked the expansion of European population and European culture during the period of four hundred years in which European commerce has made its conquest of the world.2

In a study of Lowell, made by George F. Kenngott and published in i9i2, the most striking feature of the study was the succession of immigrant invasions which in the course of the city's history, i.e., from about i830 to about i9i2, the steady demand for labor in the woolen mills had brought to it. This was a study in population succession, though not so designated. It was also a study in progressive cultural change-a progress, however, that was mostly for the worse.3

Although the term succession, as originally employed by sociolo- gists, would seem to be more appropriately applied to movements of population and to such incidental social and cultural changes as these movements involve, there seems to be no sound reason why the same term should not be used to describe any orderly and irreversible series of events, provided they are to such an extent cor- related with other less obvious and more fundamental social changes that they may be used as indices of these changes.

Thus a series of fundamental inventions like the alphabet, the printing press, the newspaper, and the radio may be said to constitute -a succession. At any rate, each may be said to mark an epoch in the history of communication, and in doing this each new invention characterizes the culture of which it is a part and defines its place in the historical succession. In the same sense we may speak of the waterwheel as in the same line of succession as the steam engine and the electric motor, each marking a phase in the evolution of the machine age. Manifestly such a series of events represents something more than a mere temporal sequence. It represents rather an irrevers-

I Rupert B. Vance, "Frontier: Geographical and Social Aspect," Ency. of Soc. Scis. 2 E. B. Reuter, Race and Culture Contacts, chap. V. 8 George F. Kenngott, The Record of a City: a Social Survey of Lowell, Massachusetts,

N.Y., I9I2.



SUCCESSION, AN ECOLOGICAL CONCEPT I73

ible series in which each succeeding event is more or less completely determined by the one that preceded it.

In a recent paper by Edgar T. Thompson on the plantation as an institution of the frontier, the author refers to the fact that a typical plantation society ordinarily passes through a cycle of change, the plantation cycle, and to this he applies the term succession. There- upon he proceeds to describe in detail the irreversible stages in the natural history of the plantation community.4

In a recent study of the "granger movements" in the United States, Thomas C. McCormick pointed out that the different individual movements seemed to be merely the periodic outbreaks of a disease that was endemic in the country, so that the different movements might well be conceived as the recurrent manifestations, the periodic risings and subsidings, of discontents that had their source and origin in a kind of permanent malaise that could be relieved but never quite cured.5

Among other things interesting from the point of view of succession which this study showed were: (i) each succeeding rural movement was under way and rising before the one preceding it had wholly subsided: (2) although each wave of utopianism was incon- tinently followed by a corresponding period of depression and disil- lusionment, there was, nevertheless, evidence with each recurring wave of a growing realism in the attitudes of the leaders at least. This was manifest in the character of the programs and in the methods for putting them into effect. This is an instance of succession in the psychic or subjective aspect of social change.

A more obvious and impressive example of succession, in the very elementary sense in which this term is here used, is the procession of peoples that have invaded and settled South Africa. First came the Bushmen; they were hunters who have left in caves in the moun- tains, as records of their presence, interesting rock pictures. The Hottentots followed. They were hunters, to be sure, but herdsmen also, and they had a great deal of trouble with the Bushmen who killed their cattle with poisoned arrows. So the Hottentots drove the Bushmen into the Kalahari desert. The Bantu were next. They were hunters and herdsmen but they were more. They cultivated the soil and raised Kaffir corn.

4 Edgar T. Thompson, "Population Expansion and Plantation System." Amer. 7our. of Social., 4I, 3 (Nov., I93I), pp. 3I4-326.

6 Thomas C. McCormick, The Rural Life Movement, unpublished thesis, The University of Chicago.



I74 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Later still came the Boers, particularly the voortrekkers, who settled the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, conquered and enslaved the natives, settled on the land, raised large families, and lived on their wide acres in patriarchal style. Although they were descendants, for the most part, of the earlier Dutch immigrants, with a sprinkling of Huguenots and other Europeans, they had be- come, as a result of their isolation and their long association with the country, an indigenous folk, having their own language, their own customs and culture.

Then, finally, came the English. They were a sophisticated city folk, and they came in force only after diamonds were discovered in Orange Free State in I 867 and gold was discovered in the Transvaal in i884. They built Johannesburg, a cosmopolitan city-a world city, in fact, like Calcutta, and Shanghai, and London. In this way they drew South Africa out of its isolation into the current of inter- national trade and the new world civilization.

What makes this instance of succession ecologically interesting is the fact that it illustrates a principle familiar to ethnologists: the principle, namely, that the more primitive the culture of a people the larger the territory needed, in proportion to its numbers, to support its population. A corollary of this is the principle that the land eventually goes to the race or people that can get the most out of it. This, on the other hand, is merely another version of the rule of agricultural economics, which declares that the best lands eventually go to the best farmers.

The thing that makes the settlement of South Africa relevant and significant, as an example of succession, is the fact that it seems to represent not a casual sequence of events but the consequences of an inexorable historical process.

It is evident that in the conception of succession, as here defined and illustrated, there is implicit a more fundamental notion of social change and of society which is nowhere explicitly set forth.

Generally speaking, succession, as the term is used by ecologists, seems to be identical with a notion of social change suggested by Walter Bagehot's phrase, "the cake of custom," in his volume Phys- ics and Politics; a conception which has been further elaborated by Frederick Jackson Teggart in his Theory of History.6

6 Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics; or Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "Natural Section" and "Inheritance" to Political Society, N.Y., i873; and Frederick Jackson Teggart, Theory of History.




Teggart's is what I have described as the catastrophic theory of history; the theory that each succeeding social order has its origin in the conditions created by the earlier; that society is continually re- born, but that now and then a new and fundamentally different society emerges. In that case, it emerges suddenly and abruptly with the accumulation of minor changes in the course of a long-term trend.

The changes here referred to, have taken place upon the cultural, rather than the biotic level. Nevertheless, they seem to be identical in form, at least, with the kind of change that plant and animal ecologists have called succession, the nature of which is elaborately set forth by F. C. Clements.7

On the other hand, the conception of social relations and society on which this account of succession is based is that suggested by J. Arthur Thompson's description of "the web of life" as "a system of inter-related lives." This is a notion that had its origin in a long series of observations and reflections like those from which Darwin arrived at his theory of the origin of the species. It is this concept of a symbiotic society based on physiological correlation rather than culture which has been adopted and elaborated in writings of the plant and animal ecologists.

Perhaps I can make clear the connection of these conceptions of society and social change with the ecological conception of succession if I state briefly certain points of evolutionary and ecological theory. In brief, then, the argument is this:

Man is involved, with all the hosts of other living creatures, in what Darwin calls "the web of life." In certain places and under certain conditions this interdependence of the species, to which Darwin's expression "the web of life" refers, assumes a relatively permanent, structural character. This is true of the so-called plant and animal communities.

The same biotic interdependence of individuals and species, which has been observed and studied in plant and animal communities, seems to exist likewise on the human level, except for the fact that in human society competition and the struggle for existence are limited by custom, convention, and law. In short, human society is, or ap- pears to be, organized on two levels, the biotic and the cultural.

We may distinguish between a society based on symbiosis, and one based on communication and consensus. As a matter of fact, however,

I F. C. Clements, Plant Succession, Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institution, i9i6.



I76 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

the two are but different aspects of one society. The cultural superstructure rests on the basis of a symbiotic substructure, and the emergent energies that manifest themselves on the biotic level in movements and actions which are obvious enough reveal themselves on the higher, social level in more subtle and sublimated forms. The distinction and relation between the two levels of society, the biotic and the cultural, is, or seems to be, analogous to that between the somatic and psychic aspects of the individual organisms of which the society is composed.

Economic competition, as one meets it in human society, is the struggle for existence, as Darwin conceived it, modified and limited by custom and convention. In other respects, however, it is not different from competition as it exists in plant and animal communities.

Society, in the more inclusive sense in which ecologists have defined it, may be said to exist wherever competition has established some sort of order or war has established some sort of peace. It is the area within which an intrinsic and functional social order has succeeded one that was extrinsic and mechanical. This does not imply that the original relations of men were, as Hobbes described them, a war of each against all, a bellum omnia contra omnes, but rather that the function and effect of competition has been to bring about everywhere a division of labor which has diminished competition. In the same sense the function of war has been to achieve peace and order, and to create a social organization capable of maintaining it.

There is this difference, however, between a symbiotic and cultural society: namely, that the restraint in the case of symbiotic society (as for example in the plant community) is physical and external. In the case of cultural, i.e., human, society the restraints upon the individual are, so to speak, internal and moral, i.e., based on some sort of consensus.

A social organization on either the biotic or social level, so far as it involves the incorporation of individuals into a more intimate association, imposes limits, control, and direction upon these individual units. One may regard the plant and animal community as an association that is wholly anarchic and free. In that case, however, every form of association on the cultural level will involve a limitation of freedom of the individual.

The individual man, although he has more freedom in some places than in others-more freedom on the economic level than upon the




political, more upon the political than the custom or moral level- never has in human society the same absolute freedom to compete with other individuals that plants and animals have.

Competition implies the existence of what J. Arthur Thompson describes as "the self-assertiveness and insurgence of the creature." The adaptations and accommodations which make society possible are for the individual organism or the individual species a partial or temporary solution of its struggles to survive.' But they limit freedom.

As the equilibrium we call society becomes relatively fixed in social structure, competition is increasingly diminished. Neverthe- less, competition persists in human society and continues to manifest itself, as does the sexual instinct, in manifold indirect and in- sidious ways.

Every now and then something occurs, however, to disturb the biotic balance and the social equilibrium, thus tending to undermine the existing social order. It may be the advent of a new insect pest, like the boll weevil, or the arrival of a newly invented and perfected artifact, like the automobile. Under these circumstances, forces and tendencies formerly held in check are released, and a period of in- tense activity and rapid change ensues which then continues until the cycle is completed and a new biotic and social equilibrium is achieved.

Changes, when they are recurrent, so that they fall into a temporal or spatial series-particularly if the series is of such a sort that the effect of each succeeding increment of change reinforces or carries forward the effects of the preceding-constitute what is described in this paper as succession.

In view, however, of the complexity of social change and of the peculiar manner in which change in the social superstructure is involved in change in the biotic or symbiotic substructure, it seems desirable to include within the perspective and purview of the concept, and of the studies of succession, every possible form of orderly change so far as it affects the interrelations of individuals in a community or the structure of the society of which these individual units are a part.

Conceived in this way succession will include studies of the form (morphology) and of the causes (etiology) of social change.

8 "The living creature is by its very nature insurgent and it finds itself encompassed by limitations and difficulties" (Thompson, op. Cit., p. 294).



178 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

Sometimes the forms of social change are such, as in the case of periodic "psychic epidemics" or recurrent business booms, that their courses can be precisely described in a mathematical equation. In that case it may be possible to predict, with some accuracy, not merely the direction but the duration of change.

Studies of succession, however, seek less to predict the course of change than to make change intelligible, so that it can eventually be controlled by technical devices or political measures. For this reason studies of succession are concerned not only with the form which change takes but even more with the circumstances and events which precede, accompany, and follow change-in short, with its natural history.

The study of succession involves, it seems, not merely the life- cycle of individual types of institution and society, but eventually a study of processes by which new types of society are incubated and, eventually, by which a new social order emerges from the lap of the old.

The problems with which plant and animal ecology have tradi- tionally been concerned are fundamentally population problems. Society, from the ecological point of view is, like the natural as op- posed to the institutional family, a symbiotic rather than a social unit. It is a population settled and limited to its habitat. The ties that unite its individual units are those of a free and natural economy, based on a natural division of labor. Such a society is territo- rially organized, and the ties which hold it together are physical and vital rather than customary and moral. It is, of course, not assumed that this is all of society, but it is one aspect of it.

The changes in which ecology is interested, it follows, are primarily physical and vital. They are the movements of population and of ar- tifacts (commodities), changes in location and in occupation-any sort of change, in fact, which affects an existing division of labor or the relation of the population to the soil.

Human ecology, in approaching the study of society from the aspect presented by its biotic substructure, assumes that the origin of social change, if one could trace it to its source, would be found in the struggle for existence and in the growth, the migration, the mo- bility, and the territorial and occupational distribution of peoples which this struggle has brought about.

Ecology conceives society as fundamentally a territorial as well as a cultural organization. So far as this conception is valid, it as-




sumes that most if not all cultural changes in society will be corre- lated with changes in its territorial organization, and every change in the territorial and occupational distribution of the population will effect changes in the existing cultures.

The evolution of society is, therefore, in one of its aspects, the evolution of a territorial organization. Thus, N. B. S. Gras, in his Introduction to Economic History, is able to tell the whole story of economic history by describing the evolution of the metropolitan economy as it has developed through a series of stages which include the village, the town, and the city, and which ends in the metropolitan economy.9

In a similar way, the present economic, political and cultural order in Europe has come into existence with the growth in population and the migration and the territorial expansion of Europe. This expansion has been made possible by a series of inventions which have, at different epochs in its history, revolutionized and transformed the prevailing methods of transportation and communication. They are:

(i) The perfecting of ocean-going ships with which, in the age of discovery, Europeans extended their knowledge of the world outside of Europe.

(2) The steamship, by means of which a great commercial high- way has been established around the world and has made of the seas, with their seaport cities, the center of the world.

(3) The railways, by which the continental areas have been pene- trated and their resources transported to the seaboard, where they have entered into world commerce.

(4) The automobile, which has suddenly further transformed continental areas by spreading out over the land networks of roads which permit rapid and unlimited transportation in every direction.

(5) Finally, there is the airplane, the possibilities of which we are now just beginning to explore.

These changes have literally plowed up the ancient landmarks, undermined the influence of the traditional social order in every part of the world, and released immense social forces which are now seeking everywhere a new equilibrium.

It is from the point of view of these spatial and temporal changes in the interrelation of human beings that ecology seeks to investigate the processes and mechanisms of social and cultural change.

I N. B. S. Gras, In Introduction to Economic History, N.Y., I 922.



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Succession, an Ecological Concept