JOEL B. HAGEN
                           teaching
                             ECOLOGY
           DURING THE ENVIRONMENTAL AGE, 1965-1980
                           ABSTRACT
        The period 1965-1980 was a time of dramatic change in the academic discipline of
        ecology. Membership in the Ecological Society of America more than doubled. This
        growth was accompanied by spirited debate over fundamental concepts and the
        intellectual boundaries of ecology. As public awareness of environmental problems
        grew, ecologists struggled to define their professional identity and their public role in
        the burgeoning popular environmental movement. The resulting tensions within
        professional ecology were strikingly evident in the way different ecologists presented
        the conceptual framework, norms, and goals of their discipline to students through
        competing college textbooks. This paper explores how the dominant textbook of the
        1960s, Eugene Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology, was challenged by a new breed of
        textbooks, beginning in the early 1970s. Odum’s textbook was notable for its emphasis
        on applied ecology and its presentation of ecologists as expert environmental
        problem-solvers. The newer textbooks differed from Fundamentals of Ecology both
        in their strong evolutionary perspectives and their ambivalence toward environmental
        biology. Ironically, as environmentalism gained increasing public support during the
        1970s, many ecologists turned away from teaching environmental issues.
        TEXTBOOKS MAY BE a pedestrian form of literature, but they play a critical role
        in the training of neophyte scientists.1 Unlike the humanities, where students
        often are introduced to the primary literature from the very beginning, science
        students typically learn the rudiments of their subject by reading textbooks.
        Through this sometimes distorted lens students not only are exposed to well-
        accepted facts and theories, but also the norms and goals of the discipline.
        Examined in retrospect, textbooks can, therefore, provide a historical window
        into important intellectual and social changes within disciplines. Such is the case
        in ecology, which changed significantly beginning in the late 1960s and
       Joel B. Hagen, “Teaching Ecology during the Environmental Age, 1965-1980,” Environmental History
       13 (October 2008): 704-723.
                                                               TEACHING ECOLOGY  |  705
             continuing through the 1970s. This period was marked by a spirited debate over
             fundamental concepts and the intellectual boundaries of ecology. At the same
             time, ecologists struggled to define their professional identity and their public
             role in the emerging environmental movement. All of this occurred during a period
             of unprecedented growth and specialization in ecology, as the Ecological Society
             of America saw its numbers more than double between 1965-1975.2
                During the early part of this period the dominant college textbook was Eugene
             Odums Fundamentals of Ecology. First published in 1953, the book quickly
             displaced competitors, eventually went through five editions, and became the
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             most widely used textbook of ecology during the 1960s and early 1970s.  A recent
             survey suggests that the book profoundly shaped the outlook of a generation of
             ecologists trained during this period.4 Odum also condensed his ideas in several
             shorter books written for nonscientific audiences, thus providing the core
             concepts for a popular science of the environment.
                For both admirers and later critics, Odum became indelibly linked to ecological
             pedagogy and particularly to the ecosystem concept. Largely due to his promotion
             of the idea, the ecosystem became part of everyday speech and was widely used
             by the popular press to discuss environmental problems. A professional specialty
             of ecosystem ecology had gradually established itself during the decades following
             World War II. By the 1960s, Odum and other advocates boldly claimed that the
             ecosystem concept could now serve as the central, unifying concept for a new
                    5
             ecology.  The concept unified plant and animal ecologies, which previously had
             been quite separate specialties. It also directed attention to the importance of
             bacteria, fungi, and other organisms that often had been ignored by earlier
             ecologists. By joining the living community and the nonliving environment as a
             single, interacting entity, the ecosystem concept provided a focus for studying
             pollution, habitat destruction, overpopulation, and other pressing environmental
             problems. Using the conceptual framework of energy flow and nutrient cycling,
             the idea of an ecosystem was sufficiently abstract and flexible to explain the
             operation of something as small as a spacecraft or as large as the entire biosphere.
             Not surprisingly, “spaceship earth” became a compelling metaphor both for
             ecosystem ecologists and for nonscientists concerned about an imperiled planet.6
                Much of the success of this metaphor and the scientific concepts at its core
             can be attributed to the way that Odum embedded these ideas in the progressive
             social and political ideas descended from the New Deal. From this broad social
             perspective ecologists were societys expert problem-solvers, who used their
             understanding of natures processes to cure or repair the environmental side-
             effects of a growing population in a technologically advanced society. Odum
             artfully combined cooperative metaphors drawn from the organic world of lichens
             and corals with mechanical icons of a technologically sophisticated culture. Coral
             reefs, human societies, spacecraft, and computers all could be understood as
             complex wholes made up of interacting parts coordinated by intricate homeostatic
             mechanisms.7
                Odums ideas about organicism, cooperation, interdependence, and
             progressive evolution both in nature and in human society were within the broad
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             mainstream of American political, social, and biological thought throughout
             much of his career. By the late 1960s, however, a strong reaction began against
             this way of thinking, not only in biology, but also in politics and popular culture.
             A self-conscious group of evolutionary ecologists argued the importance of
             individual fitness and the improbability of the type of group adaptations that
             were central to Odums thinking. Cooperation, which Odum took for granted as
             an inherent characteristic of ecosystems and human societies, became highly
             problematic. Evolutionary ecologists tended to dismiss it or downplay its
             importance. In the new evolutionary theory cooperation was not the predictable
             result of progressive evolution as Odum thought, but rather a strategy
             occasionally employed by self-interested individuals to increase their
             reproductive success. If the new evolutionary ecology undermined Odums claims
             about cooperation in nature, the erosion of the liberal progressivism of the New
             Deal also changed the way professional ecologists thought about their public roles
             in the environmental movement. In contrast to Odums view of ecologists as expert
             problem-solvers working within a cooperative political system, many younger
             ecologists retreated into purely academic pursuits or viewed themselves as
             detached social critics outside the established political order. In important ways,
             the textbooks that began to replace Odums Fundamentals of Ecology during the
             1970s reflected these changes.
             BIOSOCIAL ROOTS OF FUNDAMENTALS OF ECOLOGY
             FUNDAMENTALS OF ECOLOGY was a striking departure from other ecology
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             textbooks, both those that preceded it and those that later replaced it.  Stung by
             criticism that ecology was glorified natural history, Odum highlighted the
             scientific foundations of the discipline. Each chapter began with a concise
             statement of a fundamental ecological principle followed by explanation and
             examples. This pedagogical style was accompanied by a holistic approach that
             introduced students to ecosystems at the very beginning of the book. The
             ecosystem concept permeated later chapters and was used as the primary
             organizing principle for discussing other ecological topics. Equally striking was
             the way that Odum presented ecology as a bridge between the natural and social
             sciences. No other major ecology textbook has placed so much emphasis upon
             applied ecology and the social role of ecologists as expert problem-solvers in a
             complex, technological world. For Odum, professional ecology was more than an
             academic discipline; it was also a field responsible for providing environmental
             counsel and for training conservation workers, sanitary engineers, and other
             applied ecologists.9 This view of ecology—which was widely rejected by later
             textbook writers—was strongly influenced by Odums father, the sociologist
             Howard Washington Odum. The elder Odum was an important role model for his
             son. He strongly encouraged Eugenes interest in textbook writing, and as we
             shall see, his ideas provided an important foundation for Eugenes thinking about
             the relationship between science and society.10 Equally striking was the way the
             father used his sons earliest ecological writings in his own sociology textbooks.11
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          This symbiotic blending of the natural and social sciences would become a
          hallmark of Eugene Odums approach to teaching ecology.
            Beginning in the 1930s, Howard Washington Odum became a leading
          spokesman for regionalism, which he sharply contrasted with an older
          sociological school of sectionalism. Unlike sectionalism, which emphasized
          divisiveness and conflict, Odums regionalism emphasized cooperation and
          interdependence among the various regions of the United States.12 According to
          Odum, each region contributed to the national whole by bringing a unique set of
          natural resources, economic opportunities, social structures, and cultural
          characteristics. Regionalism was premised on the idea that progressive social
          evolution leads to increasing equilibrium and harmony in the organic whole of
          the nation.13 The Great Depression challenged this assumption, and Odum
          emphasized the growing role of the federal government in planning and
          coordinating social and economic progress through large regional projects such
          as the Tennessee Valley Authority. However, Odum took pains to place the growth
          of government within the context of traditional democratic ideals and to present
          big government as a necessary part of the continuing evolution of American
          society. His views reflected the progressive liberalism of the New Deal, to which
          he was deeply committed. The Great Depression and the New Deal programs were
          defining episodes in American history, and Odum believed that regionalism
          provided the proper balance between the extreme individualism championed by
          traditional political conservatives and the equally extreme totalitarianism
          exemplified by the Soviet Union and Germany.14
            Eugene Odum credited his father with introducing him to the idea of the
          functional integration of parts into a larger whole, which he routinely applied to
          both ecosystems and human societies. As he later wrote, “the concept that
          uniquely different cultural units function together as wholes is, of course, parallel
          to the ecologists concept of the ecosystem.”15 This central idea was reinforced
          by other intellectual influences that Odum freely acknowledged. As a graduate
          student, Odum came under the sway of Victor Shelford, an ecologist who was
          deeply committed to holistic approaches and who stressed the social role of
          ecologists in promoting conservation and environmental protection. There were
          obvious parallels between Shelfords idea of ecological regions (biomes) and the
          sociological regions of Odums father. Odum later claimed that Shelfords biome
          concept was a forerunner of the ecosystem concept.16 Odum was also strongly
          influenced by his brother, Howard Thomas, who wrote some of the chapters in
          Fundamentals of Ecology, and spent his career trying to create a unified systems
          approach to studying both ecosystems and human societies.17 H. T. also played an
          important role in introducing his older brother to the early ecosystem research
          of his mentor, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, and Hutchinsons protégé, Raymond
          Lindeman. As Fundamentals of Ecology evolved, Odum also was able to draw on
          the expanding work of other ecosystem ecologists. Thus, during the 1960s, Eugene
          Odum was not only a leader of the specialty, but also the primary synthesizer of
          research on ecosystems.