The Centennial Return of Stewardship to the Ecological Society of America

Abstract

In 1917, Victor Shelford, a founder and the first president of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), formed and chaired the ESA’s Committee for the Preservation of Natural Conditions (CPNC), an advocacy arm of the organization. Representing the Wilderness Society (WS), Aldo Leopold’s efforts to form an alliance between the two organizations were spurned by Shelford because the WS encouraged the recreational use of wilderness reserves, thus altering their “primeval” condition. Seized by positivist zealotry, in 1945 the ESA prohibited members of the CPNC from advocacy activities and the committee disbanded in 1946. Shelford formed the private Ecologists’ Union in 1946, which became The Nature Conservancy in 1950. In response to an intensifying global ecological crisis, the ESA has latterly returned to the policy-oriented advocacy under the banner of “Earth Stewardship” that characterized it during its first three decades.” In addition to the values of its first president, Victor Shelford, the concept of Earth stewardship also expresses the spiritual values that its thirty-second president, Aldo Leopold, found in the scientific study of nature. The concept of Earth stewardship also returns ecology to its first organismic paradigm, for the Earth as a whole, Gaia, exhibits the defining characteristics of a “superorganism.”