I’m still looking for a few more speakers interested in this topic to fill out an Organized Oral Session proposal for the 2015 ESA meeting. See the description below. If you are interested in making a presentation, either in this session or perhaps a related session if there is enough interest, please email me your tentative title ASAP, ideally by Wednesday, since the proposals are due this Thursday.
Michael Huston Environmental Influences on Ecological Theory: The Effects of Climatic, Geological, Historical, Social, Political, and Economic Conditions A organized oral session proposed for the 100th Anniversary Meeting of The Ecological Society of American, developed by Michael Huston and others Description: The relatively short history of the field of Ecology is full of conflicting paradigms, paradigm shifts, and vigorous arguments between leading ecologists and “schools” of ecology. Although ecological hypotheses are developed and tested using the time-honored processes of the scientific method, multiple alternative, and sometimes conflicting, hypotheses are often proposed as explanations for a particular phenomenon or class of phenomena. Ecologists work on all of the major continents and all of the world’s oceans, each of which has its own unique geological, climatic, biogeographical, and in most cases, political history. Furthermore, ecologists typically work out of an academic institution or governmental agency in a specific country, with different institutions, agencies, and countries having different missions and political and social values, as well as differing funding structures and overall financial resources. Could these different and often contrasting social, economic, political, and environmental settings influence the hypotheses that are developed to address ecological phenomena? To what extent might conflicting hypotheses and clashing paradigms be the inevitable results of concepts that are developed, tested, and elaborated under differing social, political, economic, and presumably environmental conditions? Speakers in this half-day session of organized oral presentations will present case studies that examine some of the well-known and less-well-known examples of how environmental conditions, defined broadly, have influenced the types of ecological questions that are asked and the types of hypotheses that have been developed, as well as the conflicts that alternative theoretical perspectives have generated. Examples could include such topics as 1) the influence of social conditions in England on the development of Thomas Malthus’ influential ideas, and their subsequent influence on Charles Darwin and many others; 2) the effect of the contrasting geological histories and environmental drivers of Australia and North America on hypotheses about the regulation of species abundance and diversity; 3) differences in the types of questions asked and the types of hypotheses developed at institutions with an applied versus a basic science focus; 4) the influence of historical literary and artistic movements on concepts about how “nature” operates; and 5) the effect of political-economic systems on the types of hypotheses that are developed (and funded). Related examples could potentially be found in research done in eutrophic verus oligotrophic systems, in plants versus animals, at high latitudes versus low latitudes, or in different biomes. Speakers will explore the ways in which these conflicting theories could potentially contribute to more inclusive and broadly applicable theories in ecology.