Ecological Systems

oikos = home

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ecology as that branch of biology that deals with the relations of living organisms and their surroundings, their habits and way of life, etc. The word ecology, originally, was spelled œcology, but in American English we have dropped the umlaut œ (as in Goethe) for plain e. The word is relatively new to English having entered the language in 1873 from the German. Economy is a some what older word having entered English in 1791. The root eco- (greek = oikos) simply means house, and economy originally meant the management of the home. Ecology can loosely be thought of as the study of living things in their homes i.e. in their surroundings. The motto of the Ecological Society of American, carried on the front cover of their journal, Ecology, is "Living Organisms in Relation to Their Environment." Ecology is a study of relationships, a study of things yes, but in relationship to each other and their environment. There is no bad ecology or good ecology; ecology doesn't get better or worse, it doesn't deteriorate or ameliorate because it is relationships and relationships are what they are.

I began my study of ecology in 1949 a mere 76 years after the word was introduced into the language. As an undergraduate I found all scientific subjects equally fascinating and it was my inability firmly to settle on any one that led J. Arthur Henick my major professor to lead me into ecology as more or less a synthesis of all biology, chemistry, physics, geology etc. In the graduate school I worked with John N. Wolfe, who was probably the first ecologist to see how the science of ecology was an integral part of our modern life and who brought ecology from the sheltered groves of academe into the world of the industrial-military complex. John's greatest contribution to science was to pioneer the science of microclimatology. His greatest contribution to mankind was to bring a vivid, balanced, and rational description of the potential biological consequences of thermonuclear war to everyday conversation.

The Fathers

The early work in ecology was an attempt to understand how the living things of the Earth came to be where they are. Much of the work had to do with the distribution of vegetation and the effects of climate and geology on the processes that caused the plants to be distributed the way they were. This led to the attempts to classify vegetation and there were a number of competing schools of thought on the subject. Henry Cowles, the ancestor from whom I am descended, (Cowles, Transeau, Wolfe, Sudia), thought that geological conditions had a lot to do with what vegetation grew where and he invented the concept of physiographic ecology. Much of his work was done at the Indiana Dunes, which are now included in the Indiana Dunes State Park and Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, both on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

William (Billy) Cooper was also a student of Cowles and represents a collateral branch of the school of ecology from whence I am descended. My good friend Robert M. Linn, former Chief Scientist of the National Park Service and Vice President of IdT is a student of Henry Oosting, who was a student of Cooper. (Cowles, Cooper, Oosting, Linn.)

Organismic Nature of Vegetation

Frederick E. Clements, who began his career at the University of Nebraska studying the prairies with J.E. Weaver, erected a taxonomy of ecology, classifying the great aggregations of vegetation into climax and developmental stages. Clements also believed that plants were organized into communities, which had the properties of organisms in that they had a beginning, development and maturation, old age, and senescence. This idea arose from a philosophical concept known as "holism" which was advanced by Jan Christian Smuts. The world knows Jan Christian Smuts as a soldier and statesman, the Prime Minister of South Africa in 1941, but he was a philosopher in his own right. In his book, "Holism and Evolution," he held that evolution is a sequence of evermore comprehensive integrations. Clements put plant communities on that evolutionary scale as "super-organisms".

Physical Systems / Ecosystems

Clements with the help of the animal ecologist Victor Shelford attempted to extend Clements' concepts of plant ecology to the other half of the biological world and came up with bioecology, again with a large lexicon. It is out of this effort that we get the term biome to mean the largest aggregation of self-reproducing plant and animal forms, e.g. spruce-moose biome.

Clements' insistence on the organismic nature of vegetational communities invited dissention. Henry Gleason, the iconoclast of the early ecologists, claimed that he could find no structure in plant communities, asserting that they were completely and totally individualistic—no two alike.

It was into this controversy that Arthur Tansley, a British ecologist, introduced the concept of ecosystem. His reasoning was simple. The physicists, under the leadership of Willard Gibbs, invented statistical physics and postulated that the universe was one of a set of physical systems all of which could be different but which could be contained within the statistical variation of this universe. Tansley applied this same thinking to plant communities and in a paper dedicated to Henry Cowles, concluded that if there were physical systems, there also had to be ecological systems, i.e. ecosystems. (The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms, Ecology 16: 284-307, 1935). The word ecosystem has come into universal acceptance, principally through the work of Eugene and Howard Odum, both leading ecologists of our day. Eugene Odum was a student of Charles Kendeigh who in turn was a student of Victor Shelford. Howard was a student of G. Evelyn Hutchinson who pioneered the work of trophic ecology—food chains and energy levels in biological systems. Among the Odum brothers' major contributions to ecology was to treat both animal ecology and plant ecology as one living system thereby raising and refining the concept of ecosystem to its present level of sophistication.

Ecosystem is now the preferred term since it includes the abiotic, non-living part of the environment along with the biotic, living part, to form the whole. It can usefully be applied to a great variety of circumstances, and with an adjective or two to limit the scope, the word can apply to the world of any organism or group of organisms. Ecology then is the study of ecosystems, on the one hand with the focus on the individual in the system and on the otherhand with the focus on the system. Ecosystems are self-generating, self-regulating decisions systems. If the information driving the system is primarily genetic, (genetic wisdom hard wired in the organisms), the system is natural. If the information driving the system is cultural (information contained in language and the tools of design), the system is technological. Humans, obviously straddle the line since they are driven by genetic information and yet are the generators of cultural information. For the most part, humans use technology to drive the ecosystem which contains them, sometimes with benign or beneficial effects, sometimes with catastrophic or disastrous effects. The trick is to determine what outcome will occur as the result of any given action. The hope is that we can learn to do it right before the system "tilts" and rejects us. The system will go on, altered, perhaps, but living, and since it didn't need us in the first place (we need it), it will go on merrily without us. We will not have destroyed the biosphere, (trash it maybe, but not destroy it), it will have destroyed us.

We, also, have the option of learning a little ecology and using the ecosystems of the earth to inform our discretion and to benefit us all—all humans and all species. We need to understand the first starting condition of IdT: Teach (learn) ecology to protect, preserve, and restore sustainable, cultural and natural diversity. This is not an easy task and it requires the dedication of life times.

Long-term Ecological Research

Durward Allen, long time friend and emeritus professor at Purdue University, studied the wolf-moose relationships on Isle Royale. After twenty-five years of study, he remarked that had the study been concluded at any earlier five year interval, (5, 10, 15,20,25 years) the result in every case would have been different from the previous five years. This was due to the fact that after each interval of time, the researchers knew more about the system and therefore could deduce more, but more importantly the events of that ecosystem are on a long term continuum and the chances of seeing all or even the major swings of variation possible in the ecosystem in just a short time is unlikely so the longer the study period the more the system reveals itself to the researchers.

The Task of Ecologists

Natural ecological systems have evolved over millions of years. They will not reveal their secrets in a week, or a year, or a decade. Even human ecosystems have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years, and much of our hard wired genetic information evolved over millions of years. Much of human biology is a mystery waiting to be solved and human ecology is waiting to be understood. We have to be able to separate our natural selves from our technological selves, see the differences, the similarities, and the relationships, and then relate these to the rest of the world. The minute we perceive we are part of the Earth—its ecosystems, its life and death—we will change the world on which we live to the Earth that gave us birth, the Earth that supports and nurtures us, the Earth that is our home (oikos). Providing that revelation is the task of ecologists.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1991
Institute for domestic Tranquility