Page 59 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1360 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

fixed singular chain of being of the natural theologians, sense that a specific habitat “begins with a primitive,
was challenged by a world that Darwin called “an entan- inherently unbalanced plant assemblage and ends with a
gled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with complex formation in relatively permanent equilibrium
birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting with the surrounding conditions” (Worster 1985, 210).
about, and with worms crawling through the damp Both ecology and the earlier natural history understated
earth.” The result was nature that, although partaking of the roles of inorganic forces in the creation and mainte-
universal, unchanging physical laws, had a distinctive his- nance of life. Under the ecosystem concept that was
tory: “whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to developed by the British botanist Arthur George Tansley
the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning end- (1871–1955) in 1935, mechanical philosophy returned
less forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, through twentieth-century thermodynamic physics as a
and are being, evolved” (Darwin 1964, 489–490). powerful approach to constraining nature. Uniting living
and nonliving aspects of the world under the processes of
The Age of Ecology energy flow emphasized nature’s processes as historical
Nature, in gaining history, regained some of the vitality while repudiating the organic community posited in
that it had lost under the reign of mechanical philosophy. Clements’s version of nature. Nature as ecosystem is as
Darwin took the Linnaean conception of a stable chain linear as nature as climax community, but time moves
of being and put it in motion through competition and toward entropy (gradual decline into disorder) rather than
co-adaptation. Donald Worster emphasizes the shift dur- toward progress. As Donald Worster describes it, “the
ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to an ecosystem of the earth, considered from the perspective of
imperfect nature—communities of competing lives that energetics, is a way-station on a river of no return. Energy
are contingent along axes of space and time.The ecolo- flows through it and disappears eventually into the vast
gist Paul Sears situates Darwin’s centrality to ecology in sea of space; there is no way to get back upstream”
his observation that “environment had from the begin- (Worster 1985, 303). Both Clements and Tansley, how-
ning built itself into the very form and organization of all ever, assume a predictable trajectory in natural history.
forms of life” (Sears 1950, 56). Scholars generally credit Historical nature by the end of the twentieth century
the German zoologist and comparative anatomist Ernst had acquired randomness, chaos, and chance.The ecol-
Haeckel (1834–1919) with coining the term oecologie ogist Daniel Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies posits an
(by 1893, ecology) in 1866. Worster agrees with Sears organic nature, a “living system, global in scale, produced
that Haeckel grounded the web of life in Darwin’s the- and in some ways controlled by life” (Botkin 1990,
ory that the economy of nature is governed by relation- 189), that may be modeled through computer programs,
ships that derive from the struggle for existence. uniting Clements and Tansley, but with a critical twist.
The lack of a designer did not imply that no order Nature abstracted is essentially ambiguous, variable, and
exists in a nature that is conceived of as ecological. Dur- complex; time is not singular but rather a sheaf whose
ing the early twentieth century botanists and plant geog- arcs and marks are defined by probability, “always in
raphers in the United States and Europe gradually dis- flux, changing over many scales of time and space,
covered in plant communities a changeful, active nature. changing with individual births and deaths, local dis-
By the 1930s this nature was defined most forcefully in ruptions and recoveries, larger scale responses to climate
the work of the U.S. botanist Frederic Clements (1874– from one glacial age to another” (Botkin 1990, 62). In
1945). He argued that nature is dynamic but that change the twenty-first century nature has a radically contingent
occurs in patterns of “successional development” over history that is particularly troublesome in light of the role
time. Innovation through competition is progressive in the of nature in human history.