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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 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 |
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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 most widely used textbook of ecology during the 1960s and early 1970s.3 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. |
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