On the Ecology of Theories

Abstract

In a striking passage, the ecologist Ramón Margalef points out how both the perceptions and the theories of different ecologists are strongly shaped by the particular kind of environment they study:

Ecosystems reflect the physical environment in which they have developed, and ecologists reflect the properties of the ecosystems in which they have grown and matured. All schools of ecology are strongly influenced by genius loci that goes back to the local landscape. “Desert” ecologists, working in arid countries where weather fluctuations exert a controlling influence on poorly organized communities, would hardly accept as a suitable basis for ecological theory the points of view put forward in the preceding chapter. … The mosaic-like vegetation of Mediterranean and Alpine countries, subjected to millennia of human interference, has assisted at the birth of the plant sociology school. … Scandinavia, with a poor flora, has produced ecologists who count every shoot and sprout. It is a pity that the tropical rain forest, the most complete and the complex model of an ecosystem, is not a very suitable place for the breeding of ecologists. And it is only natural that the vast spaces and smooth transitions of North America and Russia have suggested a dynamic approach in ecology and the theory of climax. In such areas, the concept of succession, one of the great and fruitful ideas of classical ecology, was best formulated.¹

Time is nature’s way of making sure that everything does not happen at once.

Anonymous