Demarcating Nature, - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Demarcating Nature,
Defining Ecology:
Creating a Rationale for
the Study of Nature’s
“Primitive Conditions”

S. Andrew Inkpen
University of Pittsburgh

The proper place of humans in ecological study has been a recurring issue. ICH
reconstruct and evaluate an early twentieth century rationale in ecology that
encouraged the treatment of humans as apart from natural processes, and I
unearth the interests and assumptions, both epistemic and non-epistemic, Das
fostered it. This rationale was articulated during the early years of the Eco-
logical Society of America, particularly through its Committee on the Preser-
vation of Natural Conditions. Committee members advocated for the
preservation of what they considered epistemologically foundational and func-
tionally normal objects of study—nature’s “primitive conditions”—and in
doing so collapsed two conceptually independent categories of unnaturalness:
the artiﬁcial and the pathological. As these ecologists demarcated what
counted as nature, sie waren, in the process, deﬁning ecology as a science in
ways that had lasting repercussions.

The relationship of man himself to his environment is an inseparable
part of ecology; for he also is an organism and other organisms are a
part of his environment. Ecology, daher, broadly conceived and
rightly understood, instead of being an academic science merely, out
of touch with humanistic interests, is really that part of every other
biological science which brings it into immediate relation to human
kind. (Forbes 1922, S. 89–90)

I would like to thank the following people for their comments on and discussions about the many
earlier drafts of this essay: Will Bausman, John Beatty, Matt Chew, Adrian Currie, Antoine
Dussault, Margaret Farrell, Dani Hallet, Lisa Haushofer, Anna Johnson, Alex Krongel, Markieren
Sagoff, Jim Lennox, audiences at the University of Pittsburgh, Lake Forest College, Harvard
Universität, and Dalhousie University, one anonymous reviewer for Perspectives on Science,
and the Editor in Chief, Alex Levine. This research was made possible by a SSHRC Postdoctoral
Research Fellowship at Harvard University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Perspektiven auf die Wissenschaft 2017, Bd. 25, NEIN. 3
© 2017 vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology

doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00246

355

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Demarcating Nature

Einführung

1.
The proper place of humans in ecological study has been a recurring issue
for ecology. Of course humans are part of Nature writ large, but are they
part of the ecologist’s nature? The question bothered biologists even before
the discipline of ecology was ﬁrmly institutionalized. Thomas Henry Huxley
argued in 1876 that because man was a living creature, he and “all his ways”
should properly be considered under the province of biology; yet, biologists,
he felt, are a “self-sacriﬁcing” bunch, for whom non-human nature is
sufﬁcient disciplinary territory (Huxley [1876] 1897, S. 270–71).

Twenty-ﬁrst-century ecologists are apparently less self-sacriﬁcing. Con-
fessing that they have traditionally neglected anthropogenic factors, viele
recent ecologists have argued that this has been for the worse.1 The reason
they offer is that our world, or at the very least our understanding of it, hat
changed (Ellis et al. 2013). We now recognize that humans are a dominant
force in most ecosystems, transforming ecological processes and patterns
around the globe, and current ecologists are afraid that a methodological
position that discounts humans would lose its global relevance. They feel
that they “cannot effectively contribute [to recent discourses] without
models that incorporate the activities of our own species” (Collins et al.
2000, P. 418).2

As a consequence of this disciplinary self-reﬂection, commentaries
abound in the contemporary ecological literature. Ecologists Boris Worm
and Robert Paine, Zum Beispiel, write that “Humans have historically been
treated as an externality, as if their effects belong in a separate category
compared to other species and their interactions” ( Worm and Paine
2016, P. 604).3 Such commentaries emphasize, Zuerst, that ecologists con-
tinue to systematically bias the study of “protected” areas—areas protected
from humans—over the human-disturbed (Martin et al. 2012). Aber,
zweite, and more interesting from a philosophical perspective, they indi-
cate that this is not just a matter of contingent institutional, finanziell, oder
sociological reasons, but also a matter of epistemology. Martin et al. (2012)
argue that most ecological practice assumes that non-human environments
“better represent ecological and evolutionary processes and are therefore
better objects of study” (2012, P. 198). Ecologist James Brown has argued
that such biases are the result of mistakenly associating the epistemic
values of “rigor and objectivity” with “natural areas” alone. “The study

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1. See Rees 1997, Haila 1999, Grimm et al. 2000, and O’Neill and Kahn 2000 as older

but inﬂuential examples. See the citations below for more recent examples.

2. The history of “human ecology” speaks to the controversial place of humans in ecol-
Ogy. See Cittadino 1993a, Tjossem 1994, and Kingsland 2005. Steiner (2002), ein aktueller
proponent of human ecology, calls human ecology “the subversive subject.”

3. For other recent examples, see Inkpen (2017).

Perspektiven auf die Wissenschaft

357

of humans and their interrelationships with the rest of the natural world
has been left to the ‘social’ and the ‘applied’ sciences,” he writes, “both of
which have been viewed with disdain by many of those who practice ‘pure’
ecology” (Braun 1995, P. 205). But why associate “natural areas” with
rigor and objectivity? Why treat “the natural” and “the artiﬁcial” as
distinct domains, and why think that an area is epistemologically superior
because it involves less human interference?4

Critical historical study can help to answer these questions by going
back and reconstructing the rationales or styles of reasoning that encour-
aged the practice of treating anthropogenic factors as improper research
Objekte. In diesem Aufsatz, I will explore the origin of just such a rationale in
ecology. This is not the story of a true origin, as the roots of the idea that
nature is separate from the human world can be traced much further back.5
But it is the story of the role this rationale played during the origin of
American ecology as a “self-conscious scientiﬁc enterprise,” when the
rationale was articulated clearly and inﬂuentially, and when it served as
an intellectual adhesive for the emerging science (Ilerbaig 1999, P. 456).
I argue that this rationale has roots in the early history of the Ecological
Gesellschaft von Amerika (ESA), particularly through its Committee on the Pre-
servation of Natural Conditions (1917–1945). Members of the Society
attempted to protect what they considered to be epistemologically and
methodologically foundational objects of study, what they called nature’s
“primitive conditions”: “the conditions which existed before man came
upon the scene [Und] the conditions which would again supervene if the
human inhabitants were withdrawn” (Adams 1913, P. 30). These condi-
tions could be found or reestablished only on large tracks of undisturbed—
meaning un-human-disturbed—land, such as in a nature preserve. Als
these ecologists demarcated what counted as nature’s primitive conditions,
they were also, in the process, deﬁning the science of ecology in ways that
had lasting, but largely unacknowledged, repercussions for the methods
and practices of ﬁeld ecology.

In den vergangenen Jahren, a handful of historical and sociological studies have
touched on this committee (Croker 1991, Tjossem 1994, Kinchy 2006,
Kupper 2009, Barrow 2009, Rumore 2012). These studies have shown,
Zuerst, that early ecologists were not just inﬂuenced by environmental

4. Brown’s comments are striking also because historians and philosophers of twentieth-
century science commonly point to highly artiﬁcial laboratory work as the current ideals of
rigour and objectivity. Sehen: Shapin 1988, Gooday 1991, Hacking 1991, Knorr Cetina
1992, De Chadarevian 1996. On the laboratory-ﬁeld boundary, see Benson 1992, Kohler
2002, Kingsland 2009; 2015, Vetter 2012.

5. Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Glacken 1967, Williams 1980, Oelschlaeger 1991, Worster 1994,

Descola 2013.

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Demarcating Nature

Bewegungen, they were active participants: understanding early ecology re-
quires more than identifying parallelisms between ecology and these wider
Bewegungen, it involves appreciating that ecologists articulated their scien-
tiﬁc rationale as members of these movements, sharing many of their
assumptions. Zweitens, this literature, and in particular Rumore (2012),
has shown that the preservation of nature in its “primitive conditions”
was important to ecologists because they viewed these conditions as nec-
essary for the advancement of their science. Mit anderen Worten, these condi-
tions were in particular epistemologically valuable. But the mystery, Und
the question which this essay addresses, is why? What was it about “prim-
itive conditions” that made them so epistemologically valuable?

The current essay departs from the previous literature by taking both a
broader and more philosophical approach. I aim to reconstruct the scien-
tiﬁc rationale articulated and advocated by these ecologists and to unearth
the assumptions and interests, both epistemic and non-epistemic, Das
fostered it. Dabei, I will draw on and extend Elliott Sober’s analysis
of the “natural state model” of scientiﬁc reasoning (Sober 1980). Ich werde
argue that their rationale was a variant of this style. I will also argue that
their rationale implied a collapse of two conceptually independent ways of
being unnatural: pathological and artiﬁcial. Being artiﬁcial was for them
simply one way of being pathological.

My aim is unabashedly presentist. I ultimately desire to better under-
stand how ecologists got to where they currently are, das ist, to explain
how rationales articulated in the past have become de rigueur and encour-
aged the practice of favoring nonhuman research sites today.6 In the end, ICH
will brieﬂy discuss how this rationale fares in the light of modern ecolog-
ical interests and assumptions, again both epistemic and non-epistemic.

This essay will proceed as follows. Abschnitt 2 historically situates the
Committee for the Preservation of Natural Conditions within early
twentieth-century environmental thinking. Abschnitt 3 illustrates the meaning
of nature’s “primitive conditions” through an analysis of nature preserve
architectural plans. Abschnitt 4 argues that ecological succession theory, mit
its guiding metaphor of orderly development, encouraged the treatment of
humans as disturbances to the normal sequence of ecological development.
Abschnitt 5 analyzes their treatment of humans as disturbances and argues that
the rationale they offered is a variant of the “natural state model” of scientiﬁc

6. The historical methodology utilized in this paper has been described as analogous to
developing a phylogeny in biology. See Lennox (2001) for a full account of this method-
ology. Maienschein et al. (2008, P. 348) argue for a similar methodology, apparently inde-
pendently of Lennox. For lucid accounts that don’t make reference to phylogeny, sehen
Hacking 2004 and Vogel 2015, S. 33ff.

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reasoning. Abschnitt 6 argues that underwriting the perceived functional
normality of nature’s primitive conditions were non-epistemic assumptions
about its multifarious superiority. Abschnitt 7 demonstrates further methodo-
logical implications. Abschnitt 8 argues that these ideas were widely held, sogar
among those less committed to the theory of succession. And Section 9
concludes with a critique of the value of their rationale.

2. Preservation for Science
Following its founding in 1915, the ESA quickly assumed a role in nature
preservation, aiming to protect North America’s “primitive conditions”
through its Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions (Shreve
1917; Shelford 1938; Dexter 1978). Convened during the Society’s second
Jahr, this committee concentrated its efforts on listing all of the preserved
and preservable areas in North America, explaining the scientiﬁc need for
preservation, and attempting to secure the preservation of each area. Victor
Shelford, an ecologist at the University of Illinois and the ESA’s ﬁrst pres-
ident, was appointed chair of the committee, a position he would hold
intermittently until the committee disbanded in 1945 (Croker 1991).
Shelford’s appointment was understandable: as ﬁrst president of the
ESA, he argued that the preservation of natural conditions was just as
important for the establishment of ecology as professional communication
through annual meetings or a journal (Tjossem 1994, P. 18). Aus 1917
Zu 1945, the committee consisted of many prominent members of the
ecological scientiﬁc community—in fact, six of the ﬁrst seven presidents
of the ESA served on the committee—but to eliminate unnecessary com-
plexity, I will focus primarily on Victor Shelford, Charles C. Adams,
Francis Sumner, and Joseph Grinnell.

Readers familiar with environmental literature will recognize that the
name of the committee is signiﬁcant. Environmental historians recognize
two subspecies of early twentieth-century environmental thought: conser-
vation and preservation.7 Conservation implies human management: con-
servationists argue that a governmental body needs to actively manage
natural resources for long-term human use, whether for recreation, wie
hunting, or for the “wise” management of essential resources like lumber.
Preservationists, andererseits, argue for a passive, non-interventionist
approach that involves protecting the land from any human interference
whatsoever. The committee’s name—and its motto, “An Undisturbed Area

7. On the conservation-preservation distinction, see Shelford 1933, Pinchot [1947]

1998, S. 319ff, Nash 1967, Dunlap 1980, Worster 1994, and Rumore 2012.

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Demarcating Nature

in Every National Park and Public Forest”—reveals its commitment to the
latter cause (Croker 1991, P. 124).

The committee wanted to preserve nature in its “primitive” state for
scientiﬁc reasons. As Gina Rumore (2009) has argued, this is often over-
looked in environmental histories and histories of ecology.8 One might
think that this committee was formed so that ecologists would have a ven-
ue for entering into the political sphere—for using scientiﬁc knowledge
and authority to inﬂuence political decisions about land management. Das
is in part true, and certainly this was part of Shelford’s overall plan (Croker
1991, P. 120ff ). But it is not the whole story. The committee was ofﬁcially
established to help protect what ecologists considered to be epistemolog-
ically foundational objects of study in ecology: nature’s primitive condi-
tionen. It was a professional society committee concerned to promote
scientiﬁc research.9

Despite its scientiﬁc focus, the committee was not alone in its attempts
to protect nature from human exploitation. Tatsächlich, it was one of a handful
of similar committees formed around the same time.10 A prevailing nar-
rative in environmental history argues that the proliferation of such com-
mittees was due to anxieties over the closing of the American frontier, Und
this narrative is worth brieﬂy recounting to contextualize the claims made
in later sections of this essay (Nash 1967). Until the early twentieth cen-
tury, the “frontier”—that westward-migrating area of reaction “between
wilderness and the edge of expanding settlement”—had been a deﬁning
American idea (Turner 1932, P. 183; see Nash 1967, P. 146; Cronon
1996). To many, including famously the historian Frederick Jackson Turner
and President Theodore Roosevelt, the frontier had created a uniquely
American mentality and set of ideals. Living in the wilderness, what Turner
pertinently called “the return to primitive conditions,” led to the admirable
American trait of independence and a democratic society (Turner 1896,
P. 289; my emphasis). According to Turner’s narrative, struggling against
the wilderness set Americans apart from their European ancestors, and set

8. See also Warren 2008 and Barrow 2009 for this emphasis.
9. From the beginning, the ESA focused on ﬁeld work and the training of ecologists
from different areas in the diverse natural communities throughout America (Shelford
1938).

10. See Kupper (2009) for an international perspective. In Switzerland, Zum Beispiel, A
similar Committee was created around the same time, the Committee for Nature Protec-
tion. These national movements also had connections, especially through the American
botanist Harvey Hall, who spent a year in Europe learning about European approaches
to nature reserves. See also similar movements in England, Zum Beispiel, Arthur Tansley’s
work Our Heritage of Wild Nature (1945).

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them apart for the better. Roosevelt similarly argued that “Under the hard
conditions of life in the wilderness,” Americans shed their European roots
and became new “in dress, in customs, and in mode of life” (Roosevelt,
quoted in Nash 1967, P. 149).11 According to this narrative, Amerika, beide
the idea and the place, was a product of westward pioneering expansion
durch, and ultimately with the overcoming of, wilderness. It was perva-
sive and persuasive in Progressive Era America (Hays 1959).

The writings of members of the ecological committee testify to the
power and ubiquity of this narrative; it recurs throughout their work.
Charles C. Adams—committee member, seventh president of the ESA,
and director of the New York State Museum—wrote that, “Historians
[like Turner] have shown us how much our American democratic institu-
tions have been a direct outgrowth of our pioneering, and how this has
tended to encourage independence, self-reliance and other traits which
have contributed so much toward our institutions and our ideals” (Adams
1929, P. 40). If these ecologists focused on the value of nature’s “primitive
conditions” for science it was not, mit anderen Worten, because they overlooked
or underappreciated its other non-epistemic, culturally sanctioned
values.12

Turner declared the close of the frontier in 1890, and by the early twen-
tieth century, the narrative of the value of wilderness was intimately linked
with anxieties about its disappearance (Nash 1967, P. 147). Turner him-
self wondered whether American ideals had “acquired sufﬁcient momen-
tum to sustain themselves under conditions so radically unlike those in the
days of their origin” (Turner 1903, P. 91). Part of the reasoning behind
early preservation movements, the National Park Service, and city parks,
was to protect nature in its “primitive conditions” so that Americans could
revisit the conditions that made them who they were. The most pressing
issue was urbanization: many Americans had moved to cities, where un-
natural living conditions were believed to result in degeneration. Land-
scape architects, like Charles Eliot, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jens
Jensen, who tackled these problems head on, argued that city life caused

11. Theodore Roosevelt was inﬂuential on the thinking of the ecologists of the Com-
mittee. Zum Beispiel, see Victor Shelford’s long and favorable quotations from Roosevelt in
Animal Communities in Temperate America (1913, P. 6ff ). Joseph Grinnell’s cousin, George
Bird Grinnell, was a founding member, with Roosevelt, of the Boon and Crockett Club, A
conservation organization dedicated to protecting America’s wilderness, largely for hunt-
ing. See Haraway (1989) for an examination of Roosevelt, his part in these “Nature Move-
gen,” and his inﬂuence on natural history.

12. Tatsächlich, the inﬂuence goes both ways, since Turner himself drew on the science, Und

in particular biology, of his day (Coleman 1966).

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exhaustion, depression, and emasculation—as “we grow more and more
artiﬁcial day by day”—warranting the protection of “natural” areas for
recreation and regeneration.13

Alongside these social, political and moral meanings, to members of the
committee like Shelford and Adams, vanishing wilderness raised a partic-
ular problem for the new science of ecology: objects of study were vanish-
ing with it. Using phrases already laden with cultural signiﬁcance, Die
committee argued that the “primitive” or “primeval” conditions of
nature—those existing before the encroachment of man—were being lost
as the North American landscape was urbanized or adapted for agriculture.
Joseph Grinnell, the committee’s livestock “grazing advisor,” wrote that
“as the settlement of the country progresses, and the original aspect of na-
ture is altered, the parks will probably be the only areas unspoiled for sci-
entiﬁc study” (Grinnell and Storer 1916, P. 379; Shelford et al. 1921,
P. 4). “The science of ecology,” wrote another member, “depends upon un-
disturbed patches of nature as its ‘material’” (Shelford et al. 1921, P. 10).
The vanishing frontier meant vanishing research objects.

A conveniently slippery buzzword, “primitive conditions” spoke to
more than just ecologists at this time; it also harkened to these broadly
popular cultural ideas about American exceptionalism and the health of
a nation and its people. Their particular understanding of the idea of na-
ture’s primitive conditions is best explained through a discussion of their
landscape architectural plans.

3. Demarcating Nature’s “Primitive Conditions”
According to the committee, preservation was intended “to allow nature to
take her own course, with as little interference by man as is possible”
(Adams 1929, P. 38). In September of 1917 the committee mailed out
information cards to its members in order to secure a preliminary data
set (Shreve 1917; ﬁgure 1). Those who knew of areas desirable for preser-
vation were encouraged to ﬁll in as much information about these areas as
möglich, including the location, Bereich, and ownership, but also the type of
ecological habitat and species therein. The committee could then prioritize
and secure as much natural variability as possible, spanning prairies and
mountains, swamps and deserts.

13. Stanley White, a landscape architect at Shelford’s home institution, the University
of Illinois, contributed a piece to the Committee’s publication Naturalist’s Guide to the
Americas entitled “The Value of Natural Preserves to the Landscape Architect.” Adams
referred to the work of Jens Jensen, the landscape architect and committee member (Adams
1929, P. 41). On Jensen and preservation, see Grese 1992. On Jensen and his connection to
Henry Cowles, graduate supervisor of both Adams and Shelford, see Cittadino 1993b.

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Figur 1. An information card, mailed out by the committee to members of the
ESA in September 1917 (Shreve 1917).

In its ﬁrst report, published in 1921, the committee speciﬁed diagram-
matically how one might go about preserving natural areas from the “en-
croachment of civilization” (Shelford et al. 1921; ﬁgures 2 Und 3). Diese
suggested management plans demonstrated how to preserve the “Natural”—
represented in the ﬁgures by a particular symbol and distinguished from
“stream,” “fence,” and “shrubs”—by building a buffer zone around its
borders. To discover landscape plans within a committee document is unsur-
prising given that landscape architect Jens Jensen was a “co-operating mem-
ber” of the committee in the Chicago area and that, as suggested above,
landscape architecture was a key element of many preservation initiatives
at the time (Cittadino 1993b, S. 526ff ). Each nature reserve, they argued,
should be sub-divided into three distinct areas: a “Nature sanctuary,” a
“buffer area of partial protection,” and an area for the development of human
Verwendet, where this is one of the aims of the reserve (Shelford 1933, P. 245).
These plans thus also represent attempts to reach compromises between
various economic and environmental interests.

These diagrams are important because they reﬂect the committee’s own
ideas about what nature was like—namely, that it was a physical location,
containing an assemblage of species, free of human interference—where it
might be found, and that it could be cordoned-off and contained. Der

364

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Figur 2. A suggested management plan for a sixty acre tract of forest (Shelford
et al. 1921).

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Figur 3. A suggested management plan for a 1600 acre tract of forest (Shelford
et al. 1921).

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Demarcating Nature

“Natural” area was an area where, in the absence of human disturbance,
nature’s primitive conditions would develop or express themselves. Das
the committee ultimately rested upon a distinction between “natural”
and “human,” despite possessing a rich vocabulary for describing the vari-
ability of ecological associations—as shown in ﬁgure 1—is a testament to
their belief in the homogeneity of urban or agricultural spaces and the
degenerative effects of human inﬂuence (ﬁgure 4). Some argued, and I will
return to this below, that agricultural pests, such as scale insects, existed
only in human-disturbed places, and not in nature itself (Shelford 1913,
P. 18; ﬁgure 5).

As I’ve said, the committee’s primary goal in the report and through
subsequent work was not just to demarcate nature, but to articulate a sci-
entiﬁc rationale for the study of this nature. It would be misrepresentative
to focus on one set of factors giving rise to their treatment of nature’s
“primitive conditions” as epistemologically foundational. A constellation

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Figur 4. Two diagrams showing the differences in arrangements of plants and
animals under primitive conditions and agricultural conditions (Shelford 1913).

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Figur 5. We can get a sense of the perceived degenerative effects of urbanization
by considering the committee’s repeat photographs of Gary, Indiana following the
establishment of a U.S. Steel plant. The photographs depict the progression of
deforestation and urbanization of Gary from 1905 Zu 1911, which the committee
saw as a process of de-naturalization (Shelford et al. 1921).

of mutually reinforcing arguments supported this belief, as the next
sections will show.

4. Ecology’s “Laws of Orderly Sequence”
In the early-twentieth century, two styles of ecology were distinguished
from one another and these styles began to develop along separate inves-
tigative lines (Mitman 1992, P. 42ff ).14 Einerseits, there was aut-
ecology: the investigation of the development “of the structure, Funktion,
and behavior of a given individual or kind of animal from the standpoint of

14. Early ecological textbooks by Adams and Shelford both repeat this division (Adams

1913; Shelford 1913). See also Shelford 1926, P. 57.

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Demarcating Nature

its relations and responses to the complete environment” (Adams 1913,
P. 3; emphasis added). Andererseits, there was synecology: the in-
vestigation of ecological communities, das ist, relatively stable assemblages
of species coexisting in a particular location.

Autecology was highly amenable to laboratory investigation: it involved
subjecting individual organisms to various environmental stimuli and
measuring responses—what Shelford called an individual’s “physiological
life history” (Shelford 1915, P. 2). Synecology, Jedoch, was much harder
to conduct under laboratory conditions. Maintaining an entire community
in the laboratory was infeasible, and so most of these studies were descrip-
tive ﬁeld studies. Mit anderen Worten, if one wanted to understand ecological
relations above the individual level, one was forced to focus on natural
communities and this couldn’t be done well in the laboratory. Criticizing
autecology, Shelford wrote, “Perhaps one reason why nature study has been
unsuccessful is because too often it is not the study of nature but of single
natural objects or groups of objects which constitute a small part of any
natural aggregation” (Shelford 1933, P. 241). In order to study the whole
Gemeinschaft, what Shelford simply refers to as “nature,” one needed to go
draußen.

Adams and Shelford were both trained at Chicago, and their early work
on communities took them both outdoors. Adams’ doctoral work focused
on variation in gastropod shells in the Tennessee River system (Adams
1901; Adams 1902; Sears 1956; Ilerbaig 1999, P. 446). Shelford’s
Ansatz, as would be his approach for the rest of his life, combined lab-
oratory experiments and ﬁeld study, to investigate Tiger beetles on dunes
along the Lake Michigan shoreline (Shelford 1908; Shelford 1911; Croker
1991, P. 15ff; Mitman 1992, P. 38; Cittadino 1993b).

Daher, synecology provided one impetus for the preservation of nature’s
primitive conditions.15 This reason, to be more speciﬁc, is natural histor-
ical in character. Ecologists were interested in collecting, cataloguing, Und
comparing the various natural communities of organisms throughout
North America to understand the order of the natural world.16 As the
landscape was claimed by humans, these natural communities were disap-
pearing. Preservation was required to save or regain these objects before
they disappeared entirely. As Shelford straight-forwardly put it in the com-
mittee’s dense, 761-page magnum opus, Naturalist’s Guide to the Americas

15. Synecology became so important that by the mid-1930s it was sometimes used

synonymously with ecology, see Clements and Shelford (1939, P. 2).

16. On the history of natural history and its methods, see Jardine et al. (1996) Und

Farber (2000).

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(1926), “A branch of biological science which obtains its inspiration in the
natural order in original habitats must depend upon the preservation of
natural areas for the solution of many problems” (Shelford 1926, P. 3).17
But nature’s primitive conditions were more than just important, Transporter-
ishing objects for collection in this natural historical sense; they were epis-
temologically foundational objects, requisites for the science of ecology. To
appreciate why, one has to realize that most of the attention in synecology
at this time was devoted to the problem of ecological succession. As Greg
Mitman has argued, the theory of succession, developed at the University
of Chicago by Charles M. Child and Henry C. Cowles, incubated in a con-
text which emphasized progressive, goal-directed, and orderly processes
(Mitman 1992, P. 31).18 This was true of many burgeoning biological
Wissenschaften, like developmental biology and evolutionary biology, und es
was true of the early theories of community ecology, including succession
theory.

Succession begins with barren ground following some disturbance, wie
a forest ﬁre. As new species arrive a sequence of stages of community com-
position unfold until the mature “climax” condition is arrived at. Als
Shelford wrote, “Cowles found that in the Lake Michigan sand area cotton-
woods precede pines, pines precede black oaks, black oaks precede red
oaks, red oaks are usually followed by sugar maple and beech” (Shelford
1912, P. 60). This process was progressive and goal-directed, and early
ecologists thought of it as analogous to the development of an organism:
from unfertilized egg, through a number of differently organized stages,
ending at the adult individual. Shelford and Adams would lead the way
in applying this approach to animal communities. Development “is the
basic process of ecology,” Shelford later wrote, “as applicable to the habitat
and community as to the individual and species” (Clements and Shelford
1939, P. 3). The metaphor of development ran deep.

The rise of succession theory can be partly explained by the promise it
offered: it gave ecologists a chance to make their science more than simply

17. There was also a sense among these ecologists that other biological sciences had
falsely underestimated the problem of vanishing primitive conditions. Shelford, for his part,
thought that evolutionary theory had “retarded the progress of biology” because it turned
biologists’ attention largely to types of work that could be done in museums and labora-
tories (Shelford 1926, P. 3).

18. Greg Mitman has argued that these ideas were underwritten by a Spencerian phil-
osophical position commonly held by many at Chicago (Mitman 1992). Adams, for exam-
Bitte, later wrote that “The physical world is undergoing constant change, living organisms
are likewise undergoing similar changes, and the constant interaction between these major
series of processes, as Herbert Spenser long ago pointed out, constitutes the essence of the
living organism” (Adams 1951, P. 39).

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about descriptive patterns and instead about dynamic, ordered processes
(Cittadino 1993b). In an inﬂuential paper, Cowles, a graduate teacher of
both Shelford and Adams, put the point as follows: the ecologist “must
study the order of succession of the plant societies in the development
of a region, and he must discover the laws which govern the panoramic
changes. Ecology, daher, is a study in dynamics” (Cowles 1899,
P. 95). Eighteen years later, Adams called this “dynamic” science “the
new natural history,” to set it apart from the static, natural historical approach
that dominated the previous century, and that I referred to above (Adams
1917, P. 493). He authoritatively cited the nineteenth-century philosopher
of scientiﬁc method, John Stuart Mill, in this regard: “If the signs of the times
are not read correctly, the most striking advance in scientiﬁc methods of
thinking during the century will be in the direction of interpretation from
the standpoint of processes—dynamically” (Adams 1913, P. 82). “Modern
ecology,” Shelford wrote in agreement, could ﬁnally answer the “epithet of
a famous contemporary zoologist who closed a discussion of habitats with
the words ‘developing hodge podge’” (Shelford 1926, P. 3). With the discov-
ery of “orderly sequences,” ecological knowledge could “be organized into [A]
Wissenschaft,” with ecologists working to uncover the “laws of orderly sequence” of
community development (Shelford 1926, P. 3; Adams 1913, P. 92). Once
these laws were discovered, they could then be used to inform policy decisions
and make sensible choices about nature’s management (Grinnell and Storer
1916; Sumner 1920; Adams 1925; Moore 1925; Shelford 1926; Adams
1929; Shelford 1933).

Succession theory, with its guiding metaphor of orderly development,
had a perhaps unintended consequence: it encouraged, possibly even jus-
tiﬁed, the treatment of humans as disturbances to the normal sequence of
ecological development. And it was mobilized to establish nature’s prim-
itive conditions as epistemologically and methodologically foundational,
and thus their preservation and study essential to ecology.

5. Much Ado about Humans
In his introductory ecology text, Adams provides an articulation of the idea
that humans are disturbances within the framework of the theory of suc-
cession (Adams 1913; Adams 1929; Pritchard 1999). Like many ecologists
at the time, he compared ecology to physiology—ecological communities
to organisms—and argued that the study of human-disturbed environ-
ments was like the study of pathological organisms (Haraway 1976;
McIntosh 1998). He wrote,

Some appear to think that an interest in such original conditions is of
no particular scientiﬁc value […] But if we come to consider that the

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original primeval conditions give us our best conception of the
normal processes of nature and are comparable to the normal health
of an organism, it puts the subject in another light. […]

To study disturbed, artiﬁcial, and “pathological” conditions,

without an adequate knowledge of the normal and original
conditions of both the organisms and the environment, is an attempt
to interpret the abnormal and artiﬁcial in terms of itself, rather than
in terms of the normal. (Adams 1913, S. 26–8)

He concluded that ecology needed a prior understanding of nature’s
normal development, what he called a “bionomic base line,” a phrase
Adams borrowed from another ecologist, Orator Fuller Cook (Adams
1913, P. 30). The bionomic base line would provide “an idea of the con-
ditions which existed before man came upon the scene, and the conditions
which would again supervene if the human inhabitants were withdrawn”
(Adams 1913, P. 30).19 This reasoning depends on, Zuerst, the intelligibility
of the distinction between “normal” states of nature and “pathological”
states of nature, zweite, that humans are a cause of ecological pathology,
dritte, that no sound inferences can be drawn from “pathological” condi-
tions to “normal” conditions, and fourth, that the normal is epistemolog-
ically prior to the pathological.

Adams’ reasoning is a variant of a style of scientiﬁc reasoning that Elliott
Sober has called the “natural state model” (Sober 1980). According to this
Stil, a distinction is drawn between natural states of nature (oder, more spe-
ciﬁcally, natural states of kinds of objects) and unnatural states of nature;
the latter being produced by subjecting a natural state of nature to a dis-
turbing force. Natural, in diesem Zusammenhang, means functionally normal: the nat-
ural state may not be common, das ist, may not be statistically normal, Aber
is functionally normal in the normative sense that it is in a state of proper,
correct, or healthy functioning.20 It is, mit anderen Worten, not pathological.
Scientiﬁc investigation proceeds by ﬁrst determining and describing the
natural state, and then enumerating the disturbances that interfere with
the expression of this state. The explanatory payoff of this model is that
all variation—in this case variation in the development of ecological
communities—can be explained as the result of deviation from a natural

19. Shelford seemed to agree, citing ecologist and Committee member Stephen Forbes:
“There is a general consent that primeval nature, as in the uninhabited forest or the untilled
plain, presents a settled harmony of interaction among organic groups which is in strong
contrast with the many serious maladjustments of plants and animals found in countries
occupied by man” (Shelford 1913, P. 17).

20. See Wachbroit 1994, Siipi 2008, and Dussault 2016 for a discussion of types of

normality and their connection with naturalness.

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state by a disturbing force. Sober provides an example of this style of
reasoning from Aristotle’s Generation of Animals:

According to Aristotle’s theory of sexual reproduction, the male
semen provides a set of instructions which dictates how the female
matter is to be shaped into an organism. Interference may arise when
the form fails to completely master the matter. This may happen, für
Beispiel, when one or both parents are abnormal, or when the
parents are from different species, or when there is trauma during
fetal development. Such interferences are anything but rare,
according to Aristotle. Mules—sterile hybrids—count as deviations
from the natural state. (Sober 1980, S. 361–62)

Committee members considered nature’s “primitive conditions”—
nature’s un-human-disturbed conditions—to be a natural state in Sober’s
sense, and this grounded and organized their research. As the natural state,
nature’s “primitive conditions” were considered both epistemologically and
methodologically foundational. Epistemologically, they deﬁned what
counted as functionally normal and thus what counted as deviation from
normality; they provided a “bionomic base line” against which pathological
states of nature could be interpreted and ultimately healed. And method-
ologically, they were the proper investigative starting point: ecology begins,
Zuerst, by determining the laws governing the natural state, and then pro-
ceeds to understand how unnatural states are created through disturbances.
To do otherwise, as Adams puts it, would be to erroneously attempt “to
interpret the abnormal and artiﬁcial in terms of itself, rather than in terms
of the normal” (Adams 1913, S. 26–8). What is signiﬁcant is that on this
account of the theory of succession and how it is to be studied, humans
come out as disturbing forces—given that they are by deﬁnition not part
of nature’s primitive conditions—and non-human nature comes out as the
place where the normal processes of nature can be discovered. The easy
slippage in Adams’ quotation between “artiﬁcial” and “pathological” is
one symptom of this thinking.21

In this regard, it should be noted that there is no necessary connection in
Sober’s model between “natural” meaning “functionally normal” and “natu-
ral” meaning “nonhuman.” By treating nature’s primitive conditions as the
natural state, these ecologists were in essence collapsing two conceptually

21. What at ﬁrst may seem paradoxical is that Adams was an early proponent of urban
biology (Adams 1951). It is clear from his discussion of unhealthy conditions in urban
environments that this doesn’t go against the belief that nature’s primitive conditions
are epistemologically foundational.

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independent senses of unnatural: pathological and artiﬁcial. The functionally
normal state, or normal developmental sequence, did not as a matter of
deﬁnition involve humans. Mit anderen Worten, being artiﬁcial—being human-
disturbed—was simply one way of being functionally abnormal. I will return
to this in the next section.

These ecologists employed a distinction between primary and secondary
(also “man-made”) communities to distinguish between nature’s “primi-
tive conditions” and human-disturbed nature. Primary communities
housed nature’s “primitive conditions.” Secondary communities—to which
ecologists were often forced to resort—were those that had been disturbed,
and could be grouped in the order of their degree of difference from
primary communities. Communities of roadside were less disturbed than
those of pastures, pastures were less disturbed than farmlands, farmlands
were less disturbed than orchards, orchards were less disturbed than “com-
munities of buildings,” and so on (Shelford 1913, P. 16). This established
a continuum of more-to-less epistemologically appropriate research
Objekte. An important philosophical point is worth making here. Als
Steven Vogel has argued, recasting the human-nature binary as a continuum
“doesn’t render it less dualistic, it just extends the dualism along an axis
whose poles […] remain fundamentally opposed to each other” ( Vogel
2011, P. 96). Naturalness, in this case the normal sequence of development,
is simply measured along an axis whose negative pole is human
domestication. Domestication is a disturbance, it’s just that some humans
are less domesticating.

But how much interference or domestication was too much? This ques-
tion introduces a level of racialized complexity and tension in the commit-
tee’s analyses, as they tried to account for degrees of human interference.
Zum Beispiel, Shelford’s wife, Mabel Brown Shelford, contributed a section
to his Animal Communities in Temperate America (1913), which reads, “When
the white man ﬁrst appeared near Chicago no secondary community ex-
isted, as the aborigines lived almost entirely by hunting and ﬁshing. Sie
cultivated the land only a little, and are accordingly to be ranked with the
larger animals as a part of the original communities” (1913, P. 13). And
Shelford himself later wrote that although “ecology has advanced beyond
the simple distinction of the natural and the artiﬁcial,” there is still “an
important difference in the reactions and coactions exerted by man at var-
ious culture levels” (Clements and Shelford 1939, P. 24). “In pastoral
Bereiche,” for example, “man perhaps is still to be reckoned as a constituent
of the biome” (Clements and Shelford 1939, P. 24).

When these ecologists referred to “civilized” humans in studies of suc-
cession, they were often directly referred to as disturbing factors. Cowles
believed, according to Shelford, that the superior climax community of the

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374

Demarcating Nature

Indiana dunes region—the beech-maple forest—had failed to actualize be-
cause of human inﬂuence: “man eliminated,” the forest would “occupy the
entire territory east of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers” (Cittadino 1993b,
P. 551). In this case, the normal state of the area, the beech-maple forest,
was displaced by a disturbing force: humans. Frederic Clements, a plant
ecologist not on the Committee but whose inﬂuential work on succession
was well-known, argued more forcefully that humans and their co-
domesticates, notably sheep, gave rise to successions resulting in “disclimax”
(Clements 1936, P. 265).22 „[T]he signiﬁcance of this term,” wrote
Clements, “is indicated by a preﬁx, dis-, denoting separation, unlikeness or
derogation, much as in the Greek sys, poor, bad” (Clements 1936, P. 265).
Disturbance “by man or domesticated animals” resulted in the “modiﬁcation
or replacement of the true climax” (Clements 1936, P. 265).23

In 1939, when Clements and Shelford co-wrote Bio-ecology, their open-
ing remarks explain how they hoped humans would one day properly be
synthesized into the study of succession. But the status of humans as dis-
turbances that give rise to disclimaxes was not called into question
throughout their analysis, and one wonders in the end whether this eco-
logical study of humans would simply be the study of disturbances. Sie
worried about which humans were a part of nature and about how domes-
ticated was too domesticated, but the status of humans as disturbances was
taken for granted.

The style of scientiﬁc reasoning advocated and articulated by these ecol-
ogists privileged nature’s primitive conditions—essentially non-human
nature—as the normal state, against which disturbances could be deﬁned
and enumerated. This seems to me to be less a matter of “axiomatic mis-
anthropy,” as historian Matthew Chew has argued, and more the valoriza-
tion of nature’s primitive conditions: these ecologists weren’t arguing
directly that we shouldn’t study “artiﬁcial” environments, but that the
study of nature’s primitive conditions was the proper starting point (Chew
2009). This was an epistemological valorization: the motivation behind
focusing on non-human nature was that it reveals the functionally normal
(non-pathological) sequence of community development. And this was in
turn important because it held open the prospect of creating an ecological
science about dynamic ordered, predictable processes—perhaps laws—
rather than simply descriptive patterns. Variation in the development of
ecological communities across locations might be explained, rather than

22. Shelford referred to Clements’ succession theory as “representing the essence of mod-

ern synecology” (Shelford 1926, P. 58).

23. Thanks to Matt Chew for this reference. Siehe auch, Chew 2009 Und 2011.

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simply described, as the result of deviation from the natural state caused by
a disturbing force, such as humans.

Perspektiven auf die Wissenschaft

375

6. Whence Normal?
While the reasons motivating the search for a natural state (or natural
Staaten) were largely epistemic, the decision to treat nature’s primitive con-
ditions as the natural state—as the functionally normal state—was under-
written by a constellation of non-epistemic factors. The decision to treat
these conditions as normal was a normative judgment, and so we should
ask, whence the normal?

This question can be answered at varying degrees of ﬁneness. Since these
points have been raised elsewhere by historians of ecology and the environ-
ment, my exegesis will be brief. At the coarsest level, the assumption that
humans were disturbances was widely held among many at the time, als
mentioned in Section 2. The massive industrialization and closing of the
frontier in the nineteenth century and urbanization in the twentieth cen-
tury, caused many to worry about the degenerating effects these trends
would have on humans and the natural world. This degeneration touched
on all aspects of human life: wirtschaftlich, in the sense that wild land was
more productive; moral, in that wilderness inculcated positive values; spir-
itual, in that wilderness had the power to provide religious experience; aes-
thetic, in that it could provide inspiration for literature, poetry (Die
committee frequently cited poems by the American romantic William
Cullen Bryant), and landscape painting (in the style of Albert Bierstadt).
Primitive nature was broadly taken to hold the antidote to the malaise of
urban life. Statements made by members of the committee—for example,
that nature was a remedy to “restore to the human organs the normal bal-
ance which special or artiﬁcial conditions of life disturb” (Grinnell and
Storer 1916, P. 375)—show that ecologists were, to varying degrees,
sympathetic to these wider cultural sentiments. As historian Greg Mitman
has said, these ecologists “did not want to heal nature as much as be healed
by it” (Mitman 1992, P. 8).

At a ﬁner grain of analysis, many recent historians have drawn atten-
tion to how the experiences of urban and agricultural life of speciﬁc ecol-
ogists inﬂuenced their views of humans as disturbances. Historians
Sharon Kingsland and Donald Worster have both shown the inﬂuence
of environmental and economic problems in the Midwest on the ecology
of Clements ( Worster 1994; Kingsland 2005). Kingsland has argued
Das, “he was deeply impressed by the degeneration of the land and what
this impoverishment implied for human society” (2005, P. 148). Clements,
she continues, “connected the breakdown of the destruction of [prairie land]
to moral degeneracy and the breakdown of society” (2005, P. 148).

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376

Demarcating Nature

Many ecologists at this time had similar experiences and shared similar
perspectives.

The inﬂuence of an important American philosophical tradition is also
relevant here. The committee’s understanding of the relationship of hu-
mans to nature which placed humans at odds with natural processes was
also widely-known to these ecologists through the American Transcenden-
talism of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Muir.24
For these philosophers, nature’s primitive conditions were important not
just for narrow human ends, like recreation, but served “higher purposes”:
reverence for God’s work, Natur. As one member of the committee put it,
preserving nature offers “a source of health and recreation which leads one’s
thoughts away from the mundane affairs of this world ‘Through Nature up
to Nature’s God’” (Shelford 1921, P. 13). Domesticated or civilized
humans were set apart from nature, as living artiﬁcial, and thus morally,
spiritually, and physiologically, inferior lives.

As environmental historians have noted, Muir had a considerable inﬂu-
ence in early twentieth-century America. And we can see his ideas within
the committee by considering his discussions of sheep and social Darwin-
ism. Muir had ﬁrst-hand experience as a sheepherder in California and he
didn’t care for them much. Following Darwin, he argued that natural se-
lection was similar in form, but superior in product, to artiﬁcial selection
or domestication (Worster 2008, P. 288).25 This was particularly apparent
in the case of sheep; the domestic sheep was not only harmful to the
natural environment—he called them “hoofed locusts”—but also aesthet-
ically “expressionless, like a round bundle of something only half alive”
(Nash 1967, P. 130; Muir 1874, P. 359).26 And as the ending line to
one of Muir’s articles indicates, he had more than just domestic sheep in
Geist: “A little pure wildness is the one great present want, both of men
and sheep” (Muir 1875, P. 366). The committee held and reinforced
Muir’s negative assessments of sheep; their ﬁrst grazing advisor, Joseph

24. These ecologists also knew Thoreau as one of the ﬁrst to study ecological succession—
though there were obviously signiﬁcant differences between Thoreau’s and their approaches
(Thoreau 1887).

25. I should say, Muir considered this analogous to Darwin’s position. It actually seems
more intellectually connected to the very disparaging remarks made about domestic species
by Darwin’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace. Sehen, Darwin and Wallace (1858, P. 60).
See Lennox (2000) for a discussion of the intellectual relationship, or lack thereof, zwischen
Charles Darwin and John Muir.

26. This assessment was connected to the sheep’s domesticity. Wild sheep, in contrast,
were a part of nature: “the wild is elegant as a deer, and every muscle grows with life. Der
tame is timid; the wild is bold. The tame is rufﬂed and soiled; the wild is trim and clean as
the ﬂowers of its pasture” (Muir 1874, P. 359).

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377

Grinnell, summarized the “disastrous results following upon close sheeping”
(Shelford et al. 1921, P. 14).27

Of Muir, Adams wrote fondly, deeming him the original preservation-
ist: “The older champions of our national parks, as John Muir, were among
the leaders in this country to see in a broad way the value of preserving
wild areas, but in recent years there has been an intense movement to get
vast crowds of people in the national parks, and at such a rate that vast
areas of the parks are without question being severely injured” (Adams
1925, P. 562). Adams saw Muir as America’s “ﬁrst and greatest champion”
of nature study, “who exempliﬁed the beneﬁts derived from the apprecia-
tion of the wilderness. He was a naturalist, an artist, and from the wilder-
ness he derived science, Kunst, Ausbildung, recreation” (Adams 1929, P. 40).
One member of the Committee, William S. Cooper, considered abandon-
ing his scientiﬁc research career to become a nature writer in the style of
Muir; and even after reconsidering, his decision to spend years of ﬁeld re-
search in Glacier Bay, Alaska, was inﬂuenced by reading Muir’s Travels in
Alaska (1912). With Cooper’s help Adams notably built his presidency of
the ESA on protecting Glacier Bay as a national monument (Lawrence
1980; Barrow 2009, P. 214; Rumore 2009).

Daher, the belief in the functional superiority of nature’s primitive
conditions—a normative judgment underwriting the normality of these
conditions—was inﬂuenced by a host of historically-speciﬁc assumptions
about domesticated humans and their ill effects on nature. As I’ve said
über, this involved the collapsing of the categories of pathological and
artiﬁcial, two conceptually independent senses of unnatural. Being artiﬁ-
cial was one way of being pathological.

Implications for Experimental Method

7.
Nature’s primitive conditions were treated as foundational, but some saw
further implications, not just for what we should study, but how we should
study it. At this time in the early-twentieth century, the growth in status
and scale of academic and privately-funded laboratory biology created a
context ripe for disputes about the advantages and disadvantages of differ-
ent experimental methods (Allen 1979; Rainger et al. 1988; Kingsland
1991; Kohler 2002).28 The committee’s ideas about nature’s primitive
conditions often meant that they emphasized ﬁeld over laboratory study,

27. Apparently Grinnell met Muir as a boy, when the latter came to view the boy’s

impressive collection of bird skins (Grinnell 1940, P. 5).

28. See Pauly (1987), Rainger, Benson, and Maienschein (1988), and Benson,
Maienschein, and Rainger (1991). See Gooday (1991) on the rise of the laboratory in
the late 19th-century. See also Kohler 2002.

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378

Demarcating Nature

at least for synecology. Unsurprisingly, the methods they recommended
were often non-interventionist, like “natural experiments.”29 In a natural
Experiment, one studies the results of an experimental perturbation, Aber
the perturbation is natural—e.g., a forest ﬁre or hurricane—rather than
induced by the experimenter. Adams’ own example is extreme. What he
called “nature’s vast experiments,” for example, were by-deﬁnition impos-
sible to discover on areas of human-disturbed land, since these would cease
to be nature’s experiments at all (Adams 1913, P. 8). These experiments,
he thought, avoided the problem that human manipulation spoils the ob-
ject of study, rendering nature pathological. Other members held similar
Positionen, perhaps not quite as extreme. Victor Shelford, an advocate of
mixed-experimental approaches inﬂuentially defended in his Laboratory
and Field Ecology (1929), argued that human experiments could be con-
ducted in “buffer areas,” but that Nature’s experiments, found in the
“nature sanctuary,” were more epistemologically valuable because they al-
lowed one to grasp nature in the absence of such disturbances (see Ilerbaig
1999).

At the time laboratory biologists also rhetorically drew on the artiﬁcial-
natural distinction, but to opposite effect. Zum Beispiel, the physiological
plant ecologist of Johns Hopkins University, Burton Livingston, tactfully
argued that the “older reverence for natural or ‘normal’ phenomena has
largely disappeared” (Livingston 1917, P. 9). “We have learned that the
range of conditions offered by nature,” he continued, “does not generally
happen to be great enough to allow adequate experimental interpretation
of plant processes.” “[ICH]f a student has not a liking and talent for creating
physical and chemical conditions such as never have occurred in nature, Er
should not cast his lot with plant physiologists, for the next generation”
(Livingston 1917, P. 10). “Where would the chemist be,” he asked rhetor-
isch, “if he were constrained to study his salts always as they occur in
nature?” (Livingston 1917, P. 10). Livingstone is here exploiting the same
cultural rhetoric as committee ecologists, but for a different purpose.

Discussions of experimental methodology, such as these, also introduce
another, more practical, epistemic reason why nature’s primitive condi-
tions were judged to be the natural state. They were also judged to be

29. Natural experiments emerged as a contentious theme in these disputes, and were
advocated by biologists as diverse as E. B. Wilson, Frederic Clements, Charles C. Adams,
Victor Shelford, Joseph Grinnell and Francis Sumner, many of whom also served on the
Committee for the Preservation of Natural Conditions (Clements 1905, S. 149, 306).
See also Adams (1915, P. 8), Sumner (1915, P. 696), Grinnell (1919, P. 472), Clements
(1934, S. 41–2, 46), Shelford (1934, S. 491–92), Nash (1967, P. 198ff ), Kohler (2002,
P. 216), Kingsland (2005, S. 146–47), and Inkpen (2014).

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379

superior on grounds of experimental or cognitive tractability. Humans
were considered not just pathological disturbances, but also unpredictable.
Barrington Moore—a forest ecologist, committee member, and fourth
president of the ESA—provides an example of this reasoning. Moore ar-
gued, like Adams, that the more nature is “kept free from man’s interfer-
enz, the better is the area for scientiﬁc study” (Moore 1925, P. 49). Vor
we can “avoid the fatal consequences of running counter to nature’s laws,”
he wrote, “we must know what those laws are; and before we can use na-
ture’s help in attaining our ends we must better understand nature’s pro-
cesses” (Moore 1925, P. 49). But the problem for Moore wasn’t just that
humans were pathological, it was their unpredictability. The processes of
nature, Moore wrote, “are so delicately adjusted that when man interferes
in one respect he sets up a chain of consequences the end of which no one
can foresee” (Moore 1925, P. 49). Comparing the situation to the popular
British nursery rhyme, he wrote, it’s “like ‘the house that Jack built,’ only
the consequences may be almost endless” (Moore 1925, P. 49). This re-
quired, he reasoned, “both searching laboratory tests and thorough ﬁeld
studies in areas on which nature has been undisturbed” (Moore 1925,
P. 50). Wieder, nature’s “primitive conditions” are considered epistemolog-
ically foundational, but for the methodological reason that humans are
unpredictable and so are the results of their actions. Their actions are, In
other words, not orderly, not law-like, enough.

Two Integrative Examples

8.
So far this discussion has treated the committee as a whole and as intellec-
tually homogeneous. This is obviously an oversimpliﬁcation. Ecologists at
this time held the above positions to varying degrees and were inﬂuenced
by events particular to their own lives. Through two brief sketches—of
Francis Sumner and Joseph Grinnell—I would like now to show how these
themes were instantiated in the thinking of particular individuals, Und
ones that were part of the committee, but not synecologists of the Chicago
Schule, like Adams and Shelford. This latter point is important: although I
believe that it was within synecology and its central organizing theory—
succession—that this rationale was articulated, its inﬂuence was broad. In
other words, the epistemological centrality of nature’s primitive conditions
permeated outwards, transgressing into other styles of ecology less directly
committed to the theory of succession. Grinnell, trained as a taxonomist,
advocated what he called “dynamic zoogeography,” which focused on the
comparative study of geographical ranges of animals (Ilerbaig 2009).
Sumner, trained in laboratory physiology, advocated an evolutionary
approach combining genetics and systematics of mice populations. Beide
nonetheless argued for the epistemic importance of nature’s primitive

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380

Demarcating Nature

conditions as a natural state, and both grounded this judgment in a mix of
epistemic and non-epistemic reasons.

Sumner studied as a graduate student under the famed cell biologist
E. B. Wilson at Columbia. After a short stint at a College in New York,
Sumner began his research career working in the laboratory of the Bureau
of Fisheries measuring the response of ﬁsh to extreme environments
(Provine 1979; Kohler 2002). After a number of years of frustrating lab-
oratory work, Sumner turned to biogeographical ﬁeld studies of the deer
mouse: “I have had enough to do with the experimental method in zoology
to make me realize its rigid limitations,” he wrote, “I am therefore dis-
posed to attach considerable importance to what have been called ‘Nature’s
experiments’,” the method championed by Adams (Sumner 1915, P. 696).
Sumner was well-suited for the ESA’s Committee and ﬁeldwork, gegeben
his love of “natural areas” and his explicit stance against urbanization. Der
“love of nature,” he wrote, “includes vastly more than the appreciation of
natural scenery. It includes that deep-rooted feeling of revolt […] against
the noise and distraction, the artiﬁciality and sordidness, the contracted
horizon and stiﬂed individuality, which are dominating features of life
in a great city” (Sumner 1920, P. 238). Sumner had ﬁrst-hand experience
of urban life: after beginning his career unhappily teaching in New York
City, he moved to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Kalifornien,
only to witness the urbanization of the San Diego area. Of urbanization,
he wrote, “If this is the real trend of human evolution, we who represent
the ‘unﬁt’ type, may well pray for a speedy extermination” (Sumner 1920,
P. 239).30

Sumner’s views about preserving natural conditions, and about what
counted as “natural conditions,” were closely connected to his views about
proper biological practice. He thought laboratory biologists could not un-
derstand nature, if they did not take what happened in nature seriously.
They were frequently happy to study domestication products, aber die
problems of ecology, genetics and evolution, he wrote, “are not all to be
solved by rearing pedigree-cultures of the fruit-ﬂy and evening-primrose.
We must study the actual products of evolution as they have arisen in na-
ture” (Sumner 1921, P. 11). Tatsächlich, he even doubted the results of one of
his own experiments simply because of the perceived “pathological charac-
ter” of the lab-raised mice involved (Sumner 1924, P. 504). He preferred

30. Sumner’s views didn’t change much throughout his life. He wrote in his autobiog-
Raphie, published the year he died, “One of the glorious features of the desert landscape is
the relative scarcity of that hopelessly unesthetic creature, man. Aber, even here, he has be-
gun to stream in over a maze of newly constructed automobile roads … Alas, poor Desert!”
(Sumner 1945, P. 223). This occurred in a chapter titled “Man versus Nature.”

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381

to study “nature’s experiments,” in which she had subjected the same
species of mice to different environmental conditions, along the California
coastline, for long periods of time.

Außerdem, for Sumner, it wasn’t simply that laboratory biologists
were scientiﬁcally misguided; they were also inclined to promote—or at
least disinclined to speak against—what he considered to be undesirable
environmental policies. Since they could not appreciate nature, they didn’t
understand the need to protect it; something he thought that biologists, von
all scientists, should grasp. Als solche, he believed them to be failing in their
responsibilities as biologists. “That both our native fauna and ﬂora and our
natural scenery are disappearing at an appalling rate is obvious to all,” he
schrieb, “except those whose interests and outlook are bounded by the walls
of their laboratories” (Sumner 1921, P. 39).

This same interconnected triad of method, nature’s primitive condi-
tionen, and preservation, can also be found in Joseph Grinnell’s writings.
Unlike Sumner’s laboratory beginnings, Grinnell had been an enthusiastic
naturalist from a young age (Hall 1939; Grinnell 1940; Runte 1990). Von
eighteen he had already gained a reputation as an able ornithologist, con-
tributing a section on birds to the History of Pasadena (1895)—the author
of which wrote, “Young Joseph Grinnell […] has won the reputation of
having captured, preserved, labeled and classiﬁed more specimens of our
native birds than any other person” (Grinnell 1940, P. 4). Like Sumner,
Grinnell drew attention to the dangers of modern city life, and to the need
for preserved lands in combatting these dangers. Life “in the cities,” he
schrieb, “is so far removed from the surroundings of preceding human
generations that it is conducive to serious nervous and mental fatigue”
(Grinnell and Linsdale 1936, P. 152).

Natur, for Grinnell, is the antithesis and remedy for the artiﬁcial.
Natural “processes are capable of maintaining an area with all the desirable
qualities just to the extent they are allowed to do so by not interfering with
ihnen,” he wrote, “Artiﬁcial help is not required” (Grinnell 1940, P. 16).
The “existence of any artiﬁcial change,” he concluded, “is the basis for
harm,” since it is a hindrance to the expression of nature’s primitive con-
ditions (Grinnell and Linsdale 1936, P. 153).

When it came to nature’s primitive conditions as a research object,
Grinnell drew on the close connection between “natural” and “nor-
mal”—and pathological-artiﬁcial—that I’ve discussed above. Natur, Die
antithesis of artiﬁcial, is also the proper object of ecological study. Wann
discussing a study of the responses of white-crowned sparrows to environ-
mental changes, Grinnell advocated for the necessity of making such ob-
servations under natural conditions in a nature preserve. As visitors to the
Point Lobos reserve, sparrows are not interesting in and of themselves, “for

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this is a common bird in our backyards at home” (Grinnell and Linsdale
1936, P. 153). They are interesting in relation to the natural environment.
Grinnell was “intensely interested in seeing the normal responses of this
species of bird to its natural environment” (Grinnell and Linsdale 1936,
P. 153). “If the area is allowed to make its own changes these responses
will be natural,” Grinnell continued, “but with human inﬂuence it be-
comes another, artiﬁcial backyard” (Grinnell and Linsdale 1936, P. 153).
And, ﬁnally, Grinnell’s thoughts about what nature is like and why it
should be preserved support his scientiﬁc methodology. An advocate of
natural experiments, he argued that objections to their use based on their
perceived lack of rigor—that “‘factors’ of the environment are not sorted
out”—were based on false characterizations of the experimental alterna-
tives (Grinnell 1919, P. 472). In “the breeding cage,” he argued, “there
are always ‘unknown’ factors; so let us admit the existence of those in
the wild as not invalidating the ‘experiment’” (Grinnell 1919, P. 472).
The advantage, he argued, was that the natural experiment provided an
indication of an organism’s behavior under relatively undisturbed—i.e.,
healthy—natural conditions, where they can, as he later said, “play their
normal rôle in nature” (Grinnell and Linsdale 1936, P. 153).

For Sumner, Grinnell, and other members of the preservation for science
Bewegung, the scientiﬁc rationale they were creating, one that treats na-
ture’s primitive conditions as epistemologically and methodologically
foundational, was inseparable from a number of wider, historically-speciﬁc
trends. Although the rationale was articulated clearly through the theory
of succession, and through the metaphor of normal development, it had a
much further reaching inﬂuence. The point is not to call into question the
importance of the intellectual contributions made by each of these ecolo-
gists. The point is that they both adhered to a model of science that treated
non-human states of nature as functionally normal and foundational.
Given the methodological, philosophical, and political diversity that many
historians have shown to exist among these ecologists, one wonders whether
this belief in the epistemic value of nature’s primitive conditions is one of
the strongest threads pulling them together.

9. Abschluss
The committee disbanded in 1945. Certainly one important factor was in-
ternal tension within the ESA (Kinchy 2006). Shelford, as he had argued
aus 1917 An, wanted the committee, acting on behalf of the ESA, to lobby
for the preservation of particular areas. In the years leading up to 1945, Die
Society’s council members increasingly came to believe that lobbying
efforts and direct political action might jeopardize the “objective” status
of the Society and the science of ecology. The committee was disbanded,

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and Shelford and a number of other ecologists formed the Ecologists Union
in 1946—which eventually reorganized as The Nature Conservancy in
1950—to continue such pursuits outside the auspices of the ESA. Aside
from internal political tension, there were also methodological factors.
Post-war ecology changed directions: short-term laboratory studies were
favored over long-term ﬁeld studies of succession, and community ecology
came into competition with other schools of ecology, such as ecosystem
ecology, population ecology, and systems ecology (Palladino 1991; Rumore
2012). As important as these reasons are for why the committee disbanded,
for my purposes, the absence of a particular reason is more important: Die
disbanding was not the result of a general belief that ﬁeld ecologists should
question the epistemological centrality of nature’s primitive conditions and
start considering the role of humans in their ecological studies as anything
other than pathological disturbances.

Let me end with a brief summary and two reﬂections. My aim has been
to reconstruct the scientiﬁc rationale advocated by the Committee for the
Preservation of Natural Conditions and to unearth the interests and as-
sumptions, both epistemic and non-epistemic, that fostered it. I argued
that their rationale was a variant of the natural state model of scientiﬁc
reasoning. These ecologists considered nature’s “primitive conditions” to
be a natural state, and this grounded and organized their research: diese
conditions were both epistemologically and methodologically foundational.
Epistemologically, they deﬁned what counted as functionally normal and
thus what counted as deviation from normality. And methodologically, Sie
were the proper investigative starting point. Treating nature’s primitive
conditions as the natural state involved a collapse of two conceptually in-
dependent ways of being unnatural: artiﬁcial and pathological. More accu-
rately, we might say that these ecologists subsumed the artiﬁcial under the
pathological. While the reasons motivating the search for a natural state
may have been largely epistemic—they wanted to build an ecological sci-
ence that was explanatory and grounded in laws—their decision to treat
nature’s primitive conditions as the natural state—as the functionally normal
state—was underwritten by a constellation of epistemic and non-epistemic
factors (an example of the former being that humans were unpredictable,
an example of the latter that human inﬂuence was, perhaps by deﬁnition,
pathological). As these ecologists demarcated natural from artiﬁcial—normal
from pathological—they were at the same time, both chronologically and
methodologically, deﬁning ecology as a science in the process. They were
not the only ecologists writing in the early-twentieth century, und ihre
vision of ecology was not shared by all. But their inﬂuence on ﬁeld ecology
is still felt today because their idea that “natural” states of nature are
epistemologically and methodologically foundational persists and still

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informs the choice of research sites. As Adams suggested, “The natural
starting point [pun intended?] seems to be in as nearly natural normal envi-
ronments and associations as possible” (Adams 1913, P. 34).

Now for two reﬂections. Erste, discussions of the vagaries of the concept
“natural” mostly focus on bioethics, environmental policy, or environmen-
tal ethics (Siipi 2008; Vogel 2015). Zum Beispiel, the question of whether
we have an obligation to preserve what is natural. I think this essay dem-
onstrates that there is another dimension. In biology at least, concepts of
“natural,” and the artiﬁcial-natural distinction, are entwined in answers to
basic research questions. How we decide what counts as worth studying,
and in the end what we know, is inﬂuenced by how the concept of
“natural” is demarcated.

Zweite, I’ve attempted to show how this rationale was a product of its
Zeit: it should be historically-situated within the interests and assump-
tions of a particular set of early-twentieth-century ecologists. This histor-
ical situating certainly emphasizes the contingency of their perspective.
But it does more than that. Unearthing the assumptions and interests that
fostered this rationale leads to the question of its value: if we ﬁnd that the
assumptions are no longer tenable, or that a science of ecology without this
rationale would ﬁt better with our current interests and assumptions, Dann
we can legitimately question the current value of this style of scientiﬁc
reasoning. Perhaps the best way to put this is as a series of questions:
do we believe that humans are often or typically pathological? That eco-
logical communities have functionally “normal” developmental sequences,
analogous to the development of an organism? That domestication and ur-
banization often or typically lead to degeneration? That “ecological laws”
can only, or more safely, be discovered in a category of geographical places
deemed “natural”? Do we take for granted the intelligibility of ﬁnding
nature’s primitive conditions? For one thing, we have come to recognize
that nature is constantly in ﬂux in the absence of human interference
(Hobbs et al. 2006). For another, we now recognize that humans were
substantially inﬂuencing North American landscapes long before the
arrival of Europeans (Cronon 1983). If not by a version of the natural
state model, how do current ecologists justify their bias in favor of the
study of non-human nature? Mit anderen Worten, if many or all of the assump-
tions that supported this rationale have in fact fallen away, what is left in
their place? I do not want to answer these questions, but use them to show
that this sort of history can help us better approach our current predi-
cament by helping us to understand the assumptions that led us to where
we are.

Außerdem, we can also reﬂect on how the natural state model more
generally fares in light of the recent shift in ecology towards treating

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385

anthropogenic factors as legitimate objects of study. There seem to be two
options. The ﬁrst is to reject the natural state model altogether on the
grounds that there is nothing that can be usefully called the natural state
of an ecological system. Zum Beispiel, even those optimistic about the cur-
rent usefulness of succession theory provide analyses that emphasize the
context-sensitivity of ecological communities and the numerous, diverse
drivers of ecological succession (Meiners 2015). These analyses seem to
provide little justiﬁcation in choosing a natural state for an ecological com-
munity or its development because they are not committed to one succes-
sional state being a better candidate for functional normality than others.
The second option is to accept a version of the natural state model with
two signiﬁcant modiﬁcations: (A) acknowledge that, because of the points
just made, the natural state must be relative and stipulative, Und (B) keep
the artiﬁcial and the pathological as conceptually distinct categories such
that an ecological community can be human-disturbed without being
considered functionally abnormal. This would mean developing an account
of functional normality that is highly context-relative but in some sense
objectively grounded. To do so would be to provide an account of ecolog-
ical normality analogous to the account of medical normality developed by
philosopher Georges Canguilhem (Canguilhem 1991; see Dussault 2016
for the outlines of such a project).

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