Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 9780674020221

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Imperial Ecology

Imperial Ecology Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945

Peder Anker

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England

2001

To Nina

Copyright © 2001, President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Anker, Peder. Imperial ecology : environmental order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 / Peder Anker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0-674-00595-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Human ecology—Great Britain—History. 2. Natural resources—Great Britain—History. 3. Plant ecology—Great Britain—History. I. Title. GF551 .A65 2001 304.2⬘09041—dc21

2001039407

Contents

Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii

1

1

From Social Psychology to Imperial Ecology

2

General Smuts’s Politics of Holism and Patronage of Ecology 41

3

The Oxford School of Imperial Ecology

76

4

Holism and the Ecosystem Controversy

118

5

The Politics of Holism, Ecology, and Human Rights

6

Planning a New Human Ecology

196

Conclusion: A World without History An Ecology of Ecologists Notes Sources Index

251 329 330

247

237

7

157

Illustrations

Figure 1. Neurological systems, from Arthur George Tansley’s New Psychology, 1920. 26 Figure 2. General Jan Christian Smuts: “The philosopher on Table Mountain.” 53 Figure 3. Victor S. Summerhayes and Charles S. Elton’s diagram of the nitrogen cycle on Bear Island, 1923. 91 Figure 4. Charles S. Elton cooking, Spitsbergen, 1924. 96 Figure 5. Hudson’s Bay Company’s chart of the relationship between wildlife and human prosperity, 1932. 99 Figure 6. Charles S. Elton’s diagram of biological surveys, 1927. 104 Figure 7. “The Newer Mathematics” by Will Dyson, 1931. 205 Figure 8. Edgar B. Worthington’s diagram of ecological order and administration of knowledge, 1938. 216

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the ongoing support of Everett Mendelsohn; for this I am very grateful. My work has also benefited from communication with William Beinart, Mario Biagioli, Stephen Bocking, Robert Brain, Laura Cameron, Eugene Cittadino, Alix Cooper, Richard Drayton, Nina Edwards, Robert Marc Friedman, Peter Galison, Michael Gordin, Arne Hessenbruch, Helge Høybråten, Matthew Jones, Hannah Landecker, Mark Madison, Ernst Mayr, Gregg Mitman, Arne Næss, Denise Phillips, Thomas Potthast, Lisbet Anna Rausing, Nils Roll-Hansen, Charles Rubin, Simon Schaffer, Ravi Rajan Srinivas, Helen Tilley, Conevery Bolton Valencius, Douglas Weiner, Nina Witoszek, and an anonymous reviewer. My gratitude goes to Kate Brick, Sherrilyn Roush, and Rena Selya for their editorial work. A special thanks to my editor Ann Downer-Hazell for a series of valuable suggestions. I am also grateful to family and friends for ongoing support for this project. I have received support from The Norwegian Research Council’s Ethics Program (grant 108285/520 and 135411/520), a grant from the U.S.Norway Fulbright Foundation, the Bertram J. and Barbara B. Cohn Fellowship (Harvard University), and a stipend from the Dibner Institute Graduate Fellowship Program. The Center for European Studies (at Harvard University) readily made available a grant to visit the Max-Planck-Institut für wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin for their stimulating Summer Academy in 1997. The Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, generously provided me with office facilities and affiliations. I would also like to thank archivists and librarians for all their help and patience, especially Bronwyn Jenkins at the University of Natal Archives, Serena Marner and Anne-Marie Townsend at the Plant Sciences Library at Oxford University, Fred Inge Presteng at the Norwegian Polar Research Institute, Richard Savage at the Plant Sciences Library at Cambridge University, and finally the superb staff at the Botany Libraries and the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. I am also grateful to Ernst Mayr who donated his personal files on ecology to the project. vii

Introduction

“Ecology may now be considered a fashionable study,” an editor of a botany journal remarked in 1904.1 Unlike other fashions, however, ecology refused to fade away, and botanists soon found themselves debating the exact content of the promising new approach. It was an intense debate, and few could even agree on the right spelling of the captivating word: was it æecology, æcology, öcologie, oecologie, or ecology?2 The “correct” spelling was eventually decided by a dictionary editor who thought “ecology” should agree with the spelling of “economy.” This correlation between nature’s and society’s economy will be one of the main topics of this book. The ecological understanding of imperial economy is a key explanation for why ecology became fashionable in botany and beyond. Almost one hundred years after its introduction, one finds that ecology is still a powerful frame for a whole set of questions from linguistics, history, religion, and philosophy to sociology, geography, architecture, botany, zoology, law, and economy. For better or worse, ecology has become a popular way for contemporary thinkers to organize knowledge, frame environmental questions, and write about social issues. Sciences such as molecular biology, genetics, and atomic physics have also dominated much of these debates. Yet, ecology has for many represented a privileged and sometimes alternative path of reasoning. How could a method that at the turn of the twentieth century focused on such specifics as researching grass on sand dunes expand to such diversity and wide usage? This history of ecology will look critically at how ecology emerged as a science in the first part of the twentieth century. Why were the order of knowledge, social crisis, and the environmental havoc of our age framed in ecological terms? The formative period of ecological reasoning coincides with the last years of the British Empire. Ecology grew out of the imperial administrative and political culture, and the title of this book—Imperial Ecology—reflects the path by which ecology evolved from botany to a study of human relations. 1

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This broad ecology owes its success to its patrons in the economic administration of the environmental and social order in the British Empire. The beginning of this period of growth is marked at one end by the publication of Eugenius Warming’s important conceptual work on ecology in 1895, and, for the purposes of my study, concludes with the formation of the United Nations in 1945. This was the period in which ecology flourished in the British Empire. I will discuss in detail a number of its key scientists and recommend to the reader an excellent overview of British ecology and ecologists prepared by John Sheail for the British Ecological Society.3 Instead of providing an overview, this history will be an in-depth study of how a handful of highly influential scientists and politicians established a three-part ecology of nature, knowledge, and society. The expansion of ecological research is my theme: the chapters will follow step by step the conceptual evolution of ecology from botany to studies of forests, fish, animals, and finally human beings. Two major patronage networks within the British Empire were available for ambitious ecologists looking for research money and opportunities. The discussion will compare and contrast one small patronage system in the southern part of the empire, centering around the South African botanist and leading political figure Jan Christian Smuts, with a larger patronage system in the north, encompassing a whole set of British colonial agencies based in England. Both the patrons in the south and in the north urgently needed tools for understanding human relations to nature and society in order to set administrative economic policies for landscapes, population settlement, and social control. By the end of the 1930s, ecologists from the north and south developed two radically different and competing ecological theories about the human condition in nature. The British ecologists in the north, with Arthur George Tansley as their spokesman, developed a mechanistic view of ecology suitable for creating a system of control of material and human resources in the empire (see Chapters 1 and 3). In the south, Smuts was equally active in mobilizing a small but vocal group of ecologists, who through his politics of holism argued for an idealistic ecology that could solve the empire’s environmental, social, and racial problems (see Chapter 2). The clash between Tansley and Smuts’s protégé John Phillips was perhaps the most important ecological debate of the period (see Chapter 4), a debate that ultimately led to two different approaches about how to include humans in ecological research and policies (see Chapters 5 and 6). The enlargement of ecology required a broader methodological base that drew on technology, psychology, philosophy, epistemology, sociology, geography, and historiography in addition to the natural sciences. This cluster of knowledge ecologists used to strengthen the methodological aspects of their research. The first half of the book explores the importation—or cannibaliza-

Introduction

3 3

tion in ecological terms—of reasoning from other disciplines by ecologists. The second half explores the export or the emergence of new ecological orders of knowledge as tools for imperial management of the empire. The most important new technology in the enlargement of ecological method was the airplane, which was crucial for surveying large, often unknown, landscapes with diverse vegetation, animals, and human activities. The animal ecologist Charles Elton successfully used planes in his research for possible colonial settlements in Spitsbergen in the far north, whereas the forester Ray Bourne used planes in the south to research nature’s economy in the region of Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo in an attempt to determine political borders (see Chapter 3). However, it was in psychology that botanists found the most important sources of inspiration for the expansion of ecology. The development and structure of the human mind and human society served as analogies for the evolution and structure of ecological habitats. Tansley, a student of Sigmund Freud, wrote extensively on the nervous systems while developing his ecosystem theory (see Chapter 1); Smuts first laid out his theory of holism and evolution inspired by the poet Walt Whitman’s thinking (see Chapter 2). These uses of psychology to develop ecological methodology help to explain why from the very beginning botanists thought it was possible to expand ecology to include human beings. The expansion of ecology also required an overreaching philosophy of science that included all sciences of nature, and served as the focus of a fierce debate between an idealistically informed philosophy of holism and a mechanistically informed systems theory that dominated most methodological discussions (see Chapter 4). At the crux of these issues was the question of who should order the environment and carry out ecological research throughout the British Empire, and thereby lay the scientific foundation for economic and social policy. This fight for control resulted in contradictory paths of human ecological research. In South Africa Smuts’s followers John William Bews and Phillips explored the ecological division of human labor in a racially segregated environment, whereas Smuts himself used ecological reasoning to frame a racist charter of human rights for the United Nations (see Chapter 5). In Britain, the ecologists also explained human faculties in ecological terms: the human abilities to reason, to will, to envision and plan the future, to recapture past histories, to organize knowledge, and to perceive and learn were all explained according to ecological principles. Julian Huxley tried to implement some of this human ecology as the first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (see Chapter 6). Research took place in environments stretching from the far icy north of

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Spitsbergen to the very southern tip of Africa at Cape Town. This northsouth dimension in ecological research will be crucial for understanding the tensions in debates that explicitly and implicitly dealt with the policy of scientific administration of the British Empire (and eventually of the whole world through the United Nations). The geographical diversity of research in this period provides one explanation for why ecology emerged as a global science. This hypothesis of the history of ecology could certainly be supported by including research undertaken in other interesting regions of the empire, but that would require at least another volume. Fortunately, several historians have already explored how ecological research grew out of colonial expansion on tropical islands between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and anthropologists as well as environmental philosophers have made valuable contributions to our understanding of the development of ecological reasoning from a north-south perspective.4 This book will draw on this rich scholarship and argue that the history of ecology is best understood as a product of north-south relations, which took local research as models for an emerging global reasoning. Through this focus on the history of ecology one may understand how and why ecology could provide a global framework for environmental and social debates. To fully appreciate the social and political tensions of north-south relations in ecological research, this book will focus on their political views. Most of the ecologists in this history held progressive social views, and much space will be devoted to exploring the tensions among socially concerned scientists and politicians. Similarly, the argument will not try to separate managerial and Arcadian views of nature’s economy. On the contrary, this book argues that designations such as “good” Arcadian views of nature and the “bad” imperial or industrial management views represent false and anachronistic dichotomies. A close examination of primary sources will show that the often-used distinction between preservation and conservation views of nature is a useless historical dichotomy. The history of early British and South African ecology represents instead a tangled web of both imperial and romantic views unified by a shared critique of urban life and culture. The main tension in the ecological domain was between South African idealists who thought of nature’s economy as fixed (by an omnipotent divinity, according to some), and British mechanists who thought that the economy of nature could be—and should be—planned. The social order of society was at the heart of the debate in which British mechanists argued for an ecological re-ordering of society, nature, and knowledge against South Africans who favored naturalizing the existing ecological segregation of their country. The methodology used in this book is anthropocentric compared to the

Introduction

5 5

flourishing environmental philosophy and historiography currently in vogue in environmental studies. The general scholarly trend has been to follow the ecologists’ advice of understanding humans as being part of (as opposed to separate from) the household of nature. One cannot help noticing the novelty and originality of this growing body of literature. Notions of ecocentric or biocentric ethics, political ecology, and environmental history have their own challenging history, which dates back at least to the 1920s. This history has mostly been ignored by contemporary scholars, despite their keen interest in using ecological approaches in historical studies. In writing about those who argued for the view that the human condition is integrated in nature’s economy, this book uses an historiography that may be summarized in the words of one of Tansley’s chief antagonists, the historian Herbert Butterfield: The historian does not treat man as the student of biology seems to do, [he] does not regard him as essentially a part of nature or consider him primarily in this aspect. He picks up the other end of the stick and envisages a world of human relations standing, so to speak, over against nature—he studies that new kind of life which man has superimposed on the jungle, the forest and the waste. Since this world of human relations is the historian’s universe, we may say that history is a human drama, a drama of personalities, taking place as it were, on the stage of nature, and amid its imposing scenery.5 To be sure, the religious and political implications Butterfield drew from his argument and the gender bias of his language are not worth pursuing. Yet Butterfield’s understanding of the human condition as being “over against nature” provides an accurate description of how ecologists “superimposed” their social views into an environmental order. One of the ironies in the history of ecology is that ecologists hardly looked upon themselves as being part of nature’s economy. On the contrary; the master perspective from above was the very precondition for describing (human and nonhuman) interrelations within nature and society, as well as for creating an ecology of knowledge. This book views the history of ecology as a product of human and not environmental agency. Indeed, the very idea of explaining human activities (including science) as a product of the environment dates back to those ecologists that I will discuss in Chapter 6. Since this book thus may be read as a contribution to the history of thought in terms of environmental history, it makes little sense to use environmental history as its methodological tool: a book about the history of human ecological research tools cannot profitably use those same tools to describe itself. There are also moral and political reasons for using a methodology that

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seems to provide better philosophical explanations for why humans have—irrespective of biotic background and ecological belonging—equal and unique capabilities to create history, alter the environment, and participate in the public sphere, although a defense of this position would require another volume, and has indeed been published elsewhere.6 All the reader needs to know is that population ecologists and deep ecologists as well as environmental historians and philosophers have long challenged the idea that humans have a unique moral and political status among species in the web of nature. This criticism—which ranges from subtle philosophy to vulgar generalization—attempts to break down boundaries between what is human and what is natural. It is in the spirit of this ongoing debate that this book explores the oppressive potential of accepting the ecologists’ advice to integrate the human condition and society into nature’s household. Finally, this is not a comprehensive history of ecology. Of all its rich material this book only includes that which may explain the evolution of botany into human ecology. On the way, I hope to prove Charles Elton incorrect when he wrote that “[w]e have to face the fact that while ecological work is fascinating to do, it is unbearably dull to read about,” a remark once underlined in bright red by a Harvard University student.7

1 From Social Psychology to Imperial Ecology

The ecologist and botanist Arthur George Tansley once amazed his friends by saying that Sigmund Freud would prove to have the most lasting influence upon the world since Jesus Christ.1 This appears to be a remarkable comment from the president of the British Ecological Society, longtime editor of the Journal of Ecology and the New Phytologist as well as author of key monographs, and founder of the ecosystem theory. Yet he also wrote books and articles and lectured on sex-psychology, which raises the question of what (if anything) psychology had to do with ecology and how he found a link between them. In order to provide an account of this apparent schism in his thinking I will argue that three elements of his research intertwine: He was a socially concerned scientist committed to the moderate political left; he was a strong admirer of Sigmund Freud, who used his psychology to develop ecology; and he thought the chief aim and method of ecological research was colonial exploration and exploitation. Tansley’s life and work up to 1927, when he was offered a professorship in botany at Oxford University, will be the subject of this chapter. The first section uses Tansley’s early life as a guide through the British ecological debates at the turn of the century, in which research along plant geographic and genetic lines at University College, London, confronted morphology among Scottish ecologists. The debate was devastating to Tansley, who turned to psychology and Freud for psychoanalysis and professional renewal, and then returned to London where he used his theories of the mind to develop his mechanistic view of nature and ideas about ecosystems. There was no job awaiting Tansley in London upon his return from analysis in Vienna; the final part of this chapter discusses his attempts to find patronage in various imperial and colonial groups. Using Freudian theories of the human mind and social psychology as a departure, he explored how the aims and methods of ecological research could enhance British imperialism, a project that finally generated the Oxford professorship in botany. Despite their obvious importance in his work, Tansley’s support of social7

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ism, Freudian psychology, and imperial ecology has been poorly understood by both practitioners and historians of ecology. It is rare to find references to his psychological works at all, much less any discussion of their significance. The common interpretation of Tansley’s political views is that they were conservative. One historian of ecology argues that Tansley’s “political ideology of plant ecology” implied “a commitment to individuality,” that his “bourgeois [Freudian] analysis . . . separated him from a major part of left-wing analysis of English society,” and that “he did not want to see ecology as a scientific discipline justify leftist political theory.”2 This has created the misleading opinion that he “wanted to strike the word ‘community’ from his science’s vocabulary,” and that “Tansley’s ecosystem, unlike the Romantic style of ecology [Goethe and Thoreau], dovetailed nicely with the agronomic and industrial view of nature as a storehouse of exploitable material resources.”3 Whereas one historian thus concludes that Tansley had a utilitarian management approach to both the conservation and exploitation of natural resources, another argues that he believed the British landscape “transcended economic utility.”4 What all historians of ecology seem to agree on, however, is that “[Tansley] depended upon the connection of the ecosystem to the physical sciences, the most precise and mathematical sciences, and the concept of physical equilibrium to convince his audience.”5 If not downright wrong, these views are inaccurate and anachronistic interpretations of Tansley’s ecological project. Strangely enough, there are few, if any, references in his writings on topics of chemistry, physics, or mathematics; instead most references outside the realm of biology point to social psychology.

Arthur George Tansley and the British Botanists This history of Tansley starts at the North London Working Men’s College where his father, George, gave free lectures and carried out other unpaid educational work in an effort to overcome social ills among workers in the north of London by means of scientific education. He was a businessman when Arthur was born in 1871, and soon after decided to take an early retirement so he could devote his life solely to the promotion of science. This unselfish commitment to the value of science for workers and less fortunate people in society had a lasting influence on his only son Arthur.6 Most teachers at the Working Men’s College were organized into the Fabian Socialist Group under the direction of Frank Galton, who lectured on the history of trade unionism and the workers’ right to own their own industries.7 Tansley the younger recalls that it was a wood turner in this environment of socially concerned teachers that introduced him to botany.8 Tansley’s father and mother Amalia Lawrence were anxious for their son to

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go to one of the old and respectable universities. At the preparatory school at Worthing and at Working Men’s College, they secured the best education for Arthur, especially in botany, which was important for potential medical students. At an early age Arthur developed editorial skills; when he was thirteen he became an assistant editor of Westbury House School Ephemeris, in which he wrote articles on botanical taxonomy.9 At the age of fifteen he was sent to Highgate School for three years, where he complained about the lack of serious instruction in science and botany. As a result his parents decided that Arthur should attend University College, London, where he took courses from early 1889 until the summer of 1890 with Edwin Ray Lankester and Francis Wall Oliver. Only seven years older than Tansley, Oliver was a promising botanist who had inherited his father’s job as lecturer at the college in 1888, and advanced to professor of botany and chair of the department in 1890. Oliver was educated by Quakers at their school in Kendal, an institution known for broadminded people, and Oliver was most definitely among their more radical graduates; he “remained throughout life something of a rebel, disliking all authority, rules and regulations and liked to be a law unto himself.”10 His administrative duties focused on restructuring the Department of Botany into a dynamic place for research, a project financed by a large grant from the Quain Trusteeship.11 This plan included building a new laboratory, purchasing collecting equipment, establishing a new professorship, and organizing special lectures and colloquia. With the help of this grant, Oliver transformed the department into one of England’s most progressive locations for botanical research, attracting numerous students and scholars. It was also known as an arena for new ideas about educational and social reform, and as a center for scientific research aimed at curing social ills and injustices. A telling example is the department’s support for aspiring women: Four out of eight recipients of the prestigious Quain Studentship between 1890 and 1927 were women; the College granted several doctoral degrees in botany to women, and nine out of twenty-seven members of the staff in the same period were women (four with a Ph.D.).12 The educational policy of the London botanists was thus clearly on the side of women’s equality at a time when such views still were controversial. Oliver’s major research project in the 1890s on the effects of “urban fog” on vegetation illustrates how he engaged with society as a socially concerned scientist. He employed several students and fellow researchers and collaborated with botanists in various industrial parts of England. The damage urban fog caused to plants was an “increasing source of dismay,” Oliver explained, “something ought to be done . . . London suburbs are enshrouded in semi-

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darkness, whilst the air is tainted with foreign and offensive matter.”13 He consequently carried out a detailed investigation of the chemical composition of urban fog and its injuries to plants, including comparisons of the sulfuric acid content of the air inside a greenhouse juxtaposed with air surveys inside and outside London. Although his practical solution was rather simplistic— building “fog-proof” greenhouses—his urban research does illustrate his interest in socially concerned botanical research that attempted to benefit society at large. The botanists in London found their chief intellectual competitors in Scotland, where Frederick Orpen Bower was the driving force behind botanical research at the University of Glasgow. Bower came from a very different social background than his colleagues in the south; his friends could not help noticing the “Victorian atmosphere” that surrounded him throughout his life.14 He was raised in a comfortable country home where he learned to appreciate the sublime pleasure of chamber music promoted by his father, a man of leisure and high society and a connoisseur, and by his mother Cornelia (the daughter of Rear-Admiral Morris of Beverley). It was through her brother, who was known for his impressive butterfly collection, that the young Bower learned to appreciate botany before he went to Cambridge. In 1880 he worked for one year as an assistant for Daniel Oliver at University College, London. Then he continued as lecturer under Thomas Huxley until he accepted the botany professorship in Glasgow in 1885. Bower’s close friend and intellectual companion was Isaac Bayley Balfour, the former Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, who by 1888 was at Edinburgh University. Balfour had a social background similar to Bower’s, and was known to focus on evolutionary explanations presumably learned during his assistantship to Thomas Huxley.15 Together they developed an approach to education and research that emphasized plant physiology and morphological reconstruction of species. Much of this research on the evolution of species in relation to their environment was published in the volumes of Annals of Botany, edited by Balfour from 1887 until 1912. Also in Scotland was Patrick Geddes, who was known to use such concepts as “The Web of Life” to explain the biological evolution of human relations, first as a lecturer in Edinburgh, then as professor of botany at the University of Dundee.16 Bower and Balfour dominated the field of botany. By the turn of the twentieth century, they were intent on establishing a school of ecology based in morphology. The Londoners, with Oliver at the forefront, were looking for another path; their methodological point of departure in the 1890s had yet to differ radically from their Scottish rivals, but socially they were of a different caliber. It was in their environment of socially responsible botany that Tansley came

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to know Oliver, his chief mentor and patron from whom he claims to have learned more botany than from any other person in his life.17 His other teacher was Ray Lankester, a socialist and “a superb lecturer” with the unfortunate habit of lecturing during lunch hour.18 Tansley thus could not fully appreciate the content of his courses, which ironically focused on theories of degeneration and extinction of animals.19 Learning about the hardship of the struggle for survival was a bit too much for Tansley, who organized a student protest and campaign in favor of lunch instead of lecture. Lankester also participated in University College’s élan for socially responsible science; he too wrote and lectured on the utility of botany for medicine by pointing to the importance of Louis Pasteur’s work, as well as to the relevance of biology for both fishery and the improvement of human heredity.20 After nearly two years in London with Oliver and Lankester, Tansley entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890, where he read the first part of the natural sciences Tripos (botany, zoology, and physiology). He went to Francis Darwin’s and Walter Gardiner’s lectures on botany, but felt he learned little that he had not already learned in London. Tansley was more involved in scientific research in the second year of the Tripos, and for this he was awarded a Trinity exhibition as a result of the intercollegiate examination of his work. In his final year at Cambridge he attended Thomas McKenny Hughes’s lectures on geology, which included numerous field studies that later became useful in Tansley’s ecological surveys. At the end of 1893 he completed the first part of the Tripos and placed first in his class and fifth among the candidates in aggregate marks. These excellent academic results were not the outcome of intensive studies: instead one has to turn to his social life to see how his Cambridge experience reinforced his social views in a period when he was “absorbed in undergraduate activities of an intellectual sort, society meetings and interminable talks, often into the small hours.”21 He apparently owed more to his undergraduate society than to any other influence at the university: “I took my share of the usual interminable discussion on the universe—on philosophy, psychology, religion, politics, art and sex,” he would later recall.22 His friendship with Bertrand Russell had, in particular, a lasting influence on his intellectual development. Russell had become increasingly involved with the socialist Fabian Society (which he formally joined in 1897), and he associated himself with the views of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, and most important, Herbert George Wells.23 The Blackman brothers Vernon Herbert and Frederick Frost (who shared rooms at St. John’s College) were also among Tansley’s best friends at the university. Their father practiced as a physician in the slums of London and their mother was the daughter of a medical superintendent of a prison, who struggled to

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raise eleven children. Whereas the family could not afford to send Frederick and Vernon to Cambridge, they were nevertheless able to get an education there thanks to a generous donation from the wealthy husband of their aunt.24 At Cambridge they decided to follow their father’s admirable work by studying medicine so that they too could be useful to society’s poor. Another close friend of Tansley’s worth mentioning was Frederick William Keeble, a son of a cabinetmaker in London.25 The Blackman brothers, Keeble, and Tansley formed a kind of clique, and would often discuss how education and science could improve a society divided by economic inequality. After three years at Cambridge, Tansley returned to University College, London, because of a tempting offer from Oliver to work as his assistant. Tansley readily accepted the job and worked there from 1893 to 1907, doing a variety of research and teaching in palaeobotany, plant anatomy, and ecology. This job did not prevent him from continuing his studies at Cambridge; he finished the second part of the natural science Tripos in 1894 with botany as the main subject. He also helped Herbert Spencer revise his Principles of Biology for a second updated edition, which was released in 1898.26 During his years in London, he shared a flat at the Old Ship Hotel with Vernon Blackman, who worked as an assistant in the Natural History section of the British Museum and as a lecturer at University College.27 Together they experimented with vegetarianism as a healthier diet by frequenting Eustace Miles’s restaurant daily, which was known not only for its all-vegetarian menu but also as a meeting place for socialists and London’s counterculture. Perhaps Tansley even learned to appreciate opium in this environment.28 At the restaurant Miles advocated the new vegetarian avenues to social health and sold books exploring the connection between the brain, muscles, and diet. He gave lectures every Thursday as well as advice to his customers on how to begin his regimen, and upon leaving the restaurant a client could pick up free leaflets containing vegetarian recipes. It is likely that Tansley’s later interest in the relation of psychology to social health had its origin around the tables of this restaurant and in reading Miles’s popular books and pamphlets.29 It was while eating vegetarian meals that Tansley’s circle of University College students and scholars discussed their educational program focusing on the importance of socially concerned research. As lecturer at University College, Tansley also showed concern for his students through his involvement in the Student Union. Traditionally young lecturers took the responsibility of leading the union, and Tansley served as vice-president, then later as president (1898–1900), and finally as the union’s treasurer.30 The Student Union’s mission was to organize lectures, orations, and formal dinners, as well as to address questions of concern to the general student body. Tansley seems to have taken the welfare issue especially seri-

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ously in his term as president; items on his agenda included the need for a student lounge, better food, improved athletic facilities, and improvement of heating and ventilation of the libraries. He described his London years as happy ones, and his entertaining lecture, “The Origin of Death,” from 1898 is surely evidence of a man in a good mood, displaying charming British irony at its best.31 His diary from his halfyear tour to Ceylon, the Malay peninsula, and Egypt between 1900 and 1901 also tells of a young man excited about exploring the world. The voyage was important for Tansley’s career—all ambitious scholars had to make such a voyage if they wished to scale the hierarchy of British botany. Tansley consequently published a paper on his findings.32 Upon his return the Gazette reported that he “danced to the very last extra” during the annual prom of 1901, and he even wrote an article praising the women in Cambridge, whose “feet and ankles are proverbial . . . and hockey skirts are short.”33 It was during this happy period of his life he fell in love with his former student Edith Chick (the first female student to receive the Quain Studentship), whom he married in 1903. Her article about seedlings of nutmegs soon found its way into Tansley’s New Phytologist, and she was also among the staff of University College for some time.34

Ecology Arrives in Britain In 1894 Tansley learned German and subsequently discovered Eugenius Warming’s book about plant societies through the 1896 translation from Danish. Warming “opened . . . a new way of looking at the plant world” for Tansley, and he devoted his time almost entirely to ecology from then on.35 He frequently suggested that British botanists should base their approach on the work of German and Scandinavian ecologists. Balfour was equally excited about Warming’s book, and the tension that eventually developed between him and Tansley had to do with how to conceptually understand the ecology Warming pursued. Warming was an admirer of Alexander von Humboldt, who in his books about plant geography relied on morphological methods as well as traditional systematic botany.36 The focus in the original Danish edition of Plantesamfund (Plant Societies) of 1895 and the first German translation was not on morphology but rather on how to understand the geographical distribution of plants by analogy to human society and economy.37 This correlation was not accidental; Warming and his students sought to develop an ecological method suitable for Danish imperialism. Ordering nature in a colony into one economy was important for achieving environmental control in a foreign region.38

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It was precisely the ordering of plants according to geography and economic method that intrigued Tansley. He was not against morphology as such when he first read Warming, and the tension that developed between Tansley and Balfour did not become apparent until Tansley learned to appreciate genetic and biochemical research upon his return from Egypt in 1901. Tansley started to promote the idea that the genetic origin of plants was rooted in soil formations and that physiography was thus the correct ecological approach, whereas Balfour stuck to the morphological study of tracing the ancestral history of species as a methodological basis of ecology. Warming himself did not believe in the value of the genetic origin of plants, and the subsequent German editions of his book grew with a six-hundred-page morphological enlargement in its final version of 1918.39 This elaboration disturbed Tansley but pleased Balfour, who arranged to translate the first English edition. Warming, working with an assistant, wrote a fully revised manuscript for Balfour to translate; he also updated the morphological content by borrowing from the German versions. Balfour thus claimed in 1909 (with Warming as the authority) that proper ecology used the morphological method, that he as Warming’s translator was defending the correct ecological approach, and that Edinburgh was the center for such ecological research.40 Henry Cowles at the University of Chicago was much pleased with the morphological turn of ecological methodology, but Tansley wrote a long critical review of the English edition, in which he advised his readers to stick to the first German version.41 Tansley’s critical review of Warming’s later work was published in The New Phytologist, a journal he founded in 1902 to promote new approaches to botanical research.42 It was a blend of current research reports and a newsletter, published on a monthly basis. Tansley serialized important articles to ensure continued readership and a permanent circulation. Many articles thus end with “to be continued.” Besides the serial articles, Tansley published book reviews, correspondence, debates, miscellaneous notes about other journals, seminars, textbook suggestions and other relevant news. His aim—to create a sense of scientific community—was soon achieved. One had to read the journal to know what was going on among progressive British botanists. The first volume has several articles (probably written anonymously by Tansley) with a content appealing to a broad scientific audience: “Ecological Notes” (review of current ecological research), “Toward an Ideal Botanical Curriculum,” and “The Meeting of the British Association” (reviews of botany papers). Some of these reviews pointedly name-drop, to make sure that all potential subscribers are mentioned. Tansley’s growing number of subscribers received a journal whose radical views promoted new approaches to botany and which explored how botany

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might serve society. The editorial policy of the first fifteen volumes provided a forum for the new generation of botanists, with, for example, articles about Mendel’s laws.43 The journal did not participate in the fiftieth anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1909, but instead published numerous articles about Mendel. Neither did Tansley curry favor with the old generation of established scholars by begging them to subscribe and publish; instead he made reference to the Darwinian struggle for survival by dismissing “. . . kindly but mistaken ‘loyalty’ which prompts some people to support a magazine which they do not want, or which has outlived its claims to recognition.”44 The acceptance of his girlfriend’s paper in The New Phytologist was not an act of generosity, but a serious attempt to create a forum where young scholars could publish their first articles. This patronage of a new generation of botanists explains why Tansley later became such a father figure to so many British ecologists. Tansley’s journal had stiff competition in Annals of Botany, which was edited by Balfour. His editorial policy tended towards the morphological tradition. Here established and respected scholars published articles and commented on each other’s greatness until the journal had the unmistakable flavor of a forum for retirees. The rivalry between ecologists in London and morphologists in Scotland created tension over how to understand the history of botany. Oliver was as eager as ever to show that ecology was at the cutting edge of history as well as science, and consequently in the spring semester of 1911 he invited several botanists to give lectures on the history of British botany that were designed to place ecology at the scientific frontier. The series started off with lectures on Robert Morison (1620–1683) and John Ray (1627–1705), and continued with Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), who “seems to have been alive to the importance of the ecological standpoint.” These were followed by descriptions of alleged forerunners of ecology such as John Stevens Henslow (1796–1861), whose research “lay in the direction of what is now called Ecology,” and William Graffith (1810–1845), who thought in terms of ecology “long before ecology was invented.” The whole point of the series was to construct a history that would venerate ecology, “so that a new sphere of usefulness is opened” to taxonomists, botanists, and natural historians.45 Such a reconstruction of history displeased George Sarton, an historian of science, who wrote a critical review of the lectures in the first volume of Isis when they were compiled into a book.46 Bower and Balfour were also invited to lecture and they naturally chose to focus on how morphological botany in Edinburgh led to ecology. Although all the contributors agreed that ecology was at the forefront of history, there was still a schism over whether this front was genetic or mor-

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phological. The immediate answer came a year later when Joseph Reynolds Green published a history of botany in the United Kingdom ending with a long tribute to Balfour, Bower, Scotland, and morphology.47 Robert John Harvey-Gibson got the last word when he wrote a balanced account, Outlines of the History of Botany, that identified morphology, taxonomy, and ecology as different historical paths (surely a gentleman’s way of describing the general upheaval in the scientific community).48 The emerging conflict between the two approaches to ecology included methodological, social, and educational differences. Morphology in Edinburgh was taught with professorial pomp and authority in large auditoriums, with laboratory training on the side. Laboratory work was also part of the Londoners’ curriculum, but the teaching was done in small seminars and special courses. After 1905, most ecological training took place at field stations, where plant geography played a much more important role than plant morphology. The highlight for London students was to spend their summers studying sand dunes at Bouche d’Erquy in Brittany or (after 1913) at the seashore at Blakeny Point in north Norfolk. Here they enjoyed the dunes, a field laboratory, and student parties in the university’s lifeboat houses, where lasting friendships were built and romances unfolded.49 Tansley’s growing interest in ecology took root on these expeditions. He assisted Oliver in his research on French and British sand dune vegetation, salt marshes, and shingle beaches in collaboration with Edward James Salisbury, the likely author of the following limerick about Oliver: A certain Professor of Botany To save his class from monotony Led his students a dance Round a salt marsh in France To develop their brains If they’ve got any.50 The verse reflects an informal jocular research culture different from Edinburgh. Indeed, Salisbury, in his obituary of Oliver, recollected all the amusement they had enjoyed, taking “short-cuts” at night over cucumber frames in the private gardens. (The next morning the owners would ascribe all the broken cucumbers to vandalism by outraged suffragettes.)

Patronage of an Ecological Survey of Britain In the period leading up to the Great War, Tansley was known not as a researcher, but rather as a skillful organizer of scholarly activities, editor, and lecturer in botany at the University of Cambridge. The historian of ecology

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Laura Cameron has reviewed Tansley’s research activities while he was lecturing at Cambridge and shows in an excellent study that he was the main force behind the Cambridge Ecology Club, which carried out research at Wicken Fen nature reserve.51 He soon controlled the growing ecological debate in Britain through his editorial work, as secretary of several meetings of the botany section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and as leader of ecological societies and committees. Most important of all these activities was his organization of an international ecological excursion around the British Isles. Such an ecological survey had long been sought by Tansley, and in 1911 he mobilized his colleagues to form the Central Committee for the Survey of British Vegetation and to carry out his plan.52 In retrospect, historians agree that the excursion became the formative event for modern plant ecology in Britain.53 What historians have failed to discuss is the importance of the survey’s patron George Claridge Druce and the genetic approach of the survey: the ecologists sought to ground the history of vegetation types in soil formations around the British Isles to determine the ecological relations of plants on the islands. Druce was one of the founders of the Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire, the author of an account of the flora from the region, an active Freemason, the leading pharmacist in Oxford, and the former mayor of the city representing the Liberal Party.54 He was a rich gentleman who challenged the hegemony of the town’s university by focusing on how science should serve society (as in, for example, his pharmacy). Tansley and the Blackman brothers fully agreed; they had long advocated that science should serve society, and cooperation with pharmaceutical interests could prove their point, especially with a patron like Druce who did not belong to the conservative establishment. Tansley had long been in correspondence with Druce on this issue. He had tried (on the occasion of Druce’s election) to get him to contribute to the first volume of the New Phytologist, but Druce was too busy.55 When Tansley proposed to carry out an international phytogeographical excursion around the British Isles with all the major ecologists, he turned to Druce for financial support.56 Druce became the excursion’s unofficial guide (a task he carried out according to Tansley with “kindness and good humor”), and he even published the floristic results from the journey.57 The ecologists raised more money than they needed, and spent the surplus on costly banquets and luxury hotels. Exclusive dinner cards made especially for the excursion reveal sumptuous menus of French cuisine, prearranged seating, a carefully planned order of toasts, and extensive wine lists.58 The foreign members of the party were overwhelmed when their British friends at the dinner at the Royal Hotel in Truro proposed after a cabinet of custard puddings, stewed fruits, trifle, jelly, and creamed meringues to toast

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and sing “I dream of thee” in their honor (followed by a violin playing “meditations” by Squire). Afterwards the party would sign Druce’s dinner card with remarks like “for kind remembering” or “with love” as a special tribute to their generous patron. All the extravagance was of course prepaid; the participants had only to contribute a small fee and bring their evening dress as well as a dark suit for the dinners.59 The old saying “There is no such thing as a free lunch” was also then a law for ecologists.60 The Swedish participant Carl Lindman, for example, thanked Tansley for the pleasant summer lunches by sending him the picture book Sweden Through an Artist’s Eyes. He also wrote an article praising the survey and Tansley’s role in it for the New Phytologist, and invited Tansley to Stockholm.61 The other international participants reacted in similar ways, and Druce received letters of appreciation from ecologists that indicated loyal support and close friendship with the Oxford pharmacist and politician.62 Several upon their return home wrote flattering reviews of the survey for the New Phytologist,63 and Tansley in turn compiled them into a costly private leather-bound edition that he gave to Druce. Druce’s patronage created an intimate relationship between the pharmaceutical economy and ecology. Druce had by his patronage added many of the leading ecologists to his social network, and could mobilize them when needed for pharmaceutical research. The results of the excursion were published in a celebrated monograph by the Committee for the Survey of British Vegetation in 1911 as Types of British Vegetation, dedicated to Warming as “the father of modern plant ecology.”64 Tansley wrote the main theoretical introduction to the book and edited individual contributions from the committee. He was careful to point out that their ecological approach was new and different from earlier classifications of British vegetation. Instead of a taxonomy of plants based on individual species, the ecologists classified plants according to geography and relations to other plants. The difference between ecology and natural history was that ecologists established their taxonomy based on factors in the habitat, such as climate, geology, and the soil, whereas natural historians classified plants according to what Tansley saw as the outdated concept of a great chain of being.65 The opening chapter of the book describes the physical character and climate of the British Isles, including maps of hard and soft rocks, heights above sea level, distribution of rainfall, sunshine, and influence of warm and cool air. The subsequent chapters elaborate on different types of soil, distribution of rocks, and so on. After laying out these features of the British habitat, the committee began to describe the distribution of different types of vegetation, starting with the forest. The chapter on forests is particularly striking since it builds on a long debate on the issue of English deforestation. “The British Isles was originally

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covered with forests,” the authors explain, but with the introduction of the human community the forests gradually disappeared, since the human community was “the natural and inevitable enemy of the tree-communities of the countries it inhabits.”66 There was thus an imbalance between the trees and human civilization. The formation and degeneration of oak forests and woodland occupy a good part of the book, which established that a forest climax “before the beginning of the historical period” had “degenerated into heathland during the last few centuries.”67 Subordinate, retrogressive, or degenerating associations of woodland had been brought about by too much felling of trees, grazing, and, above all, “the absence of any definite system of re-planting.”68 There is a romantic strain in this argumentation; the task of ecology was to save British civilization from itself by returning to the original state of forest community. This theme, which Tansley reiterated throughout his life, supports his role as a socially concerned scientist. What is also striking about the book is its commitment to genetics and rejection of an evolutionary approach to ecology. Clearly, Tansley wanted to fashion ecology as a new and progressive science that rejected what he thought to be outdated morphological theory; all of the book’s ecological diagrams show lines of affinity indicating genetic derivation grounded on types of soil formations within the plant communities.69 The contrast to the research of Balfour and the later Warming could not be starker.

Botanical Bolshevism The outcome of the collaboration on the monograph was the foundation of the British Ecological Society in 1913 at University College, London, with Tansley as the first president. The activity of the society’s first years was seriously hampered by the Great War. Tansley was studying the relation between Alpine and Mediterranean vegetation in the Alps when the war broke out.70 His unpublished notes from the period reveal that he was working on how to classify vegetation into ecological “zones” based on a climatic classification system of temperature, humidity, altitude, frost, and so on.71 This theme, which some years later would dominate Charles Elton’s work on animal ecology, was an attempt to break away from traditional botanical classification systems. Tansley discovered that he was too old to enroll as a soldier and that there was hardly any teaching at the universities, so he was assigned to do routine clerking in one of the government ministries.72 In his leisure time he cultivated a friendship with two young psychologists named Wilfred Trotter and Bernard Hart, who introduced him to the works of Freud. Tansley’s election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1915 seems to have been one of the few

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bright spots in a dark period of his life, especially since Balfour and Bower may have halted his nomination for several years.73 From December 1916 Tansley edited the British Ecological Society’s own Journal of Ecology while also continuing to edit his New Phytologist, which contained several moving obituaries of promising students who died in the war. In order to be of some use to his country, between 1917 and 1919 Tansley led the Scientific Research Association, whose task was to contribute to solving postwar problems. The association was, according to Harry Godwin, a major concern for Tansley during the concluding stages of the war and illustrates his sense of social responsibility, but his concern for the public did not materialize in national support for the association, and it was thus closed down.74 In this postwar period both Oliver and Tansley became increasingly engaged in environmental protection by joining the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves.75 The best means to cope with the country’s war trauma, they believed, was to construct and protect a healthy environment for the people. This is most evident in Oliver’s contribution to the reconstruction of the country of 1918. Together with Alfred E. Carey (a fellow of the Royal Geographical, Geological, and Chemical Societies) he published a book on how to manage, improve, construct, preserve, and embellish the British shores. This remarkable study, which summarizes the social relevance of Oliver’s research, outlines how the marine engineer can utilize ecological knowledge about sand dunes to build a beautiful wilderness along the British shoreline. They advise on how to create plant communities that hinder the notorious wandering of sand dunes, discuss how to construct sand dunes as environmental fences for devastating wind, outline ways of reclaiming land and beaches lost to the sea, and debate various initiatives against soil erosion. The book ends with a fierce critique of capitalistic enterprises that buy up sand dunes and beaches for construction purposes to the detriment of local fishing communities.76 Meanwhile Tansley lectured on botany at Cambridge, but his belief in the social aim of science did not resonate with the more conservative dons he now engaged with. Worse, in Cambridge they were mainly doing comparative morphological studies instead of those genetic, plant-physiological, biochemical, and ecological studies Tansley supported. This had earlier resulted in tension between Tansley and his colleagues; back in 1912 he prepared an application for a professorship in botany at the University of Sydney to vent his frustration, but his colleagues were apparently unmoved.77 The conflict between the geographical and morphological camps was finally spelled out in a heated debate from 1917 to the spring of 1919 in Tansley’s own New Phytologist. It began with a manifesto for the reconstruction of botanical teaching signed by the Blackman brothers, Keeble, Oliver,

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and Tansley.78 They were still close comrades; Frederick Blackman had just married Elise Chick, the sister of Edith Chick (now Tansley), and thus became Arthur’s brother-in-law. Tansley was also a frequent guest in Vernon’s home, where besides discussing politics he would entertain their small son Geoffrey Emett with botanical rarities.79 As the Bolshevik October Revolution in Russia filled the news they decided that the time was right to question the social value of morphological science and education for society. At the heart of the matter was the issue of whether scientists rightly belonged within the world of labor and thus whether they should support the National Union of Scientific Workers.80 They were skeptical about the union because the Executive Committee consisted of fierce revolutionaries without respect for the all-important democratic basis of a free society, but they nevertheless thought the general aim of such a union was admirable. The academic status of botany, they argued, was “not only unsatisfactory, but even dangerous,” their salary was “absurdly low,” and their field was dominated by outdated morphological biology hopelessly tracing evolutionary developments of plants.81 The authors suggested focusing on an approach to botany that was “something broader, more vital and more practical”: Morphological “intellectual activity divorced from practical life tends to what is called ‘academicism,’ whose characteristic vices are formalism, pedantry, and hair-splitting.” They do not understand that “the human mind, like the human organism as a whole, is primarily and fundamentally a mechanism for getting things done, not for abstract thinking and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.”82 The pursuit of science, the manifesto announces, should not be divorced from real life: “Further, and this is also of great importance, practical life offers for solution a large number of problems which actually interest the greatest numbers of [scientific] workers.” Morphologists should connect “the spirit of science and the spirit of practical life,” and since the country is in a state of war it was time “to readjust our intellectual ideals . . . on sounder lines.”83 The authors made it clear that they did not suggest any “patching” of the existing botany, they wanted no less than a total reconstruction of botanical teaching with “a new spirit and a new ideal” along genetic lines.84 The Scottish morphologists were outraged. Bower in particular had reason to be upset since he was about to prepare a new textbook on botany that clearly did not fit with the manifesto’s ideals for reconstruction of elementary botanical teaching.85 Indeed, Tansley would later publish an unusually harsh criticism of Bower’s book in his journal.86 The tone of the debate became hostile. In one fictional dialogue, for instance, The Five Wise Men (the authors of the manifesto) examined their biological-morphological opponent by asking mocking questions like “Have you ever heard of ecology?”87 Some of the responses to this criticism came from Tansley’s morphologically ori-

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ented colleagues. They were not pleased. One sharp criticism of “the five wise men” came in the form of “a plea for freedom” from “revolutions” in botanical teaching,88 and Bower argued that his opponents “appeared to advocate immediate Botanical Bolshevism . . . That is the spirit that has ruined Russia, and endangered the future of civilization.”89 Now, “the five wise men” did not praise communism, Bolshevism, or the Russian Revolution. Oliver’s reply to the criticism was more modest, saying that “we need to develop the applied side . . . thus gradually building up a connection with industry.”90 Yet the conditional endorsement of the National Union of Scientific Workers, of better salaries for botanical workers, and of a strong connection between scientific and practical life had a clear socialist aspiration. Tansley’s background and education at North London Working Men’s College and University College, London further highlight this reading of his political views, which in many ways resembled those of other ecologically inspired writers such as Julian Huxley and Herbert George Wells (see Chapter 3). This was an academic form of socialism that blended utilitarian philosophy of economy, social responsibility, and a strong belief in the utility of science for society at large. There is no evidence in either published or private material that Tansley or any of his friends promoted revolutionary ideas, and if one looks at Fabian socialism at the turn of the century it seems clear that its adherents were generally against anarchism, Marxism, and revolutionary activity. Rather, they were committed to building a welfare state by democratic means, with an emphasis on solving practical problems for the benefit of society at large. Their goal was to provide a socialist critique of free-market capitalism through a vision of a society managed by economic planning and social engineering, based on the advice of scientific experts. In their handling of the ideas they did not dismiss elitism and imperialism, since experts and scientific planners could help in raising poor colonies to a higher level of material and intellectual life. The aftermath of the debate was detrimental to Tansley, who at the time was a candidate for the vacant Sherardian professorship of botany at Oxford, for which his friend Keeble had also applied. Unfortunately for Tansley, Balfour was on the Board of Electors for the appointment, and he firmly believed that Tansley was the main author of the manifesto. Consequently, when he realized that none of his own favorite students had applied for the chair, he convinced the board that the obviously less qualified Keeble was better for Oxford than the chief advocate of radical educational reform. “I laughed in my sleeves,” Balfour wrote to Bower. When the value of Tansley’s manifesto was mentioned at the meeting, Balfour knew he was about to impede the man’s career.91

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A New Beginning: Tansley’s Turn to Psychology Tansley was devastated when the news came from Oxford. For the better part of his life he had worked harder than anyone else to establish the field of ecology and to promote new approaches to botany, but the Oxford dons would still not accept him. Disillusioned with his life and career (or lack of such), he turned to psychology partly as a personal therapy, but also to be of some help in a society shattered by war. The result was his book New Psychology and its Relation to Life, published in 1920. At the age of forty-nine Tansley finally experienced his first major public success; this book received flattering reviews in all major newspapers and intellectual journals.92 What caught the public attention was what several reviewers found to be a scandalous psychological explanation of God and sexual sin, about which Tansley soon found himself in the midst of controversy.93 The counterculture of occultists, feminists, socialists, and educational reformers were, on the other hand, very pleased with the book.94 Yet Tansley got the highest praise from revolutionaries, who saw his analysis of social herds as a “remarkable” psychological explanation of a Marxist understanding of class-consciousness: “In conclusion, we reiterate our recommendation of this brilliant volume. Every class-centre should add the book to its library. All Plebeians who can beg, borrow, or steal a copy should hasten to study The New Psychology.”95 Indeed, the book soon became a bestseller that appeared in no less than eleven editions and was translated into both German and Swedish. The success of the book owed partly to Freud’s fame, and Freud’s close collaborator Ernst Jones naturally wrote a long and very favorable review of Tansley’s book.96 Jones recalls, “Freud’s name was becoming a household word in London at this time. In January [1922] his photograph appeared in the fashionable weekly magazine, The Sphere. But publishers had to beware of the police . . . in those days sexuality and psychoanalysis were interchangeable concepts.”97 Some of Freud’s books were withheld from the public because of their “offensive” sexual content; the translation of his study of Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was only accessible to people in the medical profession. Tansley’s book was thus received by the general public as a thriller exposing hidden sexual forces in human societies that the government tried to hide from the public. All this attention helped to establish Tansley as a scholar outside the closed circle of botanists and ecologists. He frequented psychology circles and lectured on Freud’s theory of sexuality before the British Society for the Study of Sex-Psychology.98 His book was a popularized explanation of such clinical psychology, and was aimed at a broad audience. He was taken by

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surprise, however, when he discovered that it was used as a textbook for students of the topic. The aim of the book was rather consistent with his general urge to contribute to the public good by addressing questions concerning “great human problems and activities” in postwar Britain.99 Tansley’s theory of psychology is largely a synthesis of Freud’s psychology and a discussion (as the title suggests) of how it relates to life. The human mind, Tansley argues, follows the laws of biology, and these laws are allegedly best expressed in Freud’s psychology. Tansley saw in his psychology a theory of how psychic energies search for an unconscious equilibrium within the mind and ultimately within society. What is the relationship between the mind and its brain? Tansley was unable to solve the deep philosophical problems related to this question, and instead of becoming lost in the labyrinths of philosophy he found a practical solution: He used analogies “from our own experience of the external world” in his explanation of the internal mind: “The justification of this apparently illogical and contradictory procedure is simply scientific utility . . . If we can make some progress in reducing the bewildering complexity of mental phenomena to something like order, . . . [then] the means by which we obtain these results are fully justified.”100 Tansley bluntly agreed that using concepts from the external world on the mind is an illogical and contradictory procedure, but he defended his method as justified because it produces something like order in the complexity of the mind. The justification for this illogical procedure was the practical importance of establishing law and order in a state of insanity and disorder. Tansley started building the practical bridge between mind and body by pointing out the importance of inherited instincts.101 Although these instincts are the product of biological evolution, Tansley carefully avoided the historical fallacy by stating that knowledge of inherited instincts does not explain the entire human condition. Instincts were fundamental to Tansley; they “determine the ends of all [mental] activities,” they “form the groundwork of the whole structure of the mind,” and they represent “the beasts that perish” within us, and “the plan on which the mind is built.”102 Tansley’s next step was to focus on how sense stimuli from the external world caused reflex actions that unconsciously determine the development of instincts.103 Such minor and major responses among individual instincts were for him the key to understanding the evolution of species. Numerous stimuli-response charts for simple organisms as well as the human mind illustrated the interaction of an organism with the environment (see Figure 1). The chief metaphor in these illustrations was that of explosions. The first of Tansley’s figures shows how stimuli are like an “action of a detonator” triggering an “unstable substance with stored energy,” which

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causes an “explosive discharge of energy” as a response.104 The image of an explosion is used to explain how stored energy responds to different stimuli. Tansley’s Figures 3 and 4 are images of more complex organisms with a sense organ, indicating how stimuli and responses interact with the help of a motor mechanism in a central nervous system. The explosion has been converted into a “motor mechanism.” Notice also that “the space within the inner circle,” in his Figure 4, “represents the mind, [and] that between the two circles the body.” Tansley is careful to separate the mind from the brain. Stimuli from the objects on the sense organ go through the body in tubes into the mind, which, with the help of cognition, affect, and conation, produces a coordinated motor response. In his following figures Tansley would use basically the same model, only with more stimuli and responses to indicate higher mental processes and a higher conation. The brain is filled with unstable stored energy that explodes like a combustion chamber, and out of the brain tubes comes psychic energy or a stream of consciousness. This stream can be either fore-conscious, conscious, or unconscious, Tansley explained, depending on external sense stimuli and on whether the person is awake or asleep.105 These forms of consciousness in the mind structure are hereditary, and the environment can only change their intensity. Within the mind there is an associative network (“tubes”) between the mental elements (“explosions and combustion chambers”), seen in his Figure 7, in five different clusters. Some of the clusters are in a state of activity (b) while others only produce unconscious energy (a), often with the help of sub-clusters (a⬘). Tansley’s Figure 7, “The associative network of the mind,” is particularly important to the argument of this book. I will later argue that Tansley projected this model of the mind into ecology, and that this figure thus represents the very origin of the ecosystem concept. In the book Tansley outlines how the psychic energy in the mind-network flows in channels of conation that constitute a person’s libido. His text is virtually flooded with channel, water, and dam metaphors, all of which are supposed to explain how energies flow from one level of consciousness to another in the mind machinery. The mind will always try to direct its energy towards equilibrium and balance. The feeling of injustice, for example, is caused by an imbalance of energy in the mind structure, and only stimuli in the form of compensation, revenge, or punishment can restore the lost “mental balance” and hence create a feeling of justice.106 The mind is not alone; its channels reach—with the help of stimuli and responses—other minds and hence create social channels, clusters, and networks. Tansley explains that besides artistic, philosophical, and scientific networks, “the immense complexity of modern civilized life provides numerous other channels for the employment of psychic energy.”107 The mind’s social

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life includes primary channels that secure biological needs, secondary utilitarian channels that measure psychic cost and benefit, and luxury channels for pure enjoyment of life. Most important, the economy of psychic energy must be in balance with its environment: If the mind were a perfect machine, an organism completely adapted to its environment in every detail, this would represent a fairly complete biological description of its structure and mode of action. But the human mind is very far from perfect, and the smoothness of its working is in fact constantly hampered by faltering purpose, mental conflict, and the refusal of the world to lend itself to the gratification of the heart’s desire.108 This is a daring observation. The mind is insufficient; its psychic energy cannot satisfy all the demands from the external biological world. The mind’s brain as well as the social and physical environment refuses “to lend itself . . .

Figure 1. Illustrations and original captions from Arthur George Tansley’s New Psychology (1920) indicate his view of the motor mechanism of the mind and the brain. Tansley would use the model of the brain as an analogy to his ecosystem theory. Reproduced courtesy of HarperCollins, UK.

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to the heart’s desire.” Tansley uses this picture to explain abnormal human behavior such as insanity, immorality, and decadence in terms of lack of psychic energy, energy gone astray, or energy out of balance. It is not always clear whether he is writing about the mind, society, or the environment, but he is certain that this world consists of channels of energy: cognitive, emotional, conational, normal, abnormal, easy, uneasy, new, old, sexual, plain, deep, narrow, or smooth. These channels explain who we are and where we belong. The major metaphor for energy distribution in this network is balanced or unbalanced equilibrium. Tansley uses different examples to explain the balance of an officiating mind. One such example is that of efficient management of a committee by an effective chairman.109 A good mind always tries to

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restore a lost equilibrium, and a good leader always tries to create a well-organized herd out of a messy crowd. It is likely that Tansley was inspired by Herbert Spencer, although he does not refer to him, since some of Tansley’s writings about equilibrium of the mind and the social herds resembles Spencer’s principles. The primary force of the mind or the instincts is an ability to form systems in the form of either ego systems or social systems.110 The primary instinct creates an ego system that roughly corresponds to an equilibrium of psychic energy in the brain’s network of channels. The herd instinct, on the other hand, creates social systems because the human by (biological) definition is “a gregarious animal.” “The normal individual man,” Tansley explains, “must obey suggestions arising from his social unit, or he will be as miserable as if he is physically cut off from human society.”111 In order to illustrate how closely the social system of a human herd is integrated, Tansley mobilizes a whole range of biological metaphors. Human herds are like bee communities, animal organs, social organisms, or animal communities, and “we meet the same sort of division of labor between different classes of the [human] community, as we find among organs and tissues of the animal body.”112 This naturalization of the human condition implied that biological laws could explain behavior of human herds. Moreover, “the whole system of morality and the moral law are the direct outcome of herd organization, and the felt obligation to obey the moral law is a direct expression of the herd instinct.”113 From Tansley’s point of view it was thus just and fair to severely punish “the so-called ‘conscientious objectors’ to military service in the Great War.” In fact, for Tansley it was questionable whether such a thing as personal conscience existed, since “morality is primarily a herd concern.”114 In short, morality and social behavior were controlled by the herd, and in the herd everything is a question of network, conventions, etiquette, and good form. Much more could be said about Tansley’s theories of the evolution and degeneration of herds, or of partial herds, universal herds, and insane crowds. Briefly, Tansley’s New Psychology represents a blend of biology and mechanism. He seems to build on a long British tradition of explaining ethics in terms of sentiments and feelings instead of reason, although he places more emphasis on the social instinct than on private sentiment in traditional utilitarian epistemology. The success of his book and the help of Ernst Jones brought Tansley to Freud and Vienna in the spring of 1922.115 There Freud psychoanalyzed him through the spring and summer, and noted in a letter to Jones that “I find a charming man in him, a nice type of the English scientist. It might be a gain to win him over to our science at the loss of botany.”116 Tansley for his part threw himself into working at Freud’s side. He was so convinced of his shift

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of career and need for psychoanalysis that he resigned from his university lectureship at Cambridge in 1923 and emigrated to Vienna with his family, where they stayed for six months. Here Freud analyzed his anxious dreams about being lost among South African native tribes only to be saved by his wife.117 Though he carried out some botanical research in Vienna, he decided to abandon botany when he moved back to Grantchester and started to practice as a psychologist. Freud referred two neurotic patients, who Tansley treated for two years before he gave them up.118 Although Tansley gave up psychology as a profession, he kept his interest in the subject throughout his life. In the summer of 1925, for example, he engaged in a long and bitter polemic in defense of Freud based on his favorable review of the first English edition of Freud’s collected papers.119 His subsequent defense of psychology will be one of the topics of Chapter 4, in which I consider Tansley’s contributions in the 1930s at the Magdalen Philosophy Club, Oxford, and again in Chapter 6, in which I discuss Tansley’s lectures on psychology in relation to freedom in science and his belief in the importance of nature conservation and preservation for the human mind.

From Psychology to Ecology After naturalizing the human mind in his psychology, Tansley turned towards a process of humanizing nature in his ecology. This circulating argumentation is most evident in a 1920 article written shortly after his book on psychology, where Tansley developed a method for classification of vegetation based upon comparison with human communities. The justification of this illogical argument by analogy is again its utility.120 Tansley coined and explained ecological terminology and taxonomy through a variety of analogies to social psychology: The development of plant associations finds its analog in the development of an individual organism; phylogeny of plants recapitulates the ontogeny of human beings; the rise and fall of plant communities is analogous to the rise and fall of human civilizations; equilibrium in the environment is comparable with equilibrium in the mind; and colonial terminology is useful to explain the development of both human and plant societies. Tansley pushed the analogies so far that he found it necessary to remind the reader of the obvious fact that plants, after all, are not conscious species.121 The argument by analogy was based on his psychological epistemology. “The human mind,” Tansley explained to his fellow ecologists, “is irresistibly impelled to express this [classification of vegetation] in some systematic form,” because the mind indispensably creates “a framework into which to fit our investigation.”122 Curiously, he defended philosophical realism, but ar-

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gued that the ecological reality did not exist independently of human experience. The ecological view of the world was a construction of the human mind forced upon nature: “We must never conceal from ourselves that our concepts are creations of the human mind which we impose on the facts of nature.”123 He thus freely draws on concepts from his social psychology to develop his ecological terminology, with numerous analogies between human society and plant communities: A human community, like a plant community, consists of separate individuals with independent powers of existence, growth and reproduction. But taken together these individuals make a new whole, a unit of higher order, with its own structure and functions depending on the definite inter-relationships of the individuals composing it. Such a community generally has differentiated classes or groups of individuals within it, each of which may carry out more or less separate functions, corresponding with organs of an individual organism. Some of these may be useless or nearly useless to the community as a whole, others are essential to its existence. The “corporate life” of a highly integrated community represents the life of the higher animal organism, the executive government the central nervous system.124 Such analogies are not new in western culture; they go back at least to Plato. What is striking is Tansley’s account of the human community where individuals together make a unit of higher order or different classes within human society. He spelled out the theme of how some classes may be “useless or nearly useless to the community as a whole,” while “others are essential to the community’s existence.” Later in this article Tansley explains the structure of plant associations by using terminology from the human community such as nationality, business, interest or opinion, taste, guilds, and even religion, all of which are various ways of organizing plants according to the activity of the human mind forced upon nature.125 A few years later, Tansley wrote his first textbook on plant biology, intended primarily for medical students. This book represents a continuation of his mechanistic psychology, now expanded to the mechanism of plants. Given that the audience for the book was medical students, he could freely introduce a whole set of psychological terminology in the field of biology. As in his mechanistic view of the mind, Tansley introduces the ecological idea that “all living organisms may be regarded as machines transforming energy from one form to another.” Furthermore, he introduces “the general physical law that all systems tend towards equilibrium,” a theory he developed in his psychology.126 Notice in the following passage how Tansley reformulates the old idea

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that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny into a reductionist argument about the law of equilibrium: the great universal law of equilibrium . . . governs all the processes of which we have any knowledge, from the movements of the planets to those of molecules, atoms and electrons, from the activity of protoplasm to the vagaries of the human mind. All things which exist are constantly tending towards positions of balance or equilibrium . . . The universe consists of the most varied kinds of systems in relatively stable or unstable equilibrium, and every fresh disturbance of equilibrium from outside any system leads to fresh activity in the system which tends towards the establishment of a new equilibrium.127 Although Tansley does not use the word “ecosystem” in this passage, it is probably his first theoretical formulation of the concept in his biological writings, and its explanation in terms of an equilibrium clearly derives from his Freudian psychology of the mind. This indicates that Tansley thought in terms of ecosystems as early as 1922, long before he coined the word in 1935.128 Tansley was not the only scientist using the law of equilibrium to explain everything from systems of planets and atoms to plants and the human mind. It was a much-discussed topic at Cambridge University at the time, particularly among economists, and he thus followed a general scholarly trend. He may have been inspired by William Lewis’s popular textbook about systems in physical chemistry of 1916.129 Yet the trend had not arrived in ecology, and Tansley avoided any radical shift of emphasis in his 1923 “guide for beginners” in ecology. The book’s purpose was to provide an alternative to Bower’s morphological textbook in botany and Frederic Clements’s somewhat outdated Research Methods in Ecology.130 The book was written to boost ecology as a discipline at the universities, and to furnish Tansley with a much-needed income after resigning his position at Cambridge.131 The new textbook introduced a new generation of postwar students to ecological concepts and kept the growing community of ecology scholars together. Tansley did not offer a psychoanalytic explanation for ecological studies; he did not believe that sea or water could be equated with vagina and uterus or that fish was a hidden symbol for penis.132 What he did believe was that a complex system like the human mind or society could be explained in terms of simple biological processes, which in turn are based on physical and chemical laws of energy. The transfer of psychological terminology into the realm of botany was based on this assumption.

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The British Empire Vegetation Committee Tansley did not have any university or college position from 1923 until 1927, and thus had to find other ways to secure his and his family’s livelihood. In other words, he had to find another patron. There is a corresponding and significant shift in the focus and content of his work in this four-year period, starting with his appointment as acting chairman for the British Empire Vegetation Committee by the Imperial Botanical Conference upon his return from Vienna in 1924. In this work he became closely associated with Thomas Ford Chipp. It is worth taking a short digression into Chipp’s life because he plays an important role in the early history of British imperial ecology as one of Tansley’s collaborators. He was the second son of a constable in Gloucester who died in 1891 when Thomas was only five years of age.133 His education was then left to the Freemasons, because of his father’s death and his mother’s inability to secure his education. After leaving the Royal Masonic School he became a student gardener at Kew, and later a student of Oliver at University College, London, where he graduated with an honors degree in botany in 1909. He then took a job in the colonial administration as conservator of forests in the Gold Coast. His diaries and notebooks from this period reveal an almost frenetic ecological activity in favor of industrialization and imperial mission for the region.134 Most telling in this material is the fusion of colonial economy with research on local vegetation. His report on the Permatang Coconut Estate at Jugra Selangor from 1911, for example, included a general description of the estate with such details as its boundaries, topography, climate, production, revenues, and market value, as well as suggestions for future treatment and commercial value of the forest.135 It is similar to his report for the Rubber Estates in Perk Selangor, which included extensive descriptions of the social condition of the labor force.136 These reports were not published in scientific journals, but only read by local landowners. Thus, they did not make a contribution to scientific ecology but do reveal the social aim and technical background of Chipp’s later research, in which he blended economy and ecology and considered the civilizing role of scientific research. More important, Chipp’s practice of collecting and organizing evidence is identical in early administrative reports and later ecological research. In the Gold Coast he created a whole series of forms and questionnaires related to forestry that he distributed to a large network of landowners.137 These included questions related to forest management, from growth of trees to criminal offenses by woodcutters.138 He used evidence from these inquiries in his later ecological writings. There is thus a clear influence from colonial administration in his scientific writings and means of organizing knowledge.

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With Tansley, Chipp became one of the prime organizers of ecological research in the early twentieth century. During the war Chipp served as captain and later major in the British Expeditionary Force, 56th Division, in France. This was a military unit involved in heavy fighting, an experience that “told greatly on him” for the rest of his short life.139 After the war he returned to the Gold Coast, where he continued to work on forest management. This eventually resulted in a dissertation on the ecology of these forests, which later appeared as a book, and a doctoral degree from University College, London.140 From 1922 Chipp worked as assistant director of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew. His lecture notes from this period are preserved, and reveal a keen interest in environmental history and ecological organization. When he guided his visitors around the garden he emphasized the social history of plants as examples of successful colonization. The distribution of coconut, oil palm, and banana, for example, was due to exultant human plantation all over the tropical world dating back to the seventeenth century.141 He thus took the historical transformation of the literal face of the Earth by human beings as a yardstick for judging achievements of the British imperial mission. The legitimization of imperialism was for him readable in the ecological history of a colony, and the Kew Gardens thus served as the very image of the empire’s commercial achievements.142 The ecological relations among the plants in the garden were a sub-language for relations among colonies. In the midst of this garden, Chipp points out, one finds the “Director of Kew [who is like] a spider in the centre of his web . . . [He has] to keep in intimate touch with all the threads of the work in progress in each of the separate departments and with all the important matters raised by correspondents at home, and abroad.”143 Chipp was the spider’s assistant, and during his time at Kew he managed to create a true web of networks among up-and-coming ecologists as secretary for the British Empire Vegetation Committee, the Imperial Botanical Conference, and for the fifth International Botanical Congress. By using his experience as a major in the army and his strong ties to the Freemasons, he cleverly organized the science of ecology. His work as a secretary and supporter of ecological science was done in the Freemason spirit of loyalty, hierarchy, and secret brotherhood. The history of the Imperial Botanical Conference can be traced within the history of the International Botanical Congress, which met every fifth year. Paris had the congress in 1900, Vienna in 1905, Brussels in 1910, and London was supposed to have it in 1915, but this was delayed because of the war. After the war the Association Internationale des Botanistes was “so seriously affected by the blessings of peace that its own continued existence had become precarious,” and it was not able to bring together botanists from con-

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flicting countries in an international gathering.144 Consequently, the British organizing committee decided to prepare for an imperial instead of international conference in 1920, but the meeting was deferred until 1924 so it could be arranged at the same time as the grand British Empire Exhibition. This was a marketing issue for the host of the conference, the Department of Botany at the Imperial College of Science and Technology at South Kensington. London was crowded during the Empire Exhibition with potential patrons from the colonial administration, and the Department of Botany did not miss the opportunity to make a special exhibition in their rooms intended for movers and shakers in various colonial government agencies. At the Wembley fair colonies and protectorates had pavilions surrounded by artificially built environments meant to look like their respective economies of nature; including environmental guidebooks about climate, geography, vegetation, animals, and the human population, which in their structure and content resembled ecological surveys.145 The search for patrons dictated the content of the conference, which was organized around the economic, practical and educational value of botany. This served as a starting point for discussions on how to develop scientific methods that could serve such social ends. These debates were centered around genetic approaches (with William Bateson as the main collaborator), ecological approaches (with Tansley and Chipp as the main contributors), or a blend of both. The lectures on genetic approaches focused on economic possibilities concerning the breeding and improvement of apples, sugar-cane, coconuts, rubber trees, and other kinds of crop plants and forests. They were followed by ecologists, who lectured on the best means of promoting a complete survey of plant communities in the empire. A complete botanical survey of the empire was to include both a full-scale genetic map of all the resources in the colonies and an ecological survey of relations among the species. In the division of labor the genetic approach focused on the development of individual species, while ecologists concentrated on overviews and relations between them. The focus of this grand survey was the economic aspect of botany; as one lecturer put, “it is our duty as botanists to enlighten the world of commerce.”146 Much of the conference was devoted to spelling out what was already done or ought to be done in various colonies to realize the grand botanical survey of the entire empire. Most delegates agreed that current and past botanical research was fragmented and that future research should be organized within the scientific context of a survey, which would be of value for further growth of the empire. The delegate from India, for example, confessed that past botanical research in this colony was sketchy and that it should not be a model

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for the future, and similar views were expressed by Tansley and Chipp in their summary of research in Burma, New Zealand, and Canada.147 The only botanical survey in the colonies that the delegates could look at as a model for their survey of the empire was that of the Union of South Africa. The next chapter will explore in detail the extraordinary context of this survey. What is noteworthy at this point is that Illtyd Buller Pole Evans, the director of the Botanical Survey of South Africa, could proudly present a sixyear-old survey with an established body of organized botanists on his team, and the famous politicians General Botha and General Smuts as the survey’s patrons.148 John William Bews, a prominent South African ecologist, argued that South Africa had the best habitats for ecological research, partly because they were uncontaminated. With a subtle reference to Oliver’s research on urban fog he said that it was a poor solution for the progress of botany to be practiced “in large industrial cities where the chief ‘limiting factor’ is the amount of coal-dust in the atmosphere.”149 In other words, he was questioning the possibility of learning how to carry out ecological surveys in polluted cities like London or carrying out research in tainted habitats. Such rivalry was not, however, the general tone of the debate, and the British ecologists were clearly taken aback by the South Africans. Indeed, the South African presentation was a minor shock to established British ecologists, who realized that they could not take for granted that they were the leading ecologists of the empire. At the close of the conference Tansley and Chipp thus secured a series of resolutions designed to place Britain at the center of the grand survey. The British Empire Vegetation Committee with London ecologists was appointed to organize and thus control the Botanical Survey of the British Empire.150 Their task was to provide an overview of existing botanical and ecological knowledge as well as to promote further research. The means of doing this was to prepare a series of monographs on vegetation in the empire, to register and make abstracts of all published material, and finally to create a handbook on aims and methods for use by ecological workers on the grand survey.

Using Nature’s Method for Imperial Management To promote ecological research in the tropical colonies and protectorates the British Empire Vegetation Committee published in 1926 a handbook, Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation, edited by Tansley and Chipp.151 The monograph, which was well received by ecologists, outlines a method for exploration and aims for exploitation. British ecologists had long been involved in colonial research; Tansley, for example, had made such a research journey

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to Ceylon and the Malay peninsula as part of his research project as a student of ecology. Such research was compatible with Fabian socialism, giving an overview of the assets and stocks of natural vegetation in the British Empire that had economic value and suggesting how this information could serve its people.152 The book itself was also meant to be an asset for the committee.153 Aims and Methods consists of a general outline of ecological methods written by the committee and regional studies on how this method had been applied in different parts of the empire. The monograph thus offers an example of both theoretical and practical ecology as Tansley and his colleagues saw it in the 1920s. “It is hardly possible,” the committee explains in the preface, “to conceive a property owner or stores manager carrying on the management of a large estate or general store and yet being unaware of the stock at his disposal, the extent of his supplies or their nature.”154 The image here is of Britain as the property owner and manager of the colonies who unfortunately is unaware of the natural supplies at their disposal. To obtain such knowledge the Protectorates needed ecologists who could map out “the vegetational assets” available to the Crown. Good management of a colony can only be obtained if the empire’s economy adjusts properly to the economy of nature. The ecologist could, with “native labor at his disposal,”155 explore and chart the local vegetation for the colonial administrative institutions. The basic idea was that natural vegetation cannot be utilized for human purposes without the guidance of social responsible science. The terminology that describes plants and vegetation resembles colonial language. Plants “establish themselves on soil ‘prepared’ for them,” higher forms of plants “kill out the lowly pioneers,” and establish new plant “associations,” “kingdoms,” “societies,” “clans,” and “colonies,” and certain species “dominate” these “communities.”156 This terminology was appealing to the colonial administration; the resonance among codes of political, economic, and scientific systems could create a colonial power cluster.157 The metaphors used in descriptions of plants created a stream of normative political and economic associations. Tansley did not try to avoid such ecological trespassing into other social domains because he believed that biology was the foundation for the human mind and hence also for the social realm. After the introduction on ecological methods, the committee explained that the ideal student should have training in biology, climatology, geography, geology, surveying, agriculture and forestry, and last, but not least, detailed knowledge of the economic uses of plants. When this skillful student arrives in the colony, he or she should first become acquainted with the land through reconnaissance with the help of the compass. The next step is to draw a map of the area, preferably with the help of air photography, and fill it

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with relevant biological and economic information, such as “m ⫽ mangrove fringing forest” or “k ⫽ Kanazo forest.”158 Maps are territories that define our place in the world and lay down the criteria for what is to count as relevant knowledge.159 Relevant ecological knowledge in British territories was information that could be of help in the management of the colonial estate. After first making the overview map, which represents a detachment from the reality of the environment, the student of ecology should draw profile charts of the soil with its root systems.160 With both a horizontal and vertical map in place, the student was finally prepared to collect, organize, and preserve specimens from the habitat. The environment could explain why certain plants grow in certain kinds of places and not in others, yet the editors did not accept the old Hippocratic theory that human conduct is determined by airs, waters, and places. Instead they defended what today is known as environmental possibilism: the habitat has a series of possibilities that affect human development, and the way development takes place is dependent on the people concerned: “Man, then, is the great biotic factor working on vegetation,” the authors point out, and “[c]ivilised man, of course, destroys natural vegetation altogether on an extensive scale, and replaces it by buildings or by planted crops.”161 The modification of the habitat by animals is determined, but for humans who have a telos and direction in their psychic energy, the environment represents a whole range of stimuli to which humans could respond in a variety of ways. The Vegetation Committee ran into a methodological problem about how “to decide how ‘membership of the [ecological] community’ is to be limited and what factors can properly be called ‘external.’”162 They point out that a plant community, like a forest, which after ages of succession has reached a stage of ecological equilibrium or climax, might be disturbed and ultimately destroyed by external biotic factors, such as change in climate, colonizing earthworms or crowds of birds, parasitic fungi, large herds of browsing mammals, and effects of human activity. The problem of how such factors should be understood relates not only to the problem of fixing a border of an ecological habitat (for example whether or not crowds of birds are invading an environment), but also to the understanding of biological and historical development of a territory. The problem was not only to draw the line between different ecological communities, but also to distinguish between friendly and hostile relations between them: How are we to draw the line between those which act as members of the community and those which are to be considered external—whether “hostile” or “friendly”—to it? Some ecologists have tried to get over the difficulty by considering all the organisms, animals and plants together,

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living in one place and mutually acting upon another, as members of the community, as a biotic unit. There is a good deal to be said for this conception from a philosophical point of view, for it is really the whole of the living organisms together, plus the inorganic factors working upon them, which make up, in a climax community, a “system” in more or less a stable equilibrium. But such a “system” considered fundamentally, that is, physically, must include the “inorganic” factors of the habitat and these obviously cannot be considered as “members” of the community; and if we take the inorganic factors as external, why not biotic factors such as grazing animals?163 The notion of a fundamental physical system is introduced to include both friendly, hostile, and inorganic factors of the habitat. The amount of matter and energy being constant, ecological factors must add up to balanced cycles of matter and energy. The idea of such cycles, in combination with thermodynamics, was an essential component of Tansley’s system of the human mind and of ecology. In the passage quoted above, the authors refer to Ernst Haeckel, who emphasized the “hostile” relations between species within or outside a plant community.164 The first sentence in this passage is in fact a critical question that paraphrases his 1866 definition of ecology.165 The more gentle Chicago school of ecology, emphasized instead the “friendly” and cooperative relations among species. The solution for the British ecologists, on the other hand, was to reduce ecological relations between species, whether they were friendly or not, to a system of exchange of energy.166 Human agency greatly influenced plant communities, and the role of ecologists was to make sure this was done in the interest of the British Crown. This is particularly clear in the practical sections of the monograph, in which different authors explore the history and practice of ecology in the dominions. The driving force in imperial ecology was economic opportunities hidden in the utility of various plants. One author, for example, points out that tropical fungi can be of great importance in developing medicine for various diseases, and that this topic is a practically untouched field in the empire.167 Another contributor emphasized that ecologists know little about seaweed, and that this “is only to be expected since . . . [seaweed] are of little economic importance, [. . . and the algologist] cannot claim that an algae survey of the British Empire is of such vital importance.”168 Knowledge of the economy of nature was relevant only if it was of importance to the economy of the British motherland. Chipp’s own contribution to the volume is of particular importance in understanding colonial ecological research. One problem in the Gold Coast, ac-

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cording to Chipp, was that the natives caused “widespread destruction of the natural vegetation [. . . of] considerable local economic importance,” because of “dense population,” “movement of tribes,” and “political insecurity.”169 Environmental problems in the area were allegedly caused by aborigines, and it was up to the British colonial administration to tidy up these problems with the help of an ecological survey: “As soon as the natives begin to farm in the forest the equilibrium is destroyed,” Chipp explains, because of their “evil” habit of clearing “virgin forest” with the help of fire.170 However, if the colonial administration resists the local traditions of burning forests and stops the movements of tribes, then good economic prospects may arise, especially with regard to exploitation of mahogany. Moreover, natives are ecologically ignorant, and the field ecologist must thus “not rely on a native fetching him specimens, or showing him plants.”171 Chipp’s scientific approach to colonial forest management is typical of most of the contributors to the monograph. What was significant about the natives was their bad habit of forest clearance by means of fire, and often their high birthrate. None of the ecologists offered empirical evidence of the lost forest equilibrium; they simply assumed that the landscape was covered with forest before historical time. This was a reasonable assumption and for some a self-evident fact from the point of view of Clementsian climax theory; an assumption that only recently has been seriously challenged.172 With the dogma of the lost forest, ecologists could offer a legitimization of British imperialism; they could argue that the empire was saving the native tribes from themselves and their bad habits of forest clearance. The aims and methods of colonial ecology did not involve any applied science derived from pure ecology. Ecology was rather an entangled bank of economy, colonial management, and systems of vegetation classification. Some authors preferred not to distinguish between economy and ecology and used instead the term “economic ecology,” because for them the economic aim of colonial management simply coincided with ecological method, hence the title Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation.173 The aim of colonial economy was for the ecologist to recapitulate the economy of nature. They also saw the economy of semi-nature (nature affected by the human factor) as the product of a historical recapitulation of a colonial economy. To quote one example of this “ecological-economic” mix: In order to understand how to make economic use of any vegetation without bringing about its destruction it is necessary to find out as much as possible of its ecology and life-history. Ecology is often taught as a part of silviculture, but the latter is really its practical application. Nature works in a certain manner, and the clue to the exploitation of economic

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plant-communities lies in using Nature’s methods in such a way as to turn them to the service of man in the directions he may desire.174 Economic use of a species was to be coordinated with its ecology to avoid its destruction. In other words; a responsible economy had to rely on nature’s own methods. The next step after Aims and Methods for the British Empire Vegetation Committee was to issue a survey with abstracts of research on vegetation in the colonies. Chipp, the editor of the index, created a system of knowledge that set him and the Botanical Garden at Kew in the center of the web of ecologists. The committee invited all the subscribers of the Journal of Ecology to submit abstracts and lists of their publications relevant to the grand botanical survey of the empire. These abstracts would appear in the index as edited by Chipp, who exercised his editorial prerogative to shorten all irrelevant abstracts and lengthen relevant submissions until the survey of botanical science had become a survey of ecological science. The result was a 200-page index with no less than 822 entries published as supplements to the Journal of Ecology.175 In this impressive list only articles with an ecological approach had comprehensive abstracts, while botanical works in the tradition of natural history appear with merely a short reference. The Freemason editor, with the committee’s approved policy of inclusion and exclusion, thus helped to establish a sense of community, a brotherhood, among ecologists spread around in the empire. Two different research approaches in ecology emerged in Britain at the turn of the century; one conservative and morphological in Edinburgh and another more radical and plant geographic among Londoners at the University College. Tansley belonged to the latter group, who sought to construct botanical research methods that would be useful for society. This group suffered a defeat to the morphologists, and Tansley would abandon ecology for some time, turning to Freudian psychology for personal and academic renewal. When he came back from Vienna, he reconsidered ecological concepts in psychological terms, while at the same time searching for patronage for ecology in colonial agencies through the British Empire Vegetation Committee. This patronage would prove to be crucial for ecologists, especially at Oxford University, where Tansley was finally offered the Sherardian professorship in 1927. Before returning to these events, it is necessary to step back and explore in depth ecological research in South Africa at the time of Tansley’s writings. The next chapter seeks to unveil the political context of the Botanical Survey of South Africa, where students of Tansley’s archenemy Balfour would find a major scientific patronage.

2 General Smuts’s Politics of Holism and Patronage of Ecology

Parallel to Arthur Tansley’s project of socially concerned research was a more idealistic and spiritual strain of ecological reasoning launched by the South African botanist, general, and politician Jan Christian Smuts. Although they had different political and philosophical agendas, Tansley and Smuts both tried to ground the science of ecology in human psychology, or personology, as Smuts called it. In this chapter I will explore how Smuts used ideas of environmental holism and of the evolution of the mind to draw up a comprehensive political and scientific program for ecological research in South Africa. Smuts was known throughout his life as a vigorous defender of human rights and of the League of Nations; indeed, he wrote the first draft of the United Nations’ preamble on human rights in 1945. Yet he was also known for stern oppression of black South Africans, labor unions, and political revolutionaries; he is also remembered as the general who jailed Mahatma Gandhi. This apparent contradiction provides a focus for my analysis: How could someone both defend human rights and carry out a policy of racial segregation and political oppression? There is no simple answer to this paradox, and my attempt to address it cannot be seen as a full explanation. Yet Smuts’s patronage of ecology is an illuminating example: what may look like a paradox to our contemporary eyes actually was a coherent ecologically oriented politics of holism. In what follows Smuts’s passion for nature and his training as a lawyer serve as contextual explanations of his reading of natural law as a basis for civil law. These readings of law were recapitulated by 1926 in a grand theory of holism and evolution. In his moral and political thinking Smuts also became known as a defender of gradualism, by which he meant that people should gain civil rights and respect incrementally in accord with the stage of their evolutionary development. Smuts would use these successive stages in the development of the human mind in his holistic theory of the successive steps of evolutionary development in general. In this chapter I will discuss how the leading ecologists in South Africa such as John William Bews and John Phillips owe a great debt to Smuts and his politics of holism. I will consider 41

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Smuts’s patronage of botanical research in general, and the Botanical Survey of South Africa in particular. Smuts was a leading player in one of the most significant periods of South African history as a general on the Boer side of the 1899–1902 war with Britain, as a defender of the unification of the nation in 1910 into the Union of South Africa, as minister of defense from 1910 to 1919, and as prime minister and minister of native affairs from 1919 to 1924. The literature about his life in the context of his political and military achievements is very extensive, and I have drawn on this rich material, especially William Keith Hancock’s voluminous biography and Smuts’s papers and correspondence.1 Yet the current literature does not in any systematic way deal with how his politics serves as the context for his holistic philosophy, support of ecological research, and views on human rights and evolution. Nor have historians of biology discussed his importance for the history of life sciences.2

From Natural Law to Civil Rights Jan Christian Smuts was born on May 24, 1870—Queen Victoria’s birthday—which is celebrated in the colonies as Empire Day, a fact that later would carry some symbolic weight in Smuts’s political career.3 In his early life, however, he clearly did not support the British monarchy and consequently preferred not to celebrate his birthday. His Boer family arrived from Holland in the seventeenth century, and the Smuts family had farmed some of the best wheat-growing fields of the Cape Colony. Smuts himself grew up in the district of Swartland, known for its fertility, beautiful scenery, vineyards, traditional Dutch country life, and its conservative and largely religious population of farmers. Jan Christian was very much part of this group and throughout his life proclaimed himself to be deeply religious.4 Smuts’s long interest in botany began when he was invited to participate in Rudolf Marloth’s flora expeditions. He read Asa Gray’s work while he was a student at Victoria College in Stellenbosch (where he was first in his class).5 In 1891, when he was twenty-one years old, he was sent to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study for the Law Tripos. He soon became homesick, suffering from loneliness as well as economic problems, but eventually found solace in the friendship of Johannes Izak Marais, a professor of theology.6 In his first year he wrote a small treatise entitled “The Nature and Function of Law in the History of Human Society.” Although he never completed it, it was published in an abridged version in the college magazine under the title, “Law, A Liberal Study.” Here he complained about how the law curriculum had become a “refuge for those that have failed in literature and science” and suggested a more rigorous study of law based on cultural and scientific stud-

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ies.7 To Smuts culture was a result of a gradual evolutionary liberation from the biological realm (the origin of the word “liberal” in his title), and he used much space to recast the history of civil law as a gradual progressive liberation from primordial law in “the embryonic stages in society” to advanced law in modern “Teutonic Europe.”8 His project was to base civil rights on a firm Darwinian platform with inanimate nature at the one end of the scale of nature and human society at the other, all sanctioned by an all-embracing divine law. He described the governing principle or natural law (in the scientific sense) behind the evolutionary development of civil rights, and argued that public law evolved “from the primitive Family to the modern State” by analogy with the growth of a human being, and that public laws gradually progressed towards more and more respect for individual freedom and greater unity within humanity. In short, “[t]he Person is recognized more and more; the rights of personality become more and more inviolable,” with “one law for all humanity” as the grand purpose of legal history.9 Through the rest of his life Smuts only modified and elaborated on this thesis. In an attempt to reveal a natural law behind the evolution of civil rights for human personalities, Smuts wrote an essay entitled “On the Application of some Physical Concepts to Biological Phenomena.” The focus of this essay was on energy as a permanent life-force in the universe, and the emergence of biological complexity out of physical matter. He explained the origin of life through an inherent and permanent life-force in matter that carried out the transformation from the inorganic to the organic world. The “universal economy,” harmony, or “universal cosmic rule” created by this omnipotent life-force was the ultimate foundation for human evolution and the progress of civil society.10 The professors were very pleased with the arguments of their young student, who studied law at an amazing speed (he allegedly became the first person at Cambridge ever to complete both parts of the Law Tripos in one year). They placed him “brilliantly first” in the examinations and showered him with prizes of the highest distinction.11 At the end of 1894 he entered the Middle Temple with an honorary grant to write on a topic of his own choice, so he chose to concentrate on his favorite author, Walt Whitman. He finished his book in the spring of 1895 and submitted it for publication to, among others, Chapman & Hall Limited, who rejected the book for commercial reasons.12 This manuscript illuminates and summarizes Smuts’s early ideas about the holistic evolution of personalities, ideas that he would later transform into a comprehensive theory of the evolution of plants, races, and human civilizations. The aim of his study was to explore the biological evolution of Walt Whitman’s personality “like any other organism,” since he believed the mental

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evolution of his character had reached the highest possible development.13 Goethe was also a candidate for such a study, but he decided to concentrate on Whitman because of the enormous dimensions of the Goethe literature. Whitman, Smuts explained, was “a true personality, strong, original, organic; . . . a whole and sound piece of manhood,” and he believed a study of his life and poetry could unveil the biological growth and fulfillment underlying his case, and thus give a deeper understanding of what it means to be “a harmonious whole” human being.14 He understood Whitman as “an organic personality developing all his lifetime like a product of nature, traveling through the successive cycles of his growth.”15 Mental evolution into an organic whole was to Smuts a fusion of biology and idealistic philosophy in the tradition of Hegel: From biology he adopted the concept of evolution and from idealistic philosophy he embraced “the purity and holiness” of the human and natural realm.16 “The application of the idea of evolution has hitherto been too analytic,” Smuts complained, and he suggested a holistic approach to evolution because “life is the most synthetic phenomenon we know.”17 The human mind was not “a herbarium” of dead species; its manifold manifestations represent something more than the sum of its parts, in the form of a synthetic, creative whole like an “Hegelian Idee inherent in the personality.”18 The biological evolution of minds like Goethe and Whitman was the outcome of the dialectic history of mind and matter in the history of personalities. Whitman, for example, wrote in his “Passage to India” about The past—the dark unfathom’d retrospect! The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows! The past—the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?19 Smuts read it as a view back on an earlier evolutionary level of human life, a passage back to the level of India. The phases of a personality are those of a growing organism, and those phases correspond to the degrees of a soul’s vital evolution. By studying both the organic, social, and intellectual context and development of great personalities, Smuts hoped to grasp the totality of a genius. Smuts’s interpretation of Whitman’s personality can explain his later fascination with human ecology. When he discusses Whitman’s “Teutonic race” and the long purification of thinking in his family (who were mostly Quakers), Smuts points to the importance of his bioregion (Long Island) with vital forces from the sea as “one of the most important factors in the growth of his thought,” as well to the broadening of his soul in the interaction with his “social organism” (Brooklyn).20 What made Whitman’s mind exceptional

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was that he lived in harmony with nature and thus had no personal crises: “A harmonious nature knows no crisis. Goethe had no crisis; it may be confidently asserted that Shakespeare had no crisis; it is certain that Whitman had none.”21 Good heredity and race, a spiritually oriented family, a vital bioregion, a healthy human environment, and absence of personal crises were all necessary conditions for living in harmony with nature and thus being able to evolve into a shining personality, and to live a complete, holistic life. Smuts particularly admired Whitman’s naturalism and celebration of outdoor life, and shared his concern for the physical and moral well-being of the modern urban population, which Whitman believed was detached from its natural human abode. The notion of high and low personalities later became crucial in Smuts’s native policy; it allowed him to draw a distinction between advanced and less advanced people, to develop a civilization ladder, and to think about human rights as “a function of the personality” (distributing rights accordingly).22 Whitman and Goethe represented the highest development in this hierarchy. Their genius was the result of successive cycles of mental growth that ended in a sublime holistic climax. Less fortunate personalities (women, for example) could only struggle and hope to evolve in the direction of this greatness. Disappointed with Chapman & Hall’s rejection of his book, Smuts returned to Cape Town in July 1895, where he started to practice as a lawyer. He soon became deeply involved in politics as a follower of Cecil Rhodes. His first important political speech was at Kimberley in the De Beers Debating Society, where he spoke in front of miners, clerks, and shopkeepers with a clear and simple message: “defy negrophilists” and establish “a grand [white] racial aristocracy.”23 Smuts desired “to discipline the native into something worthy of our civilization” for humanitarian reasons; he followed the reasoning from his study of Whitman, and concluded that the natives had to be placed in harmony with “our civilization” and their own “humanity.”24 In subsequent years Smuts found himself in the middle of important political events in South African history. It would bring this chapter far afield to recount the details of the Boer War and the subsequent political turmoil. The relevance to Smuts’s story is that in the midst of these events he advanced in the social hierarchy to become a state attorney and later a general of the Transvaal Army. (According to legend, he led his troops against the British army with a copy of Kant’s Critique in his pocket.)25 The Pretoria telephone book would for the rest of his life list him as “General” even when his formal titles were field marshal and prime minister. His political views soon shifted from extreme nationalism (separation from Britain) to an equally extreme defense of the British Empire.26 After the war, the major political battle in South Africa was between the

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Nationalists, with its leader James Barry Hertzog, the Unionists, to which Smuts belonged, and a small group of devoted socialists centered around the Labour Party. The Nationalist’s main program was based on traditional conservative values and national independence from the British Empire, whereas the Unionists believed in free trade and a liberal social system. Smuts was devoted to uniting the Orange Free State, Transvaal, Natal, and the Cape Province under the British Crown, a vision he helped to realize with the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910. His chief source of political inspiration in this period was in the life and work of the English liberal and champion of bourgeois virtues, John Bright. In Smuts’s political rhetoric one finds many of Bright’s ideas, such as defense of peace through free trade, a Quaker critique of the established Church, an attack on aristocratic values, and above all beliefs in universal human emotions, family values, and social optimism. While Smuts struggled and succeeded together with Louis Botha to unite South Africa, he worked on a philosophy of holism, resulting in a manuscript, “An Inquiry into the Whole.” For this and other reasons there is thus a clear analogy between his philosophy of holism and the political attempt to unite the country. The book was never published because of a devastating critique by his friend and teacher from Cambridge, Henry James Wolstenholme, who did not appreciate his holism because it resembled “neo-vitalism, similar to but still bolder than that of [Hans] Driesch” and Henri Bergson.27 Although the manuscript never appeared in public, it seems to have circulated among a close circle of Smuts’s friends and followers. In it Smuts expanded his Whitman thesis to the entire biological realm; the ontogeny of Whitman is now enlarged to a phylogeny of the living world. His basic argument was that one should not divide “the external physical world of energy” and “the internal world of mind and spirit” into separate compartments, but instead see both paths of organic evolution as parts of the indivisible unity of “the Whole.”28

Holism as Moral and Political Gradualism Smuts was defense minister of South Africa from the time of the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 until 1919. His term was made extremely difficult because of labor strikes, revolutionary activity, black uprising, and war. In native politics Smuts became known for a graduated respect for people according to the level of their personalities. His many encounters with Mahatma Gandhi, which were perceived in his own time as a struggle between “the powerful blond European” and “the weak little dark Oriental,” are telling.29 The two men clashed over the social and legal status of Asian minorities

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and the constant flow of immigrants from India to South Africa, which Smuts tried to impede. His demand was that all would-be immigrants should take an educational test to measure the level of their personality before entering the country, and Gandhi responded with his famous weapon of non-violent demonstrations. Smuts reacted with a blend of frustration, amusement, and admiration; he threw Gandhi in jail for his disobedience. Gandhi responded in the form of a non-violent gesture, sending the general a pair of sandals he had made himself. This amused Smuts, who later took great delight in walking on the labor of India’s resistance leader. He also took much of the credit for a peaceful end to the conflict: “big people are patient with smaller ones,”30 he explained to a friend. He was relieved when Gandhi left South Africa to lead the resistance movement in India, however. It is important to note that although Smuts clearly held racist views, he was tolerant compared to his opponents. The major slogan of the Labour Party was bold: “Workers of the world, fight and unite for a White South Africa!”31 They feared that Smuts’s gradual approach to Asian minorities and the black population would favor the industry’s need for cheap labor at the expense of the white working class. On the other side, one finds the Nationalists arguing in favor of strict (as opposed to gradual) segregation to maintain the traditional (white) South African way of living. Smuts’s approach was thus a moderate position for his time because he thought the native personality, at least theoretically, could evolve into higher or more advanced levels in the distant future. Business leaders in the mining companies thought it was a good idea to help native evolution on its way by employing them in the industry, and were thus some of Smuts’s most important allies. Consequently, when socialists started to organize resistance among white laborers, they soon realized that Smuts’s favorite word, union, was not meant for them. He suppressed labor unions in 1907 and again in 1914, when he declared to the Parliament that “[w]e are a small white colony in a Dark Continent” that needed to prevent both black uprising and white revolution.32 As defense minister, he imposed several periods of martial law against strikers in the Rand, and deported labor leaders from the country against the decision of both the Parliament and the Supreme Court. In short, Smuts managed to halt the strikes at the cost of his popularity, and even members of his own party spoke of him as “that ruthless philosopher.”33 War against an external enemy was a welcome distraction to a defense minister who by 1915 was in deep political trouble, and Smuts seized the opportunity to boost his political popularity and conquered German Southwest Africa and German East Africa together with Louis Botha. This gave him high social and political respect, not only in South Africa, where he was celebrated as a war hero, but also in London, where he lived in the final years of World

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War I as a high-ranking military adviser for the War Cabinet. In this period he socialized with a variety of people, including the famous historian Arnold Toynbee, who regarded Smuts as a sort of mentor in Middle East issues.34 Smuts’s main task during these years was to prepare the Allies of the Great War for a postwar settlement and reconstruction of the political world order. Based on his holistic philosophy he envisioned the new world order as an enlargement of the successful policy of unification in South Africa. His wartime speeches were mainly concerned with how to organize the empire after Britain had won the war, and he proclaimed in one of his most racist speeches that “the white man’s task” was to civilize the African continent. He spoke in London to members of Parliament about “the spirit of comradeship,” on how German culture was swept out of Africa thanks to his soldiers’ achievements, and on how the future government of Africa should now be unified under the British Crown.35 There were two civilizing movements in Africa, one from the North (led by the British), and another from the South (led by the Dutch), and after the war they could form one great African Empire. In such an empire, he believed, there had to be a demarcation between the white and native populations to prevent the degeneration of “Christian virtues”: since natives “have the simplest minds, [they] understand only the simplest of ideas or ideals, and are almost animal-like in the simplicity of their minds and ways.”36 The Gillett family were Smuts’s closest friends during his stay in London, and Margaret Gillett’s diary reveals that Smuts was severely depressed from his urban lifestyle.37 While soldiers were being slaughtered on the battlefields of Europe Smuts complained to Gillett about the “very severe strain” of living in his suite at the Savoy Hotel, with rooms overlooking the river (including an extra free room for his friends). The “life in a hotel” was painful to him because of his habitual dependence on “walking in the country in unity with nature and in quiet from human beings.”38 He spent nearly every weekend in the Gillett family’s cottage on the Downs at Oxford, often alone so he could keep his spiritual contact with nature and avoid “disturbance from the public.”39 Margaret Gillett notes in her diary that Smuts at their cottage had that “spiritual power of Nature over him”; he “threw an almost passionate feeling into his reaction to nature, when he plunged into these hours on the Downs, and drew life again from the air and the quiet. He used to say that the Downs were full of the presence of lives lived on them, and that he was sure he and his friends would leave their presence on Lowbury and the other (as he called them) ‘sacred places.’”40 In his correspondence Smuts regularly refers to the cottage as “Paradise” and “Paradise Plantation,” whereas he describes life in the city as “horrible” and the atmosphere at the Savoy Hotel as “poisonous.”41 By intertwining his life with the spir-

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itual powers of nature—especially at those “sacred places”—he tried to push the evolution of his own personality in the direction of his hero Walt Whitman. He also developed an intimate friendship with Alice Clark, who enforced Smuts’s religious longing for a Christian unity with nature and among human beings. In a telling letter he reveals how his philosophy of holism blends with his mystic experience of (physical or spiritual) mountains: “The great moments of life come when Personality blends with the Whole, the small whole with the great whole, with a sense of healing and pacifying and blessedness which is too great for words. That is the higher Mysticism, the mountain tops far up above the level plains, to which we sometimes ascend. You will find it, I believe, in my MS.”42 Clark’s response to the manuscript “An Inquiry into the Whole” was polite and constructive; she thought the argument was “a little fantastic” and that Smuts used obvious contradictions in terms such as “lesser wholes.” She suggested a series of changes related to the organization of the material. But her “loving criticism of Holism,” as Smuts put it, encouraged him to continue to work on the material.43 Although Smuts did his share to win the war, he was not very enthusiastic about it. By 1918 he thought there had been too much suffering, and quoted a line by Browning to his friend Gilbert Murray to express how Europe was lapsing into That sad obscure anarchic state Where God unmakes but to remake the world He else made first in vain; which must not be.44 Smuts believed the time was ready to “remake the world” by the means of the holism he contemplated at “Paradise Plantation” (or that “‘Green hill far away’ as they say in the hymn”). Through “Holism . . . [we] shall find Healing in the Whole from the grievous wounds of the spirit . . . [because] for the sick soul the Whole is the only Healer.”45 In short, the philosophy of holism should heal souls damaged by the war experience. While writing personal letters filled with spiritual talk about the healing force of nature, he made public speeches about healing the world through the League of Nations, and he even wrote the main draft for the charter to the organization.46 If properly organized, he argued, it could secure world peace, safeguard European civilizations, and administer and police fair distribution of territories among people in the world. Smuts’s vision of a League of Nations was built on the success and fairness of the British Empire: “[T]he new organ of the world government [should rise] solely from the point of view of the defunct European empires.”47 Because he thought the Allies should offer healing to a defunct Germany (humiliated by Smuts’s own

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army), he disagreed with the Versailles Treaty and thought of it as “a failure of leadership and . . . human spirit among the peoples.” Thus, he could not look at it “without a sense of grief and shame” because of the humiliation and lack of healing it offered the Germans.48 It was his reading of Spinoza that helped him through the Versailles conference; in a dejected mood he commented that “[t]he original Holism message is also my book-mark in Spinoza so that there is generally something to remind me of better times and great comrades.”49 While the rest of the Allied forces were celebrating victory, Smuts wrote and asked Alice Clark to send him “more light,” because he believed “darkness of despair is gathering round the world,” and that instead of revenge, it was time to find a place where “the lonely, wounded human spirit clasps the Divine Spirit, and Holism is consummated.”50 Smuts made his disappointment with the Versailles Treaty public. He was the only allied general who for a long time refused to sign the peace treaty, and when he was forced to sign he issued a statement to the press stating “that in the Treaty we have not yet achieved the real peace,” which could be reached only through international cooperation in an institution like the League of Nations.51 In the same way that he had helped to unite South Africa, he now envisioned both a League of Nations and a united Europe. Most of the political and academic establishment rejected his ideas as too idealistic, and a reviewer even suggested that his speech about the League of Nations was a thoughtless “hasty outpouring” without political foundation.52 Another academician noted that “the problem of world peace, as he [Smuts] sees it, is one of psychology rather than of political mechanics of any kind.”53 Yet because of his war conquests, Smuts was extremely popular when he returned to South Africa, and was elected prime minister and minister of native affairs from 1919 until 1924. Thus foisted into the realm of political mechanics, he soon found a situation in which he bitterly noted that “It seems like mockery to speak of peace or goodwill at this time.”54 He was faced with labor unrest and strikes that culminated in the Rand revolt in 1922, caused by the Chamber of Mines’s decision to dismiss 2,000 white workers thus decreasing the ratio of white to black workers in the mines.55 Neither labor unions, socialists, nor communists succeeded in defeating Smuts. The Rand revolt was crushed by his burgher commandos and infantry officers, and several labor leaders and strikers received the death penalty.56 The Native Labor Union which had just been established in Port Elisabeth, was unhappy with Smuts and demanded political power and freedom of speech, as well as better salaries. Smuts crushed it all by violent force, and sixty-eight people were killed in Port Elisabeth alone. Another incident occurred in Bulhoek, near Queenstown, where a newly established religious community of black Jews refused to work on Passover; the police killed close

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to two hundred of them on Smuts’s order. Similarly, when a community of Bantus and Hottentots refused to pay their dog tax, Smuts sent airplanes that bombed the Bondelwaart community into submission. Consequently, by the end of his term he was a very unpopular politician, and his international reputation was also damaged (especially in the newly established Soviet Union, where he was known as “the Butcher of Bulhoek”).57 So also judged James Hertzog, the leader of the Nationalists, who proclaimed from Parliament’s rostrum: “The Prime Minister’s footsteps drip with blood! His footsteps will go down to history in that manner!”58

Thinking Like a Mountain Despite his domestic violence Smuts was a prime minister devoted to international peace and mutual understanding through the League of Nations. His old friend Gilbert Murray was “extremely proud” to report from the League’s 1921 conference that the South African delegation was “not really representative of S[outh] Africa. But it was representative of your view of the League and of the spirit of the League itself. As a matter of fact the particular interests of S. Africa were hardly touched at all.”59 Not discussing South African interests was perhaps a deliberate strategy, since the political status of minorities was a main topic on the conference’s agenda. Still, the schism in Smuts’s political thinking between ruthless suppression of political opponents on the one hand and genuine urge for international peace, love, and understanding on the other remains to be explained. The explanation can be found in Smuts’s nature worship and philosophy of holism, which by 1923 seems to have been a household word in the inner circles around the prime minister.60 The larger public, however, first became familiar with holism in what is undoubtedly Smuts’s most famous speech, given at the Mountain Club War Memorial at the summit of Table Mountain in May 1923. Here he told an enthusiastic audience of 2,000 war veterans and mountaineers about the spirit of the mountain. This speech carries in Smuts folklore a Sermon on the Mount status; it is quoted and referred to extensively in the literature about him and Table Mountain.61 Smuts told his mass audience that mankind could reconcile itself with the harmony of nature through spiritual meditation and a solitary life on the mountain. “The attraction of the mountains,” he explained, “points to something very significant and deep in our natures,” and in the great mountain one finds “not only the spirit of Nature, but the spirit of man blending with it.”62 Inspired by the romanticism of Goethe and Whitman he points to our ability to experience the greater harmony of nature, an experience open only to those in tune with the spirit of nature. As evidence for this romantic aspira-

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tion Smuts points to “the testimony of science,” or as he told the large crowd: Once upon a time, in a far-off beginning of things, the ancestors of the present human race lived far down in deep blue pools of the ocean, amid the slimy ooze from which they had themselves sprung. There they lived and developed a long time, and in the sounds of the sea, in the rhythm of the waters, and of the rising and falling tides, they learnt that sense of music which is so mysterious a faculty in us, and which is in a much smaller degree shared by so many marine animals. The music in a sea shell pressed to our ear carries us back to the very beginning of life on this planet.63 The passage illustrates Smuts’s oratorical style and it hints at his ideas about human origin and the human ability to take part in the greater rhythm of nature through the image of our ancestors dancing to the music of the sea. The ascent of man from the oceans culminates on the top of his own favorite Table Mountain, an ascent that to him was an image of human moral evolution: “in man all moral and spiritual values are expressed in terms of altitude. The low expresses degradation, both physical and moral.”64 Smuts thus concludes that The Mountain [with capital M] is not merely something externally sublime. It has a great historic and spiritual meaning for us. It stands for us as the ladder of life. Nay, more, it is the great ladder of the soul, and in a curious way the source of religion. From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. We may truly say that the highest religion is the Religion of the Mountain.65 The mountain was his “cathedral,” his religion, a yardstick for good and evil, a sacred place for spiritual refreshment, and a dwelling for the development of his personality and his holistic urge (see Figure 2). This is most evident in his personal correspondence, which is filled with notes about his mountaineering life. On one telling occasion he confesses that on the top of Klein Swartberg he “took off these clothes, which are alien to that sort of surrounding” and refreshed himself “by contact with the Great Happiness,” which he describes—in Shelley’s words—as a state of being where he “‘was made one with Nature.’”66 In short, he was the type of person who could fail to see the irony of wilderness mass-tourism, and could note that he “nominally . . . was alone, but actually . . . was among people all day as so many parties went up the mountain.”67 Smuts was careful to point out that one must also bring the spirit of the mountain down to the valleys: “We must carry this spirit into our daily lives

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and tasks . . . We must practice the religion of the mountain down in the valleys also. This may sound a hard doctrine, [but in the] end Nature will cooperate with the soul.”68 Smuts was thinking like a mountain, which was his metaphor for sublime personalities (such as Goethe and Whitman), the Teutonic race, manhood, moral superiority, and deep biological and religious insight. To think like a mountain meant being able to fully understand the human condition, an insight inaccessible in principle to those who lived in the valley. Travelers on the mountain path have a deeper perspective into the holistic harmony of nature than those with a shallow view down in the pit, and consequently only those who could think like a mountain should steer the world.

How South African Botanists Came to Embrace Holism Smuts’s views on holism did not pass unnoticed in the scientific community, where they soon became a basis for research. Holism first caught the interest of botanists mainly because Smuts was an eager botanist himself and patronized such research, an interest that soon transformed into full-scale support of ecology. Botanical research in South Africa prior to the unification of the country focused mainly on the discovery, classification, and description of plants in

Figure 2. “The philosopher on Table Mountain,” General Jan Christian Smuts.

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the tradition of natural history.69 Numerous plants had been described and stored mostly in the Museum of Natural History in London, or at the smaller Cape Government Herbarium in South Africa. Most botanical literature consisted either of lists of species classified by the Linnean system or more popularly oriented handbooks for field excursions. Those who carried out botanical research were either European explorers who visited the country for a short period, devoted amateurs, or the handful of professionals lecturing in botany at South African colleges and universities. The last group was small, and the establishment of botany as an academic discipline roughly coincided with the unification of the country.70 Prior botanical research and discourse was largely carried out by nonprofessionals such as Botha, who had a passion for flowers, and Smuts, who was known as the country’s leading expert on savanna grass; indeed Smuts could truly complain “that people do not realize the importance of Grasses for human life.”71 The nonprofessionals were at the time the leading botanists in the country and highly respected for their scientific achievements, publications, and opinions. Most famous was Rudolf Marloth, a chemist by profession, who spent most of his time studying plants, published a voluminous and celebrated work on The Flora of South Africa, and had some of the richest patrons in the country.72 In sum, botany at the point of political unification of South Africa was an activity for people who had plenty of leisure time and high-society connections. The status of botany as a largely upper-class activity slowly changed. The first step in this direction was the employment of a series of botanists from around 1910 in connection with the restructuring of the educational system under the new Union of South Africa. This series of new educational institutions drew attention gradually away from chic private to public botanical gardens, and a wave of students, especially in the late 1920s and 1930s, removed from botany the stigma of exclusivity. Smuts initiated and stimulated this change by envisioning botany as a science that could unite the country through his philosophy of holism. The task of carrying out Smuts’s vision of holism in South African botanical research fell to the general’s close friend Illtyd Buller Pole Evans. Pole Evans’s importance to the history of South African ecology derives not from his ecological research (he hardly did any), but from his administrative skills and the social network he maintained. He received his diploma in mycology and plant pathology from Cambridge University, and worked from 1905 as head of the Division of Mycology and Plant Pathology (from 1913 Division of Botany and Plant Pathology) in the Department of Agriculture in South Africa until his retirement in 1939. His task was to coordinate, regulate, and edit botanical research throughout South Africa, and place it under the control of the department. He was the prime mover within the Union Botanists,

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a loose association of botanists who had advised the Scientific and Technical Committee during the Great War. In 1918 he became the director of the Botanical Survey of South Africa, which in effect was an official legitimization of research done by the Union Botanists. As a close friend of Smuts, Pole Evans also became the curator of Smuts’s social life. Botany was, according to Smuts’s stepdaughter Kathleen Mincher, Smuts’s chief way of socializing with his friends and bringing up and educating his children.73 He used to take his children on small botanical tours in the region around their house, and taught them botany lessons on his knee. Smuts was of course often away on official duties, and it then fell to Pole Evans, who frequented the family house, to teach botany to Smuts’s children. Pole Evans’s role as governmental botanist thus clearly went beyond his official duties, with respect not only to children but also to entertainment—especially of women—in the prime minister’s home. This placed Pole Evans at the heart of the Smuts family and circle as prime organizer of botanical tours and social activity for his family, friends, and political dignitaries. Pole Evans was not only a social entertainer but also Smuts’s personal mentor in botany, keeping him updated on botanical research at the Department of Agriculture, including detailed accounts of the value of bark, seed, grass, fruit storage, apple growing, and so on. Pole Evans followed Smuts on botanical excursions and encouraged him to carry out his own investigations into grass.74 Together they went on several botanical expeditions, bought a comprehensive botanical library, and carried out various kinds of botanical research. Smuts also made botanical discoveries himself; once, for example, he collected a hitherto unknown type of savanna grass that a friend described and named after him as Digitaria smutsii.75 Pole Evans gave Smuts extensive personnel reports on the whereabouts, moods, and economic situations of South African botanists, and thus kept Smuts well informed about how he could best effect his patronage of botany. His discussions with Smuts included the problem of probable botanical espionage (by Californian citrus researchers), and he inquired about whether or not the South African botanists should do the same “dirty work” in the United States in the name of fruit-fly research.76 All this activity placed Pole Evans at the very heart of South African botanical research politics. Pole Evans’s importance for early South African botany derived also from his role as chief editor of no less than three important botanical publications: The Flowering Plants of South Africa, Bothalia, and the Botanical Survey of South Africa Memoir, all issued by the Department of Agriculture in Pretoria. These journals were official state publications printed by the government, distributed around the world through government agencies. This meant that if a researcher in botany wished to publish a paper, he or she had to submit a

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draft to Pole Evans, who in the case of the Botanical Survey had to ask for written permission to publish by the minister of agriculture, who was supervised by the prime minister. This placed Smuts at the top of the hierarchy with the ability to control a large amount of botanical research in the country. The Flowering Plants of South Africa (1920–1944) was an important journal for education and entertainment among high-society botanists, such as the Smuts family and their friends. It consisted solely of hand-colored paintings with descriptions of flowering plants indigenous to South Africa. Each volume was dedicated to a special friend within the Smuts circle, and they all reflect the latest fashion in gardening. The front cover has a photo of the Union Building (housing the Department of Agriculture) in Pretoria, with the following telling little poem: The veld which lies so desolate and bare Will blossom into cities white and fair And pinnacles will pierce the desert air, And sparkle in the sun.77 The passage is taken from Ronald Campbell Macfie’s ode “Ex Unitate Vires” (“Let us take hands”) written in commemoration of the founding of the Union of South Africa ten years earlier. The ode continues: Now that the Oath of Brotherhood we swear, Now that our hearts are one, Surely a land so prodigal and broad Will grow a very garden-land of God; Surely the realm of love will be. Let us take hands Whose fatherlands Were neighbours by the Northern Sea!78 The sub-language of a seemingly innocent poem about a veldt in blossom thus sent a political message in support of Smuts, the architect behind the Union of South Africa. Research on flowering plants was to be understood as an “oath to brotherhood” among those who were neighbors in Northern Europe to stand behind Smuts and the Union and create a nation with “white and fair” supremacy.79 The journal Bothalia was a presentation of the growing contributions of plants to the National Herbarium in Pretoria collected as a result of the Botanical Survey, and its curious name was given in honor of the journal’s original patron, Prime Minister Botha, who was also the first patron of the survey and founder of the National Herbarium. Botha thought such a survey and a

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national collection of plants could ally different regions of the country (Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal) into one nation. The establishment of the Botanical Survey was thus, as Pole Evans put it, “one of the direct scientific results of the Union of South Africa,”80 and the founding of the National Herbarium was one of its first creations. The Herbarium assembled contributions from private collections from around the country in a proper building in Pretoria, under the supervision of the Department of Agriculture, with the aim of mapping out biological resources in the country. When Botha died in August 1919, Smuts succeeded him both as prime minister and minister of native affairs, and also became the most important patron of the Botanical Survey and the National Herbarium. As prime minister Smuts took great personal interest in botanical surveying and thus also in ecology, which arrived in South Africa from Scotland with the young botanist John William Bews, who soon became a close friend of Smuts.

Ecology Arrives in South Africa Ecology was introduced in South Africa by John William Bews in the midst of this highly socially engaged botanical research, and in defense of Smuts and the unification of the nation. Bews is portrayed as “somewhat aloof and impersonal” and “shy by nature,” but “always friendly, quick of understanding and ready with sympathy” and “a good speaker in public” by his former student George Gale.81 The biography Gale wrote of Bews was initiated by Smuts. It tells the moving story of a man born in 1884 and raised on a farm on the Orkney Islands, with Viking blood in his family traceable to the notorious Torf-Einar (the slayer of Thorfinn Skull-Splitter and Eric Blood-Axe).82 Needless to say, Nordic heritage was significant to Bews’s acceptance as a botanical researcher in South Africa. Bews left his family farm in the Orkney Islands and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1902, where he studied mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, geology, English, Latin, and logic, as well as philosophical and literary issues.83 The official policy of the university at the time was to prevent premature specialization and to promote a wide general knowledge of all academic disciplines. Edinburgh was also where Patrick Geddes—the world-famous professor of botany who “lectured upon almost any subject other than his own”—devoted most of his time to his Outlook Tower or Laboratory of Sociology.84 It appears likely that Bews visited Geddes’s tower, since he later used some of his sociological tools, admired his work, and referred to him as a forerunner in human ecology.85 Edinburgh University was also the home of Isaac Balfour, who pursued the morphological approach to

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botany that Tansley and his friends from University College, London, attacked so vigorously in their “Bolshevik” 1917 manifesto. This conflict had yet to develop when Bews attended Balfour’s lectures; he graduated in 1906 with a master of arts degree, and in 1907 he received special distinction in botany as Balfour’s best student for the previous three years, and won the prestigious Anderson-Henry Prize.86 For a short time he had a post as lecturer in economic botany at the University of Manchester, before he was invited by Balfour to return to Edinburgh as lecturer in plant physiology and assistant professor in botany. His two years as assistant to Balfour were difficult. The professor was an old man and loaded most of his work on his young assistant. To make matters worse, Bews fell ill with rheumatism and suffered partial lameness; field excursions became painful experiences for him. He preferred laboratory work and used his spare time to read literature, philosophy, and science.87 In 1909, now twenty-five, he applied for a professorship in botany and geology at Natal University College, and was somewhat surprised when he got the job, thanks to a series of flattering letters of recommendation, including one from Balfour.88 This was the first professorship in botany in South Africa and the establishment of the position coincided not only with the unification of the country but also with the establishment of the college. The newspapers Bews presumably read when he arrived in Natal in July 1910 were filled with comments and debate about the establishment of the Union three months before his arrival. The first meeting of the Union Parliament occurred only three months after his arrival. He discovered in the midst of these events that the two leading unionists and defenders of the British Empire (Botha and Smuts) had a great interest in botany, so his political sympathies were determined. The unification of the country also had practical consequences for Bews. His initial contract with the government of the Colony of Natal was replaced by a contract with the government of the Union of South Africa. This reflected a new administrative order; the new Natal Provincial Administration was only accountable for primary and secondary education, whereas the country’s minister of education was in charge of colleges and universities. Bews’s line of loyalty was thus towards the Union, not towards the local political administration. Natal University College enrolled its first fifty-seven students in the autumn of 1910 with a staff of only eight professors.89 The College had yet to be built, so Bews taught botany out of two offices in the City Hall, where rooms became available because of the termination of Pietermaritzburg’s status as capitol of Natal a month before Bews’s arrival. The government administration was reduced or moved to Pretoria, and Bews could thus take over offices from the former governor’s regime. In the building with the new col-

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lege professors was a somewhat disillusioned crowd of politicians and bureaucrats, who reflected on their sudden change of social status from leaders of a colony to managers of a provincial town. This social setting may explain why Bews always maintained local patriotism and loyalty towards the Natal province, though vigorously defending the unification policy. The offices in City Hall severely constrained the possibility of laboratory work and the creation of an herbarium. He consequently started to agitate for a botanical garden. In the meantime Bews faced the question of how to establish himself as a scholar in botany without microscopes, a laboratory, an herbarium or garden, only a minimal library, and insufficient office and teaching facilities. The answer to his problem was in the science of ecology, whose laboratory would be nature. Fortunately, Bews was recovering from his rheumatism thanks to a milder climate, and he now experienced the liberating joy of being able to bicycle and walk in the beautiful Natal scenery. He seems to have chosen an ecological instead of systematic approach to botany for two reasons: His lack of space and technical equipment did not allow him to collect plants and create herbariums, and as a new professor in a new college he had to create a professional distance from amateur botany. There were three amateurs with knowledge of the local flora superior to Bews’s.90 First was John Medley Wood, one of the grand old men of Natal (well over eighty when Bews arrived) with a considerable botanical capability and the author of a widely used handbook of the flora of Natal.91 He was selftaught in botany, a devoted gardener and herbarium collector who was more than happy to introduce and explain his knowledge about local flowers to the young professor. Similarly, Thomas Robertson Sim took Bews out on numerous field trips and introduced him to the plants in the fields of Natal. Sim was a horticulturist from Scotland and formerly curator of the King William’s Town botanical garden. Before 1902 he worked at the Cape Forestry Department where he organized a forest department in Natal, and by 1908 he had issued several influential reports on timber production and forest conservation.92 When Bews arrived, Sim had founded his own private business as a forestry expert and nurseryman in Pietermaritzburg. Finally, there was John Spurgeon Henkel, another devoted botanist and engineer by training, who worked in Sim’s old job as conservator of forests. There was nothing but friendliness among Bews and his fellow botanists, who went on numerous field trips together, and if one judges from Bews’s many references to them he seems to have been very dependent upon their local knowledge. He also knew how to return their favors. Both Wood, Sim, and Henkel later received honorary degrees at the initiation of Bews. Nevertheless, the embarrassing fact remained that the new professor had less knowledge about systematic botany and the local flora than his three

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friendly rivals. Worse, he could neither practice nor teach what he knew best: laboratory work and microscopy. His solution to this predicament was to explain how plants described by his new friends related to each other scientifically. Such descriptions of relations created a professional distance to existing knowledge about individual species. A former student noted: “To [Bews,] the collection and identification of plants, and the recording of the habitats and localities in which they were found, was not an end in itself—as it tends to become with systematists and keepers of herbaria—but a means to an end.”93 With the new science of ecology, Bews could place himself above systematic botany in the local hierarchy of knowledge, and by focusing on relations he brought former botanical work under his professorial hegemony. Bews’s first publications about vegetation in Natal further illustrate this process.94 These long papers, together with a similar article on the vegetation in the Pietermaritzburg region, earned him a doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, and they should thus have contained a substantial amount of original scientific research. This was not the case, however, if his articles are measured by the standard of systematic botany. What was original about his work was the way he recast existing systematic knowledge into an ecological scheme. He used knowledge available about climate, topography, geology, and botany to describe and explain relations within and between plant formations and associations. From the autumn term of 1912, Natal University College had its own building, and Bews could move out of City Hall into a more amenable site. While he was working in City Hall he socialized with W. J. O’Brien, a former member of the city’s Parliament who now represented Natal in the Senate. It was at one of O’Brien’s garden parties that Bews was introduced to General Smuts, probably in early 1913. Bews’s then recent bride, Williamina E. C. Mackey, later recalled: “Their discussions were not of politics: there were many matters of common interest more important than politics—the veld of grasses, the flora of South Africa and its migrations, evolution and philosophy, and when the talk was of human affairs it was from the viewpoints of the ecologist and holist.”95 One should perhaps not put too much emphasis on a recollection forty years after the meeting took place; what seems clear, though, is that the young professor and the minister of justice did exchange views of common interest beyond courteous phrases at an early stage in their respective scientific and political careers. During the war, Bews continued to work as a professor, but with fewer students. He had time to prepare a series of papers and books that all used Frederic Clements’s research methods as a point of departure. However, Bews’s concern was not plant succession in grasslands as studied by

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Clements, but the succession of vegetation on mountain slopes. He surveyed vegetation by climbing the steep mountains in the Drakensberg Range, from the valleys to its highest peak at 11,170 feet.96 He elaborated on climate at different altitudes and expanded his research in longitude. In his publications there is a gradual shift of emphasis from Pietermaritzburg and Natal to the entirety of South Africa.97 Bews focused his research on the importance of grass in plant communities (Smuts’s main interest), which culminated in a book published in 1918 about grasses in South Africa and their economic significance.98 Naturally, this immediately enticed Smuts, who thought the book was of fundamental importance and moved to secure a central position for Bews on the new advisory committee for a grand botanical survey of South Africa.99 In the subsequent years Bews published papers that quickly established him as the leading ecologist in South Africa, and also found time to replace Wood’s old handbook of the flora of Natal with a new book based on ecological principles.100 Bews’s writings are mainly a long defense of ecological determinism. In this he was at least consistent, and faced the self-referential problem by candidly admitting that “[b]otanists . . . are the product of their environment,” and that “important advances in Botany have been determined by the conditions surrounding and influencing the men responsible for opening up the new pathways.”101 This passage, which is taken from Bews’s presidential address to the botany section of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, addresses the question of how botany should be done. Bews argued that one had to come from the right (synecological) environment and have the right (autoecological) heredity in order to do good science. The botanical lore of the Zulu, for example, was not trustworthy because their facts were so thoroughly mixed up with their superstitious beliefs developed in the wrong environment. Bews was a popular professor among the students at Natal University College. His students found lectures organized according to the all-embracing pedagogic principles from Edinburgh very entertaining. They saw him as a professor with a good sense of humor. In these lectures he tried to develop a comprehensive science of ecology later realized in his human ecology. One student recalls that he could not help wondering “What on earth had old Virgil to do with Botany?” and continues: [Bews] was showing us how the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome could be linked with the spirit of modern scientific enquiry. I felt as though I was being taken to the top of a high mountain and shown not merely the scope of botany but all the kingdoms of science merging into

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the empires of philosophy, and the vision illuminated my mind as it had ever been illuminated before . . . The comprehensive view was completely natural to Bews.102 The students of Bews were taught how to recast routine textbooks and taxonomic studies in botany as well as sociology, classic literature, and novels into ecological frameworks. The key for ambitious students was to identify relationships, “parallels and analogies between plant ecology and human sociology.”103 His reputation among his fellow scientists was also good, not only because of his many publications, which enhanced the reputation of the college, but also because of his administrative acumen. In 1921 he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of South Africa (an umbrella university for several colleges like Natal), and in 1922 he advanced to chairman of the University Senate. Smuts probably had his hand in these decisions, since Bews wrote him an enthusiastic letter about the development of his career thanking the general for their “most wonderful” meetings. Bews praised the fact that Smuts was “so thoroughly well acquainted” with the subject of ecology, and prayed he would give “Colonial Science the benefit of some more of his attention.”104 Bews would from now gradually devote more and more time to administration of the college and subsequently become its principal. Another early South African ecologist supported by Pole Evans was John Phillips, who soon became a close friend and follower of Smuts and somewhat later would be the prime antagonist of Tansley.

John Phillips’s Experience with Miscegenation In collaboration with the Department of Forestry, Pole Evans established a series of grass, forestry, and pasture research stations in various parts of the country to carry out the details of the botanical survey. Among those who worked as a research officer at one of these stations was John Frederick Vicars Phillips, who was born in 1899 at the outskirts of Grahamstown into a wellknown family that could trace its ancestors far back in South African history. His father, Jack, was one of the volunteers who during the Boer War opposed Smuts, and he was known among his black servants as a particularly harsh and paternalistic master. His father’s grandfather was the famous intellectual politician and historian John Centivres Chase, from whom Phillips got his first name. His mother’s family, the Lovemores, emigrated to South Africa from Ireland in the 1820s, and they soon became victims of the Kaffir wars, in which family members were killed and much of their livelihood was lost. The young Phillips was consequently taught in his upbringing that “the Good

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Lord had willed them [the Kaffirs] to be ‘creatures’ (schepsels) of the ruling race. They were the hewers of wood and drawers of water, for whom the white man had a responsibility before God.”105 These racial ideas about a master status for white people mixed with a deep fear of black Africans was passed on to Phillips by his grandmother and mother whose wartime experience was part of the family’s dinner talk. Phillips owed his passion for outdoor life to his many years within the Boy Scout movement. Here he got to know several old Gaika forest guards, who found a job for him as a forester in the Crown Forest in the Cis-Kei mountain region, while he received his initial education at Dale College in King William’s Town. The Department of Forestry had a policy of giving stipends for higher education to young students on the condition that they served as research officers for the department upon their return from university. Phillips went to the University of Edinburgh on such a contract from 1919 to 1922 and obtained an honors degree in forestry, botany, and ecology, supervised by Bower and Balfour. Their influence was by now at its peak; Bower had just written his student manual, Botany of the Living Planet, which the 1917 “Bolsheviks” tried to stop with their Manifesto. Balfour was gloating over having prevented Tansley’s almost certain professorship at Oxford and by the latter’s subsequent public withdrawal from botany in favor of Freud and scandalous sex-psychology. It must have pleased Balfour upon his retirement in 1921 to have among his last students a talent like Phillips to carry the morphological torch into the next generation of ecologists. When Phillips returned to South Africa he studied forest ecology at the Knysna Forest Research Station in Deepwalls along the coast east of Cape Town from 1922 to 1927. It was in this period that he developed a friendship with Bews based on their shared background at Edinburgh and common interest in Clements’s research tools and methods in ecology.106 Judging from Phillips’s articles it is clear that Clements’s methods for constructing and using instruments to map out quadrates in the environment, record humidity, rain, light, and wind, photograph and record succession stages, and determine soil moisture were all part of Phillips’s daily scientific activity. This is particularly striking in Phillips’s early papers, in which he is concerned with practical applications of ecological research for the advancement of silviculture and agriculture. His method was to clear or burn down experimental plots, which he colonized with various kinds of seeds of desired trees, and then observed the speed of succession at different plots and measured how fast they reached the desired biotic climax (mature timber).107 Phillips classified his scientific habitat in the Knysna forests as either dry, medium moist, or moist with the help of indicator plants sensitive either to dry or to moist climate.108 One chief indicator of climax in a medium moist forest was, for ex-

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ample, density of ironwood, because it could only flourish in this type of locality.109 The goal of this classification was to indicate the ecological history, record the physical conditions in the present, and demonstrate the silvicultural possibilities for future use of the forest. The task of ecology, according to Phillips, was to suggest effective utilization of natural resources, and his research on stinkwood and ironwood demonstrates that he envisioned science as a tool for exploitation of natural assets.110 His articles are mainly concerned with the cultivation of various trees by means of succession to a mature climax in the Knysna forests.111 He applied the same method to his research on the valuable Tasmanian blackwood, indicating that this type of tree was not able to spread in a primeval forest; it could only be planted on burned ground and was therefore of limited importance.112 Another aspect of his research concerned the preservation and protection of indigenous forests, since these environments provided useful control data compared to cultivated forests. Yet one of Phillips’s most important experiences during his time at the Knysna forests was working among what for him was an unfamiliar lower class of people: There the population consisted mainly of “Poor White” woodcutters, labourers and petty cultivators, with a smaller proportion of Cape Coloureds. Bantu were rare and migratory only. What I saw of the Coloureds kept alive, however, the questions troubling me for long, because these poor, despised and often degenerate products of racial miscegenation posed a conundrum even more refractory than did the Bantu.113 Phillips’s experience with poor white laborers, degeneration, and racial miscegenation in Knysna would later emerge in his scientific writings on human ecology, and they would become a central theme in his political and scientific support of Smuts. The impressive number of articles he produced in this period resulted in a thesis that qualified him for a Doctor of Science degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1927. He had for some time been in correspondence with Warder Clyde Allee in Chicago about an article that eventually appeared in Ecology, and he trusted that Allee could find a publisher for his thesis and thus sent his manuscript to him.114 His plan was to tour the United States in the autumn term of 1930, pass through Chicago and pick up his manuscript, then visit his hero Clements. The tour never happened for financial reasons. Allee, who was not able to find a publisher because of the length of the manuscript, passed it along to Tansley, who made a lukewarm attempt to convince Oxford University Press of the value of the project.115 Thanks to Phillips’s chief, Pole Evans, the thesis eventually appeared as a publication of the Memoir of the Botanical Survey of South Africa.

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The Botanical Survey of South Africa Both Bews and Phillips became important figures in the ongoing Botanical Survey of South Africa. The survey’s initial goal was to create a grand list of all the species in the young nation, and all the publications in Bothalia indicate that this was an ongoing theme. Yet a parallel approach, reflecting their patron’s “philosophical outlook and keen judgment,” was to study how the species interrelated ecologically, and the survey’s Memoir (edited by Pole Evans) became the prime vehicle for this approach.116 Although two of Bews’s students wrote an ecological study of Natal and Zululand for the survey as early as 1921 one may say that the survey only became fully ecological when the advisory committee published their Guide to Botanical Survey Work in 1922.117 This was two years before the Imperial Botanical Conference in London and four years before Tansley and Chipp responded with their Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation. Bews was the main architect behind the scientific part of the Guide, whereas Pole Evans explained the administrative order and made it clear that the survey was organized under “one official head” (himself) at the Department of Agriculture.118 The agenda of the survey was to unite the country into one environmental order along the lines of the unification of the country and through the means of their statesman’s philosophy of holism. The sections about the physical features, climate, meteorology, rainfall, and botanical regions of the country all focus on South Africa as one physical entity. Traditional divisions of the environment into highland and lowland, desert and swamps, warm and cold climates, coast and inland environments were no longer seen as an obstacle for unification. Instead the authors of the survey set forth to reconstruct the interpretation of the environmental order so that what formerly had separated the country into several states now united the country. Unity through diversity was the new approach, and the means to achieve it was ecology. The ecologist could—armed with the science of botanical relations and succession—unite environments that formerly were divided by topography and climate. The explicit goal of the Botanical Survey was to “obtain more exact information regarding the boundaries of the different botanical regions,” and Pole Evans consequently focused his plant geography of South Africa on the succession of types of vegetation between woodland, grassland, and deserts.119 Bews argued in the survey’s Guide that it was necessary “to take a big view of natural phenomena,” that earlier botanists suffered from “mental myopia,” that they could not “see the wood for the trees” in their “minute studies,” and that the time was ready to focus on the entire environment in South Africa.120 He concluded that ecology had “much in common with the science of sociology,” and suggested that researchers for the survey should

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borrow the sociological vocabulary of communities, society, herds, clan, colony, and so on to describe interrelations among plants.121 This beginning of a circular argument was typical among ecologists of his time; in the Guide Bews humanized nature with the help of social and colonial concepts, and later he would naturalize this language through his human ecology. Yet some botanists and forest conservators refused to see the forest for the trees and continued to produce lists of species instead of describing ecological relations.122 The transformation from natural history and taxonomic botany to ecology was gradual, and the ecologists also depended heavily on the research of the former, simply because a plant has to be described and properly cataloged before one can study its relations to other plants. Thus despite Bews’s harsh critique there could not be a grave conflict between taxonomists and ecologists, but rather only a division of labor.123 One may now finally appreciate the context of the Imperial Botanical Conference in 1924, discussed previously. When Pole Evans, Bews, and other members of the South African delegation arrived in London, they could proudly inform the conference that “[t]he Union of South Africa is in the fortunate position of having a botanical survey which is now six years old.” Moreover, they reported that the survey “was promoted by a far-sighted South African statesman . . . [with] the personal interest and support of the late Premier, General Smuts, himself a no mean student of our science.”124 While others delegates from the empire, including Tansley and Chipp in the British delegation, ruminated on a possible future survey, the South African botanists could already boast a major patron, a series of publications, six years of survey research, and a readymade Guide to Botanical Survey Work.125 Tansley, who was short a professorship, money, and patrons, could only envy ecologists in South Africa who received “free passes over the State railways and grants towards other traveling expenses.”126 Worse, it now looked like Bews—a student of his archenemy Balfour—was to scoop a possible botanical survey of the empire. His and Chipp’s frenetic conference resolutions secured by an overwhelming British majority (dominated by a large crowd of botanists from University College, London) can thus be understood as a desperate attempt to regain control of ecological leadership in the empire. From Tansley’s point of view, ecology was in immediate danger of relapsing into Balfour’s morphology, now under a new motto, “holism and evolution,” promoted by Smuts’s ecological vision. Balfour’s student Phillips soon emerged as a chief promoter of such holistic ecology.

Holism and Evolution: Smuts’s Ecological Idealism When the South African botanists returned from London, they faced a new political situation. The Unionist Party was defeated in 1924 by a tactical co-

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alition between the Labour Party and the Nationalists, and Smuts became in effect the opposition leader until 1933. The major issue in the election was native policy. Unionists argued for a gradual segregation between black and white populations, with economic laws sorting blacks and whites to where they belonged. The Nationalist-Labor pact, on the other hand, argued for strict racial segregation, and consequently for economic protection of the white working class against cheap colored labor. Smuts’s political fate was sealed when the electors were asked to choose between “the People and the Mine Magnates.”127 He consequently devoted himself fully to science. Smuts had had enough, and by then he had a “deep and genuine” distaste for politics: “Sometimes my feelings go deeper and I feel as if I would get out of everything and bury myself in meditation, botany and the like.”128 Indeed, he would now devote much of his time to philosophy and botany, which of course delighted his friends in the scientific community who elected Smuts president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science for 1925. This was surely a sign of political sympathy for the defeated politician. His old teacher from Stellenbosch recalls that “many thought it was merely a political honour and expected nothing from his inaugural address but scientific platitudes. They were surprised.”129 In the opening speech to the association he argued that the aim of the association was “to bring together and unite all South Africans, irrespective of race and language.”130 Smuts was primarily referring to a greater unity of German, Dutch, Belgian, and British races and languages in Africa. Biology was an important tool to bolster such unity: “European exploration,” Smuts explained, “has led to a European viewpoint in evolutionary science.” For Smuts it was of prime importance to see evolution from the South African point of view to create a sense of political unity in a country divided among different races and languages.131 Smuts had been in contact with Pole Evans to brush up on the botanical part of the speech, and he used Charles Ernest Pelham Brooks’s book, The Evolution of Climate (1922), and Alfred Wegener’s book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1924), as the main sources for his argument.132 Wegener argued that Africa once had a central position among drifting land in the southern hemisphere, and consequently had a determining position when it came to problems of geographical distribution of plants and animals. This hypothesis allowed Smuts to give a national reading of the question of “the mysterious origin of Flowering Plants.”133 He posited that the first plants evolved out of South Africa and that Wegener’s thesis opened up great opportunities for science in his country because the Cape flora and animal life represented the highest development in evolutionary biology. It follows from his own argument that the African black population had evolved for a longer time than white people in the North, and that they thus should be more ad-

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vanced. However, on this question Smuts was more in line with his old friend and mentor Marloth, who argued that there was a shifting battle between two floras at the Cape; an ancient and decaying flora was confronted by a younger, more vigorous invading flora from the North.134 Smuts transformed this argument into a battle for dominance between white and black people. The reason why natives were on the losing side was that they had stopped evolving because of the African climate: “Our Bushmen are nothing but living fossils whose ‘contemporaries’ disappeared from Europe many thousands of years ago . . . [the] little pigmy population that hide in the tropical and sub-tropical forests are the representatives of the long-vanished human past.”135 Smuts thus concludes that in South Africa there were interesting biological problems that could still be studied through these “living fossils,” and therefore that there was a great future for research in climatology, palaeobotany, and palaeontology in the country. Smuts was very proud of his “S2A3” address (his abbreviation for the South African Association for the Advancement of Science), and received endorsements from fellow scientists, friends, and publishers in Europe.136 Pole Evans’s support had inspired Smuts and his approval afterwards filled him with even more confidence. The speech was all-important to Phillips, who met Smuts for the first time during the meeting of the association. In the course of a ten-mile walk through the Swartberg scenery Smuts unveiled his philosophy of holism to the young ecologist, who recalled that: The walk and talk, frank and intimate, ever have reminded me of the great peripatetic Greek philosopher . . . [His concept of holism] lifted— if only obliquely and in part—the veil of obscurity enshrouding my own particular problem of human relations. It enabled me to see in better perspective the psychological, sociological, economic and political implications of the “Colour question” as these presented themselves to the foremost statement in Africa, the Commonwealth and the Empire.137 For a twenty-six-year-old ecologist such as Phillips, it must have been a great honor to go for such a walk with one of the most famous politicians in the empire. It had a lasting effect on him, and he was from then on a hearty follower of Smuts’s philosophy of science, with the “S2A3” speech as his “compass” on the “human ecological issue.”138 Bews was also enthusiastic about Smuts’s speech. After concluding some delayed work about plants in Natal he wrote a book devoted to Smuts’s topic called Plant Forms and Their Evolution in South Africa.139 In the book he acknowledged Smuts’s importance to his work by quoting at length from a personal letter from the general about the importance of the concept of succes-

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sion in understanding grassland evolution.140 Such a public announcement of his inclusion in the inner circles around Smuts could enhance his own social prestige. The focus of the book is the “unique advantages” of studying geographical distribution of plants in the Union of South Africa because of its diversified topography and climatic environments. The diversity of the landscape was, according to Bews, what made it unsurpassed for ecological classification into topographical zones and evolutionary histories.141 The book attempts to verify the ideas of Smuts’s presidential address concerning the origin, evolution, and distribution of plants from South Africa. The book was an instant success if one judges from the enthusiasm of the reviews (including one by Chipp), and both Nature and the Times Literary Supplement immediately recognized the importance of Smuts’s argument to Bews’s ecological work.142 Smuts himself was naturally flattered by and impressed with the book, and he would in return continue to promote Bews and the science of ecology in the country.143 The speech was also noticed in London by his friend Murray, who throughout the 1920s had been in contact with Smuts in their effort to promote the League of Nations. They socialized at League of Nations dinner parties, encouraged each other not to drift away from spiritual activity, and tried using telepathy to develop a truly international League.144 Murray was able in 1925 to secure Smuts the position of vice-president of the Council of the League, and in his letter of appreciation Smuts returned this gift by letting Murray be the first person to read the manuscript version of Holism and Evolution.145 Holism and Evolution was published in September 1926. Smuts wrote the book between 1924 and 1925, but the main ideas, he explains in the preface, go back to his work on Whitman and the unpublished manuscript “An Inquiry into the Whole” from 1910. It is a book on the borderline between science and philosophy, leading to a new vision of a global ecology. Smuts quotes at length Darwin’s concluding words in The Origin of Species, in which he contemplates the Earth in terms of “a tangled bank.” Smuts confesses that this famous passage, which Joel B. Hagen in his fine study takes to be the origin of ecosystem ecology, affected him more deeply than any other “in the great literature of the world.”146 What fascinated Smuts was the idea that everything in nature was interconnected: “The new science of Ecology,” Smuts concludes, “is simply a recognition of the fact that all organisms feel the force and moulding effect of their environment as a whole.”147 The holistic force in the field of nature is at the core of his argument:“[T]he creative intensified Field of Nature, consisting of all physical organic and personal wholes in their close interactions and mutual influences, is itself of an organic or holistic character. That Field is the source of the grand Ecology of the uni-

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verse. It is the environment, the Society—vital, friendly, educative, creative— of all wholes and souls.”148 The tone of argumentation in this passage is typical for Smuts’s philosophy of ecology. What concerns him is an outline of a deep ecological ontology for the new and promising science. He restates his ideas from his Whitman study of a grand harmony in nature. The ecological world “is at bottom a friendly universe, in which organized tolerant co-existence is the rule and destructive warfare the exception.”149 Smuts, the general who knew the forces of destructive warfare better than anybody, stressed that destructive forces from a holistic perspective were the exception and not the rule. His basic argument was that if life evolved from matter, then matter ceases to be merely a mechanistic vehicle of motion and energy, but must instead be a place for the factors of life. Smuts’s first step in a series of arguments leading up to a comprehensive holistic philosophy was to establish that the entire world was alive. In order to do so he needed to reject mechanism on its own terms, and he therefore pointed to the importance of Albert Einstein’s physics. The variation of space-time in his theory of relativity proved to Smuts that we live in a world of relative motion, and the idea of a mechanistic permanent universal order was “metaphysical abstractions without relation to our real experience.”150 The real experience of space-time was for Smuts the experience of a living holistic universe. He developed a similar argument about radioactivity, saying that the phenomena proved the “intensely active,” “dynamic structure,” and “creative character” of matter.151 Matter had the solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, but it could also be in the colloid state, which Smuts believed to be the missing link between the inorganic and the organic world. Radioactivity thus represented the chemical origin of life, and proof of the dynamic character of matter. The latest scientific achievements in physics and chemistry were to him evidence for his basic assumption that the entire material world was alive. Smuts’s next step was to establish that the natural world was not only alive but essentially good. The life force in matter, he argued, had a “vital phenomena” that could best be observed in plant and animal cells. The internal balance of entities within cells, as well as the coordination of cells within plants and animals, was for Smuts evidence for how well organisms were organized. This is why Smuts describes the organism as a “little living world in which law and order reign,” and as “fundamentally a society in which innumerable members [cells] co-operate in mutual help in a spirit of the most effective disinterested service and loyalty to each other.”152 Moreover: [I]n the cells there is implicit an ideal of harmonious co-operation, of unselfish mutual service, of loyalty and duty of each to all, such as in our later more highly evolved human associations we can only aspire to and strive for. When there was achieved the marvelous and mysterious stable

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constellation of electrical units in the atom, a miracle was wrought which saved the world of matter from utter chaos and change.153 In this passage Smuts first projects his political ideals of unselfish mutual service, loyalty, and duty into the cells of an organism, in the next twist he suggests that human politics should aspire and strive for the same ideals, and in the final sentence he binds it all together with a religious allusion to the creation of the world. The humanization of nature and the naturalization of humanity needs a religious blessing that can “save the world of matter from utter chaos and change” and bear out the goodness of the creation. Smuts’s third argument, after submitting that the world is alive and that it is good, concerned the general concept of holism. Every organism from the lowest microorganism to the highest mind represented a whole, and all these entities were connected into greater wholes, which in turn constituted the greatest whole. Holism in itself, Smuts explained, “is the inner driving force” behind the “holistic tendency” in the world.154 “Evolution is marked by the development of ever more complex and significant wholes, rising from the material bodies of inorganic nature through the plant and animal kingdoms to man and the great ideal and artistic creations of the spiritual world.”155 Every organism is a whole but some organisms are more “significant wholes” than others. The master stroke of this argument is that it allows Smuts to differentiate between high and low species on the great chain of being, while at the same time saying that every organism in itself represents a perfect whole. His holistic philosophy enabled him to separate and combine, divide and unite at the same time. What held the argument (loosely) together were two assumptions: First, the notion of the evolution of organisms through stages in “the scale of Nature,” which permits demarcations between high and low wholes.156 Second, the transcendental assumption of an ideal spiritual world that bears out the total goodness and harmony of nature, despite the scale of differences. It is this argument that leads to what Smuts calls “the very heart of nature, the principle of sacrifice”: “[The] subordination of [the] part to the whole, of the individual to the race,” and of race to the harmony of nature.157 After the constructive part of his book (the three-step argument in favor of living material, a harmonious nature, and a holistic world), Smuts seeks to prove that he has a natural concept of the whole. His concept of freedom, for example, is rooted in the organic whole, where “the whole is free, [and] the parts are bound.”158 Human freedom is dependent on humans’ place in “the causal chain of Nature,” which grants them “degrees of freedom” according to the perfection of their respective whole.159 The organic process of selection caused this degree of freedom. To Smuts the mind is an organ of wholes with the ability to organize a social self and social environment, and an ability that

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results in “different levels of culture” depending on the “level of mental culture” and the holistic urge.160 This science of evolution of personalities Smuts called personology, a science that saw great personalities like Goethe and Whitman as examples of people who had reached the highest mental and cultural level through their ability to attain access to the highest spiritual whole. Smuts’s notion of purity, used in the same sense as the German word Reinheit, signifies the ability to reject external influences that were extraneous or would be alien to a culture or a personality’s wholeness.161 Smuts’s plea for “the grand Ecology of the universe” or for “the oikos, the Home of all the family of the universe” ultimately referred to the religious longing in his holistic science. In the worldly realm he suggested that the League of Nations would be the best political way to realize the ideal of holism and of universal ecology.162

The Philosopher Statesman Smuts’s book got glittering reviews in intellectual journals. Philosophers were taken by surprise by his interesting ideas and concepts, although some of them thought that he was a little unclear on the details and that professional philosophers were needed to clear things up.163 To many, however, Smuts realized Plato’s ideal of a statesman philosopher: The Right Honorable J. C. Smuts is known to the world as a brave and resourceful general in the recent war, as an able premier of South Africa, and as one of the most constructive influences in the League of Nations and in international affairs generally. He has not been known until recently as a scientist and philosopher. He answers perhaps better than any living man Plato’s ideal of a statesman philosopher.164 This old academic dream was now realized in Smuts’s writings, and many started to discuss the promising new word “holism,” coined by Smuts.165 Among them was Lloyd Morgan, who wrote a lengthy and favorable review of the book and a personal letter of thanks to Smuts despite the fact that Smuts had failed to refer to Morgan’s Gifford Lectures from 1922, Emergent Evolution, which dealt with some of the same topics.166 Scientists gave favorable reviews, but placed the book safely in the realm of philosophy.167 The press also gave good reviews; the Times Literary Supplement, for example, wrote about the great shift from mechanistic to vitalistic evolutionary theory, placing Smuts in the philosophical context of not only Lloyd Morgan, but also Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander, and Alfred North Whitehead.168 The philosophies of emergence (Morgan), dureé, élan vital, evolution creative (Bergson), natural value (Alexander), process (Whitehead), and holism

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(Smuts) have many similarities and differences that cannot be dealt with here. What is noteworthy is that these authors were read by their contemporaries as political philosophers of social development and progress.169 Smuts and Bergson in particular were known to the larger public primarily as defenders of the League of Nations, and their philosophies were read accordingly. Strangely enough, one critic in a lengthy article construed Smuts’s philosophy as yet another reproach to Christianity from the evolutionary camp. He found the science of personology “interesting” to the Christian because “it will study genius as the supreme type of humanity, rather than humanity as the supreme type.” Nevertheless, the reviewer could not endorse a doctrine in which “[t]here is no God, and man is become the prophet of his own perfection.”170 Although Smuts was clearly not an atheist (or so he claimed in his personal response to the reviewer),171 it is notable that his book was reviewed as an atheistic philosophy of science. Another reviewer, Smuts’s teacher Frederick Charles Kolbe from his student years at Stellenbosch, knew better and thus read the book very differently. He tried to carry Smuts’s theory “to the very throne of God” in a series of articles in The Cape and The Southern Cross, later published as A Catholic View of Holism.172 The proper subtitle for the book, he believed, should have been “A way of escape from mechanistic and materialistic views,” because the proper foundation for holism was in the Aristotelian, and thus Thomistic doctrine of the First Cause.173 The book had thus revealed a promising path Catholics could explore to explain Darwinian evolution. Smuts was very sympathetic in both his public and private response to Kolbe’s Catholic interpretation of his book. But this was undoubtedly because Kolbe was on the politically sensitive commission to design a flag for the Union of South Africa. They would eventually “agree foursquare” on both the holism and the flag issue.174 While both academic and Christian communities debated the significance of Smuts’s philosophy of science, Smuts stressed the political importance of his views. In a lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1927 designed to promote his book, he told an amazed audience of over 1,000 people that he had “tried to hammer out some rule of thought to carry my action along.”175 The political purpose of his theory of holistic evolution was to unify the South African nation and ultimately the world through the League of Nations. He admits that “[w]e have not yet the whole, we have not yet a really unified South Africa” after years of internal struggle, but the problems will soon be “solved along holistic lines.”176 Smuts also used his book in a gift exchange with several political authors. Among them was Winston Churchill, who “peered with awe” into the philosophy of holism, and responded by sending Smuts his two-volume book, The World Crisis.177 Smuts’s botany friends were also excited about the book,

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including Bews, who confessed in a long letter of appreciation that “few things have given me greater pleasure.”178 The only harsh criticism came from avant-garde literary circles. Back in July 1926 Smuts submitted an article, “Beauty in Nature,” to the journal Voorslag (“whiplash”), the vanguard of South African art and literary criticism, edited by William Plomer, Laurens van der Post, and Roy Campbell. This was clearly an act of conceit. The article was accepted as a gesture in the direction of the patron of the new journal, Lewis Reynolds, a former secretary of Smuts’s from the negotiations in Versailles with political ambitions. He was very keen on getting Smuts as the prime patron of the journal, and pushed for a favorable review of Holism and Evolution.179 In Smuts’s article he argued that science had to go beyond evolutionary explanations about beauty in nature (beyond beauty as a “motive force in Sexual Selection”), and explore natural magnificence “as one of the aspects of value in Nature.”180 Natural beauty should not, he argued, be reduced to utilitarian explanations, but should be investigated as an inherent value. One paragraph proved to be particularly damaging to Smuts: “We have to look deeper for the true explanation of the aesthetic developments in Nature. The button has no doubt been pressed by quite ordinary means. But behind the button there is a great story which Science has not yet discovered.”181 Campbell, who was a follower of Freud, politically on the left, and an opponent of any racial segregation, read Smuts’s idea of natural beauty “behind the button” as a Freudian slip. He was very “anxious” to review Smuts’s book with this in mind, but Reynolds probably forbid this. Instead Campbell used laughter as “the only real mental antiseptic” to achieve “sudden and miraculous cures” from philosophical and political illusions,182 in the following satirical poem: Statesmen-philosophers with earnest souls, Whose lofty theories embrace the Poles Yet only prove their minds are full of Holes, ... And probe “behind the button” Nature’s lore! Forgive me, Statesman, that I have purloined This deathless phrase by thine own genius coined, Seek on, “Behind the button,” in the Void— Until you come upon the works of Freud! Statesman-philosopher! I shake thy hand— All tailors envy thee throughout the land Whose button-holism, without reverse, Undoes the Trousers of the Universe! Long be thy wisdom honoured, and thy race

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Renowned for flinging smuts in “Beauty’s” face! Long may thy race perform its glorious part And scatter smuts on every work of art.183 Reynolds had just recently forced Campbell to resign from Voorslag because of his radicalism and “negrophilism.”184 He and other followers of Smuts were so outraged when the poem appeared in a collection published in London in 1928 that they literally forced Campbell and his family out of the country. Upon his arrival as a refugee in England he took his revenge through a campaign among avant-garde writers against Smuts, which seriously harmed the reputation of holistic philosophy in literary circles. It was in this period that he wrote the damaging lampoon called “holism” widely known in the radical anti-Smuts camp. Campbell and others knew all too well what Smuts was capable of doing to natives and labor unions in the name of his philosophy: The love of Nature burning in his heart, Our new Saint Francis offers us his book The saint who fed the birds at Bondelwaart And fattened up the vultures at Bull Hoek.185 Irrespective of Campbell’s fame in South African literary history, he was clearly an outsider in his time and his critique of Smuts proved largely ineffectual. His attempt to destabilize the general’s racist politics and philosophy of holism through liberating laughter failed; except, perhaps, on Smuts himself, who in a moment of merry reflection to a friend on the success of holism revealed that “I sometimes myself wonder whether it is not really at bottom a huge unconscious joke.”186 To conclude, while Smuts stressed that “we do not want to recreate Nature in our own image,” from a historical perspective this is exactly what he did.187 He modeled nature according to his own social and political values. His ecophilosophy served him as a glorification of white supremacy, with a division of society into high and low personalities, while still defending unification of South Africa, the British Empire, and ultimately the world through the League of Nations. Smuts’s ideas affected a generation of ecologists in South Africa through his patronage of botany and somewhat later ecology. This will be the topic of later chapters, which recount Smuts’s visit to Oxford in 1929 and the ecosystem controversy between Phillips and Tansley. First, however, it is necessary to return to Britain to look at how a different school of imperial ecology emerged in Oxford at the time of Tansley’s appointment as professor of botany.

3 The Oxford School of Imperial Ecology

The success of Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation brought Arthur Tansley in 1927 to the prestigious Sherardian Professorship in botany at Magdalen College, Oxford University. His appointment was not accidental; ecology was much in vogue among biologists at Oxford, who thought it could provide a new and better way of ordering nature, society, and knowledge in an empire shattered by the First World War. This chapter will discuss in depth this ecological research from the eve of the war to Smuts’s lectures on holism at Oxford in November 1929. How did a new generation of postwar ecologists at that university push ecology beyond botany into forestry, zoology, and finally sociology? An ecologist has rightly pointed out that ecology in the 1920s “was a botanical science primarily, handicapped by a certain restriction of vision associated with those whose eyes are focused on the sward.”1 How did ecologists come to broaden their vision? I have labeled this second generation of ecologists Tansley met and engaged with the Oxford school of imperial ecology because they shared the same aims and methods in their research. What brought the Oxford undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars from a whole range of disciplines into one group of ecologists was a series of university-based expeditions. Indeed, I have not been able to find one Oxford student or scholar in ecology at the time who did not participate in an expedition, so I will focus on this obviously important mode of research. In particular, I examine the ecological research in forestry by Robert Scott Troup and Ray Bourne, the emerging field of animal ecology in the work of Charles Elton and Julian Huxley, and the subsequent writings on human ecology by Alexander Morris CarrSaunders and H. G. Wells. These scientists (including Tansley) form the core of the Oxford school of imperial ecology, with the notable exception of Wells, who engaged with Oxford scholars on a more independent basis by popularizing their research through easy readers and science fiction. The enlargement of ecological research beyond botany was achieved by 76

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means of three aims and methods that distinguish the Oxford ecologists from other ecological programs, such as that found in South Africa. First, the Oxford aim was to establish a new environmental order through cannibalization2 of what they saw as an old-fashioned natural history tradition by synthesizing such research into ecological charts of relations. The ecologists turned what was conceived of as an aim in itself by natural historians (describing and classifying new species) into a means of achieving a higher ecological aim, namely, an overview of how species relate to each other in an environment. The ecologists thus placed themselves above natural historians in the hierarchy of knowledge. The chief reason that ecologists were able to synthesize natural history into charts and maps of interrelations was their aerial perspective on nature. Such a perspective was already apparent in earlier ecological works, such as Warming’s research on the Danish beaches, Oliver’s ecological view of the French seashore, and Clements’s investigations of sand dunes (one only needs to be about six feet above the ground to get an overview of these environments). Tansley’s and Bews’s work on the ecology of altitudes in the Swiss and Natal mountains provide other examples of a bird’s-eye view on a landscape. Smuts also thought in terms of mountains and vistas. What distinguished and enforced the aerial perspective at Oxford was the introduction of airplanes as tools for ecological research. Such usage moved ecologists from a local to a global perspective on the world—from local sand dune and mountain perspectives to global views provided by avant-garde aviation technology. The real impact of aviation technology on ecology arrived in the 1930s, but in this chapter I will trace the emerging globalization of ecology offered by aviation back to its earliest sources, and locate the political and cultural circumstances that shaped the development of this method in ecological research. Second, Oxford ecologists tried to establish a new social order according to the aims and values of their patrons within various British colonial agencies and commercial companies, who saw ecology as a means to enlarge and improve the management of the empire. The development of airplanes during the First World War made it possible to carry out ecological surveys on a hitherto unknown scale, and it was precisely this grand overview of natural resources that the patrons of ecology desired as an administrative management tool for the environment. Elton’s research serves as a prime example, for his natural economy of animals carefully reflects British commercial interests in territorial exploration and exploitation. His research on Bear Island and the Spitsbergen archipelago can be understood in the context of the mining industry, and his research for the Hudson’s Bay Company can be read in the context of the economy of fur trading in London. It was Elton’s idea that hu-

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man ecology could be an extension of animal ecology, which enabled him to connect nature’s economy with the commercial economy of his patrons. This argument leads to an analysis of Elton’s concept of ecological zones of interrelations among species, including human technological, political, and scientific activity. Third, the aim of the Oxford ecologists was to establish a new order of knowledge to manage academic disciplines. The establishment of an ecological order of nature and society soon transformed into a new order of truthstatements about nature, in other words an ecological order of knowledge. Through the work at Oxford, ecology became a scientific management tool meant to develop effective social systems not only for society at large but also for the administration of knowledge within a university. Elton’s animal ecology again serves as a focal point, and I argue that his ecological order of animals and human beings implied a new administrative order for the sciences. The first chapter of this book discussed how Tansley’s ecological approach was based on Freudian psychology and how he applied this to empirical research in botany at the request of his imperial and colonial patrons. Although he had a firm interest in social welfare, he had yet to develop a convincing theory of how social psychology related to vegetation ecology and vice versa. He had so far based his arguments on sweeping and methodologically shaky analogies.3 This would all change at Oxford, where his theoretical discussions would mature into his famous ecosystem theory, spelling out the relations among plants, animals, and human beings. There were three aspects in particular of the Oxford community that captivated Tansley’s interests on the road to his ecosystem theory: the debates at the Magdalen Philosophy Club, the system approach to forestry management among his colleagues at the Imperial Forestry Institute, and finally the emergence of animal and human ecology at the Department of Zoology. Tansley’s numerous discussions of social psychology at the Magdalen Philosophy Club will be the topic of the next chapter. These debates were at the heart of his dispute with John Phillips about the value of a holistic approach to ecology. This chapter focuses on the latter two issues—first situating the meaning of the word “system” in the forestry research of Troup and Bourne, and next discussing the broadening of ecological reasoning into animal and human ecology. The emerging fields of animal and human ecology were crucial to Tansley, the botanist, who now could develop a more comprehensive theory about ecology at large. The writings of Carr-Saunders, Huxley, and Elton established this broad ecology that could successfully compete with the idealistic holism of South African ecologists.

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Tansley’s Program for Imperial Ecology It was probably Herbert Warren, the president of Magdalen College and curator of the Botanic Garden, who asked Tansley to apply for the Sherardian Professorship in January 1927, a position that implied responsibility for chairing the department. The election of Tansley was not a controversial decision this time. Tansley’s antagonist Isaac Balfour was no longer on the Board of Electors (he had died in 1923), and Tansley’s old “Bolshevik” friend Frederick Keeble had resigned his professorship to become an advisor to Imperial Chemical Industries. When the chair suddenly became vacant, it was only natural to elect a candidate who had been perhaps unjustly rejected back in 1920. Tansley recollects that he was considering becoming a professional psychoanalyst, and that he was in great doubt whether he should accept the position.4 Eventually he decided to go to Oxford and entered one of the most productive phases of his life. As a professor, he would realize some of those educational reforms in botanical research that he had propagandized in the 1917 manifesto. The prime patron of botanical research at Oxford before Tansley’s arrival was his old friend and supporter George Claridge Druce, a field curator in the Botanic Garden and one of Oxford’s nouveau riche who through his pharmacy had become one of the richest people in town. A former mayor of Oxford and a Freemason, he was well known in various scientific and botanical societies, including the influential Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire. Druce’s enormous social network was probably an important element in securing Tansley’s access to the secretive Oxford political and social milieu. His scrapbook of hundreds of greeting cards from his eightieth birthday in 1930 shows a social network far beyond what one could normally expect for a botanical curator, including royalty and nobility from all over the empire.5 Druce became a true fan of Tansley’s work at Oxford, donating his house, library, herbaria, and £12,000 to various botanical research projects at Oxford upon his death in 1932, an event that helped to secure a place for ecological research at the university. Yet Druce was the very incarnation of an old-fashioned natural historian. He and his fellow curators at the herbarium were definitely within the older generation compared to Tansley, who then was fifty-five years old. Some members of the department had retired in 1926 or were expected to retire within a couple of years, and the curatorship of the Botanic Garden consisted until 1932 primarily of retirees.6 Tansley’s arrival—in a powerful Sunbeam two-seater7—was thus clearly a sign of a new generation of botanists coming to Oxford.

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In his inaugural lecture in November 1927, Tansley made it clear that he intended to transform botanical research at Oxford entirely along the new promising lines of imperial ecology. It was about time to get rid of the outdated “sterile academicism” of laboratory biology, a scientific approach that Tansley in unusually harsh words described as “so-called research,” “alien to the true spirit of investigation,” and “definitely not worth publishing at all,” because of its reputation as being detached from social responsibility.8 He suggested in its place a broader agenda: “The Government has now given us a clear lead . . . [t]he practical aim which we must set before ourselves [is] to conserve and to develop the resources of the Empire.”9 The network of patronage he had nurtured through the Imperial Botanical Conference and proposed in Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation was now ready to wed itself to ecology. Ecologists, Tansley argued, should focus their efforts on the colonies because of job opportunities. He could proudly report to the Oxford dons that “the demand is now much larger than the supply” for ecologists throughout the empire, and that the Colonial Office was offering “Colonial Agricultural Scholarships” and other “monetary support” to botanical research that had “a clear and unequivocal public utility.”10 It was urgent for the department to develop imperial ecology: most economic support would come from the colonies, and most future posts in agriculture, forestry physiology, mycology, ecology, and pastoral science would emerge in the colonial administration. This administration needed people with flexible abilities and interdisciplinary knowledge. The most common task for such ecological entrepreneurs throughout the empire was to transform forests to farmland, deserts to grassland, thus creating environments fit for various colonial interest groups. Tansley thus stressed the importance of interaction and cooperation with foresters, agriculturists, and zoologists in order to educate students with the ability to construct such environments. Ecology was an ideal science for such activity because its main concern was precisely transformation or succession of landscapes. Tansley also envisioned an academic network that included forestry, agriculture, and zoology under the wings of ecology. Tansley’s program for imperial ecology sums up the core program of the Oxford school in ecology. It should thus be seen in the context of other ecological research at the university, especially in the light of research at the Imperial Forestry Institute, where Troup worked out a new systems approach to forestry, and alongside the Department of Zoology, where Elton launched his animal population ecology.

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The New Management System for Imperial Forestry Tansley and his colleagues at the Department of Botany worked closely with the staff at the Imperial Forestry Institute. The history of forestry research at Oxford goes back to the opening of the School of Forestry in 1905. The school’s main task was to train forest officers for colonial agencies (especially for the Indian Forest Service), and most students were required to do research abroad. The Imperial Forestry Institute was established in 1924 to secure higher education in forestry, and its aim was to reach beyond forestry in India towards a science that could secure the needs of the empire.11 The institute was to be associated with a new, more responsible forestry. When, for example, the Prince of Wales spoke to the Empire Forestry Association in 1926, he allied the higher forestry education at Oxford with “a wonderful change” away from “the time not very long ago when the British race had the unenviable distinction of being the most ruthless destroyer of forests in the world.”12 New forestry researchers saw themselves as professional foresters; instead of repeating past mistakes they would develop progressive schemes for responsible forest management. Robert Troup, the director of both the institute and the School of Forestry,13 was three years younger than Tansley, but had an equally impressive list of publications, which consisted mainly of descriptions and suggestions for economic exploration of forests throughout the empire. To avoid mismanagement he favored broader state control and planning at the expense of what he regarded as irresponsible private exploitation of forest resources. Troup’s 1928 textbook, Silvicultural Systems, lays out his management approach, and offers a scientific context for Tansley’s research. Students read this book in connection with Tansley’s lectures in botany and forestry ecology.14 The book points to how previous depletion of forests “in many parts of the world gives genuine cause for alarm,” and pleads for forest conservation and protection. Troup then describes the systems that professional management must use to solve the problem by combining both protection and utilization of forests: A silvicultural system may be defined as the process by which the crops constituting a forest are tended, removed, and replaced by new crops, resulting in the production of woods of a distinctive form . . . [It] embodies three main ideas: (1) the method of regeneration of the individual crops constituting the forest, (2) the form of crop produced, and (3) the orderly arrangement of the crops over the forest as a whole, with special reference to silvicultural and protective considerations and the economic utilization of the produce.15

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The rest of the book is devoted to a discussion of the suitability of various systems for different types of environments, with a focus on how properly to synchronize economic and silvicultural systems to the best advantage of the long-term interests of society. Although Troup uses the ecological terminology of succession and climax extensively, he does not discuss the ecological relations of forest vegetation to other plants and animals but restricts his topic to forestry. One reviewer thus found the book to be a bit too narrow, though the general reception was favorable and the book immediately reached the status of a standard reference book.16 Its main relevance to the history of ecology is as a contextual work for Tansley’s ecosystem theory.17

An Aerial View: Aviation Technology and Ecology One of Troup’s many duties was to edit the Oxford Forestry Memoirs, a series of books addressing forestry issues in the empire (including Chipp’s doctoral dissertation on synecology in Gold Coast forests). Among the memoirs at the Plant Sciences Library at Oxford the pages of one volume are particularly well-worn: Aerial Survey in Relation to the Economic Development of the New Countries (1928), by Ray Bourne.18 Bourne was a lecturer at the Forestry Institute and from 1923 had been in charge of following developments in aerial surveys, relating them to methods of reconnaissance in forests. His importance to the history of ecology derives from his promotion of aerial photography as a research tool among ecologists at Oxford. The art of distinguishing culture from nature in aerial photos stems from techniques developed by John Moore Brabazon, who as a captain used spy pictures taken from an aircraft to identify German trenches and fortifications during the First World War. After the war Brabazon and his pilots formed a company called Aerofilms Limited to develop their techniques through commercial air photography, a firm which by 1928 was transformed into The Aircraft Operating Company Limited (a leading firm for aerial surveys and photography well into the 1950s).19 It is important to recall that civil aviation in England during the inter-war period was imbedded within a larger culture of extreme enthusiasm for the airplane; the airplane was a symbol of avant-garde technology and an icon of imperial power that captured the dreams of a whole generation.20 Aeronautical research was a high-status activity, supported by the world’s largest aircraft industry, and the Oxford community was no less enthusiastic about the novel and breathtaking technology. One enthusiast was Osbert Stanhope Crawford, who thought aviation marked a new beginning in archeological exploration, and used aerial pho-

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tography to unveil the patterns of ancient walls and the remains of forgotten Roman buildings. He served as a map-printer and photographer for Brabazon during the war, from whom he learned the art of distinguishing barbed wire from bushes and hideouts from grassland. This knowledge served Crawford well in his postwar work, locating ancient ruins often buried under layers of soil and vegetation. Tansley would later in life comment on the lack of reference to vegetation in Crawford’s descriptions of landscapes.21 The two authors saw different phenomena in aerial photos; whereas Crawford saw a landscape embedded in culture, Tansley recognized a landscape formed by forces of nature. The forestry lecturer Ray Bourne was an old buddy of Crawford from their years together at New College, Oxford, and it is likely that he followed his friend’s series of archeological publications with great interest.22 Bourne’s concern was not to locate cultural artifacts in a landscape, but to distinguish types of vegetation and their various levels of ecological succession. In 1928 he was invited by the Aircraft Operating Company to join them in an expedition to Northern Rhodesia. Its commission was to conduct air reconnaissance and survey for the Rhodesian Congo Border Concession. The purpose of the aerial photos was to establish an exact border between the colonies, and the estimation of ecological resources was a crucial part of these negotiations. The words “rapidity, economy and accuracy” are repeated like a mantra throughout Bourne’s report from the expedition.23 The airplane’s speed meant they could cover large and often unexplored territories. Patrons were thankful for the low cost of the research, thanks to relatively moderate needs of personnel and equipment. Bourne concluded that “these surveys might prove to be one of the most profitable investments that the Empire could make in the immediate future.”24 The convincing maps Bourne produced from his observations by the means of aerial photography far surpassed other methods. Former forest surveyors, he claimed, were neither rapid, inexpensive, nor accurate. They could not “see the wood for the trees,” whereas aerial surveying gave the forest reconnoiterer the much-desired overview.25 Another central theme that emerges on almost every page of Bourne’s book is the importance of cooperation between politicians, administration, aviation technologists, and scientists throughout their shared fields of interests. Ecology was especially suitable for such cooperation because by definition it was a science about interrelations, and the cry for multidisciplinary research was thus implicitly a cry for the empowerment of ecologists. Bourne pointed out that the maps generated by ecologists through aerial surveys should ideally unveil layers containing a wide variety of information: geological and mineral zones, climatic zones correlated with the spreading of the

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tsetse-fly, zones of forests and other vegetation, and finally various types of soil. Bourne gathered some of this information by collecting soil samples and geological information along a dirt road going through the area he had flown over. Information about climatic zones he borrowed from other scientific sources, but most of the material on vegetation he inferred by studying the photos. The final result was a colorful interdisciplinary map filled with zones of various plants, soils, waters, minerals, and geological formations. The aim of the survey of the borderland between Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo was to get an overview of all the natural resources so that the final border could be fair to both parties. Bourne thus coordinated his research so that the economy of nature could serve the economy of the colonies. After unveiling all the scientific results he concluded, “With this information before them the local government should be, for the first time, in a position to view in real perspective their present and future problems. Moreover, they would have a scientific foundation on which to build.”26 The issues at stake were the coordination of the political border with natural zones, recommendations for sound settlement and commercial zones, as well as recommendations for road and railway building. In such scientific-political negotiations native cultivation tends, as Bourne explains, “to obscure the issue.”27 A shared assumption among both ecologists and governmental agencies was that the activities of black people obscured an untouched nature. This attitude mirrored the social policy of settlement, colonization, and civilization. The shared narrative or social resonance between ecologists and the colonial government did not include natives, who had to be either ignored or naturalized to be scientifically and politically manageable. The final layer of cooperation was between Bourne, the ecologist, and the Aircraft Operating Company, for whom the survey was a vehicle for improving techniques. The grassy vegetation zones were to them emergency landing fields for planes whose engines all too often failed in the air. (Their pilot Cochoran Patrick died because he did not locate a grassy glade soon enough.) The ecologists stretched the pilots’ abilities with their demand for successive overlapping series of pictures taken from the exact same altitude in parallel flight routes. The technicians and the ecologists exchanged knowledge when they established ecological zones at the Aircraft Operating Company’s offices in London, where they carried out the complicated procedure of mosaic assemblage of photos.28 In sum, ecological zones defined through photos of vegetation landscapes in Northern Rhodesia exhibit a trading of knowledge among scientists, politicians, and technicians. The language used in this exchange was the language of visual communication, through the interpretation of photos and the creation of maps. Such images created different challenges for different audiences; the scientists saw types of vegetation, the government agency thought

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in terms of settlement and colonization, and the technicians focused on improvement of apparatus for greater efficiency and accuracy. The ecologist was the mediator in the midst of these negotiations, with the master perspective from above. The immediate reception of Bourne’s Aerial Survey was mixed. A forestry reviewer thought it was “an interesting and arresting record.”29 Though he recognized aerial photography as a promising tool for drawing ecological connections between different species and habitats as well as between disciplines, he did not fully appreciate that it was a radical break with previous forestry traditions. On the other hand, the notice in the Journal of Ecology (probably written by Tansley) was very positive, and predicted “a great future for this new method of survey” because of the cost-effectiveness of such ecological research.30 The ability to transgress traditional boundaries in science and see the environment as a whole was intriguing to both Tansley and Troup, since their research policy focused on scientific collaboration. Bourne credited both of them, and emphasized that “to approach the problem [of aerial surveying] from an ecological standpoint” was not only cost- and timeeffective; as an overreaching discipline ecology was made for aerial surveying of forests and other botanical habitats.31 The press was excited about the book. The Aeronautical Correspondent in the Times noted in an enthusiastic review that the cost of aerial forest surveying was only £1 per square mile in an area of 200,000 to 300,000 square miles. Air surveys would thus “repay in a hundred ways the capital expenditure involved.”32 This dramatic reduction in the price of surveys would now make a full-scale survey of a colony or even a continent possible, even with the constrained colonial budgets emerging from the growing depression. Yet the inexpensive price of aerial surveying was a minor advantage compared to the great virtue of getting the administrative overview, as the Times reviewer put it: Mr. Bourne . . . emphasizes first of all that cooperation between agriculturists, foresters, geologists, and other specialists is essential if needless repetition of field work is to be avoided, and if Government Departments are to be presented with a view of their problems as a whole . . . With this information before them the local government should be, for the first time, in a position to view in real perspective their present and future problems.33 Ecology was something more than the sum of its parts; it offered an administrative overview of a whole range of scientific results that could be helpful in colonial management. The use of the airplane by ecologists is important for understanding the globalization of the discipline, yet botany and forestry could not offer a

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sound ecological overview of social relations without the help of zoology, since only the science of animals could lead to a full account of the human condition. I therefore turn to the Oxford zoologists to explain the growth and empowerment of ecologists, and their comprehensive ecological order of nature, knowledge, and society.

The Revitalization of the Department of Zoology After the war the Department of Zoology suffered greatly from the loss of two of their leading staff members, Geoffrey Smith and John Wilfrid Jenkinson, both of whom died in the trenches. The teaching situation was quite desperate, so the university turned to its former students Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders and Julian Huxley to rescue and energize the troubled department by launching a new genetically oriented approach. Together with J. B. S. Haldane they were offered positions as lecturers in zoology. Charles Elton was among their new students. Carr-Saunders was born in 1886 into a wealthy underwriter family who sent him to Eton, where he was known as a lonely and “intensely unhappy” student.34 From Eton he went to Magdalen College at Oxford. He graduated in 1908 with a degree in biology supervised by Smith and Jenkinson, and he subsequently became a demonstrator in comparative anatomy. However, laboratory life at Oxford could not compete with the exciting science of eugenics. In 1910 Carr-Saunders moved to London, where he studied biometrics under Karl Pearson, became the secretary of the research committee of the Eugenics Education Society, and was called to the Bar of the Inner Temple. He was deeply concerned about all kinds of social ills and problems, and saw the solution to all of them in Francis Galton’s emancipatory writings about how through eugenics society could be engineered into a better condition. The outbreak and subsequent horror of the First World War confirmed CarrSaunders’s belief in the urgent need for biological tools for improving social and international relations. Because of his knowledge of French, he was posted at a ration depot in Suez, where he had plenty of leisure time to plan his subsequent book on human eugenics and population dynamics while watching the ongoing slaughter from the sidelines. He came back to England severely depressed about the human condition and settled outside Oxford, where he developed a passion for farming and alternative agricultural economy, and started to teach students in the Department of Zoology at the university. Huxley was one year younger than Carr-Saunders and belonged intellectually to the same generation of scholars excited about the promising field of eugenics and genetics. He was—according to his own account—born in 1887 “with great advantages, genetic and cultural” into a family whose liter-

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ary and scientific fame he carefully documents in his autobiography.35 In it he also describes a “devastating . . . love affair” with a young man named Eric Forbes-Adam, and “nervous mannerisms” while studying together with Carr-Saunders at Eton. Later in life Huxley would “shudder” thinking about “what a really ingenious neo-Freudian would make of this.”36 It was in this period of sublimation and personal crisis that he found rescue in being “mystically united with nature.” In his own words: “I could see right down into the center of the earth, and embrace the whole of its contents and its animal and plant inhabitants. For a moment I became, in some transcendental way, the universe.”37 This “cosmic vision” is the very key to understanding Huxley’s life. He emerges on several occasions in this history of ecology as one whose dream of becoming “the universe” permeates his literature, biological research, scientism, patronage of ecology, political writings, support of environmentalism, and leadership of UNESCO. Huxley took courses in zoology and comparative anatomy together with Carr-Saunders at Oxford. He graduated in 1909 as first in his class in natural sciences, and also received the Newdigate Prize for English Verse. The university saw in him an incarnation of his famous grandfather and hired him as a lecturer in zoology (Carr-Saunders’s old job) from 1910 to 1912. He then moved on to Texas as assistant professor at the Rice Institution before he returned to the continent and fought for the last two years of the war as an army intelligence officer in Italy. When the war ended, he continued—like his namesake in Stendahl’s novel Le Rouge et le Noir—to build a career in the civil service with a growing reputation as a biologist. Carr-Saunders and Huxley were both Elton’s mentors at Oxford, and shared the responsibility of teaching him natural history, ecology, and zoology. They introduced him to a series of books on animal communities.38 During his first years at Oxford, Elton felt “decidedly on the outside,” though not because of his background. He was born in Manchester in 1900, the son of a university professor in English literature. He went to Liverpool College until 1918, served his country for four months in the Army Cadet School, and continued on to Oxford for undergraduate studies. Both of his mentors were impressed with their student (particularly Huxley, who copied material from Elton’s notebooks for his own publications), and invited him to join the Oxford University Spitsbergen Expedition in the summer of 1921.39

Spitsbergen: From Political Anarchy to a New Gibraltar? It is necessary to make a short digression into the history and political circumstances of Spitsbergen to fully appreciate the context of Oxford expeditions to this arctic archipelago. People from various countries had been exploiting the natural resources on these islands as early as the sixteenth cen-

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tury, but there was hardly any permanent settlement there because of the harsh arctic climate. Spitsbergen and Bear Island were not yet part of any country’s domain, and their territorial and political status was a hotly debated issue. It was in the early 1920s still a terra nullis where anyone could claim and defend property rights.40 One simply marked the land with a flag and a name, noted the annexation to the Foreign Ministry of one’s home country, avoided occupation of an unreasonably large area, and, most important, mixed one’s labor with the land and physically guarded the property from intruders.41 Pointing to the accomplishment of such tasks, at least one prominent British explorer at the Royal Geographical Society loudly and solemnly declared in 1920 that Spitsbergen rightly belonged to the empire.42 Yet earlier debate clearly indicates that most British historians, explorers, and geographers wrote about Spitsbergen as a “No Man’s Land” yet to be explored by science and annexed to the empire.43 They were not alone. A horde of explorers, adventurers, and companies from most countries of northern Europe had before the war rushed to the region to claim boundaries and declare property rights for land believed to have all kinds of mineral treasures and resources. The political anarchy involved created bitter boundary disputes. Ownership had to be proven by the creation of mines, investment in scientific exploration, and defense of the site from intruders. “Crime and punishment, in the legal sense of the terms, [were] unknown,” and the pressure on the land increased with a rapidly rising demand for coal in the immediate aftermath of the war.44 There were rumors about British occupation of the islands, and talk in the British press about establishing an arctic Gibraltar. Coal prices were rising and optimism soared. British scientific institutions and individual companies invested much time and money in exploration and exploitation, and some even expected that the islands would be annexed to the British Empire.45 Neutral Norwegian war-profitmongers had gained from the situation by buying or occupying estates and establishing profitable mining syndicates. Consequently, by the end of the war Norwegian companies dominated the islands and Norwegian diplomats were (according to British opinion) in an extremely strong bargaining position when peace negotiations began in Versailles.46 In Paris they demanded political sovereignty over the archipelago, which was granted in the Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 with the important proviso that all nations and people had a right to explore, exploit, and settle on the islands. This was no immediate problem, since there were only about 200 or 300 people living there on a year-round basis in 1920, with a summer population of about 1,000, nearly all located in the mining camps.47 The treaty was up for ratification from 1920 to 1925 and all parties with territorial interests would have to prove their ownership of land to their re-

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spective governments during this period. The Royal Geographical Society in London was eager to secure British industrial and scientific interests, and told the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to hold out for a policy that would establish the hegemony of the empire.48 Movers within the society pointed to Spitsbergen’s strategic military importance for submarine warfare, and argued that the islands were valuable to British maritime interests and that the country consequently should not ratify the treaty.49 However, the British were not the only ones keeping a close eye on the archipelago. There was hectic economic development at both Spitsbergen and Bear Island in the early 1920s, and roughly fifty major and minor scientific expeditions and inspections from all over Europe flooded the region.

Oxford Expeditions to Bear Island and Spitsbergen It was into this tense, anarchic climate of territorial dispute, occupation, and investigation prior to the final ratification of the treaty in 1925 that the Oxford expedition sailed northward in early June 1921. They too were keenly aware that they were sailing into a lawless “no man’s land” of rough miners, and few believed the treaty would be ratified (so it is no wonder that they included plenty of spirits, tobacco, and cigarettes in their luggage).50 The expedition was organized by the arctic entrepreneur George Binney, with Huxley and Carr-Saunders as the main scientific personnel, and the famous ornithologist Francis Charles Robert Jourdain as the leader. The rest of the twentymember team consisted of a mix of graduate and undergraduate students in ornithology, glaciology, geology, paleobotany, and taxidermy, with Elton and Victor Samuel Summerhayes as ecologists.51 There exists no record of the patronage of the expedition, but judging from hints in the accounts, it seems to have been paid for by the university, with the aim of educating young students in field research and at the same time revitalizing a Zoology department devastated by the war experience.52 Shortly before he died in 1991, Elton wrote a long and detailed account of the expedition, because he thought the events were of the utmost importance for understanding the early development of animal ecology. Though the manuscript was never published, it reveals a surprisingly accurate and charming flashback to what certainly must have been some of Elton’s very fondest memories. He recalls that he was “very inexperienced, very raw indeed”; he had barely turned twenty-one and had never left the soil of Britain.53 With some pocket money from his father, Oliver, and army equipment and clothing from his brother, Leonard (who had just returned from war), he bade farewell to his family in the first week of June 1921 to test his manhood and scientific capability on a voyage with famous Oxford scholars. It is no wonder he was enthusiastic.

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After a short stopover in Tromsø, the party sailed north under the midnight sun, which inspired Huxley to write the following poem: Round and ever the circling sun Travels the summer’s single day The single day that is never done Till the snow and the frost shall have their way And come with their comrade Night to stay.54 The party’s fascination with the midnight sun is especially important to understanding Elton’s research, which later would focus on arctic light as a special source of energy for arctic workers. Meanwhile the explorers sailed towards Bear Island, where they would stop for ten days to carry out a biological survey. Elton had been violently seasick for two and a half days and Tom Longstaff (the expedition’s medical officer and ornithologist) gave him so much brandy, and on such an empty stomach, that he “went ashore sitting on top of a large load of baggage in the whale-boat, and singing loudly!”55 The party landed at Walrus Bay and soon occupied and made themselves comfortable at an apparently deserted whaling station. The exuberant explorers had unwittingly settled in the middle of a bitter property controversy. The ownership of Bear Island was as disputed as the Spitsbergen archipelago. The Swedes argued that they owned the land because Swedish naturalists had discovered it (in 1596) and described its botany, but they had clearly failed to labor the land and defend it from intruders. The owner of the whaling station argued that he owned the land, but failed to convince the Norwegian Foreign Ministry that he needed the entire island to hunt whales (the station was not abandoned but used seasonally).56 The only party who with some force could claim property rights to the land was the Norwegian firm Bjørnøya Kullkompani I/S, who had occupied parts of the island from 1915 in order to mine coal and sell it at a premium to both sides in the ongoing war.57 The prices continued to rise after the war with a dramatic increase in coal production. The company soon hired British mining engineers, who produced a grand plan of how they could develop the land to increase coal production even more. In the summer of 1921 the company was in the process of developing new production procedures, improving infrastructure and the harbor, rebuilding and opening new mines, and restructuring management so that the mining interest could increase its efficiency and strengthen its case for property rights before the final ratification of the Spitsbergen Treaty (which included Bear Island) in 1925. The chief manager in charge was taken by surprise when Elton and Longstaff showed up in his office one day to borrow the company’s telegraph. He took great delight in showing Elton and Summerhayes around the island

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while the rest of the expedition searched for rare or unknown species.58 All had not gone well for the mining company that summer. The miners had been on strike for weeks demanding better salary and living conditions and were consequently sent home. While waiting for new, less troublesome workers, the manager (who was probably Thor Haabeth) had plenty of time to show the Oxford students around the island. He had a keen interest in wildlife, and told them about the seasonal migrations of birds, the arctic lives of ptarmigan, foxes, seals, and polar bears. He showed them the inland and sea fisheries, and the locations of various bird habitats. The miners had to rely on local species for fresh food, so his interest in wildlife was hardly recreational— it had more to do with managing the local resources to improve the efficiency of the company. Inspired by this information, Elton and Summerhayes investigated the island with great speed while closely following the emerging data from their fellow explorers. What especially intrigued them was the small size of the island, its lack of biological diversity, and its largely flat, stony, and sparsely vegetated life zone, which enabled researchers within a short period of time to get a good overview of all its plants and animals. They compiled and synthesized their findings in one of the most famous articles in the early history of ecology, known for its diagram of the island’s nitrogen cycle (see Figure 3).59

Figure 3. In 1921 Victor S. Summerhayes and Charles S. Elton visited Bear Island. One result was this diagram of the island’s nitrogen cycle, published in the Journal of Ecology 11 (1923): 232. Reproduced courtesy of Blackwell Science Ltd.

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Most of the species in the diagram were described and discussed at length by other natural historians, so the arrows indicate not only species relations, but also relations of credit among different scientific works, fields of research, and fellows within academia. The only field of research that is not included in the diagram is ecology, since Elton and Summerhayes could not draw arrows to their own diagram. The ecologists are instead placed in the privileged position of designers of the diagram, drawing lines of relations between scientific findings (and also in the position of predators at the very top of the foodchain, since they ate most of the species they caught.)60 Finally, the force of the ecological approach lay in the visual aesthetic of the diagram, which was familiar to engineers and managers. It conveyed to them sources for fresh food and gave them information for a more diverse utilization of their environment. The Bear Island experience was for the young ecologists just a preview or a model for a much larger ecological investigation of the entire Spitsbergen archipelago. After leaving the island the expedition continued northward along the west coast of the Spitsbergen mainland, where they made short stops at various mining camps. They had their first experience with a lawless country when some Russians raided a research area for bird eggs. The mixed interests of the scholars and their students implied that the group spread out upon landing and inquired into their respective topics, such as animal populations, rare birds, aquatic life, plant communities, geological formations, and topographical exploration. At every camp Elton laid out geographical zones based on local climatic conditions. He plotted his own and his companions’ findings into ecological maps, whose function was to provide an overview of all the research.61 The most telling example is perhaps the map of the research zone around Bruce City in Ice Fjord. It was a fictitious “city” of three small huts founded by the Scottish Spitsbergen Syndicate to prove their property rights through a fancy name and some small-scale mining. The syndicate gladly lent Bruce City to the expedition because it would add to their legal case for proving that the region was in active use, and research on their land could unveil unknown natural resources besides coal. As a result, Scottish coal miners and managers lived alongside Oxford scholars for an entire month.62 A number of the voyagers, however, shunned the place and went on a long sledge tour (including Huxley, who left on a hike with his fellow ornithologists to peep at courtship among arctic birds), and another group had already left to catch up with the expedition at another research location further north.63 The party left at Bruce City was thus reduced to three who studied geology, paleology, and glaciology in relation to mining, plus Carr-Saunders, who was in charge of the camp, and Elton, who served as his personal assistant in his research on

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aquatic life. Elton’s main focus was again to lay out the ecological zone around Bruce City together with John Walton, a newly graduated paleobotanist from Cambridge.64 Together they climbed nearby Mount Campbell to get what Elton thought was crucial to any ecological research: an aerial overview that would enable him to draw maps of ecological zones of the almost flat delta landscape. The extensive “‘aerial’ sketch maps” and field notes from Bruce City reveal Elton’s preoccupation with ecological zones between species in relation to their respective environment and climate, and consequently with the network of knowledge exchanged among the participating scientists. These notes would serve Elton well in his later writings. So would the time he spent strolling around the seashore together with Carr-Saunders, who used the summer at Spitsbergen to resolve the basic features of his forthcoming book about the human population problem. The first thing Elton set out to do upon his return was, as he put it in a letter to Huxley, to “do some ecology propaganda!” by completing his Spitsbergen papers. He was forced to delay his enthusiasm for a year and concentrate on his graduation, with a final paper not on ecology but on warning coloration of mites.65 Huxley was obviously pleased with his student because he managed to secure him a part-time position as demonstrator in zoology at the department, which enabled Elton to sit down with Summerhayes in the summer of 1922 to write out their ecology paper. Carr-Saunders did not publish anything about aquatic life at Spitsbergen, and instead, with the help of Huxley, finished his major work, The Population Problem. The book was, as he put it, “an accident of the war” that tried to explain the tragedy by tracing the evolutionary “quantity and the quality” of mankind.66 His method was to explain the evolution of inherent characteristics through statistical surveys of human fecundity in different climatic zones. The voyage to Spitsbergen was to Carr-Saunders a visit to a prehistoric past, to an ice age without political order, from which location he takes his readers through human evolutionary history.67 Neo-Malthusian arguments served as the point of departure in Carr-Saunders’s numerical analysis, and Galton’s eugenics as a vehicle for his qualitative analysis of population dynamics. The population problem, as he saw it, was the evolution of primitive people with low mental and physical qualities and high reproduction rates. What worried Carr-Saunders was how the “over-population” of human races with lower mental capacities endangered “the standard of living” of races with higher qualities.68 He predicted a bleak scenario of more wars or an over-populated world of 246,114 million people with low capabilities in the year 2400 if world leaders did not consciously adjust the human population to a responsible level by eugenic methods.69 The book was an instant success, which overnight established Carr-

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Saunders as one of the leading British sociologists in the inter-war era. His book received rave reviews in the press, and a series of major journals received him as one who had brought “Malthus up to date . . . from the standpoint of the twentieth century.”70 He was instantly spotted by academic headhunters and offered the Charles Booth Chair of Social Sciences at Liverpool University, where he remained from 1923 to 1937 working on his next book, The Professions, which examined the sociology of professions in an urban environment torn apart by class divisions.71 In Oxford he left Huxley puzzling over the methodological relations among statistics, biological evolution, and genetics, and he left Elton pondering how the human population problem related to animal population dynamics. In the summer of 1923 a new expedition arranged by Merton College sailed northward to Spitsbergen, now with Elton as chief scientist. The voyage failed to deliver much significant scientific research, however, because of rough weather and ice conditions.72 Elton spent most of his time aboard and was only able to make extensive notes on climate, information that later would prove helpful in determining climatic zones around the archipelago. The third Oxford expedition of 1924 deserves a closer look because it laid the foundation for Elton’s subsequent works on Spitsbergen and animal ecology by using the airplane as a major research instrument. The approximate total cost of the journey was £8,300, which was drastically reduced to £5,300 by generous donations of fuel, equipment, and technical personnel from various companies, with the British Petroleum Company and the Civil Aviation Department of the Air Ministry as the largest donors. An additional £3,000 emerged anonymously (through George Binney), and the Royal Geographical Society gave £100 in an attempt to create momentum for their case for British annexation of the archipelago. “The University of Oxford gave its name to the expedition, and a donation of £50,” and the rest was collected from the members.73 The pro forma patron was the Prince of Wales, whose name gave the impression of a scientific impartiality above private interest groups. Nevertheless, the expedition was closely linked to industrial exploration and British colonization, all carried out under the general aim of surveying as yet unclaimed or disputed land. The expedition left England incognito. The logistics were planned in secrecy and the members left Oxford in small groups to avoid attention. They turned away journalists, and promptly rejected a tempting offer of £1,000 for exclusive press rights to photo material.74 They were going to disputed or unclaimed land, and newspaper articles and photos could start a race, and might stir up unhelpful political tension in the ratification process for the Spitsbergen Treaty. The Civil Aviation Department of the Air Ministry (the most important patron of the Oxford Expedition) had just completed long negoti-

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ations with the Norwegian government over the regulation of civil aviation between the countries and their domains. Regulation of the airspace above the Spitsbergen archipelago, however, was still in limbo.75 The airplane was a crucial instrument for the British government in keeping political control over remote areas, but could the plane also operate effectively in the Spitsbergen archipelago? Could a seaplane land safely and routinely in these icy waters? These were crucial questions relating to political control of the islands, of direct relevance to the issue of regulation of airtraffic in the north. This political context explains why the key purpose of the Oxford expedition was, in “the spirit of the ancient Vikings, . . . to test the powers of a new method of attack by observation from the air.”76 Their seaplane—the Avrolynx—was brought with much complication to the island by the expedition boat. The seaplane could easily cause alarm. Planes were still thought of, particularly among the Germans, as key spying instruments. Such associations could easily arise among foreign companies if they heard about British planes flying over their properties. Air reconnaissance might indicate whether or not they were actually mixing labor with the land, a key condition for claiming property rights. Moreover, a seaplane could land without a runway on remote places yet to be claimed. There were thus good reasons for keeping a low media profile. The expedition spent most of its time on largely unclaimed land at the very north of the archipelago, with three sledge tours over the northeast and numerous flights as the main activity. Elton was the expedition’s chief scientist and thus spent most of his time in the base camp organizing the scientific tasks of various sledge tours, flights, and student activities while researching soil conditions as a basis for the geographical distribution of plant life.77 He was also in charge of cooking (see Figure 4), though his interests were definitely not in the culinary arts (he did a terrible job even by English standards). The experience was nevertheless positive because his camp duties gave him an overview of all the expedition’s activities. When the explorers returned, often tired after hours of walking in rugged terrain, a fit and wellrested Elton took notes of their findings around the campfire where he began, as scientist in charge, to edit and synthesize all the research. Elton’s article about the movement of fly swarms from island to island within the archipelago and their immigration from the mainland is a telling example of how Elton based his argument on evidence collected by his colleagues. He took notes on their observations of fly swarms in various regions and extrapolated apparent movements. He cleverly placed himself in the socially fortunate position of synthesizing knowledge, and his article is consequently loaded with a long list of credits to his fellow travelers.78 The expedition leader was very pleased with Elton’s ability to summarize

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all the activities in one ecological scheme, which took the form of maps of local geology, vegetation, animals, and so on, in zones defined by the climatic environment. Elton thus created at each camp along the route a research zone where an exchange of results and knowledge took place. The pilot and the technicians were active participants in this ecology of knowledge, since with their airplane they could offer an overview of the landscape while gaining important technical knowledge and experience. The plane was of course an exciting new research instrument that everybody was “inclined to idealize,” and much of the official travelogue is consequently about the use and welfare of the plane.79 Nearly all of the images from the expedition are either of the plane or taken from it, ending with a kitsch photo by Elton of the seaplane in the midnight sun.

Figure 4. Charles S. Elton, chief scientist for the Oxford University Expedition to Spitsbergen in 1924, cooking at the camp. Reproduced courtesy of Dr. Robert Elton, from George Binney, With Seaplane and Sledge in the Arctic (1925).

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The ornithologists were naturally enthusiastic about this new ability to fly like a bird, and made effusive analogies between a bird’s nest and an “aeroplane factory.”80 To carry out observations from the plane was a popular research activity, and Elton was not left out: With the help of the plane he could see nature from above, which dramatically changed his perception of the environment. He would always try to establish an overview when writing about relations between animals and their environments, or between different academic disciplines. For the rest of his life his outlook on nature and academia would essentially be from above.

Charles Elton: The Economy of Population Ecology One result of Elton’s voyage to Spitsbergen was a celebrated article on periodic fluctuations in animal populations that appeared in 1924. The paper was supervised by Huxley, who also secured its publication. It is clearly inspired by Carr-Saunders’s book, as well as a whole range of secondary sources about the animals in question. Through an overarching theory about the effect of climatic cycles on animal populations, he attempts an overview or synthesis of others’ work. The article’s fame derives from its thesis that the population dynamics of lemmings force them to march “with great speed and determination into the sea.”81 These images of masses of lemmings drowning in the sea or falling off cliffs originate in folklore among Nordic highlanders which mirrors their daily worries of losing sheep or reindeer in a harsh arctic climate. Elton did not observe such phenomena, but relied on a word-by-word dictionary translation of a work by the Norwegian biologist Robert Collett, reinforced by cock-and-bull stories from Norwegian sailors.82 Collett accepted uncritically such lemming mythologies and tried to provide a sober scientific explanation for the population dynamics of lemmings in terms of cycles of diseases and predators, and to explain their strange migration in terms of mass suggestive behavior. Elton saw no reason not to trust the validity of such stories when a local expert like Collett confirmed them, and those shades of doubt that do exist in Collett’s long discussion disappeared in Elton’s halting translation. Why was such a folktale about mass suicide among animals so appealing to British zoologists? It was certainly appealing to Elton on a personal level, for he surely thought of the importance of accidental occurrences in population dynamics after falling through the ice and nearly drowning.83 More important is the fact that Elton explored this topic in 1921 together with CarrSaunders, who at that time had been pondering why thousands of young men during the war left the safety of the trenches to become targets for the enemy’s bullets. Consciously or not, with the image of masses of lemmings

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falling over the cliff or drowning themselves in the sea Elton captured the social image and destiny of his own generation. It is then hardly any wonder that lemming speculation could survive and blossom in the British scientific community for such a long time after.84 Yet the more practical question remains: what possible interest could Elton’s patrons have in the mass suicide of lemmings? A closer look at his conclusion reveals that his scientific motivation for gathering stories about lemmings was not only to investigate the lives of these animals; his interest was also to foster “a new method of getting at the facts of climatic cycles.”85 He believed that climate was the key factor in determining the population dynamics of lemmings, and consequently saw these fluctuations as a kind of “weather indicator.” Thus his article was primarily a contribution to climatology. If one understood past cycles of lemming populations one could predict future climatic patterns. Such information was crucial to oil prospecting. A method for advance determination of mild summers in the arctic would be crucial for the success of Elton’s patron, the British Petroleum Company. Elton’s part-time position at Oxford did not make ends meet, and he was thus looking for grants and new patrons. He found one in his friend George Binney from the Spitsbergen expedition, who recommended him as a consultant for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1925 as part of a larger attempt to revitalize the business.86 The company was selling fur-bearing animals hunted mainly by native Canadians and Eskimos, and Elton’s task was to study fluctuations in such animals’ populations to improve the company’s management of fur resources. The aim of his research was to forecast population cycles of fur-bearing animals and to predict the prices at the fur auction in London. His method is telling. He hardly did any fieldwork, but, as he had done while studying fly swarms, he placed himself in the midst of a social network of data collectors. He established a recording system in which hundreds of company workers from a wide geographic area provided often anecdotal87 input for his analysis, which he combined with an historical analysis based on the company’s account books. The result was “quite juicy,” an outline of the economy of the company and economy of nature that traced the population dynamics of fur-bearing animals in Canada back to the early eighteenth century.88 This enormous body of material was unfamiliar terrain for Elton; it consisted of voluminous accounting books and sale statistics from which he was supposed to extrapolate results readable by his business patron. To work for the Hudson’s Bay Company thus meant that he had to recast the ecology of fur-bearing animals into mathematical terms so that it would match the evidence he was working with. Elton also had to adapt to the language of numbers and statistical methods in order to be understood by his patron, whose economy relied upon the economy of nature.

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The reception of Elton’s work by the fur trade business may be seen in a plate prepared by the Hudson’s Bay Company that shows the relationship between cycles of animal populations and fluctuations in the fur industry (see Figure 5).89 The governing factor was a cyclic pattern of sunspots causing climatic changes, which explains the variability of food supply and consequently fluctuations in the number of fur-bearing animals. The balance in the center of the image represents the statistical balance of nature that determined the health and prosperity of the company’s laborers (Eskimos and Indians). At the end of the food chain (or statistically at the top of what Elton later called “the pyramid of numbers”) one finds furs offered for auction in London. The economy of nature was an integral part of the economy of the fur industry and vice versa. The ecologists helped to naturalize and legitimize the division of labor and the profit for shareholders, hence the balance, the age-old symbol of justice that centers and integrates the picture. Indeed, the paternalistic management of native Canadians and arctic Eskimos by the Hudson’s Bay Company during this period was all “natural” according to the science of human ecology.90

Figure 5. Chart illustrating the relationship between wildlife and human prosperity, published by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1932 based on Charles Elton’s research. Reproduced courtesy of the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, PAM, HBCA Photographs 1987/363-H-23/26.

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From Animal to Human Ecology In Oxford Elton continued to organize ecological research, to compile work from the Spitsbergen expeditions,91 and to collaborate with Huxley, who encouraged Elton to write a book that could launch animal ecology as a field within zoology. Huxley was now deeply involved in the so-called Science-forAll movement, whose concern was to educate the British public through a series of semi-popular books, which Huxley edited. His own contribution, Animal Biology (1927), was written with J. B. S. Haldane. It focuses on how systems of energy in the animal body (or machinery as the authors preferred) could explain the daily and evolutionary life of animals by tracking budgets of cyclic gains and loss of calories.92 The book was written at a time when Huxley was spellbound by psychology; he wrote poetry about understanding repression after reading Freud, and started to work on his own version of a Faust play based on his psychology. Only the beginning remains of this “Freudian Faustulus,” in which some main metaphysical entities introduce themselves: I am Matter. I am the condensation, The Kink in empty space that provides resistance Precious inertia—mine the sole foundation On which swift energy’s flow of fluid emanation ... I am Energy. Sublime and meaningless Energy I stream in floods across the empty ocean Of space, where island-universes float Each like a little lonely boat I set the world in motion.93 Huxley also introduces the Self, the Ego, and the Super-Ego accompanied by Time and Space before the play is supposed to begin. One should perhaps not put too much emphasis on this attempt “to set down my own state of mind,” as Huxley put it, but it does confirm what already has been apparent in Tansley’s research: the major source of inspiration for formulating a mechanistic biology based on matter and energy was clinical psychology. Huxley’s poetry was written in honor of Freud, not scientists from other fields. In short notice Huxley gave Elton the opportunity to write a follow-up to Animal Biology on animal ecology as part of the Science-for-All series. Elton (who was busy teaching) managed to write the book at night within eightyfive exhausting days, and it appeared in 1927 with an editorial introduction by Huxley, who now fashioned himself as the father of animal ecology—“destined to a great future”—by emphasizing his teacher-pupil relation with

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Elton five years after his graduation.94 However, the chief source of inspiration for Elton was not Huxley but Carr-Saunders’s book on human population dynamics. Elton explained that whereas Carr-Saunders was concerned with the “sociology and economics” of human beings, he outlined “the sociology and economics of animals.”95 He thus humanized nature by reading the social sciences into the realm of animals: “Throughout this book,” he explained, “I have used analogies between human and animal communities. These are simply intended as analogies and nothing more.” There is nothing simple about analogies, though. Analogies were crucial—in Elton’s words— “to drive home the fact,” and he could not do without them. The audience familiar with ecological terms was almost exclusively botanists, and Elton thus starts off his book with a short recapitulation of vegetation ecology, which included high praise for Tansley’s Practical Plant Ecology and Types of British Vegetation. He also secured the attention of his colleagues at the Imperial Forestry Institute by beginning the book with an aerial photograph of a tropical forest climax. He immediately stresses the importance of seeing nature from above: “If it were possible for an ecologist to go up in a balloon and stay there for several hundred years quietly observing the countryside below him, he would no doubt notice a number of curious things before he died, but above all he would notice that zones of vegetation appeared to be moving about slowly and deliberately in different directions.”96 Elton’s approach was, to paraphrase a famous sociobiologist, like that of a zoologist from another planet (say Mars) completing a catalog of species in the free spirit of natural history.97 This paragraph captures the core principles of his ecological reasoning: the view from above, the social and physical distance between the ecologist and the life-world, the classification of environments into life-zones, a teleological narrative, and, above all, a nearly endless temporal perspective. The book is an ecological tour de force of the animal kingdom with Elton as the pilot. He first lays out all the environmental zones (such as climate, topography, and temperature) and explains how these determine animal communities. He then outlines the key terms for population dynamics in an environment; food-chains and cycles, niches, and pyramids of numbers. He concludes with an ecological account of animal evolution. Elton’s methodology was not very inventive; he recycled analogies, concepts, and methods found in his mentor’s book about population pressures. The notion of food-chains and cycles hailed from Carr-Saunders’s discussion of economic cycles and class conflicts in industrial England. The niche concepts stem from Carr-Saunders’s discussion of mental characteristics, of the origin of human traditions, and of the social division of labor in various professions.98 (The activities of a badger and a vicar respectively are Elton’s own examples of two types of niches in the animal and human community.)

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Finally, the idea of pyramids of numbers came from Carr-Saunders’s chapter on statistic regulation of human populations and Elton’s review of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s accounting books. Elton’s achievement was to read by analogy Carr-Saunders’s sociology into nature, and thus to construct an order of nature that reflected and reinforced Carr-Saunders’s eugenic tendencies and Malthusian agenda of selected human superiority. That human beings were at the very heart of his animal ecology is clear when Elton returns to his experiences from Spitsbergen to illustrate an ecological balance among seals, polar bears, and human beings. The reason Norwegian hunters could kill thousands of great bearded seals without damaging its overall population was that sealers also killed large numbers of polar bears, whose diet consists largely of seals. Elton drew a little diagram of the food chain, which probably is the first published ecological illustration that includes human beings.99 This as an indication of the possible economic utility of animals, although management of food resources was not at the forefront of the book. It was not rationality, emotion, or a sense of history that distinguished human beings from seals and polar bears as Elton saw it, but our ability to eat on every level of the food chain. Through an investigation into our eating habits, he believed, one could understand mankind’s place in history and the world. That the inclusion of human beings in the animal community was important is clear from the final paragraph of his book, in which Elton criticizes the contemporary practice of human ecology: Human ecology and animal ecology have developed in curious contrast to one another. Human ecology has been concerned almost entirely with biotic factors, with the effects of man upon man, disregarding often enough the other animals amongst which we live. Owing to the fact that most of the workers in this subject are themselves biotic factors, an undue prominence has been given in history and economics to these purely human influences.100 The term “human ecology” in the 1920s had mainly been used as a catchword among a small group of sociologists in the United States with little background in vegetation or animal ecology, and whose main concern was urban planning and social geography.101 Elton was clearly not inspired by this view of human ecology and consequently set forth to rescue the term. He questioned the traditional boundaries between humans and animals: animal communities, he argued, are socially comparable to human communities and human behavior resembles that of animals. This circular reasoning of humanizing nature and naturalizing mankind opened up a large new research field. As a point of departure for a scientific human ecology Elton cites the im-

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portance of a series of books by Ellsworth Huntington at Yale University, and his London counterparts Leonard Hill and Argyll Campbell (both at the National Institute of Medical Research). Huntington and one of his colleagues had recently published a lengthy study, Climatic Changes, in which they argued that the world now faced a gradual decrease in the average world temperature.102 This was a topic of concern because Huntington saw clearly the connection between civilization and climate, outlined in his 1915 book of the same name, which Elton read in its third revised edition of 1924. The basic argument in this work is that “the distribution of civilization” around the world corresponds to “the distribution of human health and energy on the basis of climate.”103 The crux of the matter was that the important climatic zones could be distinguished on the basis of temperate and nontemperate climates, and consequently one could expect respectively high and low distributions of human energy in these zones. This energy, and thus level of civilization, could be measured by the number of inventions, the power to lead, and, above all, the trading of goods and knowledge.104 It was exactly this entanglement of nature’s economy and human economy that Elton envisioned in his concept of human ecology. According to Huntington’s scheme, the low energy of the arctic climate of Spitsbergen implied little human civilization. Thus, what was at stake for arctic entrepreneurs was whether or not it was scientifically possible to spread the British Empire of trading to such an arctic climatic zone. The focus in Elton’s second major article about Spitsbergen, published with Summerhayes in 1928, was on climate as the major factor for determining life-zones in barren, dry, and inner fjords.105 They produced a grand map of the archipelago of all the various life-zones crucial for their patrons to determine the best possible settlement zone or outpost for British civilization. Much of the industrial and commercial activities at Spitsbergen were conducted during the summer season in the midnight sun, and much of the fascination with the arctic was with this phenomenon. The question then was whether the arctic light had a potential health effect or supplied a special kind of energy that would stimulate arctic workers. Elton’s chief source of inspiration with respect to this issue was Hill and Campbell’s book Health and Environment of 1925. The aim of this study was to promote the idea of fresh air and sunlight in smoke-polluted and dark English industrial cities. Pollution and lack of sunlight could cause various illnesses (such as tuberculosis), for which they suggested various treatments. They proved—through rather kinky experiments—that the most effective treatment was heliotherapy in the open air.106 The theory that the human body could heal and be energized through adaptation in different climatic zones was intriguing to Elton, since the arctic climate offered plenty of fresh air and sunlight. These were all fac-

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tors of importance in judging the human ecology of Spitsbergen in relation to British settlement. Human ecology was not only about explaining the development of human civilizations and trading as a product of climatic and environmental zones. Elton also envisioned human ecology as a means of organizing knowledge within academia. On the final page of his book he prints a diagram—without any explanation—just “as a reminder that ecology is quite a large subject” (see Figure 6).107 The animal ecology of food cycles had been transformed into a grand ecology of academia. This scheme for intellectual cannibalism is crucial in understanding the emerging scope of a broad ecology. The implication of human ecology was that the academic community should be un-

Figure 6. Charles S. Elton’s diagram of biological surveys from his book Animal Ecology (1927).

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derstood and organized as an animal community. Biological surveys, Elton indicates, should digest almost all niches of research except, perhaps, some humanistic professions like literature, philosophy, or history of science. Medicine and ethics, for example, have formed a research niche dealing with the topic of “parasites.” They consume the “regulations of numbers,” a research niche held by astronomers as well as zoological and social economists. The result is a new way of organizing knowledge along ecological lines, where the biological survey itself is a zone in which various disciplines consume and trade each other’s knowledge. Elton’s ecological scheme for organizing knowledge did not go unnoticed. Edgar Worthington used it in his administration of a grand African survey and later in the International Biological Programme. However, though the reviews of Animal Ecology in academic journals flattered Elton, they did not notice the implications of his work for human activities and research.108 The press reviewed his book as a new approach to natural history for the general reader. The New York Herald Tribune, for example, pointed out that ecology emerged from the old natural history tradition, but that Elton’s success lay in his drawing the field “away from sentiment and anecdote towards the precision that characterizes scientific, that is, valid and usable knowledge.”109 Similarly, the Times Literary Supplement, which reviewed the book along with a whole series of popular natural history and nature writings, stressed that it was “an excellent introduction” to scientific natural history emancipated from “the sterner disciplines of morphology and embryology.”110 Animal ecology was thus perceived both in the press and in academic journals as a fresh and new scientific approach that carried on the best of the old amateurish natural history tradition. Most notable among the reviews was a lengthy and very favorable discussion by Tansley in the Journal of Ecology. There were social reasons for such a positive review. Elton had praised and used Tansley’s work in his book. Besides, Tansley had just arrived at Oxford and it was important for him to make friends among the new generation of ecologists at this university. But Tansley’s praise went far beyond polite networking; Elton had in Tansley’s view opened a path to solving one of the main problems in his own research, namely, the yet tenuous connection between botany and social psychology. Tansley now envisioned “a period of intimate cooperation between botanists and zoologists in ecological work” that over time would provide “the solution of the numerous economic problems” for human welfare.111 Another factor that may have stimulated Tansley to collaborate with zoologists was the issue of gender. Zoology was much more attractive to “the average ‘biological minded’ boy” than botany, which, according to Tansley, suffered from “the reputation of being rather ‘a girls’ school subject.’”112 In

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1929 he had only two students planning to take their final exam in botany compared to ten at the zoology department. To link botany to zoology through ecological relations was thus a way for male botanists to gain entry into a more respected research environment. A broad ecology would be more appealing to Tansley’s prospective male students than botany, which was easily associated with the typical female activity of picking flowers. (Research on animal ecology and the Oxford expeditions were exclusively male activities. Women were not welcome as Elton’s students until the late 1940s when his first female student was accepted on the condition that she do the dishes.)113 Yet some scholars did not like Elton’s book. These were the specialists, who disliked the seemingly general, and thus for them unscientific, ecological approach. One scholar with no interest in ecology challenged Elton on some of his more sweeping statements on freshwater copepods, and asked whether or not “the Ecologist [was] attempting the impossible by working upon such an unlimited field? He cannot hope to master the systematic study of many groups of animals or plants, and if he sets himself the task of sifting the reliable records from the unreliable his work is almost as impossible.”114 What this critic reacted to was the unpleasant experience of having his own research field digested as a means to a different end. Elton replied with a long survey of the literature on the nature of copepods, but admitted with unmistakable British irony that “the ecologist has before him an impossible task, and, as Tansley has said, ‘to the lover of prescribed routine methods with the certainty of “safe” results the study of ecology is not to be recommended.’”115 Elton was now an established scholar. He received a research grant and the university was moving towards offering him a full-time position as demonstrator at the Department of Zoology. At the prospect of such a fortunate development, he noted with joy to Huxley that “I never thought to be an Empire-Builder; but perhaps it’s better than staying indefinitely as a Don!”116 Elton did indeed became an empire-builder, starting with the intellectual cannibalization of competing disciplines he had outlined in the final pages of Animal Ecology. His first “meal” would be the natural historians. In the 1920s there were more than sixty journals in which authors wrote about topics relevant for animal ecology, most of them journals of vigorous natural history societies. Elton thought it would be good “to bring these local journals to some extent into the general circulation, and make such ecological work available to the professional scientists . . . [in a] system of references or abstracts.”117 He knew that Thomas Ford Chipp was about to compile the British Empire Vegetation Abstracts for the Journal of Ecology, and he approached Tansley with the idea of a similar series of abstracts for zoology. Tansley approved the project and Elton compiled his series, which was published at the same time as the vegetation abstracts. Elton later continued this

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rather unusual practice by publishing hundreds of abstracts in every single volume of his own Journal of Animal Ecology. For many of his students, these abstracts provided primary source material when they laid out food chains and ecological diagrams.

The Ecological Answer to “the Depression of the Human Trade Cycle” Elton had yet to get a firm position within the Oxford community and was constantly in search of patrons. He had terminated his contract as university demonstrator in 1928, was living off grants, and those funds ran seriously low. What was worse, fur coats went out of fashion with the crash in the stock market and economic depression, the Hudson’s Bay Company had to pinch and scrape, and in 1931 Elton was consequently let go. Much of the economic debate at the time was naturally about business prospects and the duration of the crisis, and Elton soon found himself engaged in this discourse of economic cycles. The patron for this new research was a wealthy American wilderness-lover and stock trader named Copley Amory (of Boston), who thought the ecologist could provide a scenario for business cycles. This was not so far-fetched. In 1929 the Carnegie Institution of Washington arranged a series of conferences on cycles, at which prominent ecologists such as Frederic Clements lectured along with economists on the methods of cycle studies.118 Their basic message to the anxious business community was that what goes up must come down, that nature’s spinning wheel has to go around, and that the stock market thus eventually would go up again. The terminology of succession, climax, and plague captured this narrative of cyclic patterns, and Elton set forth to confirm it in his research on the population dynamics of voles, mice, and lemmings. Amory, his patron, was a large investor in the fishing industry along the Gulf of St. Lawrence in northern Quebec, and in 1931 he invited several ecologists including Elton to his private Matamek River estate to gain a deeper understanding of the economicecological dynamic of what Elton labeled “the Depression of the human trade cycle.”119 The trade in fur-bearing animals, game birds, lobsters, cod, and mackerel was at an all-time low, and Amory was concerned about the future of his business. The conference was a major event that included notable professors, directors of companies and museums, the president of the Royal Society of Canada, the deputy minister of mines, and Aldo Leopold (representing the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturer’s Institute).120 The result was a beautiful leather-bound volume of the proceedings, The Matamek Conference on Biological Cycles, published by the Matamek Factory. Apparently every word of the discussions was recorded by the company’s ste-

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nographers, and the volume thus provides a lively account of ecological debates at a conference where the management of native Canadians was one of the main topics. Ellsworth Huntington, a particularly broad-minded man, explained to an amazed business community that political parties in the Midwest were determined by climate, that the Russian Revolution could be explained by cyclic sunspots (since “climate has a lot to do with the inert condition of the Russian peasant”), and that there was an apparent relation between climate and sexual activity in Japanese brothels. Climatic cycles were the key to all of this, and the aim of his paper was to explain the natural “ebb and flow of human population” in relation to native Canadians suffering from the collapse of the fur industry.121 Elton was no less self-confident and used human ecology to explain, for example, why “wives will be for sale” every ten or eleven years in Central Asia because of famine, but he disagreed with Huntington’s narrow focus on climatic explanations.122 For years Elton surveyed the Hudson’s Bay Company’s archives. He used statistical methods to analyze historical data on fluctuations in fur-bearing animals. To an audience familiar with economic calculations he thus suggested the use of mathematical models and statistics instead of meteorology as the chief tool for understanding evolution and the fluctuations of animal populations. Such studies would “throw considerable light on the way the human population should be regulated,” he concluded in a rapid shift from descriptive to normative claims.123 For Elton the conference was above all a fundraising event that resulted in major grants from Amory and eventually from the New York Zoological Society between 1932 and 1934. These grants and several others, including one from the Rhodes Trust that was secured by Smuts, helped Elton to establish his Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford.124 To create even more momentum he wrote several popular books on animal ecology to boost interest in the discipline.125

The Oxford University Exploration Club Elton’s activities and the Spitsbergen expeditions caused much excitement within the Oxford community. Students in ecology soon demanded to have their share of the fun and founded the Oxford University Exploration Club. The club was started by the ornithologist Edward Max Nicholson with Elton and Tansley as its first patrons. It was dominated by young students in ecology dreaming about organizing more expeditions to Spitsbergen, the arctic, and beyond. Expeditions organized by the club were at the very heart of the now-blossoming Oxford school in ecology. Students were encouraged to participate in

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multidisciplinary research arranged through the club, with Elton and Tansley as the prime movers behind the scene.126 Both found the academic setting at an old and traditional university like Oxford a bit odd for a new and progressive science like ecology, and deliberately moved their students out of town to create a suitable educational environment: “[T]he real function of undergraduate exploration,” one of the club’s members notes, “[is] the extension of an academic education which is inherently out of touch with the wide world.”127 Another function was the male-bonding activity of travelling. The club was remarkably active in the early 1930s, thanks to an annual grant of £50 from the university to carry out at least one expedition a year. Elton was a particularly eager organizer and patron of the club who sent his best undergraduates on a long series of expeditions:128 1928: Oxford University Greenland expedition 1929: Oxford University British Guiana expedition 1930: Oxford University Lapland expedition through Norway 1931: Oxford University Hudson Strait expedition 1932: Oxford University expedition to Sarawak (Borneo) 1933: Oxford University arctic expedition (Spitsbergen) 1933: Oxford University New Hebrides expedition 1934: Oxford University expedition to Ellesmere Land 1935–1936: Oxford University arctic expedition (Spitsbergen) 1935: Oxford University Greenland expedition 1936: Oxford University Greenland expedition 1937: Faeroes biological expedition 1938: Oxford Cayman Islands biological expedition 1938: Oxford University Greenland expedition Ecology was a guiding theme in most of these expeditions, excursions that investigated a whole range of topics through interdisciplinary research ranging from geology to anthropology. It was crucial for undergraduates to cast their applications for grants as ecologically oriented research if they were to get travel money.129 This was Elton’s attempt to carry out the ecological cannibalization of academic research he suggested in his diagram on the final page of Animal Ecology. As participant, “home agent,” or examiner for returning undergraduates, he would stress the importance of the ecological academic overview of various research fields, and the ability to see relations among the fields. By 1939, most of the 172 members of the club had participated in at least one expedition. The exclusiveness and macho culture of the expeditions is noteworthy; to be included among the Oxford explorers was a high honor granted to the best male undergraduates, and many who would soon be lead-

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ing scientists conducted their first field research under the patronage of the club.130 The policy of the club had a clear north-south dimension; many of the arctic explorers felt that their second challenge would be the tropics and thus took a second voyage south, and first-time explorers of the tropics often longed to see the arctic as well. Travelers to Guiana, for example, noted, “The idea of an expedition to the tropics arose quite naturally in Greenland, and members of the 1928 [Greenland] expedition were largely responsible for the experiment.”131 The ecological explorers were used to laying out zones in the sparsely vegetated arctic, and they continued to use this method in the tropics, where they often relied on a pidgin English to communicate with the locals about the nature of various ecological zones.132 Another repeated theme in the club literature was environmental concern, and many students learned to cast such problems in ecological terms. Tansley’s student Nicholas Polunin, for example, learned to appreciate ecology as a way of framing environmental issues during his visits to Sami-land in the north of Norway and with the Hudson Strait expedition.133 It was especially the aerial overview of a landscape that taught Polunin to frame environmental issues as global ecological problems. The master perspective from above was crucial to his agenda and to the rest of the Oxford school of imperial ecology.

Huxley and Wells: The Board of Directors in the Economy of Nature What were the social aims and values of the Oxford school of ecology? At one level the Oxford ecologists clearly had a romantic affection for nature, with zealous arguments for protection and preservation of environments that were about to change because of human intervention. Max Nicholson at the Oxford University Exploration Club, for example, had a keen interest in nature writings in what the historian Donald Worster has labeled the “Arcadian” tradition, from Gilbert White. Nicholson fashioned himself as a follower of White’s by writing a long preface to a limited 125-copy gift edition of White’s Natural History of Selborne, which was clearly meant for romantic high-society nature lovers.134 However, such Arcadian snobbism was the exception rather than the rule among Oxford ecologists, who endorsed both romantic environmental preservation and hard-core ecological management. To understand this apparent contradiction one may turn to the ecological writings of Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells, two highly respected and widely read intellectuals in their time who saw themselves as forerunners of the new

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ecological approach to both preservation and management of the world’s natural resources. In 1925 Huxley resigned his position at Oxford to become a professor of zoology at King’s College, London, a decision that seems to have pleased both institutions. Some conservative dons at Oxford realized that Huxley was too much a reincarnation of his grandfather with all his public appearances and popular writings, and Huxley was tempted to work for a better salary in a more progressive teaching environment. Yet Huxley kept in close contact with the Oxford ecologists, including Elton and Tansley (the latter asked Huxley to be “a general biological editor and colleague” in his journal work).135 In London Huxley made new social connections. One was with the world-famous novelist and science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, who was not only enthusiastic about Huxley’s popular writings and Science-for-All series, but also shared his interest in ecology. Wells’s importance to the history of ecology has long been ignored, though his writings are crucial to understanding the popularization of ecology, a word which in the 1920s was still one of those odd scientific terms only a few specialists would understand. This would change through popular ecological writings in best-selling books by Wells, whose numerous novels and scientific essays were for many nonspecialists their primary source of knowledge about science and its importance for understanding the human condition. It was Huxley who introduced Wells to ecology through their collaboration, and together they soon promoted the popularization of ecology (as well as moderate eugenics). Huxley learned to appreciate Wells’s thinking through his novel Men Like Gods of 1923. His enthusiastic review of the book shows that he read it as a novel about a future ecological utopia: “The triumphs of parasitology and the rise of ecology have set him thinking; and he believes that, given real knowledge of the life-histories and inter-relations of organisms, man could successfully proceed to wholesale elimination of a multitude of noxious bacteria, parasitic worms, insects, and carnivores.”136 Indeed, Wells’s book is about a future harmony of nature in which humans have risen above individual competition and chosen cooperation in a World State, rational birth control, and total manipulation and ecological control of food chains.137 What Huxley found most fascinating in the novel was an ecological manipulation of nature achieved without utilitarianism. The utopian ecological society was reached, Huxley argued, through the combined interest in two concepts: “the understanding of Nature for its own sake, and its control for the sake of humanity. By control Mr. Wells means not only utilitarian control, but that which, as in a garden, is to please and delight, and that highest control of all, artistic and

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scientific creation.”138 These ideas about scientific humanism and social planning would be central themes in both Huxley’s and Wells’s writings. Their work unveiled a holistic vision for ecology, which however differed from Smuts’s holism by focusing on mechanistic explanations and support of international socialism and global planning. When Huxley met Wells late in 1925 he was immediately invited by him to collaborate with his son George Philip Wells (a former student of Lancelot Hogben working as a zoologist at University College, London), on a book about current trends in biology for a larger popular audience.139 Huxley seized the opportunity and they soon created a plan for a money-making book with numerous printings and large personal profits gained through heavy marketing and a popular style, a game Wells apparently knew very well. A successful book in the science-for-all genre would give each of the authors a remarkable income of at least £10,000 (in comparison, Huxley earned £1,000 a year as a professor at King’s College).140 No wonder then, that Huxley was thrilled by the economic prospects and, pressed by an impatient Wells, chose to resign from his professorship two years after he got the job in order to devote his time wholly to the promising enterprise of sharing science with the masses.141 The book was written with great speed and published as The Science of Life in thirty glossy fortnightly parts, beginning in March 1929 and ending May 1930, when the parts were then compiled into a book format.142 The book’s section on ecology is introduced with a picture of a beastly lion, who with shining green eyes bares its teeth over a dead zebra, with the subtitle “I am the Eater and the Meat” as an illustration of “An African FoodChain.”143 This was clearly not an image of nature on the lines of Smuts’s holistic harmony, but rather a view of nature dominated by the dreadful force of the survival of the fittest. The section about ecology is representative of the Oxford school in ecology—it was written by Huxley and scrutinized in its entirety by Elton before it was edited to fit the science-for-all style by Wells.144 It follows the sequence of a natural history survey of life on Earth, and the aim of the section was to summarize and to help readers obtain a grand overview of the life sciences discussed in the book. The role of ecology was to organize the natural history of species into a “community or society of organisms” that created the “vital balances” of nature. The authors fashioned these balances of nature as “biological economics” after political economy, arguing that “ecology is really an extension of economics to the whole world of life.”145 The economy of nature was not an analogy or metaphor for the economy of the state—the relation between nature and society was much closer than that. Ecology was an extension of political economy:

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[Political Economy] tries to elucidate the relations of producer, dealer, and consumer in the human community and show how the whole system carries on. Ecology broadens out this inquiry into a general study of the give and take, the effort, accumulation and consumption in every province of life. Economics, therefore, is merely Human Ecology, it is the narrow and special study of the ecology of the very extraordinary community in which we live.146 Social economics was another word for human ecology, and the close connection between economy and ecology (also seen in Elton’s animal ecology) demonstrates that British ecologists were deeply engaged in human interaction with nature.147 What concerned the authors was the relation between human agency and “Nature’s agency” (with a capital N).148 They saw nature itself as an actor and agent in the evolutionary and eugenic drama that formed and continued to transform the human condition. The coherence between human agency (economics) and nature’s agency (ecology) explains how human communities evolve into complex societies dependent on life communities in nature. As an example they used Elton’s research for the Hudson’s Bay Company on the statistics of lynx skins bought from 1830 to 1914 to illustrate the connection between ecological circles and political economy. Human communities cope with the balance of nature in different ways, they argued, because some people have a stronger ability to control nature’s ecological agency than other people. This gives them power to colonize other countries: “[t]he colonization of new countries, the change from forest to fields, the reclamation of land from sea, the making of lakes” are all commensurable events in “The Ecological Outlook.”149 It is remarkable and telling that colonization of a country, including suppression of its people, was no different from changing forest to fields, reclaiming land from the sea, and constructing lake ecologies. Wells, Huxley, and Wells admit that the process of colonizing other countries can cause change “forced on nature at the point of human consciousness,” but their own conscience was only concerned with the “danger” of “tapping new [natural] sources of chemical supply and new sources of energy” and thus disturbing an old balance of nature, and even introducing “devastating pests.”150 To succeed in the ecological colonization of another country one had to enslave nature’s agency and force evolutionary processes in the direction of colonizing for the country’s welfare. The authors were well aware of the hubris involved in the attempt to control nature’s agency. Great things can be achieved, they argued, but this might have unexpected outcomes. In a manner similar to the structure of Wells’s Men Like Gods, these authors reel

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off an impressive list of the glorious things mankind can accomplish with the Ecological Outlook, but they also remind the reader of the unforeseeable consequences of the ecological project: “[Man] can colonize a new country in record time . . . [but he] upsets the balance of nature . . . He can reduce disease and the wastage of human life; [but] he is brought up against the danger of perpetuating weakly stocks that might better never exist at all.”151 This is the very danger, this is the hubris, of departing from the ecological laws of nature. Faced with the danger of people being born who from the ecological outlook should not exist, the authors conclude that “[man] cannot leave details to Nature and expect her to be on his side” unless scientific research swiftly controls the circulation of energy and matter: “From the standpoint of biological economics, of which human economics is but a part, man’s general problem is this—to make the vital circulation of matter and energy as swift, efficient, and wasteless as it can be made; and, since we are first and foremost a continuing race, to see that we are not achieving an immediate efficiency at the expense of later generations.”152 Another impending danger, the authors argued, was the inefficient and extensive use of matter and energy at the expense of future generations. Humans waste “bottled sunshine” (oil and coal), for example, “thousands of times more quickly than Nature succeeds in storing it,” they kill more animals than nature produces, burn more trees than nature can grow, and so on.153 Confronted with such environmental havoc humans need to reconsider their fundamental values: “Man’s chief need today is to look ahead. He must plan his food and energy circulation as carefully as a board of directors plans a business. He must do it as one community, on a world-wide basis; and as a species, on a continuing basis.”154 Needless to say, the authors had a bold answer to the environmental crisis. The concept of management is taken to an extreme, with a board of directors planning the business of food and energy circulation on a worldwide basis. This was not metaphorical language: they literally envisioned themselves as being on the board of directors in the economy of nature, managing the circulation of matter and energy for the world. The model was not free-market utilitarian economy, but rather socialistic planned economy. Chapter 6 will discuss this in some detail; at this point, however, it is worth mentioning that Huxley later realized his plan when he became director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, as well as initiator of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The task for the directors of nature’s economy was first of all “to adjust population to supplies” (not the other way around).155 Following CarrSaunders, they argued that the job of population control was pressing “as ur-

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gently as war” because the limited amount of resources in the world could not sustain the growth of the human population. The authors thus felt they somehow had to find means to control human sexual behavior. To pin down their point, they stressed the urgent need to keep a credit-worthy economy of nature: “[The human] species must have its reserves of nitrogen and phosphorus, of timber-growth and soil-fertility, of useful animals and of sources of energy, just as surely as the Bank of England must have its reserves of gold and credit.”156 John Maynard Keynes had yet to influence financial thinking when The Science of Life was written, so a fixed gold standard and balanced state budgets were still part of the holy dogma of economics in the late 1920s.157 The gold reserves at the Bank of England and its policy of a firm gold standard were seen, at least in Britain, as the very foundation of the British Empire. The common opinion was that economic fluctuations had the form of cycles: some argued that fluctuations occurred because of seasons and climate, whereas others pointed to banking practices with cycles of loans and reserves. Yet another more radical group stressed that fluctuations in the market were caused by maldistribution of wealth in society. The consensus, however, was that to minimize the trouble caused by economic cycles one had to balance all budgets and have a firm base in a natural gold reserve. It is therefore no surprise that the authors of Science of Life appealed to the gold reserve of the Bank of England as a basis for the economy of both nature and society. Population growth was conceived as a problem because more children meant more consumption of natural resources, which would undermine the balanced budget of the economy of nature and thus the hope of ever balancing the state budget and keeping the gold standard. The engineers had a crucial role in the economic model the directors of nature’s economy imagined, since they would carry out the struggle against the industrial or natural environment. The engineer and the scientist played crucial roles in the management of nature’s economy through their knowledge of labor discipline and workshop organization based on scientific studies of human efficiency. Studies that filmed laboring workers were in Science of Life expanded to ways of organizing and disciplining nature’s agency.158 The goal was higher efficiency and energy output from the labor source in the economy of nature while maintaining a balanced budget of nature. The nuts and bolts of ecological research, the material methods of investigation such as use of quadrates, life zones, vegetation maps, and aerial photography, could be used to improve the efficiency of nature’s labor. These would in turn be of great help to humanity, since human economy was an integrated part of nature’s ecology. The executives of nature should lead it all. Chapters on “The Nourishment of the Body,” “Fresh Air and Sunlight,” “The Present Health

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of Homo Sapiens,” as well as several chapters on the development of the human mind in relation to the environment all emphasized how nature can be modified for human purposes and reciprocally how humans must change their own habits to fit in with the balance of nature.159 These include action against smoke pollution, an urgent need for cleaning up the atmosphere and limits on the use of coal and oil, ecologically sound ways of using fertilizers, and a slowdown of the current “breeding storms” in human communities by the means of birth control and eugenic improvements of the human stock.160 This, the authors envisioned, can best be achieved through a collective human mind—or a “World Brain” as Wells later put it—represented by the joint body of scientists around the world.161 Science of Life was a great success, and the reviewers went out of their way to praise its educational value. “Wells at His Best,” one reviewer noted (his son and Huxley were largely ignored)—“a fine introduction to ecology.”162 The sales of the fortnightly parts exceeded expectation; they were first compiled into a three-volume edition followed by a two-volume release, which soon was made into one book before it was re-released in a nine-volume edition, followed by a four-volume version, and so on—all subject to variations in the science-for-all movement in various countries and languages.163 There is thus good reason to believe the authors made the fortune they had envisioned, with a steady flow of royalties well into the 1950s, when the volumes were gradually replaced as the standard textbooks for core courses in biology. Yet the book’s importance was not limited to students and lay people. Various Oxford ecologists used ideas from the book in their research, and as a bulwark against General Smuts’s politics of holism. In sum, Oxford ecologists managed through a series of expeditions in the 1920s to enlarge their discipline beyond botany into forestry, zoology, and finally sociology through a process of cannibalizing competing approaches into an ecological order of nature. The chief research instrument in this process was the airplane, which offered the ecologists a desired overview of the environment they investigated. The aim of their research was to empower the social order of their patrons in various colonial agencies or commercial companies by ordering the economy of nature so that it could serve the social economy of British imperialism. This was achieved by rendering the ecological order of nature into an order of knowledge suitable for managerial overview. This aerial view on nature, society, and knowledge—the master perspective from above—was at the very core of British ecological reasoning. Yet there were still methodological problems that troubled the Oxford ecologists, concerns brought to the surface by Smuts, who came to Oxford

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in November 1929 to lecture about the politics of holism. These lectures sparked a heated controversy between Tansley and Phillips (the follower of Smuts and Clements), which will be the topic of the next chapter. As Elton noted in a letter to Huxley in 1929, “Clements is drugged with words. And yet, I am coming to the conclusion that biology may after all need a complete new language before we can get much further.”164

4 Holism and the Ecosystem Controversy

The completely new language that Charles Elton thought was necessary to develop ecology had been under construction for several years. His own concepts of niches and pyramids of numbers in animal ecology, Ray Bourne’s aerial perspective, Robert Troup’s forestry systems, Arthur Tansley’s social psychological systems, and Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells’s management perspectives are evidence of an emerging set of new intellectual tools. The South African counterparts of the Oxford school of imperial ecology were no less eager to develop a completely new ecological language of their own, in this case based on holism and evolution. This story thus enters a period of turmoil between these two different lines of ecological reasoning, which resulted in the most important ecological debate of the interwar period. The tension between mechanically oriented ecologists at Oxford and South African defenders of holism is the theme of this chapter, and the argument is as follows: The debate was about how to conceptually enlarge ecology beyond botany to include humans as a factor changing the face of the Earth. My reading here departs from the French historians of ecology JeanMarc Drouin and Pascal Acot, who focus solely on the epistemic side of the ecosystem controversy and thus fail to understand the political and social ramifications of including the human factor in ecological research.1 The inclusion of human beings into the natural realm implied a whole range of social issues tightly connected to questions about the aims and methods of research in the empire. This was especially the case in Africa, where management of its black population, settlement of whites, and environmental concern were all central to the controversy. Both sides were convinced that there was an urgent need for a large-scale ecological survey of the African continent, but they differed with respect to who should carry it out, by what means, and to what aim. The Oxford and South African groups of scholars each mobilized, both philosophically and scientifically, to prove their case for a broad ecology that included human beings. 118

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A Cape Town Prelude to “The Nature of Life” At the end of July, 1929, the British Association for the Advancement of Science met for the first time in Cape Town, South Africa. It was one of the few meetings the association arranged outside the British Isles, and it naturally became a major event for the South African scientific community. The botanists and ecologists were excited; Iltyd Pole Evans used the opportunity to present the results from the Botanical Survey, John Bews gave a paper substantiating Smuts’s theory about the origin of evolution of South African flora, and John Phillips presented his conception of vegetation communities based on the theory of holism. Still, the definitive highlight of the program was a joint discussion, “The Nature of Life,” arranged by the zoology, botany, and physiology sections with Smuts (still leader of the Unionist Party in political opposition) as the main speaker. It was at this session that one of the formative philosophical debates in the 1930s was sparked: the so-called mechanism versus holism controversy. The session was carefully orchestrated by John Scott Haldane to promote Smuts as a philosophical leader. Haldane had just published a book of philosophy of science in which he devoted considerable space to a favorable discussion of Smuts’s holism and personology.2 A discussion of holism in the British Association would enhance the importance of his own work, and Haldane thus wrote to Smuts and invited him to initiate a debate at the Cape Town meeting. His idea was to get “an ultra-mechanistic [theorist] . . . to speak after you . . . [who could] have your book to bite on.”3 Smuts gladly agreed to the plan, and together they chose a local professor named Lancelot Hogben, whom they knew would take a radical leftist view on mechanism and thus place Smuts and the politics of holism in the safe moderate center of the forthcoming debate. Both sides of the debate had their followers among South African ecologists; on the holism side one found Bews and Phillips, and Hogben and his radical friends dominated the mechanism side. Before turning to the “Nature of Life” debate it is worth recalling in brief what the defenders of holism and mechanism were up to and how they allied with or disassociated themselves from Smuts’s holistic evolutionary views. Bews was the leading follower in the holism camp. The success of his book Plant Forms and Their Evolution (based on Smuts’s lecture from 1925) brought him a job offer as principal of the University of Natal in 1925. He turned it down because of its low salary and went instead to Armstrong College at the University of Durham, where he worked between 1926 and 1927 as professor of botany. From there he wrote Smuts a long, moving letter

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about being “homesick for South Africa,” and his admiration for the general’s ability to see “the dominant operation factor in nature” as well as in politics. Holism, he told Smuts, was a chief source of inspiration for his new book Studies in the Plant Ecological Evolution of Angiosperms, in which he argued that the evolution of tropical flora was an effect of the environment as a whole.4 The book was hardly noticed, except for a flattering review by Phillips designed to lure him back to his colleagues in South Africa and to establish bonds of confidence between them.5 Pole Evans had passed Bews’s complaint about the low salary to Smuts, who somehow managed to secure him a better offer. Bews consequently moved back to Natal to become chairman of the University Senate from 1928 and was elected principal in 1931. His appreciation of Smuts’s help can be seen in his next book, The World’s Grasses from 1929.6 Grasses, it is worth recalling, were Smuts’s main interest and a book about the subject would certainly please the general. In the book Bews developed a new system of classification of grasses that incorporated both the economic and ecological perspectives, so that evolutionary development of one species is seen in holistic relation to others. A set of reviews indicates that it was precisely the global approach in the book that impressed many critics, and that Bews soon came to be seen as one of the world’s leading experts on grasses.7 Another Smuts follower was Phillips, who emerged as a leading ecologist along with Bews. Armed with his Ph.D. dissertation in ecology, Phillips left Knysna to become deputy director of the Department of Tsetse Research at Kondora-Orangi in the Tanganyika Territory (now Tanzania), a position he held from 1927 to 1931. In contrast to his time at Knysna—where he lived with “poor whites”—he now lived “almost in symbiosis” with African chiefs and tribesmen.8 Phillips was the patriarch, advising black people on how to manage their livelihood. The racial policy in Tanganyika was at the time experimental and progressive; the governor, Donald Cameron, was trying to change the territory’s native policy from a direct to an indirect system of trusteeship. Phillips became a firm believer in what he thought was a more humane colonialism. His political views are reflected in his research on the tsetse fly, a fly that carries several diseases which may affect both humans and their livestock.9 Working with the tsetse fly brought Phillips in conflict with some basic assumptions promoted by the Chicago school of ecology, which sought to establish a nonaggressive ecology in tune with progressive democratic ideas of cooperation.10 Confronted with such ideas, Phillips could not help but conclude that the tsetse fly was “a queer beast . . . both as regards individual responses and communal behavior” and simply too destructive to fit into the gentle Chicago model of nature.11 Phillips consequently argued for a tougher management approach in tune with his social-political views on

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trusteeship. The practical conclusion he drew from his investigations into how various environments controlled fly populations was to use fire to regulate the tsetse.12 He did not promote large-scale forest clearance; some of his articles are very sensitive to the need for preservation of primeval forest to protect, for example, lichen and fungus.13 Instead he argued that fire could be used to demolish climaxes of useless weed and create opportunities for cultivating a succession of those kinds of species that were useful for human beings (and useless to the tsetse). The main aim of this research was to serve the “Administrative Officers responsible for the direction and control of native populations.”14 Phillips coined the term “biotic community” as a concept that could capture such administrative relations among white officers, black populations, animals, and plants in connection to the tsetse fly problem. Smuts’s philosophy of holism became Phillips’s main methodological approach and the general consequently read the tsetse investigator’s ecological papers with growing interest.15 This was in tune with Phillips’s aim; he made it perfectly clear to Smuts that “administrative concern, too, plays no unimportant role” in ecological research, especially with regard to the policy of trusteeship. He even invited Smuts to a lecture to hear about ecology in relation to this politics.16 The “biotic community” approach to ecology was thus formed to contribute to a policy of trusteeship based on Smuts’s philosophy of personology. The shift in Phillips’s social status, from officer in Knysna to director in Tanganyika, may have contributed to this shift from detailed studies of plants towards a broader ecology. He was now in negotiations with Pole Evans about a possible professorship at the University of the Witwatersrand, and he begged Smuts to support his request for £1,000 instead of the normal £700 professor’s salary. As an ecologist he could provide a unique view of the nature of politics that was worth the money: Would you perhaps tell me whether, as a statesman, you have been impressed with the possibilities of applying ecological concepts—and perhaps methods—to the study of those grand subjects human endeavor, human experience, human response, and human politics[?] Even in my own humble sphere I find the adoption of the ecological “turn of mind” as regards those with whom I live and labour, pregnant with great possibilities.17 Tansley was of course entirely unaware of Phillips’s “turn of mind” in support of the politics of holism. He knew him only through his correspondence with Warder Allee in Chicago, and through reading his doctoral thesis on forest succession. Tansley thus saw him “as one of the ablest of the younger British ecologists.”18 Ironically, it was Tansley who secured Phillips a prestigious pre-

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sentation for the upcoming International Botanical Congress, and he even wrote a letter in support of his candidacy to the chair in botany at the University of the Witwatersrand.19 On the mechanist side of the “Nature of Life” controversy was Hogben, the newly appointed professor of zoology at the University of Cape Town and former professor of social biology at the Royal College in London. He was the son of an eloquent Methodist preacher who had turned his back on his father’s religious views to become an equally eloquent preacher of fundamentalist socialism. His student, friend, and Science of Life co-author George Philip Wells describes him as “bright-eyed, intensely alive,” and “a very moral man” who “lived in strict conformity to his declared ethical creed.”20 His personal motto “I’m an atheist, thank God” points to a split personality—he devoted as much time to Quakers as to revolutionaries. He got his chair in Cape Town in 1927 thanks to a series of letters of recommendation from Huxley addressed to Smuts (which is rather amazing because Smuts at least formally had nothing to do with appointments of professorships in Cape Town). In these letters Huxley goes out of his way to convince the general that Hogben was neither anti-Darwinian nor politically unsafe, and that his “difficulties” were a personal matter related to his war experience, which probably would fade away with a responsible job.21 Smuts was convinced by Huxley’s letters and he apparently used his connections to have Hogben hired for the vacant chair in zoology. When Hogben arrived in Cape Town, he got to know Tansley’s friend Robert Scott Adamson, the Cape Town professor of botany, and together they would plan how to give Smuts proper resistance at the “Nature of Life” session.22 Soon Hogben’s house became the social hub of the intellectual left in Cape Town, with daily meetings and lively discussions on all kinds of subjects from literature and philosophy to fruit storage, all with a focus on the welfare and revolutionary potential of the working class. His house was also a safe haven for black resistance against racial segregation; he allowed black rebel leaders to hide from the police in a secret room in his basement. They participated in his social life, and he also included “a sizable number” of students of non-European descent in his classes.23 At home he would fire up members of the African National Congress with poems about the racist bourgeois white capitalist: The buck white bows his head in prayer With full assurance of salvation: For God the multimillionaire Is chairman of his corporation. ... One was himself an ample meal

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A diamond ring he wore; He said that niggers could not feel, And knew the comeliest whore.24 Hogben’s talk at the association had its dry run in these meetings as a unifying paper for local radicals and anti-racists, who saw in it a great opportunity to bite back at Smuts and embarrass him in front of the empire’s leading scientists. Smuts led off the “Nature of Life” session and (in his own words) “gave the audience a good dose of Holism.” This was followed by Hogben’s paper on experimental zoology, which in substance was a full-scale attack on Smuts.25 Polemics were one of Hogben’s passions and he apparently started the paper with the now well-known quip, “people will not ask the right questions because they’re afraid of getting the left answers.”26 True or not, what followed was a full-scale Marxist, mechanist critique of the holistic view of matter and politics. In the published version of the lecture, dedicated to Bertrand Russell and with an opening poem by the chief Smuts-basher Roy Campbell, Hogben argued that “the Newtonian system” was “incorporated in British middle-class” and that Darwin’s theory represented a dialectical step towards a material basis for a new classless society.27 Russell had just published Analysis of Matter, which Smuts met with odium: “Russell and I do not see eye to eye on philosophy—he is an atomist while I am a holist.” Russell may have had a similar opinion of Smuts, since he did not refer to him at all, although both took a philosophical departure from recent developments in physics.28 What Hogben did was to spell out this tension with all its fragrant political connotations, and draw a dialectical synthesis between them in his mechanistic view of life. To corner Haldane he based much of his argumentation on his son J. B. S. Haldane’s newly published mathematical theory about the mechanics of natural selection, embracing it as an alternative to Smuts’s holistic synthesis.29 That politics were at the heart of the issue seems clear from his punch line, directed at the growing interest in racist eugenics among South African holistic scientists: he advised that they should be “primarily concerned with sterilizing the instruments of research before undertaking surgical operations upon the body politic.”30 The local aftermath of the debate indicates that neither Bews nor Phillips took Hogben’s advice. Instead they would emerge as the leading proponents of racial ecology and eugenics in South Africa. The first thing Phillips did, however, was to send a long letter in support of Smuts’s “Nature of Life” paper, congratulating him on the way he had handled the mechanistic “nettle.”31 He then sat down and wrote a paper on the biotic community, which carried the holism torch to the International Botanical Conference the next summer.

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The mechanists were equally excited; Hogben could now enjoy local fame among radicals as the one who finally nailed Smuts to the wall on sound philosophical grounds. Yet his fame was short-lived; his opposition to Smuts’s politics of holism left him with few friends (except the students who admired him) and many bitter enemies. His poem to a fellow emeritus professor in Cape Town shows an attitude definitely not felicitous for networking: Toothless and bald And foul of breath, Age stared with brittle Eyes at Death, And, fumbling at his Watch chain, sung: I was a Radical, Myself, When I was young.32 Hogben left Cape Town voluntarily in the summer of 1930 for the London School of Economics, disgusted with the Union’s racial policy and scientific research.

The Controversy Moves to Oxford: Smuts as Lecturer at the University The events in Cape Town were a dry run for Smuts’s lectures at Oxford, which took place only a couple of months after the clash with Hogben. Few scholars and even fewer students had been at the Cape Town meeting, but rumors must have been circulating. The general’s lectures drew an unusually large crowd: he packed the Sheldonian theater at Oxford three nights in a row. These lectures were given with the pomp and circumstance highly valued by Smuts (and by Oxford University’s officials): He was conferred a degree of Doctor of Civil Law and capped in a red gown before he started to lecture in front of the entire Oxford intelligentsia, including Tansley, who talked to Smuts after one of the lectures.33 The lectures were initiated by Herbert Fisher, the newly appointed warden at New College, who thought Smuts’s holism in relation to civil law, politics, and philosophy would challenge the Oxford community.34 Yet the movers behind the scene were the Oxford idealist philosophers, including Alexander Lindsay and John Alexander Smith. It was Smith and Lindsay who in 1926 wrote favorable peer reviews of Smuts’s manuscript for Holism and Evolution and thus secured its publication. The publication was arranged by Smuts’s

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close friend Gilbert Murray who, like the Oxford idealists, thought that holism could promote an argument in favor of their position that would be based on science. They consequently started to lobby among Oxford dons for Smuts to appear at the Sheldonian theater.35 It was planned as their major counter-attack on the growing moral decay and atheism they associated with positivism, materialism, and socialism at Oxford University and beyond. Smuts was supposed to lecture on a policy of idealist holism that Oxford students could lean on as an alternative to the destructive mechanist view of society that they found so common around them. Haldane (Sr.) was of course excited about this endorsement of holism and throughout Smuts’s stay in England advised the general on how to handle the Oxford audience.36 The lectures had another peculiar context: in November 1929 there had been numerous clashes between the South African police and members of the African National Congress. The newspapers reported (wrongly) that the police used machine guns to disperse the crowds, and Smuts was troubled about the violent approach his Nationalist political opponent Hertzog was taking.37 When Smuts stepped up to the podium, the audience would most likely be listening to his talk in the light of this latest news. His first lecture on “African Settlement” was a celebration of Cecil Rhodes’s politics of white settlement policy in Rhodesia, and the purpose of the lecture was to encourage young British students to move to Africa. It was therefore of foremost importance for Smuts to emphasize how easy it was to adapt to the African climate, that the continent had great civilizing potential, and that there were plenty of natives willing to work hard for white settlers. Following his theory of holistic evolution he stressed that “African progress is one whole organic problem and has to be viewed as such.”38 This organic view of settlement policy emphasized the importance of climate to both white settlers and native inhabitants. The most effective way to strengthen “our civilization and claiming Africa from barbarism” was to continue Rhodes’s policy of European settlements “on the healthy high lands.”39 Lowlying countries like Uganda and Zanzibar were not suitable for white settlement, while Kenya, Tanganyika, Nyassaland, and Northern Rhodesia had enough altitude for the whites. There was no danger of a conflict between white settlers and the black population because both parties would find their natural abodes. The virtue of Rhodes’s policy, Smuts claimed, was that it was based on scientific investigation into climatic and biological adaptation. Smuts viewed his policy of separation between high- and low-land people as humane; he was a vigorous opponent of slavery, and he believed that his policy opposed repression of the black population. Instead of a policy of suppression he advocated respecting and even celebrating black people’s natural place in the biological world. The black and the white communities repre-

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sented separate wholes. A social policy based on different climates and altitudes meant that all parties were best off with separation into different bioregions. Whereas Smuts’s politics of segregation was based on his holistic ecology, his politics of civilization was based on evolution. Just like all other species, human beings evolve from one biological level to the next, and the best way to push black evolution on its way was to give them “some time to acquire the habit of going out to work for the white employer.”40 Smuts described the natives as having a “naturally happy-go-lucky” work ethic, and held that they were “slow, unintelligent . . . and display little forethought.” But it was these very characteristics that Smuts thought would make them ideal for routine work chosen for them by a white employer.41 This was based on a biological argument Smuts had developed in his notion of evolution of personalities. Goethe and Whitman represented the highest unfolding of a sublime personality, but natives and Bushmen had the (unfortunate) place at the other end of the human scale of nature. The task of the settlers was thus to bring the native personality to a higher level, ultimately with an equilibrium between the native tribal system and European civilization. The succession of native culture from one level to the next could speed up with the help of white settlers who, because of their European origin, could quickly bring about a cultural climax in Africa: “‘[T]he easiest, most natural and obvious way to civilize the African native is to give him decent white employment. White employment is his best school; the gospel of labour is the most salutary gospel for him . . . even more from the native point of view, the policy of African settlement is imperatively necessary’ (loud cheers).”42 This paternalism is also expressed in his second Rhodes Memorial Lecture about native policy in Africa. Here Smuts explained that the “Negro and the negroid Bantu” were unique because they had been “fixing” themselves for thousands of years and thus probably represent “the original mother-type of the human race.”43 Alluding to his romantic inclination from Goethe and Whitman, Smuts admits that it was not an intrinsic goal to civilize all natives. The savages were like children, and “a childlike human cannot be a bad human, [verily] the African is the only happy human I have come across.”44 This opinion fits well with both Smuts’s idea about a paramount harmony in nature and his notion of evolution, because he adds that “these children of nature have not the inner toughness and persistence of the European, nor those social and moral incentives to progress which have built up European civilization in a comparatively short period.”45 In political terms this meant that black peoples should not be granted the same level of human rights, but should be subject to indirect white rule (yet could take care of some of their own local tribal affairs).

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In sum, Smuts used his ecological theory of holism to defend territorial segregation between white and native “wholes,” and argued that evolution of blacks could only occur under white trusteeship. The ultimate goal of this politics of holism was to create world peace by expanding the colonial policy of the British Empire to a global League of Nations.46 The British king was enthusiastic about Smuts’s lectures and granted him a three-day audience so that they could thoroughly discuss his politics of holism.47 Members of the Cabinet were equally excited and promptly offered Smuts the position of high commissioner for Palestine so that he could use holism to establish an ecological homeland for the Jewish race (at the expense of “lower” Arabic personalities).48 Smuts was tempted but declined the offer because of his South African obligations. Judging from reviews of his lectures when they emerged as Africa and Some World Problems in January 1930, the scholarly reception was mixed.49 The reviewer in Journal of Negro History was downright enraged, calling the book a piece of “propaganda [that] glorifies the oppression of the weak by the strong and makes Livingstone the forerunner of the evil régime.”50 Other sharp criticism came from Joseph Houldsworth Oldham, a Fabian socialist and member of the International Missionary Council living in Kenya, who devoted a short book solely to scrutinizing Smuts’s thoughts. He pointed to the massacre of natives at Port Elisabeth and Bulhoek and noted that “[w]hen he is dealing with international affairs, we find a wholly different General Smuts.”51 He could not believe that Smuts had any respect for the human value of African people, or that work in the mines had a civilizing or moral effect on the black population. One of those who read Oldham with interest was H. G. Wells, who used his views in a fierce critique of Smuts. Wells thought that holism resulted in politics under which black peoples were “being deprived of educational opportunity and political expression. They are being driven towards the alternatives of mass insurrection or complete degradation.”52 Instead of racist ecological holism he repeated the reasoning from Science of Life as a possible way of surveying the economic and social prosperity of Africa as a whole continent. As a resistance to the politics of holism, Wells suggested focusing on the means of ecological production of food among the peoples of Africa. His main concern in this respect was the apparent “breeding storm,” which could deprive the continent of potential social and economic development. Wells was afraid that the human population had passed “the security point” for “a prosperous sustained biological equilibrium,” and that politicians thus had to get their act together to control human procreation.53 To promote further settlement in Africa as Smuts did was thus completely irresponsible. Other critics of Smuts pointed out that it was not clear whether the African

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environment really could be a suitable continent for Europeans. One reviewer thought Smuts made “highly debatable assumptions” about the climate in Africa being healthy for European settlers; there was no “healthy plateau stretching from Rhodesia to the sources of Nile” as Smuts presupposed, and it was doubtful that Europeans could “rear families successfully generation by generation” under the strong rays of the African sun. To clarify the whole issue of climate and European settlement, it was necessary to survey the continent, and “[t]he sooner a systematic survey is set on foot the better.”54 Even though Smuts received much criticism on social and environmental issues, it is important to recognize that his lectures forced the British audience to look at Africa as one unit. This is apparent in a remark by Oldham, who like many critics thought that Smuts “made people think about Africa. His prestige, his gifts of imagination and his eloquence have aroused the public mind fresh, as no one else could have done, to the importance of the continent.”55 His political reconstruction of South Africa after the Boer War convinced his audience that he offered a plausible unifying vision for the continent. The ecologist Edgar Worthington recollects that Smuts’s idea about seeing “Africa as a whole,” as a “union,” appealed to both social and natural scientists’ vision of a unified British Empire and League of Nations. The often arbitrary divisions of Africa into various colonies, protectorates, and mandates had led to similar divisions of knowledge, and Worthington felt “that a pooling of experience could be of great benefit to all” colonial powers on the continent.56 Smuts’s lectures had thus triggered more questions than they provided answers, but he managed to put Africa as a whole on the research agenda. Oxford scholars were challenged to come up with solutions for organizing knowledge about the continent in a way productive for the empire. Julian Huxley was surveying East Africa for the Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Native Education at the time of Smuts’s lectures. He probably discussed holism with Phillips when he visited the latter at the tsetse research station in Tanganyika, and read Smuts’s lectures with great interest upon his return to London. He would use an entire chapter in his African View to scrutinize Smuts’s environmental assumptions. He had for several years been in correspondence with Smuts about holism; “I cannot follow you all the way,” he wrote back in 1927, “in making the tendency to wholeness a fundamental attitude of reality,” especially with regards to education.57 Huxley was a defender of mechanistic explanations in biology and indeed very critical of the philosophy of J. S. Haldane, the local Smuts follower. In African View Huxley agreed with Smuts about the importance of indirect rule of natives and the civilizing mission of white people, but he was

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more skeptical about a massive settlement policy because it could ruin the fragile African wildlife. Instead of massive settlement in pristine nature, which surely would cause a “massacre” of animals, he wanted to regard “wild animals and wild nature in general as worthy of preservation for its own sake . . . because the world would be poorer without them.”58 To secure such biocentric respect for the inherent value of animals he proposed to create national parks where there should be no human interference. In practice this meant creating a tripartite segregation of the African environment; one for white people ruling the natives, another for a native reserve without Europeans, and finally national parks with pure wild nature liberated from the disturbing human factor.59 The policy of segregation in Africa and the notion of white superiority were thus not foreign to Huxley, although on other occasions he argued against racist views. To Huxley it was altogether unclear how suitable the African landscape was to European settlers, and to figure it out he, Oldham, and several others critical of Smuts initiated an African Research Survey Committee. The full history and background of the origin of this survey has been studied by the historian John W. Cell, who shows that its prime mover was Oldham, who was helped by several other London scientists and politicians who disassociated themselves from the politics of holism.60 Yet Smuts would still serve as an important patron for the project because they needed a person of international political fame and moral integrity to secure its practical success.61 This is evident in the foreword to the African Survey, which points to the importance of Smuts’s lectures. The agenda of the committee reflected Smuts’s holism: ideally all branches of knowledge should be covered, and the members thus included professors and administrators from all of the main academic fields.62 The aim of the survey was to collect knowledge about all of Africa and present it in one book usable as a reference guide for political management of the continent as a whole. Money for the survey was granted through the Carnegie Corporation in New York, which long had an interest in the relevance of the problem of the “poor white” and other racial phenomena for policies in the United States, and was aided by supplementing grants from the Rhodes Trustees.63 Huxley, together with the leftist John Orr, was put in charge of the natural science part of the survey, and their support came from Oldham and the project’s London supporters, who were critical of Smuts. The fortnightly issue of Science of Life in which Wells, his son, and Huxley suggested the establishment of a board of directors for the economy of nature had been released in December, 1929. This occurred during a formative period within the African Research Survey Committee activities, and it is likely that the content of the

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issue was one of the reasons that Huxley was invited to serve on that committee, in addition to his knowledge about the continent from his book African View. In South Africa, Smuts’s lectures filled Phillips with intellectual relief, which he expressed in an exulting letter of congratulations to Smuts. He was proud to inform the general that they were already discussing the content of his lectures in the Legislative Council of East Africa, especially with respect to the question of indirect rule of the black population and white settlement policy. Smuts had made “matters regarding native administration so plain,” especially on the issue of the dangerous Kaffirs Phillips had been troubled by since his youth. He ends his salute: “May I say how proud we South Africans here are of your notable deliveries at Oxford: your career certainly inspires us with a deep sense of national pride.”64 His words were probably representative of many South African botanists. Phillips embarked on a paper that could capture the ecological significance of Smuts’s lectures. When the first draft was ready, he begged Smuts for a meeting so they could go over its content in detail before he presented it to the International Botanical Congress. Smuts promptly reviewed the paper and even secured Phillips travel money through Pole Evans.65 The paper was ready in June 1930 under the title “The Biotic Community,” and its aim was to capture a broad ecology; or as Phillips explained to Smuts: I do not restrain ecology to a study of vegetation, I mean the full ecology . . . that of man, other animals and vegetation . . . I feel a study of the social ecology of our native problem would help us [in] understanding better than we do at present how to interpret the native mind, how to provide the best condition for his and our own welfare, how to better many of the difficulties in native administration. There is a wonderful field of work in this connection, at our very door.66 The agenda for the biotic community approach to ecology was very clear; it was to suggest an ecological administration of Africa’s troubling black population. The fieldwork Phillips refers to was his own grand plan for “an ecological survey of Africa” guided by the principles in his paper about the biotic community. This was central to the issue; the general should take the necessary steps to secure South African ecologists a prominent role in any survey of the continent at the expense of the British. To succeed in this he begged for money so he could go and visit Clements and talk to him about such an African survey. He was convinced that Clements would support his ideas and perhaps even mobilize American financial support for the project, since the Americans too had social unrest in their black population. Research in human

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ecology in Africa could perhaps suggest an administrative path to solving racial problems in the United States.

The Controversy Arrives at the Fifth International Botanical Congress The Fifth International Botanical Congress, which met in Cambridge in August, 1930, was a major event for botanists and ecologists, with nearly a thousand attendees. The president of the Congress was Albert Charles Seward from the Botany School in Cambridge, who used Smuts’s holism as a point of departure in his evolutionary studies of plant life.67 Yet the executive committee for the congress who did all the planning for the meeting included Tansley and many of his old friends from London, including Chipp, who acted as one of the secretaries and did most of the administrative work. The president for the section on ecology was Henry Chandler Cowles from Chicago, who noted that “[t]his [section] was probably the largest and most representative gathering of ecologists and phytogeographers ever assembled.”68 The large audience made this congress an important event in the history of ecology. Two of the sessions are of particular importance here: a long debate about ecological terminology dominated by Tansley and Phillips, and Bourne’s paper on the use of aviation technology for ecological exploration. The session on terminological issues in the classification of vegetation had several contributors who focused on the possibility of developing a common plant-sociological language. The initial debate was triggered by philosophically minded continental ecologists who were critical of the more empirically oriented British tradition. The Swiss delegate Eduard Rübel took the lead by proclaiming that “science was the forming of concepts . . . abstracted from life.”69 Thus, he argued, a philosophical clarification was urgent if ecology should obtain its deserved place within the realm of the exact sciences. He gained much support for an idea proposed by the Swedish ecologist Gustaf Einar Du Rietz to appoint an International Commission on Concepts in Plant Sociology to discuss such issues. Phillips was skeptical in the beginning, and thought “ecology had enough sesquipedalian nomenclature already.” Thus, he argued, “for the sake of science, [conceptual] additions and complications should be avoided,” and ecologists should just stick to “the working utility of the association concept of Clements and Tansley.” He was also “sure the British ecologists overseas would be glad to be represented [in such a Commission] by Prof. Tansley.”70 Tansley himself, however, was not happy. He was forced into an ecophilosophical commission as a follower of Clements, and promptly responded that he “doubted profoundly” whether

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any valuable result would emerge from any terminological working group, and that he thought “they should leave the matter to the survival of the fittest concepts and terms.”71 Tansley suffered defeat, though, and the congress voted in favor of the following resolution: “That an International Committee be appointed to investigate the possibility of attaining general agreement on some of the more important concepts and terms in Plant Sociology; and if sufficient agreement can be obtained to make proposals for an international terminology to be presented to the Sixth International Botanical Congress.” The race was now on to find the best research concepts. The Sixth Congress was to take place in the Netherlands in September, 1935. Ecologists from all over the world were supposed to settle conceptual questions in their field. The commission was dominated by continental scholars, but included both Phillips and Tansley. The first paper after the approval of the resolution was Phillips’s presentation, “The Biotic Community.” This was probably by accident, but his talk was now given extra weight because it could set the agenda for the commission. Phillips adopted a professorial tone of voice and dismissed his own earlier work as much too narrow; it was time, he believed, to reject the overspecialization of plant and animal ecology and move on to a broader ecological outlook. Having fashioned himself as a follower of Smuts’s philosophy of holism, Phillips could proudly tell the congress that Smuts had read through the manuscript and was “in agreement with his interpretation.”72 This paper not only concerned ecological concepts, but also involved the endorsement and patronage of the political philosophy of the South African general. He introduced the broad concept of the biotic community, which in its origin, growth, development, response, reaction, and reproduction behaves as one complex organism. Moreover, “[i]n accordance with the holistic concept of Smuts, the biotic community is something more than the mere sum of its parts: it possesses a special identity—it is indeed a mass-entity with a destiny peculiar to itself.”73 A biotic community had an identity analogous to Smuts’s notion of personality (from his Whitman study), and what constituted this identity was the membership of every species in the community as a whole. Phillips transferred Smuts’s theory of the evolution of personalities and wholes into the natural world. He drew the empirical evidence for his argument from his research on vegetation communities and on how tsetse flies affect the cyclical growth and decline of a natural habitat: “Man comes into the biotic community at times: for example, he is driven by advancing human or cattle trypanosomiasis from his villages, with the result that vegetation rapidly develops upon his gardens and grazing areas, game advances, and with it the [tsetse] fly.”74 In the interactions between the tsetse fly and the local vil-

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lage Phillips saw mutual membership in a larger biotic community and the need for trusteeship of nature. In front of the congress audience he also criticized Tansley for his overly narrow approach, which often excluded important animals and inorganic factors from ecological research. According to Phillips’s reading of Tansley, these factors “cannot be considered as members of the community, [but] they are certainly integral parts of the ‘system.’”75 The issue was whether to use a system or holistic approach to the biotic community, which on a practical level raised the question of the scope and limitations of ecological research. The immediate reception of the paper was very positive. Rübel praised him by saying that “Phillips was not without friends in Europe” and reeled off a list of continental supporters.76 Tansley was more cautious. Although he thought the concept “of the integration of groups of entities into higher and higher ‘wholes,’ each of which contained something more than the sum of its members (General Smuts’s holism) was quite sound philosophically,” he believed it was “certainly beset with many difficulties which practical ecologists would have to consider and discuss.”77 Tansley’s merely polite support of Smuts’s philosophy clearly dismisses the practical value of holism to ecology. It is unclear whether Phillips understood the understatement in Tansley’s remark; he wrote to Smuts from his hotel room the same evening that his “paper on the biotic community concept was well received,” that the holism approach “arouse[d] some special interest,” and most important that Tansley “gave your concept the high praise and support it deserves.”78 Given his success at the congress, he invited himself to Smuts’s home so that they could discuss together whether the biotic community concept could be the cornerstone for a full-fledged ecological survey of Africa along the lines of Smuts’s lectures at Oxford. What he did not tell the general was that Tansley also thought that holism was beset with practical difficulties and thus a questionable approach, and that he favored a more mechanistic approach to ecology. Although Tansley did not have an immediate response to the issue of interdisciplinary research addressed through Smuts’s holism, the beginning of Tansley’s forthcoming answer appeared in the next set of papers given at the congress in two long sessions, the “Cartography of Species and Vegetation,” and the “Mapping of Vegetation.” At the heart of the first session was a suggestion from a Swiss panelist that all continental ecologists should prepare a grand unified (einheitlich) botanical map of Europe based on a shared system of mapping. Most of the participants greeted such a unifying enterprise with delight, except for Phillips, who thought such mapping would come at the expense of in-depth fieldwork.79 Nevertheless, the congress passed a resolution in favor of the project, with Tansley as the project’s leader. The second and final session dealt directly with the method for the project,

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with Tansley and Bourne as key speakers. Bourne’s paper, “Mapping Vegetation from the Air,” is especially noteworthy since it was his first appearance at a scientific meeting of this scale, an honor undoubtedly promoted by Tansley. It was also the first time aerial surveys and photography were introduced to ecologists at an international conference. The main point of his paper was to highlight the way in which this research method could draw together various disciplines, information, and research through a system of colors and plotting on maps. “From beginning to end [of aerial vegetation mapping],” Bourne explained to the congress, “the closest possible collaboration is called for between geologists, pedologists, ecologists, agriculturists, foresters, and air surveyors.”80 All the sciences and various kinds of information could be placed on top of each other in layers of color, grating, or transparent paper and thus produce a coherent, easily accessible image of all factors relevant to understanding the succession of vegetation in a region. Tansley’s paper addressed this very “method of indicating distribution [of species] by means of dots or symbols,” and he sought to develop an universal “dot system” for vegetation maps. Surprisingly, no one commented on Bourne’s aerial survey method, although from a historical perspective it was the most original paper at the congress. However, Tansley’s “dot system” for ecological maps was a success, and drew support from the audience, including Phillips.81 When Bourne’s paper was published as a book in 1931, it was meant to serve as a methodological foundation for a “scientific survey of the empire.”82 Bourne was painfully aware of the grandiose task of such projects even with the help of aerial photography, and therefore suggested the method of sampling and technical cooperation with the pilots in the Aircraft Operating Company. How he investigated and established such sample zones has already been discussed at length in the previous chapter. What was new in his 1931 study was his suggestion of how to spread the use of the aerial method of surveying to the entire empire for the sake of land distribution policy. His idea was to match “the type area” with the “Land Settlement Policy” so that scientific ecology could help find the right land for the right type of people and in the end reach a “balance between white and black” humans in a “civilization of many races.” The political aim of ecological sampling in a grand survey of the empire was thus to find environmental solutions to social unrest among diverse human ecological groups in the colonies. The idea was to divide different races according to their corresponding ecological zones. The overview effect provided by airplanes was crucial in this project; as one reviewer put it, “The airplane helps to restore the perspective: it gives the Brobdingnagian view.”83 The ecologists should by all means avoid a humble Lilliputian view of the world. In sum, two holistic or global approaches to ecology were apparent at the

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Congress; philosophical holism along the lines of Smuts, launched by his follower Phillips, and “holism” along the lines of grand aerial map-surveys endorsed by Tansley and introduced by his Oxford colleague Bourne. Although both approaches were politely endorsed by representatives of both camps, they marked two different scientific modes and methods. As Phillips noted in a letter to Allee about the published version of the paper: “[it] appears to be attracting a little kindly interest in some quarters, even as it is bound to stir up wrath in others.”84 Wrath indeed; the tension would soon grow into a major confrontation. The two sides now went to mobilize and create momentum for their causes knowing that the international botanical community would meet again in September 1935 to establish the proper ecological vocabulary and method. The race was on to come up with the best result, and the following two parts of this chapter will follow the emergence of Tansley’s ecosystem theory in the Oxford community, and next the development of Phillips’s holistically informed biotic community theory in South Africa. In the final part of the chapter, I will examine Tansley’s famous critique of Phillips and the fate of the International Committee on ecological terminology at the Sixth International Botanical Congress in the Netherlands, September, 1935.

The Emergence of Tansley’s Ecosystems Theory Phillips’s challenge to the Oxford community was to come up with a mechanistic and administrative survey method for a broad ecology that included botany, animals, and human beings. Tansley, Bourne, and Elton mobilized to resolve this issue, along with Chipp and Huxley as sideline supporters. Admittedly, Chipp’s contribution was hardly academic; the virtue of his work was on the administrative level, where he created a system of ecologists. The Congress had decided by resolution to make an international address book of botanists, scientific institutions, universities, and societies. With great devotion Chipp collected and compiled the addresses within the British Empire into a 600-page reference book.85 This soon became a necessary desk tool for the growing international community of ecologists, with Chipp of Kew Botanical Garden at its center. It was a crucial device for creating a sense of international cooperation and for building a global social system among ecologists. The logistics of the congress, the address book, the editing of the proceedings, and all kinds of administrative duties at Kew were an enormous workload for Chipp. He worked day and night, including Christmas Eve, 1930, when “in the absence of the Director” he wrote a tedious receipt for parcels of 88 different mosses from Brazil.86 All the work became too much for him

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and he died prematurely of a heart attack at the end of June 1931, only fortyfour years old. Chipp’s death was a major blow to Oxford ecologists; they lost a key player in the mobilization of ecology toward a large social network. His network also went beyond the world of botanists and extended into the secret and important world of brotherhood among the English Freemasons. Now it was all gone. Sadly, Chipp left his family and children in the same situation as when his own father died prematurely, and his friends circulated a moving plea for contributions to a memorial fund to secure education for his children. His self-sacrificing generosity on behalf of ecology was hardly repaid: “Chipp made his way in the world by his indomitable pluck and perseverance and without any financial resources. Any small savings he was able to put aside were derived entirely from his official salary.”87 The plea reveals a sense of guilt among the more visible ecologists for their exploitation of his administrative devotion, not to mention a sense of loss of an extremely important social mediator.88 With the loss of his collaborator, Tansley had to re-organize his social network and mobilize the Oxford community. He was by then sixty years old and thought the time had come to pass on the editorship of his New Phytologist to his students. The journal was subsequently edited from 1932 by his young colleagues at Oxford, Arthur Roy Clapham and William Owen James, and by Harry Goodwin at Cambridge. Yet he had other reasons for his editorial retreat; he was to retire in 1937 and he had yet to publish any major empirical or theoretical work. Tansley had a whole series of articles, textbooks, and monographs on his curriculum vitae, but his life-work—a book to be remembered—was not on the list. He consequently began to research and lay out the scheme for a major book about vegetation on the British Isles, whose aim was to contribute to both the empirical and the methodological sides of ecology. The challenge from Phillips, the activity among his ecological colleagues at Oxford (discussed in Chapter 3), and the intellectual environment at Magdalen College may explain why he chose to return to psychology to renew the theoretical side of ecology. This is not too strange, considering the long tendency among ecologists to create terminology based on analogies to human behavior. Tansley amassed a thick file of notes, lectures, and manuscripts on psychology from his time at the Magdalen Philosophy Club, all of which date from between May 1931 and January 1933. To understand this important material it is necessary to point to the philosophical debate at Magdalen in a period when the College was the scene of a war between romantic idealists and material realists. To understand this conflict it is necessary to introduce key fellows around the Magdalen dinner table to fully appreciate Tansley’s manuscripts.

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The leader among Magdalen idealists was John Alexander Smith, the peer reviewer of Smuts’s Holism and Evolution, who in his 1930 lectures on the heritage of idealism argued that truth could only be understood through studies of the history of thinking. His main intellectual companion was Robert George Collingwood, who argued that scientific knowledge was based on the history of ideas about nature. His widely used textbook, The Idea of Nature, was generated from lectures at Magdalen in the early 1930s. To understand the history of ideas was to him the precondition for understanding the nature of scientific truth, which ultimately could lead to revelation of the ultimate truth that is with God. His lectures ended with a vigorous support of idealism (including Smuts’s holism) and an equally harsh condemnation of Russell’s realism and logical positivism as the product of “the fanaticism of converts.”89 What concerned Collingwood was moral decay, and flight from Christian values into the ethically and politically suspicious path of positivism and material realism, which he believed led to an unforgiving technological line of reasoning. Equally suspicious of the realists was the literary romanticist Clive Staples Lewis, author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and tutor of English literature at Magdalen, who taught his students that fiction was closer to truth than sense perception. Lewis’s close friend John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, equally famous for The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), could not have agreed more. The early 1930s were the formative years of their respective literary projects, which fed upon the work of Collingwood and Smith as well as Magdalen historians, theologians, and mediaevalists.90 Lewis and Tolkien believed that through ascending a hermeneutic circle of literary images and ancient mythologies one could reach the eternal truth that is with God. One had to depart from the worldly material realm and enter the spiritual world of literary fiction to achieve true knowledge and thus understand the human condition. Most radical was Tolkien, who invented a new language, land, and creatures based on medieval mythologies and Nordic sagas to shape an idealistic narrative that would be an antidote to modern British society. In The Lord of the Rings he brings the reader to a romantic pre-modern past blessed with social harmony, followed by a long, dramatic (and successful) fight against mechanistic reasoning and technology, which are represented by the powers of Mordor. His literary resistance against a progressing industrial society was expressed in terms of an ideal world with fairy-like creatures in spiritual communication with the landscape and its powers. Indeed, the historian of environmentalism, Meredith Veldman, argues that “green” protests in Britain after the Second World War had their origin in the literary resistance to modernity found in the authorship of Lewis and Tolkien.91 Smith and Collingwood’s teaching assistants were two young philosophers named John Frederick Wolfenden and Thomas Dewar Weldon. John Freder-

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ick—or Jack among friends—published a textbook on philosophy in 1932 intended for undergraduates, which Tansley must have read very closely.92 It is an easily read book with balanced pro and con arguments within the ongoing realism versus idealism debate. It provided Tansley with much ammunition for the club meetings. Weldon, on the other hand, soon became a wellknown philosopher whose life project was to rescue Kant’s philosophy from his (solipsistic) idealist admirers and show that his epistemology could serve as a firm base for scientific empirical research.93 Cleverly, he adapted Collingwood’s historical approach, but showed that Kant was building not on a history of ideas but on a history of science. His important work on Kant grew out of several years of constructive discussion with realist scientists at the Magdalen Philosophy Club. The realist side of the Magdalen dinner table was equally well represented. Most notable among them was the clinical neurologist and neurophysiologist Charles S. Sherrington, who won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his work on nervous systems.94 He was no dogmatist and would frequently refer to romantics with sympathy, engaging in debates with Weldon on the importance of Kant’s Critique to neuroscience. He clearly rejected the idealism of Smith, Lewis, and Tolkien, however. The tutor in zoology, John Zachary Young, was more of a realist hardliner; in the meetings he would argue that in his discovery of nerve fibers in the squid and octopus he relied on physical facts about a real and not a noumenal world. The research of Sherrington and Young surely revitalized Tansley’s interest in psychology, and together they would form a clique focusing on the nerve systems of both humans and animals. Other realist participants included the economist Redvers Opie, who was working on an English translation of Joseph Schumpeter’s theories of business cycles,95 the lecturer in physics Patrick Johnson, and the tutor in natural science Malcolm Henry MacKeith. These idealists and realists were Tansley’s main audience, and his writings should be understood as an attempt to answer the critique coming from the vocal idealist group. His notes from the Magdalen Philosophy Club cover largely the same issues as in his 1920 book about Freudian psychology, but there are also important changes. The radicalization of many of his friends after the successful revolution in Russia did not suit Tansley’s taste, and the radical part of his intellectual vocabulary had by now largely disappeared. However, this is not to say that he had turned conservative; his radicalism lay in defending realism and Freud against his idealist colleagues. His self-perception seems to be that politically he was neither to the left nor to the right but in the progressive scientific front, developing a sound psychological base for a new, moral philosophy of science. The spring of 1932 was a particularly hectic period for the Magdalen Phi-

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losophy Club. Weldon started what would be a vivid debate with a position paper that critiqued the idealist reading of Kant: He argued that the Critique revolutionized philosophy by making use of empirical advances in experimental physics.96 The true reading of Kant’s universal “system of knowledge” would show that it was a philosophy relying on and laying a firm epistemological basis for universal laws in physics. Tansley’s response shows that he was clearly intrigued. He rejected the search for truth in the history of ideas and the solipsistic mystical longing for a transcendent God, which he associated with idealism. In Weldon’s paper he saw something different: a possible connection between the cognitive system of the mind he knew from Freud and the epistemology of reasoning of Kant.97 Weldon had touched upon Kant’s ethics, and Tansley now began to ponder whether with the help of Freud one could give an account of the apparently unexplained psychological assumption about “good will” in Kant’s moral reasoning. The idealists were not pleased; Smith replied with a defense of subjective idealism, and his follower Harry Burrows Action (a senior demy in philosophy at Magdalen) questioned the possibility of establishing an ethics based on science. During the next meetings Johnson and MacKeith continued with what looks like a defense of Weldon (their papers are lost), before John Horace Woodroffe (a demy in natural science) launched a full-scale attack on realism and a defense of subjectivism: If John [Zachary Young] and I stand side by side and look at a starfish do we see the same thing? A star-fish means far more to him than it does to me, because he knows its genus and species and habitat and sexual habits, while I know none of these interesting facts. But do we both receive the same sense-impressions and then interpret them differently, or do we see, perceived or apprehend two quite different objects, I an amusing-shaped piece of pudgy stuff and he whatever he would describe a starfish as being? I am afraid this may seem to be a very stupid question, but it is important to philosophers, especially those who have a subjective bias.98 Woodroffe himself was one of those with a “subjective bias” and did not believe in any universal system of knowledge, and his admittedly naive question would require an in-depth psychological and epistemological explanation of the possibility of universal knowledge and ethics. Woodroffe then handed this “rapidly-growing baby to Tansley,” the next speaker on the list. Tansley’s response came in a paper called “The Temporal Genetic Series as a Means of Approach to Philosophy,” presented to the club in May, 1932. This is his main contribution to philosophy of science and the longest explanation to be found of the “system” concept he went on to use in his ecosys-

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tem theory, and it is therefore surprising that the paper never appeared in print (indeed a later version of it may have been rejected by The British Journal of Medical Psychology).99 Tansley starts by juxtaposing how the idealist metaphysician wrongly takes “the highly developed mind of European man” as a philosophical departure, whereas the realist biologists and the behaviorists are equally erroneous in focusing solely on the brain as an organic material object.100 Instead he seeks to develop an intermediate position with Freudian psychology conceptually bridging inorganic and organic matter, the physiological and the psychical world, and finally psychological activity and ethical values. In other words, he tried to provide a philosophy explaining first the origins of life, second the epistemological question of how the mind gets knowledge of the external world, and third the relation between a material brain and the ethical judgments of the mind. This was his “temporal genetic series” from inorganic matter to living organisms, from external world to mind, and from psychology to ethics. This was a more than modest task for a relatively short philosophical lecture, and Tansley’s chief unifying device thus had to be fairly simple: he used the concept of systems. Tansley readily admitted that no one has empirical knowledge about the origin of life, but he speculated about how living protoplasm may have emerged from increasingly complex chemical compounds in water. The theory resembles J. B. S. Haldane’s speculations about the origin of life, and Tansley used it as a source for his concept of system: “Protoplasm, in its physico-chemical aspect is a complex mixture of organic and inorganic substances, a mixture however, that is also a system,” which exchanges material between itself and its surroundings and thus maintains itself indefinitely. From this, he concludes that “[o]rganisms are to be regarded as self-maintaining physico-chemical systems.”101 Through a discussion of the origin of life Tansley constructed a temporal genetic foundation for his system approach to ecology. Yet it was only a conceptual theory whose main function was to serve as a plausible alternative to both metaphysical speculations about the origin of life in the omnipotent power of God and vitalistic theories about teleological life-forces in nature. It is in the second part of his lecture that he turns to an epistemological discussion of how human beings obtain knowledge of the external world. Here he explains why the system approach provides a better and more productive philosophy of science than does the view of his idealistic colleagues. He repeats his outline of the mind and the brain from New Psychology and stresses in particular how the development of “nervous systems” depends on internal networks of energy exchange and stimuli from responses to the external world:

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We are not necessarily psychically “aware” of a stimulus which we perceive and respond to physiologically, but we are frequently aware of an object from which stimuli proceed. Psychical awareness is physiologically conditioned by almost immeasurably complicated combinations of nervous impulses in the central nervous system of the higher mammals, and it is through this means that we synthesise the results of physiological stimuli, so that psychical awareness of objects emerges. This awareness of objects I propose to take as the mark of the psychical since it is the foundation of what we call Knowledge.102 This paragraph captures Tansley’s epistemology as a mechanistic coordination of stimuli and responses between the external systems of natural objects and the psychical nervous systems. Yet an idealist like Collingwood could still place this system theory as yet another idea of nature in the pantheon of human history. What is worse, the skeptic could object that there was no difference in principle between, say, Tolkien’s literary fairy-world and Tansley’s world of physico-chemical systems. The rest of Tansley’s paper may be read as a long argument for refuting this skeptical viewpoint. Tansley knew his audience well, and continued by saying: “I believe God would see no discontinuity between the physiological and the psychical. Such a belief means that I believe in continuity throughout the universe.”103 This is one of the few religious remarks in Tansley’s authorship and it is best understood as an attempt to accommodate his religious audience. To assume a material world arranged as an universal physico-chemical system was to him the best and most reasonable way for scientists to get further knowledge. Indeed, he said that he had “every reason for supposing that a large part of the Universe is arranged to fit the scientist’s ambition.”104 The scientist’s ambition was of course knowledge as physical awareness. If Tansley had stopped at this point, the idealist could easily have dismissed his “awareness” talk as an attempt to substitute fog with more fog. He therefore took the time to walk his audience through his principle of psychology, saying, for example, that awareness meant trying to become conscious about the unconscious, “as one might enter a dark room full of the most varied objects with an electric torch, and shift its beam from one to another.”105 To be aware or conscious meant in psychology that one tried “to reach the hidden parts of the [mental] system” and in scientific research to find the system of “objects of the external world.” In the end he redefines his initial understanding of knowledge, not now as awareness but as a “more or less ordered system or rather system of systems” ordering both the scientific, the mental, and the social realm.106 Tansley had gone far, perhaps too far, in accommodating the idealists: the

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searchlight metaphor and knowledge as “a system of systems” could be understood as a false construction forced upon the world from an idealist subject. He therefore stresses that those natural systems he seeks to investigate “are real phenomena—that they are there and are not mere figments of our fantasy.”107 This would be to the idealist simply an empty postulate, and it would take Tansley six years of hard ecological research to confirm his own theory. Indeed, one may read his large work about the vegetation of the Britain Isles as one grand attempt to verify his initial thesis. The rest of his talk was devoted to refuting the idealist’s main objection, namely that material mechanism leads to moral decay and suspicious ethical beliefs. Tansley’s rebuttal was fairly simple; the aim of Freudian psychology was not to create discontent but to help people to function with a “certain harmony” within themselves and in society. People in such harmony would get “what is called a good will,” the very precondition of ethical judgment in Kant’s moral philosophy.108 Psychoanalysis could thus provide not only an explanation, but also a method to enhance an apparently unexplained psychological assumption in Kantian ethics. Tansley did not accept that a philosophy of good will could rely on transcendent ideas, but suggested instead that a “good man’s life must be in relation to some possible social ideal because man is a gregarious animal.”109 At this point in his lecture he rehearsed his arguments from New Psychology about stimulus and response systems of social herds and insane crowds, and concluded that as “an uncompromising determinist in psychology,” he sees morality as a function of social relations.110 With respect to scientific understanding of morality Tansley clearly expanded upon his previous psychological writings: “[H]uman beings belong to all four different planes of existence: the material, the biological, the psychical and the ethical,” which may be reduced to one grand “physico-chemical system” and understood by “the system of systems” called human knowledge.111 The analyst-patient relationship is crucial for understanding Tansley’s research project: he uses the same psychoanalytic method and terminology for investigating both the nerve system and the physical system in nature. The task of the scientific researcher was thus like that of a psychoanalytic investigator and would perhaps help an unknown and even troubled system in the natural realm. Since humans belong to the material, biological, psychical, and ethical levels of existence it was of utmost importance to carry out research that would help to harmonize all systems for human well-being. Tansley had always been a socially concerned scientist, and his system theory was carefully designed to do exactly that. Through an understanding of the various levels of systems he hoped to reach a point where the scientists could not only reveal existing natural systems but also suggest ways of improving or preserving

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systems to improve society. Indeed, as Chapter 6 argues, his postwar engagement in the preservation of ecosystems may be read as a grand social therapeutic project. During the following year the club continued to meet. Johnson defended a system approach to the physics of energy and particle theory, Young defended “a through-going mechanist approach to living organisms” understood as “Living Systems,” and MacKeith argued that the machinery of the brain was best understood through mechanistic neuroscience.112 Tansley made extensive notes on these papers and was clearly inspired by their views. Tellingly, he did not make comments on a paper on the history of the idea of God and good values since Plato, probably written by Collingwood.113 Idealism was by now in retreat at Magdalen, and with Smith’s retirement in 1936 it ceased to exist as a school of thought. The Magdalen Philosophy Club was not Tansley’s only source of inspiration. In this period he also renewed his interest in the Danish botanist Christen Raunkiaer, who over the years had written extensively on “life-form-systems” and the importance of statistical methods to plant geography. Tansley sought to bring his important research to the English-speaking community and initiated a translation of his collected works, which appeared in 1934.114 The system approach in the research of Tansley’s colleagues in the Oxford school in ecology serves as the important context of his forthcoming ecosystem theory. For the better part of his life Tansley had lived with a schism as both botanist and follower of Freud. He had now for several years seen how Charles Elton successfully used ecological methods in the study and management of animals, how Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane used a mechanistic system approach to animals, how Robert Troup used a system approach to forestry management, how both Elton and Ray Bourne created a system of knowledge with their ecological zones, and finally how hordes of excited students left for multidisciplinary ecological expeditions arranged by the Oxford Exploration Club. This was all accomplished in a culture of scientific management, presumably for the social good. It was by now clear that ecology was not a branch of botany anymore, but a major method of research all around the university. What could be more natural for Tansley (who was by now the grandfather of ecology in Britain) to try to synthesize the discipline and at the same time fill in the gaps of his own schismatic interests?

Phillips’s Environmental Ethical Defense of the Biotic Community The first thing Phillips did upon returning from the International Botanical Congress in Cambridge was to spend a week with Smuts—“the philosopher of the veld”—at his home in Doornkloff outside Pretoria.115 They had a lot

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to talk about and were excited about spending time together. Smuts gave Phillips an update on the reception of his Oxford lectures, and Phillips gave Smuts a full account of the reception of his biotic community paper and other events at the congress. They discussed the status of ecological research and concepts, as well as possible future research topics, and Phillips told Smuts about his experience with the indirect rule of the black population in Tanganyika. Phillips continued to mobilize South African scholars in support of his biotic community concept. Though both Bews and Tansley had given initial support in favor of Phillips’s professorship at Witwatersrand, it was largely thanks to Smuts’s continued patronage and promotion that he got the job (starting in the autumn term of 1931). Phillips would only accept the job, he told his friend Allee, “after obtaining General Smuts’s opinion and guidance.”116 His career looked promising and he even applied for a vacant professorship in Chicago.117 Yet it came as no disappointment to him that he was rejected, for he really enjoyed the environment at the University of the Witwatersrand, or as he told Allee: “I am really happy here. The dept. is well housed, in some ways well equipped. The staff is keen and easy to work with, and the outlook of the University progressive. It is also well for me that I am able to work harmoniously with the Govt. department in Pretoria.”118 This academic environment allowed Phillips to explore with great enthusiasm a new holistic approach to teaching his 235 (junior and graduate) students. “The application of ecological concepts to teaching,” he told Allee, implied renouncing lectures and instead getting students “to think, not merely to develop good memories.” What he sought to develop was a type of teaching environment where the students and the professor created a tangled bank of knowledge. The role of the professor was not “to convert students into machines,” but merely to stimulate the students on their evolutionary way to a “whole” personality. Smuts’s holism and personology were Phillips’s chief sources of inspiration to “break with traditional methods” of teaching and create a new ecologically oriented pedagogy. In South Africa all examinations required a professor from a competing university to review exam questions and to take part in the grading. Bews normally served as the external examiner for Phillips’s students, and he too was very open to trying out an ecological format on exams. The ideal exam would create an interplay of information between the examiner and the examinee that would reveal whether or not students were able to order knowledge along ecological lines of interrelationships. Their aim was to test the holistic level of a student’s personality, to see whether their students had attained “real understanding and not ‘parrot-memory’” of a subject. Phillips’s ecological pedagogy was not merely a curiosity in the beginning of his

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teaching career; he continued beyond 1936 at least to pay “a good deal of attention to human ecology in the form of ecology in education of University men and women.”119 Phillips’s new style of teaching may be an example of how ecology in the 1930s served as a vehicle for the reformation of academic life and the order of knowledge. Whereas Bews used ecology to restructure the academic order at the University of Natal, Phillips used ecology to restructure the way students learn about things. However, their respective projects both sought to establish ecology (and thus the ecologist) at the center of how knowledge about the world ought to be obtained. One of the first things Phillips did as professor of botany was to use his new post to promote further his idea of a grand ecological survey of Africa. It was a bold suggestion requiring “[s]even senior research officers, twelve junior research officers, one secretary, fourteen lay assistants (European), together with several European (South Africa) and Asiatic (Central and East Africa) clerks,” and an annual budget of £31,000, rising to £36,000.120 It was a suggestion without official support from any authority or government, but Phillips had undoubtedly discussed the project with Smuts and Pole Evans. It was known to raise eyebrows among Oxford ecologists.121 The point of departure of the intended survey was the holistic concept of a biotic community, and the aim was to develop political schemes for grazing, agriculture, forestry, prevention of soil erosion, conservation of moisture, and control of the tsetse fly. The territory of research was to be the Union of South Africa (including the newly annexed South-West Africa), Swaziland, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Nyssaland, Uganda, Tanganyika, and Kenya. The area thus covered a variety of climates and habitats with very little in common, except being part of the same political territory. What is most striking is the omission of Portuguese East Africa. The political agenda of the proposal was thus to construct a common nature that could merge these territories and reinforce the unity of the British Empire. Phillips wished to locate “ecological interrelations,” “biotic formations,” and “succession stages” in this “biotic community.” The next step was to suggest practical methods for “wise utilization of natural grazing,” “progressive forest policies in the spheres of conservation, re-forestation, afforestation, silvicultural management, and forest protection,” “prevention of soil erosion,” “conservation of moisture,” and control of the tsetse fly.122 Phillips’s rich vocabulary, ranging from utilization to prevention and protection, reflects the blurred environmental policies of Africa. There were simply too many different interests for it to be possible to develop one streamlined policy of environmental protection. What is noteworthy is the attempt to develop one holistic approach that could suit and unite the environmental discourse.

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The development, growth, and ultimate failure of Phillips’s African survey will be the topic of the next chapter. But to preface and to understand the political agenda of his survey proposal one has to turn to a lecture series arranged during the winter of 1932 by the Philosophical Society at the University of the Witwatersrand under the title “Our Changing World View.” The series began with a lengthy discussion by Smuts about how quantum mechanics changes our view of life. The general repeated his arguments from Holism and Evolution and concluded that Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that the mind interacts with the physical world through observation and that it is thus part of a larger holistic reality.123 He claimed that mind and knowledge are interchangeable with matter, and that matter is altered by the interaction of mind in the act of observation, all of which is evidence for his holistic monism. All the subsequent lectures emphasize a changing weltanschauung in the scientific and intellectual community. For many Smuts’s holism was the very hallmark of this change into a hopefully better and more humane society. Most of the faculty saw themselves as progressive liberals receptive of new ideas, and part of an idealistic counterculture against mechanist ways of doing science.124 The lecturer on physics emphasized the radical shift in our understanding of the material world with the new theory of relativity. Robert Broom’s paper on evolution saw Smuts’s holism from the perspective of Darwin and Lamarck, but concluded “that man is a being whose evolution has been deliberately planned by an intelligent power.”125 Lecturers in psychology and literature told the audience of the horror of the mechanistic machine age and of new liberating discoveries in gestalt-psychology. A professor in classics talked about the promising new holistic attitude found in Rudolf Steiner’s principles of education. Others pointed to how Keynes’s economic theories would create a new economic world order, and how the loose gold price could forge a new South Africa. Phillips gave his paper, “Man at the Cross-Roads” in the midst of all this excitement over a changing world view. His point of departure was the importance of “our philosopher-statesman” for the science of ecology.126 To Allee he wrote in excitement that the lecture series showed how Smuts had “blazed a splendid trail for biologists as well as philosophers.”127 His “holistic attitude,” Phillips confessed in his lecture, had inspired him to see “the greater truth that ecology is an attitude towards facts and their meaning” rather than a narrow sub-division of biology.128 The “ecological outlook” in the “study of the whole of Nature” was a “personal belief” and a “spiritual experience,” which revealed that (in the words of Goethe) “‘Her Crown is Love.’”129 Phillips was much concerned about all kinds of environmental degeneration, and his ecological outlook forced him to realize that mankind now stood “at the cross-road” in its attitude towards the environment.

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The first way was the road of mechanistic philosophy in western civilization. It led to a society controlled by mass desire, emotionalism, and material consumption, which would end in “a coldly efficient, grimly material epoch in man’s history,” and ultimately to “degeneration and chaos.” The moving force was not “the True Spirit of Science,” but applied mechanistic science, whose only aim was “grasping for more and more power.”130 Through control of the environment such a civilization only gets rich in food, clothing, and comforts. Its aim is “materialistic, cruel and depressing,” because it lacks the “wisdom of the true aims in life.” Moreover, “[c]ontinued development of the ‘power’ of science at the expense of human values undoubtedly would produce a world of horror . . . a world warring with weapons.”131 Worse, if mankind did not reconcile itself to the environment the steady stream of people from rural areas to the cities would continue. “[P]ollution of the atmosphere by smoke” from the cities would cause a “definite decrease in direct sunlight and in anti-rachitic short waves, such as the ultra-violet,” and damage public health.132 Phillips recites an impressive list of items in the ongoing environmental havoc in South Africa: [U]ncontrolled and intensified firing of vegetation of all kinds; reckless use of the axe in savanna, scrub, bush and forest; primitive and more advanced but wasteful agricultural practice; indiscriminate, heavy stocking of grazing and browsing lands; . . . destruction of plants and decimation or extinction of animals; introduction of alien plants and animals, such sometimes creating biological and habitat problems of the greatest economic importance; wrongly designed public works—such as roads, railways, drains, irrigation schemes—responsible for unnecessarily accelerated run-off of water and consequent soil erosion. In a word, [. . . the environment is] disturbed by man, to his own ultimate detriment.133 Both natives and Europeans were to blame for these problems, with “the influence of the European greatly overshadowing that of the Native.”134 But at the core of the problem, as Phillips saw it, was native longing for the destructive European lifestyle enforced by a mechanistic view of life. Black people’s desire to be westernized—to dress in European clothes—and to take part in modern civilization would only increase the environmental crisis. The second way was to follow the intellectual and moral leadership of Smuts’s holism. His holistic philosophy, Phillips argued, meant changing our spiritual demeanor by means of preservation rather than callous exploitation of nature. Humans should not regard themselves as detached from nature; instead, “man should be included in the biotic community constituted by plants and animals living as interdependent, co-acting members.”135 The task of ecology was to serve such “higher, nobler values” through “[t]he alternation of man’s biotic and environmental relations.”136 Phillips argued that hu-

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mans should realize their own place and role in nature with the help of science. Inspired by Clements, but also by authors such as Allee and Alfred Edwards Emerson in the Chicago school of ecology, Phillips invoked metaphors of cooperation, harmony, and mutual friendship with nature. Phillips was sensitive to how species struggle against inherent disabilities, habitat factors, and biotic enemies, but he always pointed out that such evils were for the greater good of the total harmony of nature. What sort of politics followed from Phillips’s biocentrism and rejection of anthropocentrism? What did it mean to be included in a biotic community of plants, animals, and humans, and to live together as interdependent, coacting members? Phillips suggested several practical applications. First, natives should not be granted any autonomy or freedom of action, either within the empire or within the nation, simply because that would violate the “biotic and habitat relations” of races.137 Second, the “ruling races” should enforce strict regulation of “the sale of surplus stock” produced by native tribes to avoid an excess of grazing, which would destroy the browsing capacity of the habitat.138 Third, the government should take strong measures to avoid human “miscegenation, . . . especially in the lower European strata,” to avoid degeneration of biological diversity.139 Fourth, breeding in “the lowest strata of our [white] social organism” and the unfortunate “desire for ‘freedom’ on the part of women” among the lower classes should be constrained, while larger families among “those [white] classes likely to produce men and women of achievement, intellectual, social and otherwise” should be encouraged.140 Finally, “rational birth-control” among “the socially undesirable— habitual criminals, perverts and the like” should be exercised, because the “emotional attitude of ‘save all’ . . . is biologically and economically unsound.”141 In order to be sure that mankind did not degenerate, it was of the utmost importance to re-establish the human connection with its natural abode through a biocentric worldview. The mechanistic separation of the modern world from nature, Phillips argued, had caused a tendency “to forget how to walk” (from using modern transportation); “defective hearing” (from use of modern technology); “nerves” and sense of “horror” (from the intrusion of private space “with television”); aggravation of the ability to see (because of all the light in the cities); “decay in the teeth of children” (“due to the taking of soft, preserved and synthetic foods”); physical and mental ruin (because of wrong or too much food); “deterioration in physical well-being” of the natives (because of European clothing), and so on.142 Given this tendency of decay in modern civilization, it was reasonable and morally right, he argued, to ensure that the innocent black peoples did not take part in the ill anthropocentric customs of the white race. It was a duty of the ecologists to make

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sure that they did not evolve into modernity, but stayed strong and pure within their proper bioregion. To eliminate the natives’ autonomy and ability to create economic growth, to avoid miscegenation, and to force them to live in ecological homelands were ways of protecting their ties with their biotic community. These directives may sound harsh and discriminatory to our contemporary ears. To Phillips, however, these initiatives were humanitarian. His ecological theory about the biotic community was, as he put it, not “red in tooth and claw” but represented the “milk of human kindness.”143 A review of the lecture by Thomas Park of the University of Chicago confirms that Phillips’s biotic approach to politics was also seen as kind-hearted outside South Af rica.144 An enthusiastic letter of congratulations from Allee reveals that he too was in “complete unity” with Phillips’s lecture, and that he was very pleased that Phillips took the “responsibility for interpreting the scientific point of approach to human problems.”145 Clearly, Phillips’s racist biocentrism and suppressive environmentalism were not peculiar South African phenomena but had leading supporters in Chicago (which at the time was itself a city torn apart by racial conflicts). It is likely that Tansley read Phillips’s paper, and that the title of Tansley’s article, “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” of 1935 reflects his opinion about it. The following discussion will focus on this famous critique of Phillips and holism.

Holism and the Ecosystem Controversy Phillips’s theoretical defense of holism as the solution to the environmental crisis, and the conceptual basis for biotic community research, came in a three-part analysis of succession, development, climax, and complex organism published in the Journal of Ecology between 1934 and 1935. Today this analysis is widely known as Tansley’s main target for his criticism of holism, but what is less known is that the controversy was triggered by a letter to the editor by Alfred Michelmore. Michelmore’s fortunes were typical for ecologists of that time. He participated as a student in the Cambridge expedition to arctic Spitsbergen in 1927, took his bachelor’s degree at Trinity College in 1928, and ended up as a field ecologist in Northern Rhodesia. His only previous publication was his student thesis about vegetation on the remote Edge Island, and his letter to the editor in 1933 was thus an attempt to play with celebrities. He criticized Phillips for linking up many different types of vegetation in an imagined and hence unreal line of succession.146 Next, he suggested drawing a line between those changes that occur in vegetation through its own action on the envi-

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ronment (inherent or intrinsic succession), and those changes that were a result of external factors in the environment (false physiographic succession). Michelmore consequently proposed limiting research on vegetation to the botany of inherent succession while excluding physiographic succession from the realm of ecology. Tansley’s immediate response was a kiss of death: “Such criticism and analysis,” he wrote in his editorial note to Michelmore, “would be more valuable if [one] took the history and literature of the subject into account.”147 The subject Phillips raised, however, did deserve closer criticism. Michelmore’s letter is dated August 24, 1933, only weeks before Smuts returned from leading the opposition to become minister of justice in South Africa. With Smuts’s return the rhetoric of unity and holism again became the voice of political correctness, although unity was difficult because he had to rule the country along with his old opponent Hertzog. It was now as urgent as ever to strengthen holism, especially in one of the leading journals of ecology. Michelmore’s arguments in favor of a division of ecology were not along these lines, and Phillips’s long tripartite article in defense of Smuts was a reply to this situation. Phillips’s strategy in the first part, published in 1934, was to nail down his claim that the concepts of succession, development, and climax were fundamentally interrelated by analogy to a complex organism.148 With the basic assumption of an analogy between the biotic community and an organism, Phillips was able to brush aside Michelmore’s objection by pointing to the absurdity of an organism with only intrinsic causes. Any organism needs both external (autogenic) and internal (allogenic) causes for growth. Hence the biotic community is governed by both internal and external factors in its succession and development. As an example, Phillips points to the fact that humans may disturb, retard, or aid (internal) natural succession, but that the general course of this process is beyond (or external to) human control. The initial response to this first part of the tripartite article was mixed; Phillips could report to Smuts that some appreciated his arguments, whereas others wrote to him saying there was “no such thing as succession” and yet another thought holism was “well on the road to lunacy!”149 A troubled Phillips now stressed to the general in ad hoc terms that his philosophy was crucial for understanding the country’s problem of soil erosion.150 The second part of Phillips’s article, published in 1935, concerned the development of a climax. In it he argued that this development occurs by means of biotic reactions only, and that the development is always progressive (only limited by the climate). Again he based his argument on an analogy with the individual organism: “Retrogressive development in the individual organism is no less impossible than it is in the [biotic] community.”151 In other words,

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just as it is impossible for an adult to develop into a child, it is impossible to have retrogressive development in the biotic community. The only possible natural retrogression would be destruction of the biotic community by fire, which is not in fact retrogression but actually annihilation. Phillips’s third and final part, published in the August issue of Journal of Ecology, outlines the philosophical argument concerning holism. Again he proclaims that General Smuts’s “prophesies” and his “epoch-making book” provide a grand philosophical “synthesis” of all the fragmented fields in the life sciences. The tone of Phillips’s article is almost like that of a sermon, with him confessing to ecologists that holism “has become to me the deepest and most abiding reality.”152 Phillips reveals his headlong admiration for Smuts when he explains that “[he] was fortunate enough to hear, as a spontaneous remark, from General Smuts that he considered . . . the realms of inorganic and organic nature, regarding the whole as a cause.”153 A spontaneous remark from the general was enough to spark a whole series of reflections from Phillips. The basic features of holism were that the biotic community was a complex organism, that the whole is an operative factor in the community, and that this operative factor had the hallmark of cooperation and harmony. Human communities are biotic communities analogous to complex organisms that emerge, develop, and die; both “societies, nations and Nature” thus could all be explained by this approach.154 Finally, holism was also a way of organizing the life sciences into one synthetic field. If knowledge could be organized according to holism, Phillips argued, better collaboration among different fields of science would emerge. Tansley could not agree, and he sent Phillips a long apologetic letter in which he explained why he felt compelled to criticize the enthusiast’s views. “We all inevitably tend to interpret phenomena in the light of our underlying psychological bent,” he explained to Phillips, and as a mechanist he found Phillips’s views “blaspheme” and he did not think holism could “do the Clementsian doctrine any good.”155 What he sought with his criticism was not to attack Clements per se, but the reading of that man’s theories that Phillips advocated under the inspiration of Smuts’s politics of holism. His main target was thus not Clements but Smuts’s holistic evolutionary synthesis. Knowing that Tansley would launch such a critique, Phillips forwarded Tansley’s letter to Smuts for his comments, and bravely reminded his patron that “[t]his is the spirit of science—contribution, controversy, progress.”156 Clements would have agreed fully: “compromise is not the method of science,” he wrote Tansley back in 1931, “[it] tends to postpone rather than promote progress.”157 Unfortunately for Phillips, Smuts was busy in politics and could not devote his time to the issue—it was just “not the sort of thing that you can read

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when you fall asleep after a long day’s work”—and he therefore put both Phillips’s article and Tansley’s letter aside.158 Tansley was now in the process of writing out his critique and in early June passed to Phillips his manuscript, “The Temporal Genetic Series as a Means of Approach to Philosophy,” so the latter could understand the full depth of his forthcoming article. Phillips read it as an “onslaught on holism” from “a good old mechanist of the conservative type,” a comment that makes sense when one recalls that mechanist critique for Phillips was the equivalent of the revolutionary attack on holism from Hogben and his Cape Town friends.159 Without Tansley’s consent Phillips copied the entire manuscript and sent it to Smuts so that he could prepare a counterattack and defense of holism, but the general was apparently too preoccupied with the political arena.160 Tansley published his critique in the August 1935 issue of Ecology, which meant that it appeared simultaneously with the last part of Phillips’s article in the Journal of Ecology. This timing was crucial for Tansley, since the Sixth International Botanical Congress was meeting in early September in the Netherlands. Here the International Commission on Concepts in Plant Sociology was supposed to present its work, which Phillips undoubtedly hoped would be a synopsis of his biotic community reading of Smuts’s holism. Tansley’s outspoken criticism and unusually brusque language made it perfectly clear to the Congress that the commission had failed to reach any agreement: “I have a great admiration,” Tansley remarks with unmistakably English irony, for Phillips’s “intellectual energy and single-mindedness. [His] articles remind one irresistibly of the exposition of a creed—of a closed system of religious or philosophical dogma. Clements appears as the major prophet and Phillips as the chief apostle, with true apostolic fervor in abundant measure.”161 Such unscholarly language is rare in Tansley’s writings, and it is tempting to see his outburst as a snipe at Phillips, who was a student of the long-dead morphologist Isaac Balfour, who had deprived Tansley of the Oxford professorship in 1920. In any case, the message to the Congress was clear enough, and there was consequently no agreement on or even a debate about Clements’s theories, Tansley’s ecosystem, or Phillips’s biotic community when the botanists met in Amsterdam.162 However, at the same time Tansley was publishing in an American journal in a special issue in honor of the Chicago ecologist Henry Chandler Cowles. The editorial theme of the issue was human activity as seen by ecologists and how ecology could be of greater public service. Tansley had several followers in the United States, which is noticeable in a review article written by the New Yorker Charles Adams, who points to the British tradition stemming from Tansley as a particularly encouraging one. It was their ability to reduce human distinctness and cultural diversity to animal ecology that impressed

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Adams, because “[t]he complexity involved in human affairs only emphasizes the need of keeping the problems in as simple terms as is possible.”163 Interestingly, in his plea for cruel reductionism he suggested that ecologists should look at Tansley’s New Psychology as a source of inspiration, and the first thing one should do was to try out one’s psychology on human ecology and then on “ecologists themselves” so one could “anticipate future successions and developments” of the discipline.164 Clements agreed that ecology could be of great help for human society but doubted mechanism would be of any help. Instead he started his contribution to the volume with a quotation from none other than Smuts: “Ecology must have its way; ecological methods and outlook must find a place in human government as much as in the study of man, other animals, and plants. Ecology is for mankind.”165 Even though Tansley was unable to read Clements’s article before it appeared, it is likely that he knew about his recent interest in the relevance of the politics of holism to ecology. It is precisely his “holistic faith” in a progressive evolution of succession into a climax that Tansley criticizes.166 He wanted to halt Clements’s affinity for the harmonious nature of Smuts’s holism and thus pointed to the occurrence of catastrophic changes or interruptions of ecological succession that would completely alter any evolutionary progress towards a climax. With respect to Phillips he pointed out that succession can take the form of destruction, retrogression, and catastrophes: one thus cannot speak of a climax or of ecology in terms of a biotic community in harmony or a balanced natural organism. Tansley objected to this notion of succession because of its optimism with regard to human evolution and development; it could not explain the degeneration of the environment caused by both human and natural agencies or how destructive ecological factors could be to human beings.167 The role of the human factor in the environment, and consequently the political agenda of ecology, bring Tansley to the crux of his objections: It is difficult to resist the impression that Professor Phillips’ enthusiastic advocacy of holism is not wholly derived from an objective contemplation of the facts of nature, but is at least partly motivated by an imagined future “whole” to be realised in an ideal human society whose reflected glamour falls on less exalted wholes, illuminating with false light the image of the “complex organism.”168 Tansley is referring to Phillips’s racist biocentrism and the politics of holism explained in previous chapters, with its treatment of “less exalted wholes” at, for example, Rand, Bondlewaart, and Bull Hoek. Clements was not central to Tansley’s criticism. Phillips rightly points out in his recollection of the con-

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troversy that he did not try to “absorb the pure milk of the Clementsian word” but used Clements as a point of departure to develop Smuts’s holism into a coherent method for ecology.169 Yet it was convenient for Tansley to use Clements as a theoretical target, given that Smuts was a formal patron of the African Survey. It is after his exposure of the politics of succession, holism, and complex organism that Tansley introduces the word ecosystem. Tansley writes about the “system (in the sense of physics),” and explains that “ecosystems . . . are of the most various kinds and sizes. They form one category of the multitudinous physical systems of the universe, which range from the universe as a whole down to the atom.”170 Yet, he did not refer to any books or articles on physics or mechanics. His chief methodological reference on systems was Hyman Levy’s book The Universe of Science from 1932. Levy was professor of mathematics at the University of London, a Marxist, and a well-known and prominent member of the Communist Party. What caught Tansley’s interest was not necessarily his communist sympathies but his emphasis on how science should help the least advantaged in society. Levy argued that science is primarily a social outgrowth serving social ends, that life in the laboratory has its own social culture, that scientists have systems of values analogous to the battlefield of society, and that scientists must recognize their own social roots. In several interviews with Huxley during this period both Levy and Huxley underline the importance of doing research for the benefit of the weakest part of the social system.171 In reading Levy’s book one gets a sense of déjà-vu; it resembles Hogben’s contribution to the “Nature of Life” session in Cape Town. Levy refers with sympathy to Hogben’s mechanistic critique and launches a similar criticism of Smuts in the most vivid terms. His holism was, as the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted, an example of “outworn idealist philosophy,” and was one of the prime targets of Levy’s book.172 Smuts’s mystical “more coming out of less” philosophy was to Levy an example of bourgeois thinking gone astray from its basis in empirical and socially responsible science.173 Tansley used Levy’s critique and system approach to physics as a way of understanding stimuli-response relations among the mind, society, and the natural realm. The ecosystem concept was supposed to cover such relations and thus provide the broad ecology Phillips wanted with his biotic community. Within this broad ecosystem (which included both vegetation and animals), one finds human beings in their proper place: “Regarded as an exceptionally powerful biotic factor which increasingly upsets the equilibrium of preexisting ecosystems and eventually destroys them, at the same time forming new ones of very different nature, human activity finds its proper place in ecology.”174 Humans are part of nature as an exceptionally powerful biotic factor,

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but the human condition is not always in harmony or equilibrium with preexisting ecosystems. What is worse, humans can eventually destroy them. This refers back to Tansley’s psychological idea of a basic incongruity between an imperfect mind and the equilibrium of the biological world (see Chapter 1). No wonder, then, “that modern civilized man upsets the ‘natural’ ecosystems or ‘biotic communities’ on a very large scale” when the mind is out of joint.175 What is at stake in these passages is a subtle allusion to the evolution of the human mind, the herd, and consequently the environment. Tansley’s critique of Clements and Phillips makes a great deal of sense if one considers that they studied different types of environments. The idea of wilderness has always been important in American and South African frontier mythology,176 and Clements and Phillips’s notion of climax societies was no exception. Tansley, on the other hand, was researching an altered English environment and was thus much impressed by the truism that the environment is culturally constructed: We cannot confine ourselves to the so-called “natural” entities and ignore the processes and expressions of vegetation now so abundantly provided us by the activities of man. Such a course is not scientifically sound, because scientific analysis must penetrate beneath the forms of the “natural” entities, and it is not practically useful because ecology must be applied to conditions brought about by human activity.177 Beneath ideas of nature one has to grasp the basic physical structure of an ecosystem that is created by the activities of human society. In sum, Tansley’s ecosystem theory was the product of a heated debate between defenders of holism and mechanism. This was initially a science policy debate between rebellious mechanists and more mainstream defenders of holism, with the issue of management of Africa and the political status of its native populations at stake. In South Africa ecological scholars mobilized to defend their patron and philosopher of holism, General Smuts, whereas ecologists associated with Oxford defended the mechanist management approach to nature through the system concept. However, despite their methodological differences both parties agreed that a major survey of Africa was needed to look into the issue. Tansley’s ecosystem theory grew out of research in the mechanist group, and it had several different connotations: he coined the word as a progressive alternative to the politics of holism advocated by Smuts and Phillips. This mechanism had its philosophical bearing in his New Psychology and work with Freud, which he further developed into a universal theory about chemical flows of energy in the system of the mind, society, and nature. The aim of hu-

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man knowledge (or a “system of systems” as Tansley called it) was to use ecological research to support colonial exploitation and management. Through ecosystems the ecologist could build a bridge between imperial economy and the economy of nature, and thus naturalize imperialism. The aftermath of the ecosystem controversy will be the topic of the next chapter. Neither Phillips nor Clements was convinced by Tansley’s ecosystem theory; they would instead develop the holistic approach to ecology for years to come. Yet the next chapter is largely a story about the gradual demise of the holistic approach to ecology, a painful experience for Phillips, who would bitterly note: “One has to learn as one grows older, that complete success never or very rarely comes—but the loss of victory often comes hard to a young man ready for service.”178

5 The Politics of Holism, Ecology, and Human Rights

The paradoxical character of the politics of holism is the theme of this chapter, which focuses on the mutually shaping relationship between John William Bews, John Phillips, and the South African politician Jan Christian Smuts. Smuts was a promoter of international peace and understanding through the League of Nations, but also a defender of racial suppression and white supremacy in his own country. His politics, I will argue, were fully consistent with his holistic philosophy of science. In reading his private correspondence and miscellaneous notes one is not struck by his hypocrisy, but instead by a sincere attempt to let scientific knowledge guide his political decisions. Smuts had a keen interest in the natural laws that govern the human condition and personality, and as a statesman philosopher he tried to transfer such natural laws into his country’s civic constitution. Smuts was guided by the efforts of ecologists such as Bews and Phillips, who provided him with a day-to-day update of the latest advances in scientific knowledge of natural laws governing Homo sapiens. A substantial part of this chapter will thus return to their research on human ecology to explore the mutual field of inspiration linking them and Smuts. Two aspects of this human ecological research were particularly important: the human gradualism or ecological “succession” of human personalities researched by Bews, and the concept of an ecological biotic community explored by Phillips. Smuts transformed this research into a policy of racial gradualism that respected local ways of life in different (biotic) communities, a policy he tried to morally sanctify and promote as author of the famous 1945 Preamble of the United Nation Charter about human rights.

Holism: A Philosophy of Science for the Empire Throughout the 1930s Smuts maintained his interest in botany. He read botanical literature as “a sweet opiate” each night before he went to sleep, he collected his own botanical herbarium in an abandoned playhouse in his gar157

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den, and he still talked about scaling mountains in terms of “the heights of Being.”1 In 1930 he got the exciting news that he had been elected (unanimously) to be president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science for 1931, followed by the election of him as fellow of the Royal Society. This represented the peak of Smuts’s intellectual career, and he was naturally ebullient about all this good news and recognition. The reason for inviting Smuts to the post as president was so that he could widen the aspirations of the British Association to the entire empire. Smuts made a point of adjusting the proposed presidential banner of the tree of knowledge so it could include South Africa: “The idea is the Tree of Knowledge, Igdrasil, growing round the world, especially the British world, and I have worked Table mountain in somewhere so as to hold our end up.”2 However, what was most urgent to Smuts even above his promotion of his own country was to invite scientists from all the colonies so that the meeting would “be a symbol and expression of Empire unity of a most striking character.”3 The association was now one hundred years old and analogies between the power of the institution and that of the empire were not inappropriate. There was even an attempt to convince Smuts to make the meeting into a League of Nations gathering of scientists for peace and intellectual cooperation.4 His holism, it was proposed, should be a unifying philosophy for this agenda. Smuts’s presidential address at the meeting in London was a public event. The room was packed and many delegates were not able to hear him because of an unexpectedly large crowd. The speech was broadcast, and the Gramophone Company made a record of part of the speech, which was sold through the association.5 He was introduced in the most flattering way by Frederick Bower (the Scottish morphological gentleman who back in 1917 accused Tansley of advocating botanical Bolshevism). Smuts took his audience by storm with his image of the Tree of Knowledge, “whose roots penetrate all the continents, whose branches cover the Empire overseas.” Science, he told the scientists, had the ability “more than any other form of human activity, to draw the nations together, to reconstitute their broken unity, and to give form and substance to that ideal of mankind as one human family.”6 Dramatically, he asked “[w]hat sort of world picture is science leading to?”7 Again, holism was the answer. The emergence of an organic view of nature from quantum physics undermined mechanistic biology and opened up a new constructive organic approach to the human condition. Smuts promised that his new monism would solve the “riddle of the universe” and free the human spirit in its development into great personalities.8 He also discussed possible botanical applications to agriculture, talked about his theory of the origin of life, initiated a debate among physicists on the relevance of Ein-

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stein’s theories to a possible holistic evolution of the universe, and participated in various scientific festivities. After all this activity he was happy to report to a friend “that I managed to conceal my errors and shortcomings with some success.”9 Indeed, Smuts’s holism was by now on everybody’s lips as the darling of contemporary intellectual debate. For some his philosophical slogan “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” represented “a new synthesis” of precise sciences, evolutionary biology, and psychology.10 Smuts returned to South Africa overjoyed with the success of what he saw as a turn from materialism towards “a more spiritual approach to the universe” among scientists.11 One of the topics Smuts presented at the association that had such connotations was the results from his botanical expedition. It is important to recognize that holism for Smuts was based on science. It was not only a philosophical-political project, and he consequently planned and carried out his own botanical expedition to Northern Rhodesia and Central Africa to find evidence for his theory. The aim of this expedition, which lasted for four months, was to discover and record new plants (especially unknown types of grasses), to unveil their movements and settlement through the continent, and of course to stimulate botanical scholars “to leave their office stools a little oftener.”12 Botany was to be done in the field, not in the laboratory. The scientific results of the expedition centered on the migration of plants, and one of these was an unknown, beautiful flower that John Hutchinson named Pteronia Smutsii “in honour of our leader.”13 The discovery of this flower’s distribution was taken as evidence for Smuts’s thesis about an original migration of plants from southern Africa to the rest of the world. Various scholars and friends of Smuts joined the team, including Pole Evans, Hutchinson, and the Gillett family. Some diaries from the tour are preserved, and they reveal much about the romantic hardship of camp life: shuddering at the roaring of lions, manly and tough hunting, and juicy details about idyllic orange picking in the sunset with Margaret and Tona Gillett. It is not easy to organize the material side of such a spectacle—Smuts utilized his political contacts and got access to the Prince of Wales’s military depots to supplement his private expedition.14 The group traveled with Pole Evans’s botanical bus, which functioned much like a rolling natural history museum, containing samples of preserved species. On the radiator cap at the front of the bus he placed Smuts’s Union flag proposal as the symbol of the expedition. This was not as innocent as it may seem. The country had just been through a heated debate about the shape of the national flag, and Smuts’s Union flag proposal had been voted down because it included the Union Jack in its design, and it caused much hullabaloo as the botanical expedition went along. Once the expedition was forced to leave a hotel in a hurry without the flag—“We don’t want no damn

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Unionists up here”—and Pole Evans had to replace the stolen flag.15 The rolling natural history museum and the very image of Smuts’s political holism were not to be separated. The politically controversial idea of a unified country was to be naturalized through a holistic collection of botanical species.

The Ecological Segregation of Natal University College Smuts took a short break from the expedition to visit Bews at Natal University College. Bews could not participate in the excursion because he was busy as principal trying to unify and lead a university in deep administrative and financial trouble.16 The problems sprung from the rivalry between the university’s two colleges (one in Durban and the other in Pietermaritzburg) and from a large financial debt (among others to the father of Smuts basher Roy Campbell). Disputes among various scholars and departments were dominating both colleges, and by the end of 1929 the situation became so grave that there was serious talk of shutting down the entire university. Bews was able to turn all this misery around by refinancing the debt, reorganizing the administration, and negotiating with the various fields of research. By the summer of 1930 the university had an unified council and a new university structure with research properly divided between the colleges at Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Smuts was invited by Bews to Pietermaritzburg City Hall to celebrate this successful turnaround. “I have sat for years at his feet,” Smuts told the learned audience about his relationship to their principal.17 In reality their relationship was reciprocal: Bews supplied Smuts with ecology and Smuts supplied Bews with his philosophy. What Bews had done was to reorganize the University of Natal along holistic ecological lines. An historian of the university has rightly pointed out that “Bews the Botanist, and Bews the University Administrator” were inseparable in actual life.18 Ecology to him was both a scientific approach to botany and a way of organizing academia, and it is thus symptomatic that from about 1930 Bews stopped publishing results from field research and started to write about human ecology.19 The idea of a botanical survey of the African continent also caught Bews’s attention, and he wrote his own proposal for how to carry it out. The ability to control food resources was at the heart of his suggestion, and since “plant power means world power,” he thought the South Africans should be in charge.20 The fate of Bews’s bold suggestion is not known, but it does suggest that he too was engaged in the African survey debate and that he tried to bring it under the protection of South African holism. Bews took his initial step when he was elected president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931. Giving the presi-

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dential address was undoubtedly the highlight of his career, and Bews naturally wanted to engage his interdisciplinary audience. The means the principal used to achieve this was to adopt an “Ecological Viewpoint” on the role of science in society. He argued that the fragmented fields of scientific research were in urgent need of greater unity, achievable with the help of an ecological viewpoint. The key word—which he kept repeating like a mantra in his talk— was synthesis. The time had come, he believed, for specialized science to reach out to other approaches and fields to see a subject or a problem as a whole. His chief example was biology, whose scientific research was divided into different approaches to evolution, such as genetic and environmental explanations for developments of species. The ecological viewpoint, he argued, could have a “synthesizing holistic effect” on diverging opinions because it could “view the subject as a whole.”21 Bews’s audience came not only from different scientific fields but from heterogeneous counties of a new nation with various social backgrounds and languages. For them his talk about holism and synthesis thus had strong political connotations, especially since Bews was known as a close friend of Smuts. The subtext of his talk was thus to carry the policy of holism and unity into South African science and into a possible survey of the continent. The newly established country simply could not afford discord and division in academic research because that could endanger the unity of the state. This was particularly important for evolutionary theories, since they had a direct political bearing on the country’s policy towards the black population. Genetic and environmental explanations of evolutionary development of races would have different policy implications. The need for an evolutionary synthesis based on holism was thus important for finding a uniform racial policy for the country. Through analogies to plant ecology, he indicated a “suggestive hypothesis” about the evolutionary succession of “pioneer men, like pioneer plants” who develop into “climax types of men” to explain why “our relatively very small white population in South Africa has produced more than its fair share of able men.”22 This ecological viewpoint on social evolution would over the next years develop into the grand theory of human ecology. Bews set forth to reorganize the educational system at his university according to his ecological viewpoint and his theory about stages of development among human communities. The University of Natal did not have a formal color barrier before Bews arrived (though one may safely assume that many practical barriers existed). A small number of non-European students graduated together with their white fellows every year prior to the ecological reorganization of the university. Under Bews’s leadership educational segregation was instituted. He founded a separate native college and an Indian

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college designed “to meet the legitimate needs and aspirations of the native races, so that they may be encouraged to develop on sane and natural evolutionary lines.”23 As principal of the University of Natal Bews earned a growing respect for his successful leadership; in the eyes of his colleagues he was definitely a man of moral, administrative, and intellectual capacity. In a period of economic depression many youngsters saw education as a way of securing their economic future, and the number of students entering the university tripled from about 250 in 1928 to 800 in 1938. There was also a revived belief in the importance of education among the wealthy, and the university raised a considerable amount of money. Bews was the prime instigator of this development and a very popular principal: he mobilized patrons and constructed buildings, student residences, and a grand university library. He then quadrupled the library staff. He also opened no fewer than seven new departments and established three new senior lectureships, eleven new lectureships, and twenty-two new part-time lectureships.24 Smuts was a key figure behind the scenes, and both he and his principle of holism helped to secure some of Bews’s success in reorganizing the university. Bews used the administrative structure of St. Andrews University in Scotland as a model for the University of Natal. The students of St. Andrews had elected General Smuts as rector in 1931 to honor academic holism and freedom of scientific research. He could not be installed until the end of his term in 1934, however, when he gave a speech about freedom and the importance of “essential human rights” among the worthy, printed in a dainty little booklet.25

Human Ecological Divisions of Races and Social Classes Smuts had little time to engage in philosophical debates while also doing politics. This task was left to his intellectual companion and friend, Bews, who became increasingly involved in defending and expanding his holistic philosophy. In this research Smuts served as Bews’s personal mentor and patron, closely watching the development of human ecological anthropology and philosophy. Bews was not able to perform botanical fieldwork because of his administrative duties, and instead he turned the order of the university into a zone he could explore from an ecological point of view. His organization of knowledge at the University of Natal may serve as a context for understanding his work on human ecology. This work started around 1930 and ended in the winter of 1932 with a book manuscript submitted to his mentor. Smuts was not happy. He thought

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Bews had written “more a book on anthropology than on ecology,” and felt compelled to remind him that “it is not human culture, but human culture as the result of ecological functioning that is your theme.”26 The first draft apparently looked like a compendium in anthropology and Bews had failed to explain how factors such as climate, soil, and food may explain human evolution and organization. White settlement policy was at the core of Smuts’s interest, and he consequently wanted to know more about what would and could happen to the “English stock” when planted in tropical climate. Moreover, if Bews could focus more on “[t]he Bushman as a desert animal [or] as an aquatic animal in the swamps” he would “really make ecology throw forth light” on anthropological research and on the human condition in various biotic communities.27 His criticism was severe but not destructive, and Smuts would continue to comment and encourage Bews to develop the manuscript along holistic ecological lines.28 To appreciate the basis of Smuts’s criticism one has to make a short digression to a lecture he gave in July 1932 in Durban on the importance of climate for human development in Africa. Here he told an audience of about 2,000 people about the “sequence” of human cultures and their “chronological succession” in the context of geological order, holism, and evolution.29 His argument was to work out a comparative parallel between climate and human culture in Africa and Europe. He reviewed varying climatic conditions through the ages and compared them with human remnants discovered around the world, concluding that Europeans had their origin in South Africa. This led to a paradox for Smuts: “As they [Europeans and Bushmen] were racially and physically not very different 15,000 years ago, what has caused the immense difference between the European and Bushman of today? We see in the one the leading race of the world, while the other, though still living, has become a mere human fossil, verging to extinction.”30 The confounding factor, Smuts announced, was the semi-desert environment that dominated South Africa for many millennia. The Bushman had “[h]is desert nature inbred in him,” and there was thus “nothing left for him but to disappear” in the unfortunate process of natural selection.31 Yet Smuts was eager to protect this endangered species, because it could contribute to the science of early human advance. Following the lines of his personology, he thought that Bushmen were determined by the environment, whereas Europeans were able to control their environment and thus the evolutionary path of their race’s personality. Among South African anthropologists Smuts’s lecture was received “as a classic on the subject . . . priceless to students in other countries.”32 One of those who was very impressed by Smuts’s lecture was the anthropologist Robert Broom. Inspired by the philosophy of holism, he wrote and

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defended a creationist view of the evolution of human beings. Smuts was flattered and in return later wrote a preface to one of Broom’s books. Whereas in his scientific works Broom had some reservations, in his popular writings, he promoted Smuts’s view that in South Africa one could see all the stages in the succession of human personalities, from apes via the Bushman to the climax of the white race.33 Smuts had in this period also renewed his interest in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, which he studied with deepening fascination from his bench in the Parliament. In the midst of the budget deals he noted to his old friend Gillett that “[i]n the end the religious motif remains the deepest in human life. At present it appears to be all economics; finance dominates the world.”34 It was in the spiritual dimension of Whitehead’s philosophy of process that he learned to appreciate what he saw as an emerging religion of nature. He soon used it to reflect on holism and sociobiology; in August 1933, for example, he traveled home from Europe through Africa and notes, in a stopover in Khartoum, “I have been much struck by the continuous graduations from the white type in northern Europe to the African negro as this trip progresses—English—French—Italians—Greeks—Egyptians—Sudanese, and so on to the Bantu and the negro . . . I must say that after the Nordic I like the real African best; but that may be my continental ‘provinciality’ as Whitehead would call it.”35 This may sound like harsh racism to our contemporary ears, but it is important to recall that Smuts in his own time was considered to be moderate compared to the more extreme Nationalists who found the ideas of holism and personology odious.36 The gradual holistic approach to various human personalities (from the Nordic to the African) was conceived to be politically in the center. In one letter, for instance, he stated with empathy that he “hate[s] these useless colour distinctions which are no good and simply act as pinpricks to the Coloured and Native people. But it seems to belong to the very framework of our South African outlook to put things into colour lines.”37 Though such statements are rare in his correspondence, they do help nuance his politics of holism, which aimed at giving land and rights to people according to the supposed evolutionary level of their human evolutionary development. His political ideas were even endorsed by some black leaders, who were grateful for a policy that “helps Natives to let out steam . . . and keep quiet.”38 A sympathetic white follower noted in his discussion, “Holism and Politics,” that it was fine political philosophy with “no room for weaklings or degenerates.”39 Smuts’s lecture and views on the gradual evolution of personalities provides the academic and political context for the rapid progression of Bews’s work on human ecology. Bews was taken aback by the force of Smuts’s arguments and in the spring of 1932 he rewrote his entire manuscript to incorpo-

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rate environmental factors as the key explanation for the human condition. He fully agreed with Smuts that one has to break down the boundaries between the human and the natural realm and see all aspects of life as an ecological whole. The revised book was ready in the autumn of 1933 and he submitted it to the Longmans, Green publishing firm, which subsequently rejected the book on economic grounds. The decision was also based on a critical peer reviewer who thought Bews should update the book to include the latest advances and discoveries with respect to racial skull research and other facts in physical anthropology.40 This criticism may illustrate how hard it was for Bews to write an interdisciplinary book; he once again had to sit down and rewrite the entire manuscript. The book was finally ready early in 1935 and published by Oxford University Press the same year. Bews was of course glad to see the book in print, and even more so to have a favorable foreword by the famous statesman philosopher Smuts, a foreword that would give extra weight to the importance of his work. Smuts was less self-confident about the value of Bews’s project, which is evident from a letter to his wife Sybella: Prof. Bews has just re-written his M.S. on Human Ecology which I have had to read and for which I have had to write a Foreword. The book is an attempt to apply ideas gathered from Plant Ecology to human society and anthropology. It is only a moderate success, and a year ago I condemned the M.S. in its original form. Now it is better, and I have given it a blessing—not without mental reservation however. It is very few people who can successful[ly] dabble in fields beyond their own, and I have perhaps myself made that mistake. John Phillips at the Wit University is beginning also to dabble in social questions for which his botanical work does not specially fit him. Still the appeal of the human is nowadays very insistent to those who do not really appreciate the extreme complexity of that situation. Knowing it as I do, I would almost prefer to keep out of it altogether if that were possible, as it is not.41 This is the only instance in which Smuts shows any doubt about the value of plant ecological research with respect to social issues; it is in a private letter to his wife, and he never expressed similar opinions in public or in any other private correspondence. Yet the quotation may help to differentiate Smuts’s social views: as minister of justice he was perhaps more sensitive to the complexity and contradictions of the social organism than university professors of botany. It was exactly the lack of appreciation of human diversity as well as insensitivity to social political issues Smuts thought Bews and Phillips showed in their respective approaches to the human condition. As Smuts saw it, they had not taken into account the full importance of climate to determine the

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ecological evolution of the diversity of human personalities in various environments. They had leaned too heavily on the social and too lightly on the natural environment and were thus not fully able to appreciate the wide gradual differences among members of Homo sapiens. Bews was overjoyed by Smuts’s foreword when it finally arrived: “You can see how I have benefited by the holistic method of approach,” he wrote to Smuts, “and you can guess how much I have been encouraged throughout by your personal kindness to me.”42 Whatever doubt Smuts may have had about Bews’s human ecology, he did not express it in his foreword. Instead he pointed out that it would be fruitful to follow this new and promising ecological approach to the human condition “to its ultimate consequences.”43 The biologists should endeavor to apply ecological methods to human problems because it would be a powerful instrument in sociological research. The most important aspect of ecology to Smuts was naturally the holistic doctrine that underlaid it: ecology was for him a vision of harmony in active reciprocal relation between the organism and the environment. Yet Smuts pointed out that ecological laws only can be applied with “caution and circumspection” to human affairs, since some humans create their own environment by commanding the forces of nature.44 He thus maintained a gradualist course which allowed him to say that some humans were determined by climate and ecology, whereas others had evolved to be more environmentally independent. Bews’s book has a synthetic approach to life sciences. Just as he previously analyzed and classified the world’s grasses, in this volume he examined human life as a whole, including a general differentiation of human tribes in relation to environment, heredity, psychology, health, anthropology, and evolution of human cultures. At the base of Bews’s human ecology one finds Smuts’s holistic outlook and evolutionary view from his lecture “Climate and Man in Africa,” discussed above. Bews’s synthesis of environmental and hereditary biology was a holistic approach with synecological (social environment) and autoecological (individual heredity) branches. He elaborated on Smuts’s concept of ecology (nature as a living harmonious whole that evolves towards greater wholes) with the help of Frederic Clements’s notion of succession and climax. Plant ecology was an excellent point of departure for explaining the human condition, simply because “[p]lant ecology . . . is not a subdivision of botany, it is a view-point or . . . an attitude of mind.”45 With this weltanschauung he begins his book by explaining how plants through succession develop into climax communities. After 300 pages of ecological evolutionary history he ends with human beings and an ecological reading of Greek, Roman, Elizabethan and modern dramas. This all-embracing effort to explain the world in which we live forced the principal of the University of Natal to include almost every branch of knowledge in his ecological scheme.

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The theme of his book, however, was human evolution in different biotic communities. He argued that humans develop into different races depending on a combination of synecological adaptations to different environments and shifting climates, and autoecological inbreeding to genetic purity. This led to what he called “the ecological division of mankind,” which was crucial to understanding division of labor, segregation of races, and “ecological classes”— how humans self-segregate according to different levels of development.46 Control of the environment was the yardstick for these divisions, which he arranged according to types, areas, centers, patterns, and adhesion of traitcomplexes. Bews listed certain ecological divisions of labor in his book, as he noted in this heading: “Ecological Differentiation and Classification . . . [of] Fishermen and Seamen—Craftsmen and Artisans—Sorcerers, Priests, and Professional Classes—Traders and Merchants—Rulers, Nobles, and Aristocrats—Slaves and Serfs—[and finally] Peasants.”47 These ecological divisions of labor resulted from humans’ struggle to control their environments. Bews was (given his background from Orkney) especially impressed by the seaman’s ability to conquer the sea environment—to establish colonies and permanent settlements and thus modify the course of history. It was thus natural that British seamen should behave as ecological aristocrats towards people who because of their environment had not yet achieved the ability to exert control over it. Moreover, since “ecological and economic [terms] are . . . very nearly synonymous,” one should not try to alter the existing economic class structure of a society.48 It is noteworthy that Bews was not only known as an ecologist but also as a skilled investor, as Phillips recalled: “[Bews] has a sound sense of business, and his business acumen in University matters was widely reported. Very occasionally he indicated an interest in investments and the ‘state of the market.’ At death his estate ‘amounted’ to far more than that of the average academic.”49 Clearly, the juxtaposition of market economy and the economy of nature was not only a theoretical matter for Bews, who used ecology to naturalize and thus legitimize the economic class structures in South Africa and thus the division of labor from which he personally benefited. Bews also argued vigorously for environmental protection. A diverse biotic environment and a safeguarded economy of nature were the very preconditions for protecting the ecological division of labor among human races. Human influence on the environment could be very destructive in this respect: burning grass, overgrazing, or lowering the water levels in lakes or rivers interfered with plant succession. Ecological management of such destructive activities was important to protect human resources and economic prosperity. The book received a series of flattering reviews whose main focus was the

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importance of Smuts’s theory of holism and the synthesizing effect of ecology on the dispersed field of biology. The reviewer in Nature, for example, noted that “[t]he sterile and still surviving controversy between heredity and environment loses all meaning when approached through ecology,” which had a “synthetic” force on different evolutionary theories.50 Smuts’s holism in Bews’s reading created for another reviewer the “balanced whole of biology” or a “proportionate study of life” in which all aspects of human evolution were given due respect.51 It was this holistic path that the reviewer in Times Literary Supplement thought would give new life to the science of ethnology.52 Yet all were not happy about the holistic approach to human ecology. Charles Elton remarked in a short notice that there was “a lack of any impressive theory to bind the facts together,” and another critic thought Bews should have used Levy’s mechanistic system theory as Tansley had done.53

The Deep Ecological Succession of Climax Personalities Bews knew firsthand about Tansley’s critique of Phillips, and his response to it can be found in an unpublished lecture about human ecology delivered to the Durban Library Group. He agreed with Tansley that the human functional relationship between the nervous system and the environment may be described in physico-chemical terms, but pointed out that “the balanced relationship is much more complicated than any simple chemical reaction.”54 Unlike Tansley’s insistence on mechanistic reductionism, Bews argued that the human relationship to the environment should be considered on different levels of which the physico-chemical system was but one of many. As an alternative to the system approach, he introduced levels of life processes that integrated in wholes through gradual evolution. Much in the manner of Smuts’s study of Walt Whitman, he made the writings of Shakespeare the highest possible evolution of human consciousness and cultural development. “Shakespeare in his deep appreciation of environment and man’s relationship to it,” Bews argued, “shows himself to be so supremely great as an ecologist.”55 Shakespeare, Bews thought, was the first to appreciate the human condition and its interaction with various environments, and Bews thus thought of his plays as an original document of human ecology. The contrast to Tansley’s admiration for Freud and point of departure in the nervous system could not be starker. Literature and philosophy had since his days with Isaac Balfour at Edinburgh University been one of Bews’s main interests. In the Durban Library Group he was known not only for discussing “the ecology of poetry” but also for his poems, such as the following sonnet with the title “The Truly Wise”:

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Most wonderful the scene indeed appears Yet Nature’s inward beauties do not show To eyes unused to looking deep below Her outer self—Her music in our ears The whispering voices of the trees that grow In tune with their surroundings, for they know What man is forced to learn with many tears. The stream of Life flows onward ceaselessly And little we can do to change its course Nor do we know its purpose but agree If change there were it might be for the worse. And from it all we can but recognise That trees, like children, are among the wise.56 This biocentric poem about “looking deep below” into the ecological wholeness of nature captures the spirit of Bews’s thinking. In the context of his argument in Human Ecology, it was a line of reasoning intrinsically linked with the naturalization and legitimization of white superiority and ecological racism. Encouraged by the reception of Human Ecology, he dove into an ecological reading of the highest levels of human cultures. Bews had throughout his life suffered from rheumatism, and sometime in the early 1930s his doctor told him that he would not survive to old age.57 It is unclear whether or not he learned about his fate before he wrote Human Ecology, but he certainly knew about it (without telling anyone) while writing his last work, Life as a Whole (1937). As a result the book has the feel of a moral testament. Smuts was still the mentor for the new book; he read and made comments on the entire manuscript and provided the theoretical framework. Bews was proud to quote (with permission) a long letter from Smuts in his preface. Smuts wrote that the book made “a considerable contribution to the theory of Holism” that he could recommend “wholeheartedly” “[t]o all those who are dissatisfied with the mechanistic and analytical approach to scientific problems.”58 Few scientists could adorn their preface with a quotation from one of the empire’s leading politicians, and Bews was naturally flattered. The book deserves attention as an early attempt to outline a new deep ecological approach to the human condition. Bews’s guiding narrative was the story of walking up Table Mountain, a not-so-subtle reference to Smuts’s “Spirit of the Mountain” speech from 1923. His readers were invited to follow an imaginary philosophical route up the mountain until they could conceive life as a whole. The title of the book thus captures the very image of a holistic philosopher, who looks down from the mountain peak, embracing

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the world, with “deep knowledge” about the “balance, symmetry and essential harmony” of human nature.59 Bews, the principal, then explains how an ideal educational system would recapitulate the route to holistic ecological knowledge. Various ecological “excursions” on his imaginary mountain of knowledge to different disciplines ultimately lead the reader to a concluding peak with a new and better holistic vision for the world. “We are all inclined to view the world from the standpoint we know best,” he noted, and the most creative feature of the book is perhaps his use of plant ecology to explain humanistic disciplines.60 He had already hinted at this approach in the last chapters of Human Ecology, but it is not until Life as a Whole that he explores in full how one may use plant ecological methods to achieve a better understanding of history, art, architecture, music, and literature. The method for this view was straightforward: “collecting facts, classifying them, and fitting them together into a constructive synthesis.”61 As a consequence he also transferred the division of labor among botanists and plant ecologists into the structure of academia: it was up to all the specialized disciplines “to collect facts,” while the ecologically minded principal and holistic philosopher should make “a constructive synthesis” of these facts. A closer look at Bews’s reading of a few disciplines may reveal how he used holism to intertwine various forms of human manifestation. Art was to Bews a measure of a biological level of human sensitivity for beauty, perfection, and harmony.62 It had its primitive beginning in ornaments of hunting equipment, which through historical succession reached a cultural climax in the European open-air paintings of the Impressionists. Architecture was to Bews a utilitarian standard for the ability to create dwelling places for human development.63 It had its origin in the need among pastoral tribes for physical protection, which improved and climaxed in the American skyscraper, famous for an efficiency Bews saw as synonymous with holistic perfection. Music was to Bews an indication of evolutionary development, since “[m]an expresses himself and his ecology through the wholes he creates in music.”64 Its development from simple rhythm in folk music to its ecological climax in European symphonies was to Bews a history of growing holistic harmony. Literature was to Bews yet another “creation of new wholes . . . [where man] seeks to express his ecological experience of life.”65 The historical rise of literature was a succession from early sacred books and songs to the climax of English drama, especially in the writings of Shakespeare. Bews’s outline of art, architecture, music, and literature has one common feature: he first explains the ecological meaning of a human activity before he outlines a historical synopsis of the evolutionary succession of this activity towards larger wholes, a development that finally reaches an ecological climax in western culture. This project required thoroughly multidisciplinary research. To reach a

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synthetic conclusion Bews needed “to collect facts” in a multidisciplinary academia by analogy to how he earlier collected species in plant ecology. Universities were to the human ecologist botanical quadrates where he could count disciplinary species and synthesize them into a holistic ecological view of the human condition and evolutionary development in the world. A whole range of disciplines were like flowers in a bed he could order according to holistic evolution. Life as a Whole thus implied a paternalistic vision for academic management and a plea for a “deep-seated change in man’s creative powers” away from shallow “mechanical or applied science” and towards Smuts’s politics of holism and an ecological administration of knowledge.66 Bews extensively elaborated on Smuts’s philosophy. The book can be read as an attempt to naturalize and thus legitimize his politics of holism as a scientifically sound approach to current world affairs. Smuts’s religious aspirations became a central theme in Bews’s book; he preferred “to describe Him [the Creator] as a great artist or ecologist.”67 Smuts’s philosophy of personology, too, was central to the work. Bews used it to describe the ecological evolution and classification of various human races as well as male and female types of personalities. With a point of departure in Hippocratic theories on the influence of air, water, and environment on human beings, he extrapolates a “D.Q. (Development Quotient)” corresponding to the “I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient)” for mental testing of people to determine who they are and where they belong in the natural world as a basis for responsible ecological politics.68 The result of such research with regard to gender was a natural difference among “[c]hildren in their ecological relationship to the outside world . . . Boys collect [things such as botanical species] more systematically than girls.”69 Ecologically speaking, marriage was the only natural relationship between man and woman, and homosexuality was “from the synecological standpoint . . . morally wrong.”70 Bews also devoted much attention to the “deep ecological significance” of human evolutionary history: in the “golden age,” Bews explains about primitive hunters, “[t]he animals are his brothers and sisters” in “a well-balanced whole” where they worship “the Divine consort of the Earth-mother.”71 The fall from this innocent past started with the development of “various ecological classes” (fishermen, peasants, warriors, the learned, and the rulers) in various environments around the world.72 It was thus of utmost concern, Bews argued, to guard the last remains of the primitive hunters in their biotic community; in the early 1930s they would “migrate in great numbers to the towns, where they constitute one of the most interesting and important of our present-day ecological problems.”73 The governing classes could not return to such a pristine life because of the impossibility of reversing their evolution, but those who still had an intimate relation to the “Earth-mother”

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should be protected from the ills of modern life by remaining in their proper biotic communities. In this way “economic and general ecological organization of civilized life” should be administered—“in the hands of older men”—for “[t]he good of mankind as a whole.” Such organization included abolition of tariff barriers and international cooperation among the ruling ecological class.74 Bews was barely able to see his book in print; he died in November, 1938, at the age of fifty-three. His wife was his sole survivor, and so the memorial service was dominated by his academic family; the entire faculty and about 800 students were present to honor him in their gowns and hoods. He had clearly made a great impression on his academic friends and fellows, especially on Smuts, who praised Life as a Whole and initiated a commemorative biography of Bews.75 Also among the mourners was John Phillips, Bews’s colleague in human ecological research at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The Frankenwald Research Station: Human Ecology in Practice John Phillips was by no means defeated by Tansley’s mechanistic criticism of his holistic approach to ecology. In fact it seems to have enhanced his fame, at least in South Africa. He would now advocate his proposal for a grand survey of Africa through research and education at the Frankenwald research station. The station, which was located on a large property donated to the government for educational purposes by a rich gold and diamond dealer at the turn of the century, was now owned by the University of the Witwatersrand. The university sold half of this property to the African Explosives and Chemical Industries Limited in 1934, and Phillips and the ecologists were left with an area of about 1,000 acres and some money to build and equip a research station. The explosives firm was one of the largest manufacturers of fertilizers in South Africa, with its own Agricultural Advisory Department, and it soon became Phillips’s main patron, financing large-scale ecological research on the land.76 Phillips’s social and scientific vision for the Frankenwald research station has been outlined in detail in the previous chapter’s discussion of his “Man at the Cross-Roads” lecture. What remains to be understood is how he implemented and advocated his ideas about the biotic community and a new environmentally friendly biocentric science and society. The project was endorsed and patronized by the highest South African authorities. The African Explosives and Chemical Industries had close contacts within military, mining, and agricultural sectors of the government. The close collaboration between the firm’s research on fertilizers and Phillips’s investigations into the social structure and management of the biotic commu-

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nity was essential to the Frankenwald project. Illtyd Buller Pole Evans initiated the project in part: he saw the biotic community approach in ecological research as a tool to unite practical experiments with theoretical research. Smuts was no less enthusiastic. Phillips asked him in March 1935 if he would open the field laboratory, and Smuts inaugurated it with pomp and circumstance in October 1935 (only two months after Tansley’s critique). Phillips made Smuts’s philosophy the core of research and teaching at Frankenwald: “Nurtured by the understanding which grew up between the General and a humble musket bearer like myself, it was possible to demonstrate to successive students the identity of the ecological approach and the holistic point of view and their significance in the investigation of the biotic community and related matters.”77 The idea was to make the station into a miniature version of an alternative holistic society. Phillips’s students would learn to think and practice holistically in a research station organized according to the ideals of the biotic community; patriarchal management, racial segregation, and respect for the order of nature and environmental values. He taught his students “to see and know what is right and liberal,” instilling in them the desire to serve South Africa through science.78 The first major research projects conducted by Phillips and his students concerned cycles of nature caused by fire. In the summary article Phillips explains that fire was “a bad master” when it was uncontrolled, but it could also be “a good servant” when regulated according to objects of management, season, frequency, and locality. Fire had traditionally been a way of clearing farmland among several tribes, and finding means to regulate and control their means of production would enhance the state’s grip on the black population. It was time “for the awakening of a national consciousness,” Phillips argued, to stop “vandalism against the national heritage” and regulate use of fire to protect South African vegetation “valuable for its own intrinsic worth.”79 The poorly managed blacks were a danger to the inherent value of the environment and the nation. In October 1936 Phillips became the president of the botany section of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, and he used the opportunity to arrange a symposium on botanical research in relation to the mining industry. This would be the first of several symposia he arranged for the association whose content captures his attempt to carry out the African survey he suggested back in the early 1930s. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the mines in Johannesburg, and it was widely felt that the time had come to address a whole range of issues with respect to health and environmental problems as well as the future progress of the industry. Phillips had in his “Man at the Cross-Roads” lecture from 1932 expressed deep skepticism with respect to a mechanistic-industrial approach to nature and advo-

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cated the need for a shift in the philosophy of science towards Smuts and the politics of holism. He gave this critique a new twist by distinguishing between “pure and applied” research: pure science guided by the philosophy of holism should preferably lead the applied in order to avoid the pitfalls of the industrial approach to nature. A quotation by Friedrich Schiller helped him express the dual nature of science: Science to one is the mother revered by the Gods; To another only a cow whence to squeeze profits in butter and cheese.80 Applied science, Phillips believed, aimed to squeeze profits and must be guided by pure divine truths, such as those revealed in Smuts’s philosophy of holism and in Phillips’s own research on the structure of the biotic community. The language of pure and applied research emerged with Phillips’s new patron, the African Explosives and Chemical Industries Limited, and he from then on defined pure ecology as being concerned with “the reciprocal relations of life and its environment,” whereas applied ecology was simply “the art of ekeing out one’s salary!” 81 In the Johannesburg biotic community, pure ecologists who understood the economy of nature should reveal the external conditions for responsible management of the industrial economy of the mines and beyond. Basic research on the household of nature would provide knowledge applicable to a responsible environmental politics with respect to control of reserves for black workers, economic succession, new progressive methods of education, preservation of soil, and the establishment of vegetation over old mine dumps. To defend the welfare of the Johannesburg biotic community as well as to aid the politicians on these and related matters of applied research was the duty of the pure ecologists. Alluding to the famous platonic formula, Phillips thought that either the environmental philosopher had to become a statesman, or the statesman an environmental philosopher in order to achieve such a responsible policy of holism.82 Though he did not mention Smuts’s name, Phillips was clearly hinting. Smuts must have been very pleased with Phillips’s symposium and support of the politics of holism, because he arranged a special grant for Phillips to visit the United States through his contacts at the Carnegie Corporation’s committee.83 Phillips went to Chicago where he gave a summer course, “BioEcology,” in 1937 before he met Clements to discuss the progress (or lack of such) of ecological terminology and methods. Clements had just published a lengthy reply to Tansley in defense of Phillips, and in collaboration with Victor Shelford repeated the defense in their long-planned and voluminous BioEcology, published in 1939.84 The historian of ecology Robert A. Crocker has studied in detail the full

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context of the production of this book. He argues that Tansley’s critique of Phillips actually was aimed at Shelford. It is likely that a critique of Phillips would damage Shelford indirectly since they shared much research terminology. Yet I am not able to agree fully with Croker’s interpretation because of my focus on the north/south exchange of knowledge in ecological debate. In any case, Clements was thrilled to meet Phillips, whom he regarded as “the ablest of all the young ecologists anywhere,” and he went out of his way to make him feel welcome in the States.85 Phillips was no less excited and reported back to Smuts that Clements was “much your follower,” that the president of the Carnegie Institution referred to him and the pope for moral advice, and that educational reform in view of holism was on everybody’s lips.86 He and Clements planned how to launch a counter-attack on Tansley. In a summary of their meeting Phillips notes to Allee: “British Ecology is in the stage of marking-time: nothing much is coming from her Schools. Personally I am a little impatient of much of the formal, academic clap-trap that is called Ecology; much of the teaching in Ecology I should like to see entirely scrapped.”87 The wounds between Tansley and Phillips had obviously not healed. Tansley’s friend Robert Adamson happened to visit Phillips and Clements and he kept Tansley updated on the issue.88 Encouraged by Clements, Phillips now set forth to write a book that once and for all would establish holism as the proper ecological method and scrap for good Tansley’s ecosystem approach. It was supposed to be a book suitable for teaching and research work, and Smuts also asked him to include matters of agricultural policy in South Africa.89 The book was apparently ready in late 1938 for release by Verdoorn publishing firm in Leyden, but for some unknown reason it never materialized, even though Phillips continued to work on the manuscript beyond 1954.90 Upon his return to South Africa Phillips arranged a new symposium for all the members of the South African Association about the conservation of natural resources in the Union.91 The event, which took place in July 1938, illustrates Phillips’s holistic view that a complex issue like conservation needed an interdisciplinary ecological approach in order to succeed. It was important to see natural conservation in view of scientific problems and research on solar radiation, climate, rainfall, geology, soil sciences, vegetation, zoology, native sociology, and economics. The ecological framing of the issue of conservation of natural resources as a problem for interdisciplinary research would provide ecological solutions that not only empowered the ecologist, but also provided support for Smuts’s politics of holism and unification of the nation. The sense of apocalyptic urgency in the papers with respect to soil erosion, game management, and control of the black population had its social base in the urgent need for political unification advocated by Smuts. The construc-

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tion of a threat from nature was the result of social problems of cooperation among white South Africans projected into the natural realm. The ecologist constructed an “ecology of fear” designed to control the black and Asian population.92 One speaker was “truly horrified” about aridity and soil erosion and another deeply concerned about over-stocking of farm animals at the expense of game.93 Yet it was the need for “human conservation” that dominated the symposium. It was important to adopt the policy of segregation to protect this natural resource: “Politically the policy of segregation . . . is of great value to human conservation; it represents a break with the traditional practice of Europeanising the native and of destroying, by neglect, most of what was valuable and otherwise in the native’s own cultural heritage.”94 Phillips agreed. People of European descent had caused much environmental harm, and it was thus important to shelter the black population from developing into the same modernity: “[T]he Native has wrought great havoc” where he has not been safeguarded within his proper biotic community. For Phillips it was most important to see the environmental crisis as a national problem that could be solved only through the policy of unification: “We do not yet realise, as a nation, that our country’s most precious material possessions, its vegetation, its soils, its water, are being taken from us by three national foes—Deterioration, Ignorance and Procrastination. As a united nation we must fight these and conquer!”95 The three national foes and the threat from nature made it as urgent as ever to unite the nation in a grand effort to solve the environmental crisis along ecological lines. Phillips successfully framed the crisis so that it would empower Smuts’s politics of holism as well as his own pure research into trusteeship of the biotic community, including its black population.

The Politics of Holism and the Mobilization against National Socialism Smuts was not directly involved in the symposiums at the South African Association but followed the debate closely from the sidelines. His patronage was not limited to Bews and Phillips alone, and through his friend Pole Evans he supported new journals and various botanical and forestry research.96 While Phillips promoted nature conservation, Smuts invited industrial magnates to visit South Africa’s national parks, the gorilla reserves, and Victoria Falls, where he championed unspoiled nature and the beauty of the mountains. The burden of modern society on the American magnate Thomas Lamont, for example, could, according to Smuts, find healing in the harmony of nature: “Africa and its wilderness must be especially soothing to people like you whose nerves are harassed all the time by the wild doings of mankind.”97 His

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personal notebooks and correspondence also show that Smuts was still thinking like a mountain; they are filled with such reflections on the pleasure of being in nature, and he continued to promote conservation of South African nature. In the political realm Smuts became minister of justice in 1933, ruling the country with James Hertzog until 1939, when he became prime minister. Smuts’s biographer William Hancock has written an extensive review of his political and social engagements, and there is no need to repeat his brilliant research here. Yet it is worth discussing his portrayal of Smuts as a “champion” for native interests.98 Hancock juxtaposes Smuts with the Nationalists (and thus also implicitly to the apartheid regime of the 1960s that served as context for his work) and argues successfully that his politics were both tolerant and liberal in comparison. This may be the case, but this nuance should not overshadow the fact that the difference in policy from the perspective of black and Asian-born Africans was more of a nuance between a policy of suppression and a policy of hard suppression. Smuts was as minister of justice responsible for the enactment of the Native Representative Act and the Native Lands Act of 1936, which cannot be understood as laws that champion the interests of native Africans. The laws—which restricted Africans’ political representation and ability to buy land—were based directly on Smuts’s Oxford lectures from 1929.99 Smuts would frequently argue that the “coloured people must be treated as part of the body politic. . . . [and that] the coloured must have his rights.”100 However, these statements were never meant to indicate that everybody should have equal rights or be included in the same body politic. Through his politics of holism Smuts tried to create a multicultural country “with human races ranging from the very lowest to the highest” with a political system that provided rights to each citizen according the level of their personality’s state of being.101 Smuts’s evolutionary perspective on society allowed him not only to differentiate between high and low human personalities, but also to look at time as an endless political commodity. Social and political rights were to emerge gradually as in an evolutionary process (as in Whitehead’s philosophy or in Bergson’s concept of dureé and élan vital), which would take time, much time. Indeed, his slogan for the South African army, “Forward, March!” was not just a military command, it was a vision of the “caravan of mankind” pushing its own evolution forward.102 The tension between his visions of where mankind was heading and the grim reality of the social and political situation in his own country was to him a gap that sooner or (to native South Africans) much later would be closed. It was his understanding of time from Holism and Evolution that allowed him to be a “champion” of natives’ interests, while also signing some of the harshest race laws of this century.

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The ecological research of Bews, Phillips, and other South African scientists would enforce and legitimize Smuts’s moral and political views. Bews’s research on the ecological division of mankind legitimized evolutionary gradualism, and Phillips’s investigations into the biotic community provided Smuts with scientific tools for a policy of trusteeship that would preserve the diversity of local cultures and way of life. Yet as Smuts discussed in Holism and Evolution, it was physics—in the work of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity—that ultimately formed the basis of his philosophy and politics of holism. “What is microscopic from one point of view is cosmic from another, and vice versa,” Smuts explained to a reviewer back in 1928 in connection with Einstein’s theory; “it all depends on observers, their frames of reference and their relations of movement or otherwise.”103 This reading had spurred him to develop his holistic theory of microscopic matter, unification of the country, and an understanding of the evolution of the universe. Einstein himself had so far kept aloof from engaging in the South African reading of his theory, although one may assume that as an educated bildungsburger he was familiar with Smuts’s views. He probably learned about his philosophy through the 1931 supplement to Nature on the evolution of the universe, since this issue referred directly to his theory of relativity in relation to Smuts’s philosophy. Smuts may also have been known to Einstein as a member of the Jewish community, since Smuts was a key politician in defending Zionism and the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Smuts’s numerous talks about Zionism in connection with international peace and understanding through the League of Nations were also in general agreement with Einstein’s own world views.104 They exchanged ideas in the early 1930s, letters that now seem to be lost. What is left in the archives are three letters, two from Einstein and one from Smuts, which indicate a fraternal relationship between them. In the first letter from 1934, Einstein notes: “I have with joy seen that you selflessly on different occasions have promoted fairness and protected progress. For this I am especially happy.”105 Smuts was of course encouraged by the endorsement of the politics of holism signed “With deep respect, yours A Einstein.” He now had every reason to push forward with his scientifically based politics. A couple of years later Einstein passed on a copy of the English translation of Mein Weltbild to Smuts with a kind personal inscription. Smuts replied with a long letter summarizing his views on physics and holism in relation to their shared interest and concern for a Jewish homeland, ethics, politics, and the League of Nations.106 Einstein replied with yet another letter filled with more sympathy for Smuts’s views.107 One should not conclude based on these letters that Einstein supported

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every aspect of the politics of holism and the unity of science promoted by Smuts. Only further research may explain the precise nature of Einstein’s views on the South African reading of the theory of general relativity. Yet one may safely conclude that Einstein’s letters provided no resistance to Smuts. The larger public image of Smuts was more divided than his scholarly reception and support. His policy generated a divided public view of his achievements, which materialized in two biographies of his life, a two-volume appreciative celebration of the great South African and international politician from 1936 by Gertrud Millin, and Gray Steel: J. C. Smuts: A Study in Arrogance (with a telling cover picture of a gloomy blue-eyed Smuts) from 1937 by Harold Armstrong.108 Millin focused on Smuts as a promoter of international peace and understanding, and Armstrong on his ruthless suppression of labor unions and natives. As the European political crisis gradually came head to head with national socialism, the two biographies became tools for both sides. Millin’s work served as a basis for a series of propaganda pamphlets in which British and American political commentators wrote of Smuts as a great general, world peace-maker, and important moral philosopher.109 On the other side of the front line, German Nazis used Armstrong’s book to paint an equally bleak picture of the allied general. “At any rate I am not yet forgotten!” Smuts could note with some ironic satisfaction.110 Whatever one may think about Smuts’s politics, it had absolutely nothing to do with the growth of Nazism. Smuts did not socialize or communicate with those few defenders of British national socialism whom historians argue were inspired by holism, nor did those British thinkers and activists read or otherwise support his views.111 Smuts had no sympathy for or contact with German national socialists who may have been inspired by holism, ecology, or other “green” views.112 Instead it is remarkable that Smuts noted as early as April 1933 that “Hitler with his ruthless barbarism . . . [and with] his baiting of the Jews” would carry Europe “back to the Middle Ages” and may cause an “orgy of racial politics” in South Africa.113 There is not one line of support of Nazism in his public speeches or private correspondence (nor did his constituency support Hitler, who had greater sympathy among Nationalists). Moreover, Smuts gave qualified support to the Spanish coalition government in their civil war because they were fighting the impending danger of a fascist regime.114 Smuts’s firm rejection of fascist and Nazi regimes did not imply any support of socialist ideas, nor did Soviet and other Marxist intellectuals support holism.115 In the late 1930s he was still critical of all kinds of socialists, particularly H. G. Wells, whom he saw as a leading socialist promoter of “the general trend against our fundamental human rights.”116 Wells’s antipathy for Smuts was equally unsympathetic; he thought holism

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was a “philosophy of great totalitarian possibility” and that Smuts’s politics ultimately would lead to a “race terrorism” similar to Nazi Germany.117 These remarks should best be understood as attempts on both sides to secure a place in the safe center of science policy. Wells pushed Smuts’s politics of holism to the bourgeois right, opposite his own alleged centrist views, whereas Smuts was equally eager to label Wells as a radical socialist on the far left. In the next chapter I will discuss Wells and his views on human ecology and science policy in some detail. What is noteworthy is that his comparison of Smuts’s views to Nazism was entirely wrong. Smuts’s politics veered neither right nor left; he prominently defended the League of Nations and encouraged respect for the holistic-ecological integrity of (high and low) human personalities. The reception of Smuts’s holism in the German-speaking community was indeed mixed. His prime supporter was initially Alfred Adler (1870–1937), a psychologist who frequented the circle around Freud in Vienna (at the time Tansley was there), ultimately as one of Freud’s antagonists. Adler had just finished his book on human psychology, Science of Living (1929), when he heard about “The Nature of Life” controversy in Cape Town and thus came to know about holism. He immediately read Holism and Evolution and wrote an excited letter of support to Smuts in which he was “very glad to recommend your book to all my students and fellows as the best presentation for the science of Individual Psychology.”118 It was Smuts’s personology that intrigued Adler, who henceforth used the philosophy of holism to discuss mind-body relations in his psychology. He immediately proposed a German version of Holism and Evolution, to be translated by his colleague Erwin Krauss. Smuts was flattered, declining all royalties so as to pique the interest of possible publishing firms, and even suggested he make a promotional tour to introduce holism in Austria and Germany.119 As a dry run for the project, Krauss published a translation of Smuts’s speech at the British Association in Adler’s journal in 1932, then finished a full translation of the book. Incidentally, this was the first time the word “holismus” appeared in the German language. “I am sure we can find easily a German publisher [for the book],” Adler wrote Smuts, but in the end he was unable to do just that.120 It is noteworthy that no firm would risk financing a book about holism in German despite Smuts’s generous offer to decline financial benefits and to make a promotional tour. It indicates that holism intrigued few Germans and Austrians in this period. Yet Adler and Krauss’s fascination with gestalt theory and holism was not without importance for the history of ecology. It was through them that a young student of philosophy named Arne Næss (the cofounder of deep ecology) got to know about the topic. He traveled to Austria in 1934, where he

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became inspired by the Vienna Circle, read logic, psychology, and especially gestalt theory. In psychology he turned to Edmund Hitschman for analysis; for fourteen months he was analyzed daily to cope with his “real serious infantile neurosis.”121 Although Næss’s interests were far from ecological philosophy in this period, it is reasonable to trace his thoughts back to the Vienna experience since gestalt psychology and philosophy is at the very heart of his deep ecological reasoning. After four years in Vienna, Næss went to California, where he used gestalt psychology in his behavioral studies of learning among rats at the laboratories in Berkeley, studies that represent his first contribution to deep ecology.122 Though the reception of Smuts was initially lukewarm, the general could report with some justification that holism was “making rapid strides on the Continent” by the mid-1930s.123 In Hamburg a new attempt was made by Adolf Meyer-Abich to publish Smuts’s book in a new translation by a local intellectual interested in gestalt theory named Helmut Minkowski.124 This attempt also was met with financial skepticism by publishing firms, and it was not until the council-general of South Africa in Hamburg arranged for a contribution from an old missionary from German East Africa named Hans Merensky that publication was made possible. The book finally appeared in November 1938 under the title Die holistische Welt, with a special preface by Smuts, who went out of his way not to offend the Nazi authorities.125 MeyerAbich wrote a foreword in which he argued that the book inaugurated a promising path of philosophical and scientific reasoning. The Nazi authorities were of another opinion, and forced the publishers to withdraw the book from circulation in September 1939. The remaining stock was later destroyed by Allied bombing. The Nazis most likely suppressed the book because of Smuts’s political and military commitments, although the politics of holism Smuts advocated had little support among Nazis. The historian Anne Harrington has in an excellent study explored the culture of scientific holism (ganzheit) in Germany in this period, and she argues convincingly that some scholars in biology and psychology used holistic argumentation and gestalt psychology in their reasoning about science and society as an antidote to contemporary mechanism. As a part of this larger argument, Harrington points out that organism, vitalism, and holism became important for Nazi mobilization and suppression of Jewry, and she refers to the thinking of Meyer-Abich, among others, to support her claim.126 Though holistic metaphors may have been used in Nazi reasoning, it is worth noticing that the word “holism” was exclusively associated with Smuts and his support of the League of Nations. To the extent German scholars used the word holism, it may thus indicate resistance to and not support of Nazism, as may or may not be the case with Meyer-Abich.

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Ecological Mobilization of the South African Home Front The suppression of Smuts’s book in Germany confirmed the general’s suspicions of the growing threat of Nazism to international peace and understanding. Phillips became a close and important collaborator of Smuts in this mobilization against Nazism. Months before Smuts declared war on Germany Phillips wrote the general and told him that he was organizing a National Register of Scientists through the South African Association to enlist them for possible war duties.127 The aim was to create a register that would indicate how each individual scientist could best serve the country in case of an emergency. Physicians could do medical service, chemists and physicists could provide ballistic research, and so on. Phillips initially thought ecologists could do reconnaissance service. However, he soon realized that ecologists were better suited for “General Intelligence” because of their unique holistic overview of academic, social, and natural life.128 The structured organizational techniques of ecology and ecologists’ ability to relate human and natural life provided an exceptional position for organizing knowledge effectively in the case of war. In the months before the war in Europe actually started Phillips used all his energy to distribute questionnaires to scientists and to create a grand list of all their potential war duties.129 When Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, the South African cabinet faced a crisis about the nation’s policy, with Hertzog in favor of neutrality and Smuts in favor of declaring war. Phillips sent an urgent letter of support to the general on September 3 and reminded him that he had a ready-made survey of the entire scientific corps at his disposal in case it was needed. On September 4 the House of Assembly voted in favor of Smuts by a slim margin. While the House was still in session, Phillips sent yet another letter to show support and loyalty “for you as idealist and man of action.”130 Phillips probably had no direct influence on Smuts’s final decision, but it must have been reassuring for a general with deep respect for scientific research to know that most of the South African scientific community supported the Assembly’s decision. The coalition between Hertzog and Smuts fell apart on the war issue, and Smuts became South Africa’s new prime minister, a position he held until 1948. Tellingly, he spent his first day as the country’s leader in the National Botanic Garden, absorbed in thoughts about the destiny of the “Human Personality” and gaining strength from the vital forces of nature.131 Phillips soon became a key actor on the “home front” of the war as one of the leaders of the Agricultural and Industrial Organisation and Co-ordination in charge of mobilizing South Africa’s natural food resources and other commodities.132 This incidentally led to contact with native African and Asian

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African leaders, who from 1939 gave crucial but ambivalent support of Smuts’s policy, hoping that it would lead to better conditions for the black and Asian population than the program of the conservative Nationalists. A substantial number of black South Africans were allowed to enroll in service armed with spades—they were not given weapons out of fear of uprising— and were either assigned to build trenches or to agricultural projects. Though they were not armed, many blacks welcomed the experience of wearing the nation’s uniform and doing their share in a common effort to fight the Nazis, a fight that they hoped would lead to a less racially oriented society in the postwar political reconstruction. Smuts’s cabinet member Jan Hofmeyr was the chief architect of native policy in the war period, a policy that is rightly described as tolerant.133 The anti-racist advocacy of Hofmeyr is well documented and indeed remarkable, and Smuts may have included him in the war cabinet precisely as a person who could build a bridge of trust to the African population in a period when they were crucial to the war effort. There is a radical difference between Smuts and Hofmeyr’s arguments: as a former professor in classics and literature (with an education from Oxford) Hofmeyr was less vulnerable to ecological and anthropological arguments. Unlike Smuts he did not defend Hegelian idealism, holism, or gradualism, nor did he argue that scientific natural laws should serve as a basis for a policy of rights. Rather, he stood strictly by anthropocentric and individualistic arguments in the liberal philosophical tradition. It is in this context that one might appreciate the next symposium Phillips arranged late in 1939 for the South African Association about “[t]he need for the investigation and the conservation of human resources in South Africa.” Hofmeyr opened the event by pointing to the continuation of the theme from last year’s symposium, the conservation of natural resources. He then stressed with respect to human resources that “[e]very human being endowed with personality is an end in himself; every human being, whatever his social status or the colour of his skin, is capable of making a worth-while contribution to the community.”134 Such ideas must have sounded like a challenge to Phillips, who was sitting in the audience, and whose subsequent paper about human ecology is less self-confident and more open to questioning than his earlier racist views. The work of Smuts and Bews still provided his conceptual point of departure on how to solve racial problems in South Africa. Yet the tone of the article is less confident than his “Man at the CrossRoads” lecture from 1932; he repeats his warnings against miscegenation and genetic and mental inbreeding, and reiterates his support of segregation, but he also stresses the need “of building up a State in which all men of all colour will be given an even chance.”135 Instead of legal segregation, which may hamper evolution, Phillips proposed to carry out more ecological re-

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search on how topography, climate, soil, and vegetation may affect the natural development of various races in different biotic communities. The holistic segregation of personalities was not supposed to be enforced politically, but instead to develop naturally so that everyone would find their natural place in the world according to the level of their ecological state of being. Inspired by the symposium, Smuts started to advocate white settlement in favorable environments, as he had much earlier in his Oxford lectures.136 The “natural” segregation was part of the educational culture at Frankenwald research station. A few South African Indians and black students attended Phillips’s classes without incidents of racial tension because social privileges “by mutual, tacit consent were wisely not expected by the nonEuropeans.”137 It was this culture of mutual understanding and respect for biological difference that Phillips advocated as an alternative to legal segregation. It was thus important to overcome racial prejudices with more ecological education and understanding of the holistic principles of evolution of personalities. As the war went on, Phillips arranged for yet another symposium, now on the role of science in postwar reconstruction of the country. He invited Smuts to give a talk on a possible “new order” in education, native policy, and social welfare for the Union.138 Smuts had already addressed this topic at length at the South African Institute of Race Relations in January 1942, where he pointed to the ecologically based African Survey as “a sound basis for scientific judgment” with respect to racial policy.139 Using information from the covenant of the League of Nations, he proposed enforcing the system of trusteeship after the war through a policy of segregation, to stop the unfortunate “urbanization of Natives” that could hamper a responsible policy for conservation of nature and human resources.140 To Smuts it was important to ground the legal policy of trusteeship in science: the civic constitution for a postwar political order of rights should be based on natural laws or scientific knowledge about human nature. It was such issues Phillips wanted Smuts to address at the symposium of the South African Association. Unfortunately, Smuts was busy with the war in North Africa, but agreed to write a message of general support of the meeting, which Phillips could read on his behalf.141 It came in the form of a letter from Smuts to Phillips with “all good wishes,” which was read at the symposium and published in the association’s proceedings.142 No other South African scientist ever received such a statement of public support from the prime minister. Smuts was implicitly thanking Phillips for his creation of the National Register of Scientists, which was useful to the war effort, and for his longtime scientific support of holism. To members of the association unfamiliar with ecology, Phillips was now known as Smuts’s chief protagonist and close friend.

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It is notable that although Phillips was the prime instigator of the symposium, he did not contribute a paper. The event was instead dominated by Hofmeyr, who made several sharp comments on a set of articles that illustrated his willingness to question prewar racist assumptions.143 Phillips never seriously questioned his ecological racism and defended holism as well as the apartheid regime well into the 1960s. That he did not present a paper at the 1942 symposium may thus indicate a split with Hofmeyr on the issue of race, though only further historical research will reveal the exact nature of their relationship. Phillips’s war effort was not limited to arranging symposiums. He was also involved in more prosaic research, such as the development of hardy grass for airplane runways and the production of drug-yielding plants for the army. The research started in September 1942 in close collaboration with his industrial patrons at Frankenwald, and Phillips successfully used Smuts as a means to obtain financial support and to move his projects with speed through the military bureaucracy. The prime minister was rather annoyed by Phillips’s lengthy letters on various types of seeds in the midst of planning major battles in North Africa and noted in the margin of one of the letters that Phillips was getting “tiresome.”144 Yet he made inquiries to the defense authorities on behalf of Phillips, and the Frankenwald research station consequently received necessary funds for their research. Believing that Smuts took great interest in his project, Phillips continued to send him earnest reports on the progress of his ecological research.145 At the end of the war, when thousands of soldiers and spade-carriers returned, there was an urgent need to find employment, and many ex-servicemen went to the university to continue a civil life. The Frankenwald research station absorbed a sizable number of them in what became Phillips’s last effort to carry out a holistic African survey. Several hundred students came to his station to learn about means of controlling soil erosion, and about 120 graduated with a three-year diploma. These students soon got jobs as soil protectors all over Africa and would report to Phillips on the loss of soil in various countries. To fully understand South African ecological research after the war would require another book. It is therefore appropriate to end this chapter with what became the last important argument put forward by Smuts in the name of the ecologically inspired politics of holism: his defense of human rights at the United Nations meeting in San Francisco, May 1945.

General Smuts, the United Nations, and Human Rights In the final years of the war Smuts traveled between London and Johannesburg as one of Churchill’s military advisors and prime minister of his own

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country. The scientific community saw in him a man of the highest moral standard: “Against such a rock [as Smuts] the waves of [German] attack will beat in vain,” a reviewer in the journal Nature noted in admiration, and the Royal Society of Arts honored him with the Albert Medal, inscribed “Statesman—Soldier—Scientist—Philosopher.”146 As the southern flank of the war front was liberated by Allied forces, Smuts’s military task became less clear, and he was subsequently assigned to planning the postwar reconstruction. As a longtime proponent of the League of Nations he now started to advocate founding a similar institution to guard a hopefully more peaceful political world order. To unite South Africa was Smuts’s most important political achievement, and his dream of uniting the world in the United Nations bears upon this experience.147 To Smuts the southern part of Africa was the place of origin of Homo sapiens, and many of the social ills in the region were similar to world problems: different rival European cultures, different natural environments, and different races. Yet the birth of United South Africa had proven that diverse people were able to cooperate and create social and economic progress despite their differences. Smuts was one of the main architects of this success, and the politics of holism was the means he used to carry it out. Was it possible to unite the world in the same way and with the same means he had used to unite South Africa? Could the philosophy of holism and evolution help to unite all conflicting nations? Engaged with such questions he now began to write a completely new version of his book on holism, but did not have time to carry out the project. Much of his time during the final years of the war was devoted to diplomatic negotiations and advocacy for creating the United Nations. The Dumbarton Oaks meeting in September 1944 represents the peak of his diplomatic work, where he was a crucial negotiator among the Great Powers on the United Nations issue. It was after this meeting that the idea of creating a world organization got real momentum. Smuts put down in writing the guiding principles for such an institution, writings that eventually matured into a draft for the preamble and the first chapter of the organization’s charter. It is a remarkable document that deserves to be quoted in full: Preamble We the United Nations, assembled in conference to seek a new way of life for the nations, and to prevent a recurrence of the fratricidal strife which has now twice in our generation brought untold sorrows and losses on mankind, and to establish an international organisation to that end: Do hereby declare in this Charter of the United Nations, our com-

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mon faith and objects, and the principles on which we seek to found an organisation for the peace progress and welfare of mankind. Chapter I—The Common Faith 1. We declare our faith in the basic human rights, in the sacredness, essential worth, and integrity of the human personality, and affirm our resolve to establish and maintain social and legal sanctions for safeguarding the same: 2. We believe in the practice of tolerance, in the equal rights of individual and of individual nations large and small, as well as in their inherent right to govern themselves without outside interference, in accordance with their own customs and way of life: 3. We believe in the enlargement of freedom and the promotion of social progress, and in raising the standards of life, so that there may be freedom of thought and expression and religion, as well as freedom from want and fear of all: 4. We believe in nations living in peace and peaceful intercourse with each other as good neighbors, and in renouncing war as an instrument of national policy.148 Smuts had worked hard on every word and line of the draft to make it sound as compelling as possible. In the middle of April 1945 he presented it to all the ministers attending the British Commonwealth Meeting who had joined to discuss the Dumbarton Oaks proposals for creating a United Nations Organization. They were taken by surprise and were, according to the British diplomat Charles Webster, “a little puzzled as to what to do” with the draft, and consequently postponed a decision on it to the next day. Webster puts it delicately: “Not all those [ministers] present had the same view of it [the draft]” as Smuts did.149 In preparation for the Dumbarton Oaks meeting, Webster had written his own draft for a preamble, which went unnoticed and was soon lost in the archives, though Webster kept a copy in his diary. At the meeting he sat behind his minister, who sympathized about the sad fortune of Webster’s proposal. It was a draft focusing on institutional aspects that has an unmistakable flavor of pedantic diplomatic dryness. It lacks both the content and literary style one finds in Smuts’s draft. Yet Webster wanted his say, and on his own initiative he sat up late at night trying to draft a new combined version, merging his and Smuts’s proposal: at one o’clock he was done and immediately woke his wife so she could type it up. The next morning he discovered to his surprise that Smuts had worked into the night as well trying to make the language of his proposal even more compelling. The initial lukewarm reception

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had obviously made him worry about the fate of the preamble. Unfortunately, Smuts had no typist he could wake in the middle of the night, and he was nervously waiting for an apparently late secretary to carry this out when Webster came and surprised him with his cleanly typed version. He had altered his proposal on the institutional issues without changing its basic content: the preamble and Chapter 1 were combined into one long preamble that kept all the key phrases, including the term “human personality.”150 Smuts was pleased with finding an ally for his cause and adapted the new version on the spot. An excited Webster then ran off to make multiple copies before the start of the meeting. When the ministers turned to discuss the preamble Smuts shocked everyone by cleverly breaking protocol and announcing co-authorship of the document with a diplomatic clerk (and thus with a representative for the British government). Webster’s initiative thus forced the British minister to support Smuts, and the rest of Commonwealth ministers apparently followed suit. Smuts’s smart maneuvering came at the expense of some of the poetic value of the initial proposal, which was definitely lost in Webster’s pen, and much of the subsequent debate about the preamble would be about how to restore its literary quality. Yet Smuts had secured crucial votes and could with some confidence of success travel to San Francisco for the founding meeting for the United Nations Organization. Once he arrived in San Francisco, he realized that he was the only active politician still alive who had taken part in the negotiations for the disastrous Versailles treaty, and many found his appearance important for this reason alone. “I could be needed as one of those who remember 1919,” he noted to a friend.151 Moreover, he was known as a statesman philosopher who throughout his life had defended the League and human rights, and as a personal friend of Churchill. This gave him a leading moral voice with a stronger position among delegates, hence he was given the presidency of the Commission on the General Assembly. Smuts was well aware that his participation at the meeting was one of his last major political events on the international scene. At seventy-five, he was an old man and he grasped the opportunity to make the meeting into a grand finale for his lifelong philosophical investigation into holism and evolution. “A world will fall with [Berlin],” he told his son, and out of the ashes he hoped a new order based on his holistic views would emerge.152 The draft of the preamble was to capture the dreams of ordinary people as well as a political vision of the new world order: “A preamble of this kind is necessary to make an impression in many ways more valuable than the substance of the treaty itself. Men will read the preamble with an uplift of their hearts. They will respond to it, they will feel this is what they fought for, this is what they

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sacrificed for.”153 His sentiment was shared by many of the international delegates in San Francisco. Smuts introduced the modified draft to “Committee I/1” assigned to deal with the Charter’s preamble. The delegate from the United States recalls that Smuts presented the draft by saying that it represented “the fulfillment of his dream and crowning achievement of his life,” and that the committee was taken by his “glamorous figure as he stood before the committee, still slender and straight in spite of his age, in his marshal’s uniform with its decorations.”154 Smuts was clearly putting all his prestige and power behind his draft, and all the delegates quickly agreed to adopt it as the basis for their work. Indeed, as the diplomat from the United States observed: “when the voice vote was called for, he still stood, watching the delegates attentively, seeing how each one would vote. His Preamble was unanimously adopted ‘in principle.’”155 After the initial meeting the delegations retreated to discuss the preamble in detail in their national committees and various subcommittees. The historian Ruth Russell has reviewed this diplomatic process in some detail and her work shows that the following themes dominated the debate: One of Webster’s telling modifications was a change from “We the United Nations” in Smuts’s draft to “The high contracting parties.” The delegates from the United States insisted and would “if necessary, fight for” changing it back to “We, the People of the United Nations.”156 The contribution from the U.S. delegates was focused on securing a phrasing as close as possible to their own Constitution. This created much legal debate with respect to whether or not “the People” could create their own laws. A whole set of delegates argued that there should be a clause at the end of the preamble saying that it was the representatives assembled in San Francisco that agreed to the charter, not the collective body of the world’s people. What followed next was a long and rather unproductive debate with numerous proposals concerning how to brush up the literary quality of the text: “the Preamble should be short and moving and beautiful, something simple that every school child in the world could commit to memory and that could hang, framed, in every cottage on the globe.”157 It was during this debate that the wording “human personality” was changed to “human person,” solely as a matter of style. It is noteworthy that none of the ministers and delegates expressed the view that the preamble undermined or was in conflict with a policy of colonialism or racial discrimination. This is even more remarkable given that the original draft was submitted and promoted by a man known in all diplomatic circles as the very patron of exactly such values and policies. Smuts’s correspondence shows that few diplomats and politicians in San Francisco expressed objections in public or in private to South African racial politics in

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light of the high standards Smuts set forth in the preamble.158 On the contrary, Smuts was perceived as a man of the highest moral standards; a news report aired on the radio summarizes how he was presented to the grand audience: Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa . . . has been immersed in the writing of the preamble of the World Charter. He was given this job because he is a master of words. Some of his sentences still ring down the years. “Humanity has struck its tents.” “The caravan of mankind is on the march.” And so on. It was thought that he would put words together that would stick in the public mind—express the aspirations of the human spirit. Like the founding fathers, for instance. Or the writers of the authorized version of the Bible. So Field Marshal Smuts is applying himself to the wording of the preamble. He is, incidentally, one of the fathers of the Covenant of the League of Nations.159 To be compared to the founding fathers and even writers of the Bible has strong positive moral connotations in American culture, to say the least. His moral authority was undisputed, and his name was thus invoked frequently to convince the journalists that “a representative of one of the so-called smaller powers” could have real influence on United Nations policy. Few delegates could fire up the press with such swinging political comments and high ideals for the human civilization as Smuts.160 His oratorical skills were soon studied by literary critics to gain a deeper appreciation for the beauty of his speeches and the language in the preamble, and Newsweek portrayed Smuts with flowers on its front cover with a story about him as the moral voice or “Golden Tonic for a Sick [British] Empire.”161 The politicians also looked at Smuts with admiration. He was given the high honor of delivering the main speech for the unveiling of the President Roosevelt memorial plaque in Muir Woods, outside San Francisco. The General Assembly had just given their institution the name “United Nations” in honor of Roosevelt, and Smuts’s memorial speech was well attended. Yet what filled Smuts with special joy was the ability to walk—at least for some hours—in solitude in the forest named for the famous American nature writer. He decided to take a day off from the preamble negotiations and visit Yosemite Valley to gain further strength for the meetings. “What a day!” he wrote a friend. Yosemite “was the height of the sublime.”162 He returned to the tedious committee meetings inspired and continued to work on the wording of the preamble. The significance of this trip is not only recreational: Smuts’s notions of “faith,” “basic human rights,” “sacredness,” “essential worth,” “integrity,” and above all “human personality” belong to the vocab-

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ulary of his lifelong investigations into the holistic ecology of sublime human and earthly nature. The key terms in his draft to the preamble for the Charter of the United Nations remind us of the principles behind General Smuts’s philosophy of holism. In it he declared his “faith in the basic human rights, in the sacredness, essential worth, and integrity of the human personality.” How could such admittedly edifying words also leave room for racist views? It is an important question that evokes the parallel question of how a seemingly uplifting science like ecology could be an integrated part of a suppressive policy. The key to this holistic understanding of human rights lies in Smuts’s thinking about what it means to be a human being with a “human personality.” Though he rejected the assertion that simply being a biological member of Homo sapiens was sufficient cause for moral standing, he still argued that biology was highly relevant to defining the human condition. The science of biology could reveal the natural laws governing the evolution of crucial human faculties, such as the ability to feel, recollect, plan, and above all, reason within a social and natural environment. The science of personology that Smuts pursued in his Whitman study and in his anthropological investigations into the importance of climate for human evolution was particularly important for his understanding of human beings. These studies—highly regarded in the South African scientific community and beyond—allowed him to determine the “essential worth” of high and low personalities and to distribute human rights accordingly. Edward Roux was perhaps the only South African ecologist who showed resistance to this argument. He remembered that when “segregation was raised to a philosophy,” in Smuts’s postwar government, “there was much talk of the rights of all people to separate development on their own lines, also of education in the mother tongue, of separate university colleges for each language group, of a special kind of Bantu education divided to give knowledge suited to the needs and abilities of the black man.”163 The policy of segregation was thus about the rights of people of European and non-European descent to evolve and live according to their respective levels of evolutionary development. The argument closely resembles what moral philosophers today call “gradualism,” which questions anthropocentric assumptions of human uniqueness in the biological world and seeks to develop a scale of being among species on which to base a biologically fair system of rights.164 The politics of holism advocated by Smuts was founded on what he thought was a philosophy of tolerance that paid respect to all people’s “inherent right to govern themselves without outside interference, in accordance with their own customs and way of life.” To Smuts humans were first of all social beings who had evolved and would continue to evolve within different

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social and physical environments. Over the course of human evolution, these social environments had differed radically because of varying climatic and physical circumstances. Different races, cultures, and ways of life had all evolved over time; some with shining personalities like Goethe and Whitman and some without. The human ecological research carried out by the Smuts followers Phillips and Bews was particularly insightful to Smuts because it recognized difference among humans in their distinct biotic communities. Although it recognized difference, the ecological reasoning Smuts supported also emphasized a fundamental holistic unity in nature. Smuts was once asked by Chung-shu Lo, a Chinese philosopher, what he meant by this holistic social unity with respect to securing individual human rights, and his answer is most revealing: “[Human] ‘rights’ are much too individualistic and give no due recognition to that organic human and social unity which the duties of the older codes recognized as the real rule and law and pattern of right living.”165 This argument closely resembles the philosophy of communitarianism; a position that seeks to understand the human condition by focusing on how ethical virtues and the good life evolve within a social community.166 Smuts was a communitarian philosopher, and in his politics of holism he tried to respect the customs of different social communities by allowing them to evolve separately through a political system of segregation. The science of human ecology provided him with firsthand information about local virtues, ways of enjoying the good life, and how these customs depended on particular biotic communities. Indeed, Phillips coined the term “biotic community” to designate this ecocentric ethics and environmental social policy of segregated ecological homelands. As a politician it was important to Smuts to protect the integrity of biotic communities, the right to evolve within them, and to exercise self-governance over local virtues. His philosophical slogan, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” captures this spirit; a person separated from the local biotic community could not and would not as an individual evolve in the direction of social progress. Social progress and freedom were integral aspects of both the politics of holism and Smuts’s patronage of ecology. Of the two concepts, “freedom to” and “freedom from,” Smuts was definitely most favorable to the first, positive freedom.167 Freedom to Smuts meant the right to evolve and progress from one whole into a higher whole, as he outlined in Holism and Evolution. Having developed a deep ecological understanding of the human condition, and having reached the highest whole himself (thinking like Table Mountain), he was in the perfect position to advise and guide his country. To mix people with different biotic backgrounds would only cause want and fear and loss of social virtues, thus impeding progress. Finally, the politics of holism rejected war as an instrument of national pol-

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icy; Smuts firmly believed that countries should seek peaceful solutions to conflicts. In 1919 at Versailles he was the only general among the Allies to argue that one had to offer Germany reconciliation and not revenge, and in 1933 he condemned Hitler and National Socialism as a totalitarian regime that would lead Europe to war and barbarism. Though a warrior himself, he focused on peaceful negotiations among states through the League of Nations as a means of solving conflicts. This view of society and nations came out of his view of nature as a harmonious and peaceful realm, and the research of Phillips and Bews confirmed his views of nature and society. Yet instruments of war served Smuts well in internal national policy, where military forces and police frequently were used to oppress black resistance and revolutionary activity. One telling example of this is Smuts return to Johannesburg in September 1945. The Parliament decided to celebrate a national “Thank You General Smuts Day,” and asked him to give a speech on the steps of the City Hall in Johannesburg. Here he told the nation about peace and the good news from San Francisco, and numerous black citizens showed up to listen to their country’s leader. Just before Smuts was about to announce the coming of peace through human rights, military police began to attack these Africans, forcing them to leave with kicks and batons.168 This was not in Smuts’s eyes a paradoxical action by the police, but in agreement with a gradual ecocentric approach to human rights, and in accordance with Smuts’s defense of local ways of living in segregated biotic communities. Smuts put it bluntly to the House of Assembly in 1947: “I feel we are treating the Coloureds quite sensibly and wisely. That is to say, more or less as an appendix of the European population.”169 In the last years of his life Smuts still found renewal in his “botanical diet at bedtime,” and he used some of his last moments in life to defend the endangered biotic diversity of his beloved Table Mountain.170 Support of holism from the various scientists—including an uplifting letter from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr—still filled his mailbox.171 This correspondence includes a series of encouraging letters from Phillips, who tried to rally support from the prime minister against University of the Witwatersrand officials, who looked with increasing suspicion at his biotic community research.172 The logicians, on the other hand, looked at holism with keen interest; the philosopher Ernst Cassirer introduced it in 1945 to semantics to describe his program of linguistic structuralism as an analogy to the holistic philosophy of biology.173 Swiss, Spanish, and German versions of Holism and Evolution were on their way, but they were in the end stopped by Smuts, who thought the scientific part of the book obsolete.174 The definite highlight of these final years was his election as chancellor of Cambridge University, where he en-

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joyed nursing the intellectual side of his personality “among the real highbrows,” including his old friend Winston Churchill.175 Smuts had by then received many of the highest scientific honors a scientist could get. Yet a feeling of philosophical and political failure dominated the last years of Smuts’s life. The philosopher Karl Popper had identified Smuts and his Hegelian philosophy of holism as one of the enemies of the open society.176 Bertrand Russell argued similarly—to Smuts’s annoyance—in his history of philosophy of 1945. Holism, Russell wrote, favored the intrinsic value of the state above its individual members, and it was impossible to achieve scientific knowledge through holism.177 What was still much worse for Smuts was how the preamble started to haunt the politics of South Africa. In 1946 Gandhi effectively used the preamble against its author and the Indian delegation embarrassed Smuts in front of the United Nations’ General Assembly by pointing out the lack of respect for human rights with respect to Asians in South Africa.178 The famous African American advocate W. E. B. Du Bois thought of Smuts’s plea for human rights as “an astonishing paradox” and talked about him as “that great hypocrite.”179 The Native Representative Council was equally upset and sent a harsh protest to their prime minister, reminding him of the United Nations Charter and his inability to institute it in his own country by abolishing all discriminatory legislation. Smuts responded by providing social and economic amendments, but was taken aback that “Natives want rights and not improvements.”180 Smuts had learned to respect Gandhi and he did not take such criticism lightly. The tone of his correspondence in the last years of his life is increasingly bitter with respect to his personal achievements and the political failures of his country: My failure with U.N.O. has been a bitter experience, even where I know, or perhaps more because I know, that essentially it is South Africa’s as much as mine. The world does not know or understand us, and we feel this deeply, even when we are conscious that we are much to blame in it all . . . The opposition naturally rejoices and puts this all to my account, and to the liberalism (!) with which I have led the world astray. Here is the author of the great preamble of the Charter, exposed as a hypocrite and a double-faced time server! They are of course all right, and so is dear South Africa. But look at this bad fellow who is responsible for it all!181 Smuts may not have been “responsible for it all,” but nevertheless he shaped the political culture of the first fifty years of the Union of South Africa. His philosophy of holism was based on a political vision of unifying a country torn apart by racial tension. To carry this out he called especially upon the sci-

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ence of ecology to naturalize and thus legitimize his politics of holism, and ecologists were more than ready to provide an environmental order that could sanctify it. Smuts was not a hypocrite nor were his politics of holism paradoxical. He may instead serve as a historical example of “double-faced” ecological reasoning. He would, as he explained to Margaret Gillett in 1948, “often revert to the Spinoza terminology of deus sive natura—and his attempt thus to convey the sense of underlying unity in difference.”182 The unity of South Africa proved to enforce difference, and the divine nature Smuts envisioned in Holism and Evolution served not to liberate the soul as Spinoza once claimed, but to naturalize segregation and thus legitimize such oppression.

6 Planning a New Human Ecology

General Smuts and the South African ecologists were not alone in advocating human ecology as a way of understanding and organizing society. Rather than reviewing the entire human ecological debate itself, in this chapter I will focus on how key figures from the Oxford school of imperial ecology saw human ecology as a promising path for planning a better society in the 1930s and 1940s.1 Earlier chapters explained the expansion of ecology from botany to forestry and zoology, and this chapter will discuss the fulfillment of this process in the study of humans. Human ecology was not the only topic of research in this period; on the contrary, botanists, foresters, and zoologists, among others, flocked to the promising new science, especially at Charles Elton’s Bureau of Animal Population. In this chapter I argue that ecological explanations of the human condition implied a degradation of human moral and political life that encouraged scientific paternalism and management of the human faculties. Ecologists’ attempts to explain various human abilities: the capability to imagine and plan the future, to reason, to will, to feel pleasure and pain, to recapitulate history, and to control peoples and environments were all subdued to the scientist’s ambitions for social control and housekeeping. H. G. Wells drew on this conception of human ecology in his science fiction, producing images of doomed humanity reborn as a neatly planned ecological world-state. Ecologically engineering the future was also central to the work of Edward Max Nicholson and Julian Huxley, who used human ecology to propose a new social economy for the British Empire. Edgar Worthington used some of the same ideas when he set out to provide his colonial patrons in Africa with an economy of nature that suited imperial interests in social control. Worthington’s aim was to establish an ecological administration of knowledge for environmental sciences in Africa and beyond. Arthur George Tansley saw ecology as a new methodological approach to the historical study of human problems, a view that led him to believe that by conserving nature one could create therapeutic landscapes for human beings stressed by modern life. Inspired by Freudian 196

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psychology, Tansley believed that nature should be conserved for the wellbeing of the human mind. The various ecological approaches to improving the human condition finally culminated in the Oxford ecologists’ advocacy of a plan to reconstruct postwar Britain as a network of small towns in balance with a scientifically engineered economy of nature. These ideas also resurface in Huxley’s work as director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Some historians of ecology and the environment distinguish between “bad” mechanistic management to conserve natural resources and “good” Arcadian approaches to preserve unspoiled nature.2 I show that this distinction cannot be clearly drawn and hardly enriches our understanding of the history of ecology and environmentalism. A close examination of primary sources unveils the impossibility of drawing a line of demarcation between conservation and preservation of nature. Wells was both a vocal defender of futuristic engineering for a better nature and a doomsday prophet questioning scientific progress and predicting a dire future for humankind. Huxley, for example, promoted the preservation of nature “for its own sake.” In the 1930s ecologists advocated hard-core engineering of nature’s economy. Similarly, Worthington was a true back-to-nature advocate who focused his scientific energies on constructing radically new lake environments in Africa and in England. Finally, Tansley’s environmental history reprises Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romantic return to an innocent nature, while at the same time Tansley argued for a mechanistic approach to nature and the exploitation of natural resources (especially in the empire’s colonies). Such dichotomies in the history of ecology have proven false and anachronistic. Internal contradictions and tensions in ecological reasoning were the very hallmark of the British ecological debate of the 1930s.

The Human Ecological Science Fiction of H. G. Wells Whereas the writings of H. G. Wells are a convenient and revealing starting point for discussing the emergence of human ecology in the British Empire, my choice to begin the story there hardly means that Wells’s writings were the catalyst that spurred British ecologists to expand their research into the social realm. As discussed in the previous chapters, leading ecologists such as Tansley and Elton wrote extensively about human relationships with the environment long before Wells explored the concept. Indeed, the British Ecological Society urged its members as early as 1914 to adapt a wide approach, “including human ecology.”3 Wells’s popular books and lectures help explain why the acceptance of ecological reasoning in general and human ecology in particular gained momentum in the 1930s.

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Writing Science of Life forced Wells to refocus; after its publication in 1929 one can see a clear shift in his books towards ecological explanations of the human condition. From then on, Wells would return to human ecology again and again as the central theme in most of his writings, juxtaposing the harmonious tropical island Eden with a world increasingly dominated by technology. Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) was based on an understanding of economies as “a branch of ecology; it is the ecology of human species.” In this multi-volume work Wells argued that economics were best understood ecologically: “Ecology deals with the welfare of species generally . . . It is the science of the balance of life. Economics is the science of human life and how it prospers or decays . . . By economic animal we mean an animal that prepares and stores food socially.”4 Through nine hundred pages he explains all economic activity in terms of how human animals learn to conquer and control the economy of nature for the benefit of a progressing civilization. The work was, as he recalled in 1936, a grand “attempt to bring human ecology into one correlated survey.”5 Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind laid an analytic foundation for Wells’s more romantic and fantastic writings about the future of humankind. In his 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come, he predicts the coming of civilization based on human ecology in harmony with the economy of nature. The novel takes the form of a “recovered” manuscript written by the fictional Dr. Philip Raven. In his visionary dream Raven describes his own time as an age of frustration. He predicts “the last war cyclone” between 1940 and 1950, followed by the birth of the modern state, which matures into a militant regime. Scientists save the state from itself by assuming total control of all natural forces of energy. In this final phase of human history, the ecologists save mankind from impending disaster: “From the point of view of the ecologist the establishment of the Modern State marks an epoch in biological history. It has been an adaptation, none to soon, of our species to changing conditions that must otherwise have destroyed it. The immense developments and disasters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show us mankind scrambling on the verge of irreparable disaster.”6 Wells’s morality play takes place in three acts: First, he describes a modern social crisis, followed by a period of suffering, punishment, and catharsis, after which ecologists save the Earth by leading its people to a deeper understanding of the world. In this final phase Wells envisioned ecologists (“a more intelligent minority”) relying on eugenics to develop a new, ecologically responsible human being. “He will become generation by generation a new species, differing widely from that weedy, tragic, pathetic, cruel, fantastic, absurd and sometimes sheerly horrible being who christened himself in a mood of oafish arrogance Homo sapiens.” This new breed of human beings would all merge into a transcendent “members of one body” of the powers of nature.7

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In the 1936 film version of the book, Things to Come, Wells developed the three-phase ecological narrative even further. First come the horrors of war, doom brought on by a lack of ecological understanding of human possibilities. When the global wars end, warlords join with religious and political ideologists to oppress scientific research in “Everytown,” until the hero John Cabal (played by Raymond Massey in futuristic clothes) mysteriously emerges from an equally fantastic airplane with the proper overview on human ecology. He seeks out a few scientists who have survived the devastating conflict, and informs the delighted survivors: “We have ideas in common; the freemasonry of efficiency—the brotherhood of science. We are the natural trustees of civilization when everything else has failed.”8 In the next scenes scientists unite to defeat the warlords and ideologists. The victorious brotherhood of scientists establishes a regime of autocratic enlightenment founded on principles of ecological reasoning, planning, and management. The story then fast-forwards to 2054. The population problem has solved itself quietly and mysteriously, and a fantastic futuristic society has arisen. A new, marvelous society based on the economy of nature has now been constructed below the surface of the old, doomed society. Through the triumph of human ecology, a blissfully happy ecologist explains, the population revels in new fête grounds provided by the oligarchy: “Our light is brighter than the sunshine outside and never before has mankind breathed so sweet an air. We have got the better of nature.”9 Yet many of the citizens of this apparent utopia show signs of discontent. A philosopher called Theotocopulos (played by Cedric Hardwicke) leads a literal underground resistance, questioning scientific progress. (He was modeled on Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World (1932), a book Wells did not like.) “What is the good of this Progress?” the philosopher demands in a dramatic speech televised to the populace of Everytown: We demand a halt, we demand a rest. The object of life is happy living . . . I say; an end to this Progress. Make an end to Progress now. We are content with the simple sensuous, limited, lovable life of man and we want no other. Between the dark past of history and the incalculable future let us snatch to-day and live. What is the future to us? Give the earth peace and leave our human lives alone.10 The next scenes depict dramatic tumult with Theotocopulos’s Earth-peace activists, who are trying to stop the launching of the ultimate scientific project of Progress: a “Space Gun” with a bullet-shaped capsule to send scientists into space. In the final scene the capsule is fired (liquid-fuel rockets were still to come in 1936), leaving a crowd of angry Earth-peace romantics on the ground. As the closing credits roll, the viewer is left wondering whether humans should stay on Earth or progress with science into the cosmos.11

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Things to Come illustrates some important aspects of what I call the visionary ecological narrative. It has a three-act story of social crisis, followed by a period of catharsis, before “the brotherhood of science” saves the Earth through ecology in the final act. It is worth noticing the entangled bank of both imperial and romantic views. The counterculture of romantic resistance to progress and the imperial-industrial approach to nature form two halves of the same narrative. Wells presents these two opposite lines of reasoning as the Janus face of the human ecological project of creating a new economy of nature. Wells continued his fascination with ecology in his 1934 Experiment in Autobiography, which in effect was an experiment in writing an autobiography based on ecological principles. “Instead of presenting the clotted masses of un-digested or ill-digested facts which still encumber academic history today,” Wells tried to present his life in terms of human ecology. He saw his own voluminous Outline of History (1920) as an “Outline of Human Ecology. But I did not call it that because the word Ecology was not yet widely understood.”12 It is worth recalling that Wells’s recapitulation of history was the main vehicle for an evolutionary explanation of historical events in the 1920s, and was used by many colleges and universities as the standard (though controversial) textbook in core history courses.13 Through Wells, thousands of students and lay people received an education based on “Biology, History and Human Ecology, . . . [the] triple foundation . . . equipped for the rôle of world citizens.”14 Wells even suggested employing human ecologists as professors of history in Britain’s universities to foster a deeper understanding of human development: Human Ecology would be a good alternative name for this new history as I conceive it . . . My new men and the students under them would be working out strands of biological, intellectual, economic consequences. Periods, nations and races they would consider only in so far as these provided them with material facts. They would be related to the older school of historians much as vegetable physiologists, ecologists, and morphologists are related to the old plant-flattening, specimen-hunting, stamen-counting botanists. The end of all intelligent analysis is to clear the way for synthesis. The clearer their new history became the nearer they would be to efficient world-planning.15 The aim of human ecology was efficient global management. Historians could contribute to this goal by creating an ecological synthesis of known human history, much the same way that plant ecologists created an ecological synthesis of natural history. Such an “invasion of the field of history” by scientific ecology could offer a deeper understanding of the behavior of human

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animals, the intellectual development of races, and the evolution of economic cycles.16 The board of directors in the world economy of nature—as envisioned in Science of Life—could then act upon historical knowledge and create a global plan for intellectual and economic development of the human stock. This would not be achieved through a bourgeois “Peace League” as proposed by Smuts and his friend Gilbert Murray. Wells was envisioning a much more powerful world institution, one that would lay out a new economic order in the form of a new global ecological system.17 Wells further elaborated his ecological narrative in Fate of Man (1939). In this doomsday manifesto, Wells urges the reader to see “human social life in the light of ecological science,” because “human ecology” is capable of “analyzing operating causes and forecasting events.”18 Wells now condemned the ideas he had championed in his earlier futurist work, The Time Machine, as “secondary and irrelevant considerations,” and exhorted the reader to reconsider the role of technology in human society; “the cornucopia of invention may perhaps prove far more dangerous than benevolent.”19 A more worldweary Wells questions “mastery” of nature—“Man’s conquest of nature may prove a sterile conquest”—and proclaims the urgent need for “a mental readjustment” towards ecology.20 More sensitivity towards the world’s web of life would lead to a harmonious socialist state in balance with nature. This would be achieved when “History becomes Ecology,” which to Wells meant a fulfilled integration of social economy and the economy of nature into one ecology of nations.21 Under these utopian conditions, history would no longer evolve because human culture (history) would submit to the laws of nature. In a steady-state society, one in equilibrium with the balance of nature, there would be no room or need for historical change. The human world could only reach this final phase of history, Wells argued, if scientists applied the tenets of modern ecological science to current human affairs. He imagined ecology as “an organized World Brain, a gigantic . . . super-university” with the aim of installing a scientific elite to manage the globe. It was, as one contemporary critic noted, Victorian socialism from above.22 Throughout the 1930s, Julian Huxley had been an intellectual friend and consultant to Wells. Their friendship—increasingly strained by the tension inherent between two demanding personalities—came to a sad end in 1941, when Wells published a damaging review of one of Huxley’s essay collections, accusing him of being “too ready to deal with telepathy.”23 Huxley soon retaliated in a meeting of the British Association for Advancement of Science, which Huxley chaired. Wells was supposed to lay out his vision of “The New World Order,” or “History become Ecology.” Other speakers were scheduled as well, and Huxley forced his old collaborator to keep to the time limit of twenty minutes. Wells believed he had the solution to world peace in his

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hand, Huxley recalls, “and here I was, measuring his time when crucial words could be spoken before disaster overtook us all.”24 Huxley’s moderation of the meeting must have been most insulting to Wells, a thinker known to view time as an endless biological commodity.

Ecologists Plan a New Economic Order Many ecologists were taken aback by the enthusiastic endorsement of their field by a leading intellectual such as Wells. As fantastic science fiction, Wells’s authorship was inspiring, though most ecologists thought it would take less fantastic flights of reasoning to realize Wells’s vision. Max Nicholson, the ecology-inspired ornithologist from the Oxford University Exploration Club, was one of Wells’s admirers. In 1931 Nicholson stunned his colleagues with a long article about national economic planning, a piece that became the manifesto of an influential British research organization, Political and Economic Planning.25 In his “National Plan for Great Britain,” he attempted to extend ecological reasoning into the realm of the economy. He reasoned that more equitable and efficient human economy should be based on the economy of nature, as known and explored by the ecologists. In 1930 Nicholson left Oxford and moved to London to begin a career as the assistant editor of Week-End Review, a new weekly of social and political commentary, scientific articles, and book reviews. The editorial team was, Nicholson later recalled, “a lively band of young contributors who set themselves to exposing the ‘Old Gang’ and their out-of-date, ineffectual ways of running the country,” not to mention the world.26 The political scene in Britain in 1930 was particularly tumultuous; a national economic crisis had resulted in bankruptcies, mass unemployment followed the 1929 stock market crash, and politicians and economists debated whether the gold standard was worth defending. The first volume of the Week-End Review is filled with critical essays and analyses about the way the political establishment tried to handle the economic crises and growing depression. In February 1931 chief editor Gerald Barry decided to publish the “National Plan for Great Britain.” Officially, the author of the plan was anonymous, though all insiders were well aware that it was written by Nicholson. It was a plan designed to satisfy all those who were neither to the left nor to the right, but in the progressive center. Liberal conservatives could enjoy reading how private capital could effect social reforms with only minor state intervention. Socialists found suggestions for ways to involve the worker in economic planning through increased public control. The virtue of the plan was thus its “elastic solution capable of adjustment to the needs of a growing organism” that brought the nation into one “organic relationship.”27

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Nicholson begins his plan by describing all major political institutions as habitats of different human activities, then outlines an elaborate plan for how these political habitats should relate to each other to be most effective. In his plan of action Nicholson focuses on how natural economic growth depends on the dynamic exchange of goods, money, and services within social, technical, and political structures.28 A careful plan for taxation, financial regulation, civic laws, and national economic investment was urgently needed, he argued. The list of what such a grand plan should include covered regional and town planning, city development, national parks, health care, education, transportation, communication, buildings, power, agriculture, industry, and commerce. In foreign policy Nicholson suggested mobilizing the colonies through an “Empire Crusade movement” and eschewing national protectionism in an effort to make all of Great Britain habitable for future generations. The unique aspect of Nicholson’s plan was not its details (they were rather vague) but the overview it provided on the national economic organism: he declared all social activities interrelated and showed how the government could plan and initiate economic growth. Nicholson borrowed this ability to think in terms of overview and relations from ecology. The conventional economists’ discourse of free trade and tariff reforms did not provide tools for such thinking: a grand managerial overview of social and economic activity was needed so that one could lay out a plan for social development. This ecological outlook was somewhat foreign to the British political establishment; as one of Nicholson’s friends, Kenneth Lindsay, recollected in 1981; “[the National Plan] was a brilliant political document. Although many of its comprehensive proposals now seem familiar, in 1931 it belonged to the realm of political pioneering. [It was] a beacon in the hopeless confusion of those post-war years.”29 Indeed, the National Plan took Britain by storm. In the same issue, the Week-End Review ran a series of largely favorable comments from across party lines, including support from Oswald Mosley (the fascist) and J. B. S. Haldane (the communist). H. G. Wells was not consulted initially and in a letter to the editor the following week he made it clear that he by no means conceived himself part of the Old Gang: “Yes, I agree” with the plan, he wrote. “[D]id I not write in the Daily Mail before the war of the need of a National Plan (article after article), and what in God’s name do you suppose my journalism has been about since that time?”30 Wells was clearly puzzled by the Week-End Review’s failure to acknowledge him as the grandfather of such economic principles. At the end of March 1931 Huxley and Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders joined the rapidly evolving debate, casting their support for the plan by founding the Political and Economic Planning organization at University College, London. Its abbreviation, PEP, soon drew fire from a hu-

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morist who proposed a catchword for the organization: “PEP—try it in your bath.”31 During a period of growing economic depression, the organization’s members clearly thought “pep” was what society desperately needed, and adopted the National Plan as the best way to achieve recovery. Although the full history of this influential association cannot be dealt with here, it is notable that the author of the plan was closely tied to the Oxford school of imperial ecology, as were three of its key supporters, Robert Troup, and Ray Bourne, and Huxley.32 By 1931 Huxley was convinced of the political need for a planned economy, though he was not yet intellectually satisfied that the methodological foundation was in place. The idea of transforming nature’s economy into human ecology, as envisioned by Wells and carried out by Nicholson, was certainly intriguing, but lacked a secure scientific methodology. Huxley believed an unified method for biology was urgently needed to link the natural realm and the human mind with social planning. Huxley was not alone in his concern about the methodological foundation of scientific planning; it was a frequently debated topic in Week-End Review in the early 1930s. A cartoon by Will Dyson from February 1931 captures the culture of arguments favoring the synthesis of mathematical reasoning, genetics, and evolutionary biology (see Figure 7). A professorial figure in futurist clothing, representing “the newer mathematics,” converses with a female novelist (Virginia Woolf?) holding Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in her hand. She “wonder[s] if by any chance there are any what you might call sex implications hidden” in the newer mathematics, “something you could put in a novel. We’ve just about played out the New Psychology.”33 By 1931, Tansley’s best-selling New Psychology was still the standard introductory text on the mind’s mechanism, though a bit “played out.” The major theoretical problem with Tansley’s argument, it is worth recalling, was his use of sweeping, somewhat shaky analogies between the mind (consciousness) and the mechanics of the brain. Huxley now set forth to rescue Tansley’s psychology. With the help of mathematics he attempted to unify the mind and the brain, life and matter, biology and mechanism. He was fascinated by psychological experiments with participants at séances, at which sequences of strobe light were used to capture photographically the structure of the mind. Huxley saw these experiments as empirical evidence for explaining life in terms of energy; they offered a statistical mathematical method to investigate life as a force. These experiments revealed to him “a new mode of inter-action between the realm of mind and the realm of matter, and a new way in which thought and will can be translated into practical action.”34

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Figure 7. “The Newer Mathematics” by Will Dyson, published in Week-End Review in 1931. The novelist is probably a caricature of Virginia Woolf, holding Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) in her hand while mentioning Arthur George Tansley’s New Psychology (1920). Week-End Review 3(1931): 177.

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Practical political action was indeed Huxley’s goal, as he began his investigations into a possible evolutionary synthesis. Huxley makes this goal very explicit in “Biology of Human Nature,” a serial article published in the WeekEnd Review in the early winter of 1933. The article was billed as an attempt “to bridge the gulf between biology, psychology and politics.”35 In the article, Huxley relates the latest research in Freudian psychology to nervous mechanisms and reflexes found in neurobiology. He relates these to his interest in eugenics, genetics, and the social environment. In the end he turns to a newly released book on genetics: Dr. R. A. Fisher has shown in his Genetical Basis of Natural Selection how in a society organised on a commercial and individualistic basis like ours, the qualities making for success are progressively sterilised, so that, radically speaking, it is self-destructive; whereas certain types of primitive society are, radically speaking, self improving. The most important thing which can be done during the next hundred years for the improvement of the race is to ensure that the new organisation of society which will emerge out of the present chaos shall not of its very nature be dysgenic.36 What follows is a plea for rational social reorganization along the lines of Ronald Fisher’s synthesis. It was important to find a way to organize and plan society “for the improvement of the race,” and Huxley believed he had found the tools to accomplish this in Fisher’s mathematical model of genetics and natural selection. Huxley states his aim for an evolutionary synthesis clearly: “As the technique of rational development of knowledge and control over nature can be summed up in the two words scientific method, so that of the rational development of society and its organisation can be summed up in the two words orderly planning.”37 With a new scientific methodology in place, a “potent mechanism” for social planning, Huxley could “organise the advance of knowledge” for the improvement of science and society.38 Nicholson was no less eager to develop methods to plan the ecology of the nation; his revised 1936 plan for Britain became a key document in the debate about regionalism.39 He had for years argued that economic planning was the solution to unemployment and a way to control the “large and complex machine” of industrial civilization.40 Though a promoter of regionalism, the preservation of small towns, and a return to country life, Nicholson was not a naive back-to-nature romantic; regional planning was the key “for society to engineer its own development as it engineers the services on which it depends.”41 In order to leave behind “the period of anarchy in industry” Britain had experienced in the 1920s, Nicholson saw an urgent need to plan a decentralized industrial Britain.42 Living in overcrowded London had made

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him realize that the city faced a serious population problem. His fellow Londoners seemed to him “inmates of the world’s biggest open-air lunatic asylum,” and an aggressive government population policy was required to offset disaster.43 His proposed solution was to move people out of the cities into small outlying towns, managed by a network of local authorities. Broad social acceptance for such national planning was a precondition for success, and the major challenge facing Huxley and his followers was how to mobilize the masses behind their cause. Huxley used the concept of “balance of nature” to encourage everyday Britons to welcome national planning. Planning a new human ecology dominated Huxley’s writings in the 1930s. In a 1930 booklet, for example, he drew sweeping analogies between the social order of the peoples of Java and the food economy of ants. Maintaining the “balance of nature” and “population-control” were his aims in the mechanistic scientific humanism he advocated in What Dare I Think? (1931). To create a sound basis for a responsible politics, he argued, “we need a well-developed science of ecology” that could help remold the environment “to suit the economic purposes of man.”44 Huxley also advocated using popular nature films to recruit the masses to the cause of nature protection, as Gregg Mitman has discussed in his book Reel Nature about the history of wildlife on film. He shows how the fledgling medium of documentary filmmaking was crucial in shaping the goals of ecological research as well as promoting environmentalism, and that Huxley was a key figure behind the writing, production, and finance of nature films.45 Producing such scientific “propaganda” for the masses posed a serious challenge to Huxley: how could he create a simple but persuasive narrative for his viewers and readers? The concept of an economy of nature provided him with a ready-made script: In his book More Simple Science: Earth and Man (1936), for example, Huxley walks his lay readers through various disciplines by using ecological cycles to bridge branches of science from chemistry to economy and even environmental history.46 He briefly explains how the circulation of matter through life via the carbon and nitrogen cycles indicated a worrying “wastefulness” of natural resources. He compares this waste with the ineffectiveness of human economy and moral behavior throughout history. The loss of capital in the economy of nature—oil and gas, large forests, countless species from the great auk to the dodo, and the wholesale slaughter of bison and whales—was the result of an unwise laissez-faire capitalism. To prevent further losses, scientists need to plan a new human society and guide it toward the goal of an economy in balance with nature. The implicit conclusion was that paternalistic scientific control of the human economy through national (and even global) planning was humankind’s best hope of keeping the cycles of nature in balance. In a lecture from 1936 Huxley put it more

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bluntly: “We [scientists] have reasonable control over inorganic or organic nature, but we have not got control over human nature, and we have not got control over the economic, the social and the class systems that have grown up in our midst.”47 Control over inorganic, organic, and even human nature required the sort of planning to be found in the ecological overview. Huxley spelled out his vision, based on his experiences in the Political and Economic Planning organization, in a book with the telling title If I Were Dictator, published in 1934. The manuscript was scrutinized in its entirety by Nicholson before its publication.48 Huxley’s brother Aldous published his novel Brave New World in 1932, which masterfully ridicules PEP as well as his brother’s, Nicholson’s, and Wells’s various plans for an ecologically planned society.49 Julian Huxley would not let this damaging critique go unchallenged. In If I Were Dictator (1934) he sets out the positive sides of scientific planning by pointing out what he would have done if he were the scientific dictator imagined in Brave New World. To lift Britain out of economic depression, Julian Huxley argued, it was urgent to halt “laisser-faire individualism, for that is not organic,” and instead leave social engineering to a board of directors of the economy of nature with a scientist (Huxley?) at the helm.50 To swing the public support for a policy “of trusteeship dosed with enlightened self-interest” it would be equally important to mobilize “the Press as an agency for persuasion and propaganda.”51 For “the well-being of the indigenous populations of the Empire,” Huxley the Dictator would station “a small and highly selected sample of white men . . . to introduce the better elements of European thought and practice” in the colonies.52 In reality, though not a dictator, Huxley was influential on science policy issues; he had just managed to engineer the selection of ecologist Edgar Worthington to head the scientific part of the African Survey. The choice of an ecologist to take charge of African research was part of Huxley’s “dictatorial philosophy” of science, under which social progress meant “control over nature (including human nature and its products),” and empowerment of the entire empire.53 How were such concepts of planning used to enhance British imperialism in Africa? To understand the outcome of the African Survey, it is necessary to introduce the work of Worthington.

The Environmental Order in Inland Waters of Africa Edgar Worthington is perhaps best remembered as the ecologist who directed the International Biological Programme. What is less often recalled is how and why he became such an important scientific figure. I will now turn

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to his early research to ask how he came by his ecological expertise and why he was entrusted with organizing a vast array of scholarly research. In the following analysis I suggest that, as an explorer of the inland waters of Africa, Worthington acquired a unique capability to transform the local know-how of fishermen and anglers into ambitious schemes for management of academic knowledge on a global scale. His career began with research into the traditional methods of fishing in Kenya and Uganda. Worthington went on to write the scientific portion of the African Survey in the mid 1930s, then continued his career in the English Lake District, constructing natural economies on a local scale. In Worthington’s work, lakes served as microcosms for global management schemes and vice versa.54 Worthington’s history illustrates a catch-phrase rightly associated with ecological bumper stickers, “Act locally, think globally!” The aim of both local and global management was to construct (in the material sense) an economy of nature that would enrich and empower his research patrons. His lake research thus served as an example of how the human ecology Huxley and Wells envisioned could be based on the natural ecology. The impending collapse of the Lake Victoria fishing industry was one of many problems facing the British colonial administrators at the beginning of the twentieth century. The crisis began in 1905 when a well-meaning Norwegian fisherman named Aarup introduced efficient mesh nets. Within twenty years a boost in the fishing industry was followed by an equally radical decline as fish stocks were depleted, with consequent hardship for the fishing communities.55 By 1926 concerned British colonial officers debated how best to preserve the endangered supply of fish and the endangered livelihood of the fishermen. The European homesteaders moved away or—as in the case of Aarup—sank into poverty. A promising fishing industry that once had been the mainstay of white settlers had turned into a major problem for the colonial administration. Compounding any possible solution was the fact that the government knew little about either the fish stock in Lake Victoria or the fishing culture practiced locally. The available articles on inland lakes in Central Africa were written from the natural history tradition and were thus of little practical use; some of the commercial fish had not even been described by Western scientists.56 The district officer in Kenya, G. A. S. Northcote, informed the Royal Geographical Society in 1932 that about six years ago [in the winter of 1925–26] in Nairobi, where I lived comfortably [. . .] we heard a dreadful rumour that our breakfast tables were in danger of being deprived of their daily fish, which was principally

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derived from Lake Victoria. I had the honour, or audacity, then to suggest—money was easier to get in those days—that we might have an expert out to see if our breakfast tables could be maintained.57 Northcote became Worthington’s main patron, and his comment reveals some of the colonial administrator’s motivation for pouring money into research on fish. In this case, at least, there seems to be some truth to the saying that the aim of the British Empire was to get the English aristocrat a decent meal. The goal of the research into the freshwater fish of central Africa, of course, went beyond improving the kippers on British breakfast tables: it was undertaken to save a fishing industry threatened with extinction. Worthington was hired to research the economy of nature by a colonial administration that saw ecology as an administrative tool to improve, even save, their political economy. Worthington participated in all three expeditions to explore the inland waters of East Africa to investigate the fishery crisis, as an assistant and leader of two expeditions in 1928, and as a leader of one in 1931. To shed light on Worthington’s efforts I must first briefly describe his social and scientific background. He was born in 1905 into a well-respected family of engineers: his father was secretary to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and his grandfather had been a leading engineer over the years of railway expansion in Britain in the nineteenth century. In his memoirs Worthington mentions that his grandfather advised him “how to engineer with nature, not against it,” and that this advice was one reason he became an ecologist.58 To engineer with and not against nature was at the crux of good craftsmanship in his family, so it was considered important for him to first study rocks, soils, grasses, flowers, and birds before moving on to master mathematics and mechanics. At Cambridge University he became familiar with such major works in ecology as Tansley’s Practical Plant Ecology, Elton’s Animal Ecology, and CarrSaunders’s The Population Problem. Worthington considered Elton’s book “a landmark,” and Carr-Saunders as the founder of human ecology.59 As an undergraduate he also enjoyed an hectic social life, most notably as a performer with the Cambridge Morris dancers. At twenty-two Worthington graduated with first-class honors in the natural sciences Tripos, with a major in zoology supervised by Stanley Gardiner. It was Gardiner who secured Worthington his first job as research assistant in the fishing survey of African lakes. Two local guides were particularly helpful to the inexperienced Worthington in his early research: an Ugandan fisherman named Pangrasso and a British fly-fisher named Dick Dent. The travel logs are unfortunately rather vague about Pangrasso, but it is clear that either he or perhaps several differ-

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ent African fishermen trained Worthington to locate and distinguish among fish species, and to understand how they interrelated in a lake’s food pyramid. In Uganda Worthington learned about the food chain in Lake Albert, for example, using local fishing gear and live bait. Through this exchange of knowledge Worthington transformed a fishing practice and know-how into a theoretical explanation of the food chain. Contrasting his own knowledge with that of the Africans, Worthington wrote of them as “primitive African fishermen” with “primitive fishing methods.”60 Indeed, in his outline of the ecological chains from fish to human beings he did not differentiate between investigating human activity and that of other species. By portraying African fishermen as workers within the natural economy, Worthington could claim that knowledge gained from them was like any other knowledge obtained by observing nature. Worthington’s other local source was his English guide, Dick Dent. A professional coffee planter, elephant hunter, and “a born naturalist with a passion for fish,” Dent not only guided the expeditions, but also acted on behalf of the expedition’s patron to help Worthington establish contacts with the inner circles of the colonial elite.61 Dent identified relevant topics for ecological investigation for the inexperienced younger Englishman. To Dent, ecology was not a descriptive science, but rather a tool to create food chains beneficial to his patrons, mainly wealthy Britons who belonged to the Kenya Angling Association, an organization whose official aim was “[to stock] all possible rivers in Kenya with trout.”62 Dent took this directive to heart, and by the mid1920s he had stocked several hundred miles of freshwater, sparking a sudden surge in the popularity of fly-fishing. The responsibility for trout management was transferred in 1925 to the government’s game department, where in 1925 Dent became assistant game warden in charge of fish for Kenya. In this capacity he became known for his creation of novel fish ecologies, particularly in Lake Naivasha, where through clever cultivation of local fish stocks and the introduction of new species, Dent managed to create a food chain with big fish for the anglers. When he told Worthington about Lake Naivasha in 1929, he could also point to a growing influx of European tourists who wanted to explore African “wilderness”; fishing satisfied the demand by wealthy people for Arcadian ecotourism in the wild.63 Worthington was clearly inspired by Dent’s ability to create an economy of nature that strengthened the colonial economy and interests of white settlers. He first carried out a detailed description of an area unknown to the governing authorities, and then used this knowledge to suggest and sometimes carry out constructions of food chains that could serve colonial interests. The aim of his research was to create a human ecology with social and biological distance from “primitive” humans that would allow for a trusteeship

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policy of fish resources. Most aspects of British engagement in the region were geared towards economic growth. Worthington’s job was to research the effects of a proposed dam by the Sudan government at Lake Albert that would raise the lake level by about four meters. Such a dam would overflow large areas, since the landscape is flat, and create productive fish swamps. Worthington thought it would “probably be beneficial” to the fish stock, although the salt concentration in the lake could rise because of increased evaporation.64 He did not discuss the cost of moving local villages in order to achieve this territorial expansion on behalf of the fish industry. Instead he discussed at length the consequences of climate change on water layers in the lake environments, since such knowledge was needed to understand the effect of a dam on the ecology of a lake.65 Managing the food chains to serve the colonial government was the most important part of Worthington’s job. In his recommendations for exploitation of Lake Albert, for example, he suggested “that the closure of the hook of Butiaba spit to all fishermen except those of the Kenya and Uganda Railway would . . . ensure a more dependable supply of fish for European consumption.” The justification for “the class distinction involved by this closure” was that it would force those not serving the railway authorities to explore other parts of the lake in order to obtain “a more thorough exploitation of the fish resources.”66 Such a policy meant expelling a large part of the local fishing community from an attractive market created by the railway, since fish could not be transported from locations much beyond the Butiaba headland without being spoiled by tropical heat. Worthington also recommended altering the economy of nature to improve the human ecology of the fishery. He suggested extending use of the five-inch mesh gill nets in order to maintain the natural balance of fish in Lake Edward and Lake George. In the case of Lake Bunyoni he advised placing a size limit on fish caught and introducing new species to the lake.67 To illustrate this he made a chart, “The food-chains of Lake Bunyoni as they are to-day” as well as a suggestive illustration, “The food-chains of Lake Bunyoni as they may be in the future.”68 He suggested that black bass, among other fish, could be a possible future species in the lake in addition to a small catfish already introduced. This was not perceived as a radical idea, but as a natural continuation of existing fishery policy, since the major food chains in this lake were originally constructed by an angler named Tracey Phillips back in 1919.69 For lakes Nakavali, Kachira, and Kijanebalola, Worthington noted that “in all of these lakes a natural balance between fish and fishermen has been struck,” and that one therefore did not need any restrictions in the fishery, but that the lake resources could still be improved by introducing new species. Similarly, with Nabugabo, a small lake separated from Lake Victoria by a sand bank, he recommended “an admirable experiment” of intro-

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ducing Nile perch to study in miniature the possible effects of introducing the same fish to Lake Victoria. Moreover, Nabugabo was a much-used holiday resort for bathing among British colonialists, and Worthington argued that “a good sporting fish such as the Nile Perch would increase its attraction enormously.”70 This fit well with Dent’s ideas; he had long argued that if sportsman could “forsake the rifle for the rod,” then the harassed great game animals could be rescued.71 In short, “the whole question of farming the waters” was at the heart of ecological research in the inland waters of Africa, with the ecologists as chief ranchers and the colonial government as the landowner.72 The economy of nature was carefully constructed by the ecologists to serve the human ecology of the colonial power, and in return ecologists gained legitimacy and more research opportunities. In this win-win game both parties expanded their territories; the government tightened the control of natural resources at the expense of local tribes, and the ecologists enlarged their system of global knowledge at the expense of local knowledge. The management perspective on the economy of nature did not prevent Worthington from having an Arcadian view of the African environment. His view of nature in the last expedition was surely colored by the fact that it was also his honeymoon with his new wife Stella Johnson. The marriage had forced her to choose between taking a degree at Cambridge in geography or joining the expedition in Africa, and the journey thus represented an end of her academic career.73 The book they wrote about their voyage is a narrative of two happy scientists leaving civilization in a heroic struggle against the hardship of nature, until in the midst of the isolated Lake Rudolf they discover not the heart of darkness, but the pure and untouched Eden of the Crocodile Island. This was a “patch of virgin land” with “tame” and “friendly crocodiles,” and with “thousands of Caspian terns . . . [who] kept up a perpetual flight and wail over and around us as we lay in bed in the bright moonlight.”74 Huxley must have been very impressed with Worthington’s work because he recommended him first for the African Survey and then for a position as director of the Freshwater Biological Association of the British Empire, where he conducted research from late 1937 until 1943 and continued with administrative work until 1946.75 The research reports from the Freshwater Biological Association’s laboratory at Windermere bear a strong resemblance to Worthington’s research in the inland waters of Africa. For seven centuries Windermere had been a great fishing lake, but its fish population dramatically declined around 1860 because of net fishing. Finally, in 1921, all commercial netting was banned by law. The stocks of commercial fish did not return, and upon Worthington’s

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arrival the lake had a large population of very small perch, a few large perch feeding on them, a small population of trout and char, which do not eat perch, and a dominating population of pike, which enjoy eating everyone, including other pike. Such a lake ecology was for many high-society anglers a wasteland. Perch and pike were not game fish and their bony meat made them usable only for fish cakes. The trout and char populations were so thin that it was hardly worthwhile fishing. Worthington’s friends were members of organizations like the National Federation of Anglers, Salmon and Trout Association, and the Flyfisher’s Club, and much of the initial research at the lake was consequently on the issue of whether the trout and char population could increase at the expense of the worthless perch and pike. At Windermere Worthington transferred his know-how from Africa to his native country in an attempt to construct a new lake environment that could serve his new patrons.

The Ecology of Knowledge in the African Survey Upon his return from Africa in 1931 Worthington started to teach zoology in Cambridge as Stanley Gardiner’s assistant. At the time Huxley was looking for what he described in If I Were Dictator as a “highly selected white man to introduce the better elements of European thought and practice” in Africa. To carry this out for the African Survey Gardiner recommended his pupil, and Worthington was apparently overjoyed when he got the job. The choice was an easy one for Huxley; Worthington had the ability to draw a comprehensive survey that could serve as a basis for a grand plan for the continent. His family background in the railroad industry made him an ideal networker among progressive empire-builders in colonial offices around Africa. Still, it was his ecological approach from his expeditions in the inland waters of Africa that proved his ability to create surveys useful for constructing economies of nature that could empower an imperial human ecology.76 The aim of the scientific part of the African Survey was to give an overview of all of the scientific research and institutions on the continent in a manageable reference book for the colonial administration. The following argument suggests that Worthington approached this task by using the ecological order of lakes in Africa as a microcosm for creating a grand ecology of knowledge for the continent as a whole. Thus, the virtue of Science in Africa is not primarily its review of scientific activity on the continent, but rather its contribution to colonial management of science as such. Worthington’s chief source of inspiration in writing his fishing surveys of the inland waters of Africa was Charles Elton’s “Ecological Zones.” Each lake had various zones where he established an administrative synthesis of biologi-

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cal and economic information about species from algae to human beings as well as soil, climate, and water, among other factors. He describes this work as a “combination of the several sciences of Geography, Biology, Geology, and Chemistry” recapitulated in ecology.77 An ecological lake zone contained information about meteorological conditions, drainage, shoreline, depth, turbidity, water temperature, and chemistry in connection with the natural history of species. The task of describing all the various parts of the zones resulted in a considerable number of scientific publications.78 Worthington arranged all species listed in his natural history of the lake according to which ecological zone they lived and fed in: surface waters, shallow waters with shelter, shallow waters without shelter, intermediate waters, and deep waters with different seabed (sand or mud). This created a network of food chains either within or between the zones.79 When Worthington wrote Science in Africa, he substituted academic disciplines for zones. He first collected articles, reviews, and letters from ten previous years of the journal Nature.80 Armed with this knowledge he approached about two hundred specialists in most academic fields to provide information and summaries of their scientific work on the continent. He then made a year-long journey on the continent with Malcolm Hailey, on which they talked and visited as many colonial scientists, politicians, and administrators as possible. Among them was General Smuts, whom they saw in September and October 1935. He was naturally very interested in the progress of a survey he had initiated in his Oxford lectures, and they discussed its content at length. They talked about the worrying “socialist tendency” among Bantu people, and were pleased that Rockefeller money was used to research this phenomenon.81 More important, they discussed whether or not the African Survey should “go beyond the merely ‘objective’ and suggest lines and policy suitable for adoption.” They all agreed that “it would be a mistake not to make such suggestions; with a guard on language and expression.”82 Thus one may read with suspicion Hailey’s praise for scientific objectivity in the foreword to the final book. Indeed, he would later explain to the League of Nations Union that the aim of the survey was to exploit and develop the colonies through scientific planning.83 According to Hailey, the survey method Worthington used was “chosen with deliberation.”84 Instead of having an edited volume, in which specialists from all the fields presented their work, the African Survey Committee chose to let one person write one review of all the sciences in Africa. The rationale for this was the explicit need to see all the scientific activities as a whole in order to generate one grand human ecological plan for the entire continent. When Worthington returned from Africa he immediately engaged in an intense correspondence with his scientific contacts. Summaries and clusters of

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references were now written and re-written until the final result emerged in the form of a grand 750-page treatise. He soon became an influential scholar for scientists and their institutions because the African Survey was used as the standard reference tool by their colonial patrons. It was a survey in which scientists had to be mentioned in order to get more patrons in African research. The virtually unknown demonstrator from Oxford became a well-known figure among African scholars. Yet it is unfair to describe Worthington’s work as secretarial when one looks at how he organized Science in Africa. It was here that his ecological knowledge came in handy. In the final pages of Animal Ecology Elton had introduced an ecological diagram of academic knowledge. Worthington took Elton’s suggestive chart very seriously because he introduced his own version of it to organize his book (see Figure 8). The illustration, Worthington explains, “is designed to show in broad outline the interrelations of the subjects . . . in such a way that each topic discussed depends on those which have gone before.”85 The reader may follow the chapters and the relations between

Figure 8. Edgar B. Worthington’s diagrams of ecological order and administration of knowledge, from Science in Africa (1938).

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the subjects in the book from “Surveys and Maps (II)” to “Anthropology (XVIII).” The arrows in the diagram simultaneously indicate flows of nutrition in nature and lines of collaboration among sciences. The order of knowledge thus follows the order of nature as it is perceived by the ecologist, or as Worthington put it: “the balance of nature . . . can be classified in the same categories as are used in the diagram.”86 He then develops schemes for scientific administration based on ecological management: “progress in one [scientific] field may be hampered through neglect of related studies” just as changes in the “balance of nature” may change or even be destroyed by single-minded use of natural resources.87 Worthington suggests an order of knowledge based on science as a vocation of exploration and exploitation. The first discipline he reviews is the science of surveys and maps—especially air surveys—because this field was the practical administrative basis for colonial science. Knowledge obtained in disciplines such as geology, meteorology, soil science, botany, and forestry could be plotted into the maps as it suited the colonial administration. What emerged was what Worthington later would describe as a cinematographic ecological panorama of Africa with “all branches of physical, biological, and human activity changing, singly and collectively, and reacting on each other.”88 The book juxtaposed the economy of nature and the economy of knowledge in Africa. This may be seen by comparing the ecosystem and management regime Worthington created for the inland waters of Africa with the science policy he recommended for Africa as a whole. In the fish research Worthington used ecology as a means to synthesize a variety of sciences into a toolbox for the construction of an economy of nature compatible with the economy of his patrons. In Science in Africa he uses the same approach to construct an economy of academic knowledge suitable for colonial management. In his chapter “Co-ordination and Centralization of Research,” he points out, as did several socialist scientists of his time, that “scientists in general are coming to agree that no valid distinction can be drawn between pure and applied science.”89 Consequently, every branch of science has an associated social aim and thus there is need for a central coordination of scientific efforts. He suggests the creation of an ecology of interrelations between administration and research to ensure closer cooperation between social needs and scientific aims (see Figure 8). This diagram outlines a form of such cooperation in which the executive heads coordinate research in agriculture, veterinary science, and forestry respectively. Through the construction of this ecology of knowledge the economy of nature could yield the best economy for a colony. The idea of coordinating the economy of nature, knowledge, and society into one grand human ecology was not new. Worthington was simply making an explicit application of ideas already promoted by Elton in

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his animal ecology, and by Huxley and Wells in their plans for a board of directors of a human ecology of the world. In Science in Africa, these ecological enterprises were applied concretely. Indeed, after its publication in 1938, Wells saw it as the first successful step towards establishing the “World Brain.”90 The African Survey was not intended merely as a description of African affairs and scientific activity—it had political advice built into it. This was in the form of a defense of the British Empire in general and the policy of trusteeship in particular. It was in this context of paternalism that Worthington examined a series of ecological problems, including soil erosion in areas of population pressure, desertification by an advancing Sahara, famine, drought, climatic change, deforestation and reforestation, game management, and fauna preservation,91 setting these important problems in ecological terms. The framework and analytic tools to analyze these social and environmental discourses in Africa would remain ecological for years to come.92 Science in Africa was not published alone—it appeared as a separate subsurvey to An African Survey, which was an even larger book on the social and political conditions of the continent written by Malcolm Hailey. These two books were placed in colonial libraries and in most governmental offices for colonial administration.93 They served as a standard reference tool for scientific and social issues in Africa well into the 1950s, when they were revised. The immediate reception of Science in Africa was flattering, though most agreed that the survey was most appropriate for reference and administrative use, since no new knowledge was unveiled.94 The ecological approach was widely praised and Worthington’s neutrality appreciated (except by one who thought he was “objective to the point of being colorless”),95 though it was understood that the role of the book was to give the policy of colonial trusteeship a firm scientific basis.96 Writing for the African Survey project became an exhausting experience for Hailey, and by January 1939 his diary indicates he experienced a serious emotional breakdown.97 This was not so for Worthington, for whom the survey was a flying start on an amazing administrative career. In order to better understand the relation between the “primitive” and “advanced” levels of historical development that Worthington took for granted in his human ecology, it is worth discussing how Tansley introduced historiography to environmental studies.98

Environmental History From “Virgin” to Semi-Natural Ecosystems Tansley shared Worthington’s keen interest in the value of ecology to colonial management, and he kept publishing suggestions on how to record, clas-

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sify, and explore tropical forest communities as late as 1940.99 However, his attention was diverted by the writing of his magnum opus, The British Islands and Their Vegetation. It absorbed most of his time, time that became more available with his retirement from Oxford in 1937 and from his editorship of the Journal of Ecology that same year. British ecologists had been waiting for Tansley’s book for years, and when it arrived in 1939 they were not disappointed: it quickly became a standard reference and “A Milestone in Plant Ecology.”100 In 1941 the Linnean Society honored Tansley with their Gold Medal for the book. Tansley’s work went beyond plant ecology; it was also a contribution to environmental history and human ecology. The book must be read in the context of Tansley’s speech on the occasion of his reelection as president of the British Ecological Society in 1939. There he concluded that “the principles of ecology are unquestionably applicable to mankind,” a statement that provides the key to what his plant ecology was all about.101 His methodology was based on the ecosystem approach used to explain how various biotic systems in the British Isles were determined by their geology, climate, soil, and most important, human activity. He went out of his way to secure broad acceptance for the ecosystem concept; he only hinted at the 1935 controversy in a footnote, and in his 1939 recapitulation of the history of ecology he merely alluded to the debate.102 The reference to the radical Hyman Levy was replaced with a safer reference to William Lewis’s textbook A System of Physical Chemistry of 1916.103 Interestingly, this is the first and only known reference to a chemical text in the body of Tansley’s work. In his reintroduction of the ecosystem concept he also adds a mystifying explanation of the term ecotope as deriving from a combination of the Greek words topâv (a place in the physical world) and oËkâv (a home of the organisms).104 He then explains how an ecosystem includes “not only the plants of which it is composed, but the animals habitually associated with them, and also all the physical and chemical components of the immediate environment or habitat which together form a recognisable self-contained entity.”105 Aerial photos created by the Aircraft Operating Company served Tansley equally well for laying out the ecosystem as they had served his colleague Ray Bourne in his expeditions to Northern Rhodesia. To see the environment from above was important, since it enabled him to draw relations and see connections that were not obvious on the ground. The Oxford archeologist Osbert Crawford’s famous aerial photos of British landscapes embedded with historical artifacts became a major source of inspiration, and they would later correspond about them as empirical evidence in support of Tansley’s environmental history.106 To obtain the overview he also suggested creating a national atlas of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at the Cambridge meeting

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of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1939.107 The plan was to create a map that could unify different kinds of scientific knowledge about soil, climate, vegetation, zoology, and human affairs. The project received initial support, but did not result in publication, probably because of the war. Tansley’s attempt to avoid controversy when reintroducing the ecosystem approach can be understood as an attempt to secure a broad audience, crucial to the promulgation of his research on nature conservation and planning. He found his audience by differentiating between “the ‘virgin’ ecosystem” or “original ecosystem” and “semi-natural ecosystems” altered by human activity.108 This untested assumption (based on analogies to Freud’s sex-psychology) frames the argument in the rest of the book. He explains humans’ use of British forests as a tragic history from an innocent past where “primitive man” lived in harmony with the virgin ecosystem until nature came “under the human yoke”: [W]ith his increasing control over “nature” the human animal became a unique agent of destruction of the original ecosystems, as he cleared and burned natural vegetation and replaced it with his pastures, crops and buildings. Limited first to the regions where civilization originally developed, this destructive activity has spread during the recent centuries, and at an increasing rate, all over the face of the globe.109 Tansley walks the reader through the sad story: the virgin ecosystem of a golden Bronze Age is gradually destroyed by industrial civilization. In the beginning of human history the vegetation on the British Islands was in harmony and consisted largely of huge forests. Then forests were cleared and pastoral farming introduced instead of the hunting and gathering of the Iron Age. Belgian settlers and the Roman occupation continued this process, but it was particularly the coming of the Saxons in the fifth century that caused the alteration of the original ecosystem. Further deforestation continued with human (especially Danish and Norwegian) colonization of the islands in the Middle Ages. How to adjust the rural economy within the economy of nature then became a tense issue with the political enclosure of the Royal Forests. The destruction of the “virgin forest” increased dramatically with iron smelting, mining, ship building, and an “over-developed” sheep-raising industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.110 Full-scale enclosure of the commons accelerated the process of deforestation, which ultimately led to the destruction of the highland forests. Industry “became overwhelming and completely altered the face of the country as well as the structure of the society,” along with tripling the population and troubling agriculture with pollution.111 The development of British civilization was based on, and

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yet fundamentally opposed to the original forest climax, and the discontent (in the Freudian sense) within modern civilization resulted from the fall of a virgin ecosystem. The story ends with a plea for preserving the countryside against urban destruction, pointing out the need for national planning of the country’s whole environment in order to save the last remains of the virgin land in nature reserves. This narrative should be familiar to environmental historians, many of whom repeat it almost like a mantra. John Perlin, a leading historian of forestry today, for example, assumes that “forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow.”112 Many contemporary environmental historians believe that they are promoting a new approach to history with this narrative. This view is held by Donald Worster, who argues that environmental history is a new discipline that “first appeared in the 1970s.”113 Historians’ lack of historical knowledge about their own discipline is surely puzzling, especially since Tansley was not the only ecologist of his time using historical analysis. As indicated in this chapter, Huxley, Wells, Worthington, and many others discussed environmental history in writing about human relations to the Earth. Indeed, Tansley’s environmental history draws upon the ancient Christian narrative of the fall from grace: There was once a true garden of Eden (the virgin ecosystem), but because of a human mind out of balance humanity was driven out of Paradise (the original ecosystem) into the corrupt semi-natural ecosystem with ecological devastation and deforestation.114 Lack of forest vegetation on the British Islands was therefore a result of the maladjustment of human psychic energy to the equilibrium in the ecosystem. The only hope for “salvation” was to restore the human psyche through conservation and restoration of the original ecosystem in the form of national parks and nature reserves. The psychological and social assumptions about human history in Tansley’s narrative derive from his studies in psychology. He based his narrative on the idea that the phylogeny of the natural environment recapitulated the ontogeny of a human being as understood by Freud. The construction of his narrative from a virgin to a semi-natural ecosystem thus recapitulates the growth of a discontented human mind. The rest of the book (psycho)analyzes in detail these corrupt semi-natural landscapes in urgent need of ecological therapy. The chapter about British woodlands, for example, exposes various natural, semi-natural, and “artificial woods” caused by agricultural enclosures, game reserves or unwise exploitation.115 He suggests that the ecologist’s attempt to restore the “balance of nature” is akin to the analyst’s attempt to restore the balance of the human mind. Tansley promoted various environmental therapies such as distributing seeds, reforestation, and other

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projects aimed at recreating the lost balance. Like an analyst trying to restore and investigate the childhood of a patient, Tansley tried to restore and investigate his country’s heritage through conservation of nature.116 Tansley’s plea for conservation of nature was not only a desire to serve the interest of Britain’s heritage. Like many of his fellow ecologists, he had a profound self-interest in nature conservation: One of the most troublesome and irritating hindrances to ecological observations intended to serve as a basis for the study of successional change, and therefore having to be spread over a series of years, is the liability to interference with or destruction of the vegetation of the area under observation by such events as clearing, felling, draining, gravel digging, change of ownership, or “development.” I myself have twice had serial observations brought to an end by events of this nature in areas which I thought were safe from interference.117 One can only imagine the anger and frustration Tansley and his friends must have felt when the human factor in the ecosystem completely altered or destroyed years of miniature investigations into the succession of vegetation in a landscape. No wonder many ecologists argued so vigorously for conserving nature when it became a question of preserving their research laboratories. To portray Tansley as only concerned with nature conservation would be misleading.118 In a not-so-subtle reference to the Political and Economic Planning organization Tansley ended his environmental history with a plea for “Country planning” or “[s]ome sort of national planning of a systematic ‘lay out’ of the whole country, in which the various interests are duly considered and adjusted.”119 Country planning would soon absorb much of Huxley’s time, and after the war it captured much of the environmental agenda. Human ecology was at the core of all this. As Tansley explained to the British Ecological Society in his 1939 speech: “A well-defined localized human community is the kernel of an ecosystem just as is the plant community or the biome of any of the ecosystems.”120 Here Tansley defines the well-being of a human community according to the structure of plant communities and thus ends up favoring a local way of life in tune with the local ecosystem. At the same time, however, he also recognizes “the trend towards internationalism, with world federation as its ultimate goal—the establishment of a worldwide ecosystem—arising inevitably from the increased interdependence of the people, the multitude of the bonds between them, and the immensely increased rapidity of every sort of intercommunication.”121 The reciprocal relationship between the local and the global could not be more striking. What Tansley envisioned was world-wide planning of local life through global communication among individual members. “I need not translate my words into political language,” Tansley concluded, hinting at the possibility of a human

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ecosystem that “embraces the whole of community” in the lines of a “world federation.”122 He was probably declaring his support for a federal version of the League of Nations along the lines of Huxley and Wells’s political writings from this period, which use the same wording as Tansley uses.123 General Smuts reached a similar conclusion through the work of John William Bews and John Phillips. Tansley, however, made a clear case against oppressive biocentric arguments of understanding human beings as integrated parts of the biotic community. Drawing on his years with Freud he emphasized the unique human “self consciousness, will, reason, the moral sense, and the power of deliberate action directed towards a conscious goal.” These capabilities made humans “transcend and override the primitive adaptations” of other animals in the environment, and “the human ecologists” should consequently “work with very different methods from those we [members of the British Ecological Society] employ.”124 This strong plea for a turn to psychological and anthropocentric grounds to understand human ecology fell on deaf ears at the time. Now it provides an important clue for understanding Tansley’s approach to nature conservation.

Ordering Nature as Place of Therapy for the Human Psyche Tansley was of course much too old to engage in any form of war activity during World War II. Nevertheless, he worked for the well-being of humankind through the Society for Freedom in Science and in writing about Freud’s psychology in relation to nature conservation and planning. On September 23, 1939, just weeks into the war, Freud died in Hampstead, ending his English exile. Tansley, as his old student and champion at the Royal Society, was assigned to write his obituary. It is indeed remarkable that a botanist was given this task, and it is surely evidence of Tansley’s fame as a British expert on Freudian psychology. This task and the course of the war around him awoke his old interest in psychology, and Tansley sat down to prepare another popular book about the topic. The Tansley Archive includes several long (unfortunately undated) manuscripts: “Biology and Psychology,” “The Historical Foundation of Psychoanalysis,” and a preface to a book that shares elements with the Freud obituary and thus may have been written in this period.125 The obituary does not reveal any important information about Tansley’s personal experience with Freud. Instead he used the opportunity to relate the history of Freud’s scientific achievements so that it would enforce the system approach to neuroscience and ecology. Freud’s psychology was, as Tansley saw it, an “essentially mechanistic picture of the mind,” explained in terms of a “mental economy” of “psychic energy” flowing in “the psychic ‘systems.’”126 While writing about Freudian psychology he also became involved in

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founding the Society for Freedom in Science. The historian William McGucken has reviewed the intellectual and social circumstances concerning Tansley’s engagement in this society.127 It is a compelling story about how Tansley, along with the Oxford zoologist John R. Baker and the Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi, launched a critique of radical socialist scientists like John D. Bernal and James G. Crowther.128 The issue at stake, McGucken argues, was whether or not social planning by the state should include planning of scientific research. Tansley is here rightly portrayed as a critic of communist planning policy as it was carried out in the Soviet Union. Yet it is important not to frame the society’s early history in light of what its members said later on, during the height of Cold War fear of a communist takeover.129 During World War II it was more or less a dormant society. Its first members included a diverse crowd such as Charles Elton (who was no radical), Vernon Blackman, and Frederick Keeble (the co-authors of the 1917 “Bolshevik” manifesto). Tansley’s Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford in 1942 captures some of the ideas he thought the society should promote. Like Huxley’s Romanes Lectures of 1943 on evolutionary ethics, Tansley tried to come up with constructive proposals that took the best of Bernal and Crowther’s arguments while avoiding the pitfalls of their radical Soviet-style planning. Tansley sought, unlike his fellow society members Baker and Polanyi, to explore a middle course in favor of scientific planning. Scientists should work independently of state control, Tansley argued, but still pursue issues of social importance and contribute to lay education “irrespective of means or social class.” With respect to planning Tansley concluded that it “must play a very large part in our future social and economic life.”130 The lecture thus represents the views he had held throughout his life, though he avoided wordings that could be confused with the radical and very vocal socialist camp. A note in the archive, “Science in the Liberal State,” which was written by Tansley in this period, reveals that he thought “it must be the aim of liberal reform to spread the opportunities so that children may be brought up free from crippling handicaps of under nourishment, overcrowding, and other bad social conditions.”131 This, he thought, “would be true equally in a semisocialist society and in a state with a free market for labor in the widest sense.”132 These remarks indicate that Tansley was still a socially concerned scientist struggling to keep a centrist position in a political arena that was gradually evolving into the polarized Cold War world. Tansley was not against planning scientific research, he was only critical of the idea that such planning should be submitted to state control. Instead he thought such planning should be carried out by the Royal Society, of which he was a member.133 This sense of scientific elitism and paternalism he shared with Huxley,

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one of his collaborators for planning nature conservation during and after the war. They both endorsed the view of scientific planning captured in Wells’s film: “the brotherhood of science” could build a new human ecology for the world. That Tansley was no conservative is clear from an exchange of letters between him and the poet Frank Kendon about the Society for Freedom in Science. They indicate that Tansley’s ideas about science in a liberal state included too much social planning for Kendon, a disagreement that dates back to the old mechanism versus idealism debate discussed in Chapter 4. Kendon was an arch-conservative idealist who in the early 1940s received a prize for his poem “Nature is the Art of God.” It included the following lines: A man, confronted with a daisied wilderness, Feels his heart flourish without taunt of fear; Because in these, as manifests of life, We read by self-light our fierce mortal pleasure— The passion of a pulse to move Along the veins of creatures. ... There are no stars! We have invented “stars”— To image for our waking mind a matter Burnt into man’s dark memory of Eden.134 Kendon would include slides of nature scenery in his poetry readings, and for a subjective idealist like him these images “read by self-light” were “invented” from the “memory of Eden” embedded in the human Self and held up by the immanent power of God. To Kendon, nature was a medium for the reflective Self to reveal images as God’s art. The whole concept of planning nature disturbed his use of nature as a source of meditation. Stars, stones, and manifestations of life were on the other hand very real to Tansley, though he shared Kendon’s passion for (images of) nature.135 Notice how Tansley responds to the poet’s dislike for planning: “I do think that much planning is necessary now; only it must be our servant not our master, as too many people today would make it . . . I agree about leisure and wise passiveness and leaving it to Nature, but not everywhere and always. I confess I doubt if Nature has a plan in the human sense.”136 Kendon did not agree and never joined the Society for Freedom in Science. This comment illustrates how Tansley was caught between radical planners (like Bernal and Crowther) and conservative idealists who thought “leisure and wise passiveness and leaving it to Nature” would be the best approach. To the conservatives it was unnecessary and indeed immoral to replan God’s artwork, and to the radicals there

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was an urgent need to empower the layman with scientific nuts and bolts to reshape the face of the Earth. The Second World War was, like the first, yet another example for Tansley of human psyches clearly out of balance. In this depressing period, one of the few bright spots may have been the acceptance of his ecosystem approach by Raymond Lindeman, a young student in the United States unknown to him.137 A socially concerned scientist like Tansley had no time for theoretical musings with his country at war, and he focused on a therapy for the British psyche to restore its balance through conservation of the environment.138 With great energy Tansley carried out this assignment with Huxley as vicechairman of the Wild Life Conservation Special Committee, and as chairman of a special Committee for Nature Conservation (which also included Elton) approved by the council of the British Ecological Society. The Committee for Nature Conservation’s 1943 report was written largely by Tansley.139 The aim of the report was to create an argument that could unify industrialists, preservationists, conservationists, bird lovers, townsmen, and countrymen. Using a similar argument to Tansley’s 1939 book on British vegetation, the committee explained that “the wild life of our country is part of our national heritage . . . [It] forms the original scene in which our history has unfolded and has largely conditioned the development of our culture and civilization.” But this same culture had now undermined its own base, and “the national heritage” was now “seriously threatened with destruction and degeneration.”140 Although “economic development must continue,” it was of utmost importance “to preserve [landscapes] unspoiled and free from the chances of ‘development.’” Moreover, they required that the problem of nature conservation be viewed against the human or social background. The committee emphasized the great psychological importance of unspoiled places for Britain’s mental health, because “they touch the deepest sources of mental and spiritual refreshment, both conscious and unconscious.”141 The committee based its argument for the conservation of nature on both psychological and ecological grounds. The argument for conscious and unconscious mental refreshment corresponds well with Tansley’s theory of the human mind. Human psychic energy would, through response-stimuli with an ecosystem equilibrium, restore its mental energy and balance. Natural parks should consequently be planned by ecologists, who had the scientific knowledge of all the components of a well-balanced equilibrium. Ecologists, the committee explains, have a “special duty” to advocate and plan nature reserves. They know the “methods [and] machinery of nature conservation,” they know “the facts and principles” behind the “harmony and co-operation” of nature, and they should thus be responsible for educational activities and administration of the nature reserves.142

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In April 1945, when the war was about to end in Europe, Tansley published Our Heritage of Wild Nature: A Plea for Organized Nature Conservation, which is a small booklet filled with sweet pictures of deer and pretty scenery. It was a popular version of the committee’s report on nature conservation and a plea for ecological education and large-scale planning of the environment. As the reviewer of Times Literary Supplement put it: “Tansley’s book comes at the opportune moment of reconstruction planning.”143 Tansley’s plea for organized nature conservation should thus be understood as part of a larger plea (by Huxley and others) for planning the nation’s environment as a whole. Education, Tansley argued, should be conducted along ecological lines that “would greatly widen the new citizen’s intelligent outlook on the world, would quicken his feeling for the Britain he has inherited, and help to fit him to take proper part in wise and balanced planning of the homeland of a democratic community.”144 The study of nature could enhance national feelings for balanced planning as well as democratic values since nature reserves represent the public’s “home region.” A return to nature was a return to Britain’s core “cultural value.” Alienated pupils who had grown up in (bombed) cities, for example, did not have a home region and should accordingly be transported out to their nearest national park to refresh their memory of the past. Here they would experience “the most precious parts of our national heritage,” Tansley argued—a return to the place of origin from where “our history has unfolded.” Since “the present aspect of most of our British countryside is man-made” and “semi-natural,” he continued, it was important to let students experience a “really ‘virgin’” nature as often as possible.145 The country’s last forests were of particular importance, since they represented the very childhood of the British heritage. In the peaceful summer of 1945 he would write to the Times and urge people to be more “forest minded.”146 The main reason for conserving nature was thus not to protect it for its own sake; instead, Tansley appealed to the psychological argument that nature “touches one of the deepest sources of mental and spiritual refreshment” in the human mind.147 When Tansley turned to arguments for planning nature reserves and national parks, he fell into the role of a psychoanalyst wanting to establish a new kind of mental hospital for the British psyche. The urgent need for “large scale planning for the post-war world,” required “expert management” of the country’s ecosystems.148 An administrative and economic laissez-faire policy was not in accordance with scientific ecological knowledge about the flows of energy in nature and stimulus-response mechanisms between nature and the human mind. Tansley did not want to recreate an original prehistoric ecosystem; instead he argued that one should preserve nature as a piece of environmental his-

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tory—as part of the national heritage. This meant expert management of human activity (such as agriculture) by the ecologist so that the designated landscape remained unchanged. Tansley thus in his own way argued for a fulfillment of Wells’s prediction of an end to history (an end to evolution of human culture) when “history becomes ecology.” In a nature reserve human culture would not change, but would instead be managed by experts as “invaluable sites for further ecological research work.”149 Indeed, as more and more nature reserves were established around Britain, they increasingly became an important justification for providing funding for scientific activity.150 It would be misleading to look at the work of Tansley on nature conservation as the only formative basis for environmentalism and human ecology. One has to turn to the activity of Worthington and Huxley to get a more balanced view on what human ecology in Great Britain was all about.

British Ecologists at War Mobilizing the Human Ecology The war became an important vehicle for human ecological reasoning. Worthington was still working on how to construct a better lake ecology for the economy of anglers at Windermere when the war broke out. Accidentally, this research became very important: The navy was not able to guard British fishing boats from German submarine and air attacks, and salt-water fishing consequently became a dangerous activity and an unreliable source of nourishment. Fish from the inland waters of Britain thus became an important source of food. For the researchers at Windermere this meant initiating vigorous management of the lake as their contribution to the war effort. There was an urgent need to adjust the economy of nature to the war economy of the state by providing military depots with as many calories as possible. To serve the soldiers pike would be the least efficient, since the pike was on top of the lake’s food chain. Instead Worthington and his team harvested the large population of small perch, which would provide calories for the soldiers, hopefully starve out unwanted pike, and perhaps even create a harmonious ecology with trout at the top of the food chain for anglers to enjoy after the war. The economy of warfare on land and in the lake would eventually create a peaceful solution in both realms. The practical problem was finding a method whereby the small perch could be fished in sufficient quantity. Worthington recalled how African fishermen used to trap fish and utilized these methods to construct an effective perch trap. He then mobilized local fishermen and women to maintain them as a voluntary war service for their country. The first year (1941) they caught over twenty-five tons, which on Worthington’s suggestion were made into “perchines in tomato” by the British Fish Canners in Leeds, a little-loved product along the front lines. In subsequent years the researchers consciously over-fished the lake for small perch

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to serve the military depots and ultimately to create an ecology of the lake suitable for tourism and the angling economy. For Worthington the lake was a microcosm for global interests. He recalls, “[in] the back[s] of our minds were the much larger problems of fisheries management in the seas surrounding Britain.”151 Although Worthington never managed such a project, it was carried out after the war by an old friend from Africa, Michael Graham, who served as a fisheries inspector at Lowestoft.152 Worthington was hired from 1943 until 1945 by the Middle East Supply Centre in Cairo to carry out a survey of natural resources.153 Max Nicholson, the Oxford ecologist and general secretary of the Political and Economic Planning organization, was the principle organizer of the Supply Centre from his position as the head of the Allocation of Tonnage Division at the Ministry of War Transport. Based on his ecological understanding of planning he geared the Supply Centre towards massive production of food and other material resources important to the ongoing war. Nicholson hired Worthington as the Supply Centre’s scientific advisor based on his book Science in Africa and on his perch research at Windermere, which was widely known through its unsavory tinned results. The Middle East was then understood as a circle of countries around Egypt, with Tripolitania and Cyrenica (now Libya) in the west, Sudan and Ethiopia in the south, Saudi Arabia and Persia in the east, and Turkey in the north. This large region was not self-sufficient in food and other resources, and Worthington’s task was to suggest ways to reduce imports so that support ships could be released for other war purposes. Much like his previous work for the African Survey, Worthington now attempted to match the economy of nature with the war economy of the Middle East Supply Centre through a grand ecological survey that resulted in Middle East Science of 1946. The first thing he did was to utilize territorial surveys conducted by the Royal Air Force to create a map of the Middle East corresponding to the political sphere of responsibility of the Supply Centre.154 Manuscripts and books from the center’s conferences show that Worthington based his book on a synthesis of various surveys of forestry, soil erosion, livestock, cereals, agricultural machinery, consumer goods, and grain extraction by other researchers. He then collected knowledge about meteorology and geology obtained by the Royal Engineers in their ongoing effort to supply the standing armies with water in a desert climate and plotted it into a map. It was through this military discourse of intense water management that he raised the issue of how to irrigate, dam, and control the Middle East’s rivers and water supply, such as the Nile, in the most effective way.155 Needless to say, water supply is perhaps the most crucial natural resource in this part of the world, and controlling it means holding a good deal of social, political, and military power. What Worthington suggested was to create an

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ecology of water that would direct the flow fairly throughout the Middle East and thus unite different peoples under one common administration. As a model he pointed to ancient Egyptian and Roman ruins of dams and aqueducts as evidence for how those empires were held together through engineering and grand-scale management of water. If the pharaohs and Roman emperors could politically unite and control the region through water management, could not the Supply Centre do the same? Having laid down the ecological basis for social control, Worthington continued in collaboration with various authors to survey plant, agriculture, forestry, fishery, and animal resources, and suggest how these resources might best be used or conserved according to the principles of water management.156 The ecological scheme was fairly simple; the flow of water controls production of food, which determines nutrition and health for humans, which controls the development of human population. When Worthington followed this line of reasoning, ecological management of water supply soon became an important tool for controlling population growth in the Middle East. “The rate of increase [in human population] must be reduced if ultimate disaster is to be averted,” he argued.157 When the war ended, UNESCO became one of the chief patrons for constructing a new Nile ecology from Uganda in the south to Egypt in the north. The need for a revised African Survey to support this attempt to create a second nature on the continent now became urgent, and the aging Smuts organized various conferences to gather support for the cause.158 Together with his old collaborator Malcolm Hailey, Worthington carried out a new African Survey in the 1950s, which in content represented a continuation of the policy of trusteeship and suppressive imperialism; indeed, as late as 1983 Worthington expressed sympathy with the South African policy of apartheid.159 The new African Survey promoted a plan for a scientifically engineered economy of nature for Africa that could foster economic growth and prosperity for its people, nations, and their leaders. At the same time, Worthington argued fiercely for conservation of nature: he kept in close contact with Nicholson, Huxley, and many others on this issue, including Tansley, who lived close by his home in Grantchester. All this activity created a boost for various international environmental organizations. This leads the story back to Julian Huxley, who as UNESCO’s first director-general gave initial support to Worthington’s research in Africa.

A United Ecology of Nations In the first years of the war Huxley spent a lot of time laying out the methodological foundation for ecological planning in a book about the synthesis of

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evolutionary biology and genetic research methods.160 This represented the end product of his earlier ideas from his articles in the Week-End Review about creating a unified biology for a planned society. The evolutionary synthesis provided Huxley with an “external yardstick” by which he could evaluate social progress, planning, moral reasoning, and even religion.161 While summarizing arguments for unifying evolutionary reasoning and genetics, he pointed to the value of “the unifying effect of war” for Allied powers, scientific research, and democratic culture.162 After an extensive tour of West Africa in 1943, he argued for transferring British colonies and mandates to a unifying world organization that could provide greater respect for regional and local authorities.163 His unifying device was energy; a natural force in all organisms that humans might control and render into social progress. To mobilize this energy it was important to unify the individual energies of laissez-faire capitalist countries into one socially planned stream of energy, which could bring forth a “a truly organized, living community.”164 In If I Were Dictator Huxley gave his general explanation of how to reconcile scientific paternalism with grand-scale planning of human ecology and democracy. The argument in favor of democracy in both Huxley’s and Wells’s wartime writings are puzzling. They both argued vigorously for democracy, freedom of speech, and even human rights, while at the same time suggesting paternalistic scientific management schemes for postwar reconstruction of society that does not seem easily compatible with democratic values.165 Huxley associated “mass democracy” with the destructive laissez-faire society and was instead intrigued by the sociologist Karl Mannheim’s notion of a “minority democracy” for a scientific and political elite.166 Wells, on the other hand, became frightened by the German dictatorship and was thus less enthusiastic about his earlier scientific elitism; he started to argue for more respect for the individual’s rights within the state. This tension between the previous collaborators, which marked the end of their friendship, is evident in Huxley’s defense of Wells’s vision from Things to Come—a second postwar economy of nature—which ignored Wells’s later focus on the individual’s rights.167 Huxley’s chief practical example of a planned economy of nature was the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States.168 Huxley had visited Tennessee briefly in 1935, and again in 1941. He became firmly convinced that the valley could serve as a model for rebuilding his own country. The analogy was apt in terms of size—the district covers an area about four-fifths the size of Britain—but what caught Huxley’s attention was the potential for a synchronized plan that included geography, soil, agriculture, forestry, animal life, recreation, scenery, fishing, technical research, health, commerce, industry, architecture, housing, and design. It was a project that radically altered

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the environment and social life in Tennessee, with scientists and lay people living together in small harmonious communities like the “Atom City” of Oak Ridge.169 The virtue of the alteration of the Tennessee Valley was, Huxley argued, the complete reinforcement of the economy of nature (through dams, electrification, and highways), which empowered human ecology. When lecturing to architects, Huxley stressed the “architectural disaster” of individualism and promoted instead landscape architectural planning in the British countryside: “[The] combination of the modern engineer, the modern architect and the modern planner,” he told them at a conference about rebuilding Britain, could create new projects that would “form an organic part of the landscape.”170 Like Huxley, Nicholson continued to promote not only wildlife conservation, but also the need for a radical “switch from an unplanned to a planned society” when the war ended.171 They both saw radical remodeling of existing environments along the lines of what was happening with the Tennessee Valley as a model for the eventual postwar reconstruction of Britain. When urban culture and centers were shattered through bombardment, Huxley saw in them “a rare and perhaps unique opportunity of replanning the physical basis of life in our country.”172 As chairman of the Wild Life Conservation Special Committee and a member of the Standing Committee on National Parks, Huxley also became known as a planner of nature conservation.173 This planning went hand in hand with plans for engineering aimed at reshaping the energy of the British landscape and people. At the end of the war Huxley got the job as director-general for UNESCO because of his writings about planning, his popular scientific books, and his support of democracy. In this new job he continued to promote large-scale planning for world reconstruction along the lines of his earlier writings: “[T]he general philosophy of UNESCO,” he argued, should “be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background.”174 The organization would function as the institutional basis for creating the scientific board of directors for the planned economy of nature he had envisioned together with H. G. Wells (who died in 1946). Social progress was to be based on the synthesis of evolutionary biology and mathematics, and Huxley consequently strongly emphasized biological principles when he outlined the “philosophy of UNESCO” to his political coworkers. The new organization, he argued, should develop into the cornerstone of “a single world government” of the future, after the withering away of nation states.175 Huxley gave the organization’s tripartite purpose of promoting education, science, and culture a rather narrow interpretation corresponding to “population [planning], the conservation of wild life, and semantics.”176 The educational part of UNESCO would focus on the importance of teaching people throughout

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the world family planning and birth control to prevent overpopulation. The scientific aspect of the organization would focus on how to create social progress through housekeeping the economy of nature, with special emphasis on nature conservation. The inclusion of the word “cultural” in the organization’s name was not to Huxley’s taste, and he defined the cultural task narrowly as the study of semantics. The role of semantics for a future world government was as a management tool for scientific communication. Proper semantics had its basis in positivist philosophy, Freudian psychology, and comparative neuroscience, which to Huxley were the bases for “social organization in general and the machinery of government in particular.”177 In its study of linguistic diversity semantics could find a unified language for scientific world-planning. Huxley hired the philosopher Arne Næss (the cofounder of Deep Ecology) to study the semantics of the ambivalent word “democracy” as it was used in different political systems. It is likely that he had personal reasons for exploring the exact meaning of a democratic world government. Perhaps Næss could help sort out the schism in Huxley’s scientific humanism between defending free speech and human rights on the one hand and minority democracy, scientific paternalism, and elitism on the other. Næss was to Huxley a rare example of a positivist philosopher who took science seriously in his behavioral studies of rats and human psychology. Under UNESCO’s patronage, Næss consequently surveyed professors and leading intellectuals from around the world about the semantic meaning of the word “democracy.” The result was a fine contribution to objective political science about what democracy is while avoiding unscientific suggestions about what democracy should be.178 To the critics and to many delegates of the United Nations it was rather shocking to read about Leninism as one possible semantic interpretation of democracy, and despite a high demand UNESCO never reprinted the report. The general uproar was rather damaging to Huxley, whose democratic views became suspicious, and the organization was forced to fire their leader and focus on less controversial topics, such as fighting illiteracy.

“The New Masters of the World” Huxley was also active at the Nature Conservancy in Britain after the war where he promoted environmental planning and protection alongside Tansley. Tansley was the chief architect and prime mover behind the Nature Conservancy. He was gradually shifting his support to the conservative side of Cold War tensions while spending most of his time defending nature conservation. With increasing bipolar agitation, nature (conservation) was one of the few realms where he could negotiate his prewar social views. Nature be-

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came for Tansley, to paraphrase Douglas R. Weiner’s excellent book, a little corner of freedom from the Cold War.179 The popular version of British Islands and Its Vegetation, published in 1947 as Britain’s Green Mantle, is illustrative of this trend. It was reorganized so that the nation’s environmental history became the dominating theme: it is a book about the deforestation of Britain. In it Tansley predicts a rather bleak future landscape devoid of vegetation. The book’s opening photo, a pine stump in a blanket bog, nicely illustrates his version of Britain’s environmental history: the nation evolved from a wooded past into a marshy landscape covered by railroads, towns, grasslands, and industry. Tansley closes with a plea for planned conservation of the nation’s heritage—the last remaining forests—as a constructive postwar policy. National parks were a needed symbol for Great Britain’s imperial heritage: while withering away as political superpower Britain could still claim to be a moral empire through nature conservation.180 The book soon became the classic reference for British environmentalists, and it was reprinted in several editions, the last one in 1968. This book was part of a larger effort by an aging Tansley to boost nature conservation with popular articles, educational books, and lectures on the topic. While returning British soldiers sought to rebuild their bombed houses and cities, he sought to foster “love of nature,” safeguard the environment from “destruction and ‘development,’” and teach teachers how to educate with “the ecological outlook (. . . including human ecology).”181 This is not to say that Tansley was against rebuilding Britain; like Huxley, he was arguing for an ecological reconstruction of the country with national parks at the center of national planning in the place of destructive urban cultures. In Tansley’s last book about ecology he thought of oaks as “the symbol of British solidarity and strength,” since they were the last remnants of an older British landscape and heritage. He was well aware that the Germans successfully used the oak as “the symbol of their strength and solidity [of] ‘deutscher Kraft’ and ‘unerschütterlicher Festigkeit!’” and he seized the opportunity to use the same symbolism in order to empower the moral force of British nature conservancy. The oak was also the reverse symbol of the city; it was urgent to save “city children who have never seen a green field or a cow” from the evils of urban culture by bringing them back to nature and the oaks.182 His last book on psychology (published when he was eighty-one years old) was a long defense of Freud, including an elaboration on how children became mentally healthy in a stimuli-response relationship with the natural environment.183 His disagreement with the historian Herbert Butterfield, discussed in the introduction of this book, was based on his lifelong attempt to understand human history as an integrated part of nature’s economy.

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Tansley’s plea for nature conservation was heard. In 1948 the Parliament adopted the principles recommended by the British Ecological Society’s Committee for Nature Conservation, and as a direct result of the committee’s recommendations the Nature Conservancy was established by Royal Charter the same year. Tansley became the first chairman of the Conservancy, was knighted for his patriotic work in 1950, and until his death in 1955, was the chief authority on environmental issues. These included concern for population “dangers,” which he argued to be “at least as threatening and certainly more inevitable than those of atomic bombs.”184 This fear grew out of Tansley’s interest in the social psychology of sexual behavior, in Elton’s statistical surveys of lemmings, and finally in Carr-Saunders’s work on population dynamics. Tansley’s fear was not based on studies of human populations; he provided no empirical evidence for his claim. Yet it would be a major theme among Tansley’s students and colleagues, who after his death continued to view environmental and social issues within this framework.185 After Tansley’s death Nicholson emerged as the most important figure in British environmental debate. He worked with Tansley after the war in a stimulating collaboration at the Nature Conservancy until he took over Tansley’s position in 1952. Nicholson worked as economic planner of reconstruction for Herbert Morrison in the Labour government—experience that became useful later in promoting environmental planning and protection. During the 1960s and 1970s he became the counterculture’s most famous and celebrated advocate of environmentalism through a series of books on the ecological and social crisis. Some of the titles of these books, such as The System or A Guide for the New Masters of the World, evoke the British imperial vision of achieving global control through planning the social system and the ecosystem.186 That environmentalists should be “the new masters of the world” may represent, at least on the rhetorical level, a continuation of Huxley’s and Wells’s ideas in Science of Life about creating a scientific brotherhood or a board of directors of the economy of nature to steer the world. This raises the question of whether the environmental debate of the 1960s and 1970s is best understood as a continuation of ecologists’ imperialism of the 1930s, perhaps with a more human face. This chapter has discussed how science fiction and scientific planning, theories, historiography, research, and practices allowed ecologists to claim a stake in human ecology. The human ability to plan and deliberate future political actions was explored by Wells in his futuristic and apocalyptic visions of human ecology. The human ability to recapitulate the past was researched by Tansley in his environmental history of human relations to the Earth. The human ability to reason was surveyed in Worthington’s grand ecology of

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knowledge. The human will was explored in Tansley’s human ecological psychology along with the human ability to feel pleasure and pain in various environments. The human ability to learn was effectively used in Huxley’s ecological pedagogy in the science-for-all movement. The human ability to transform environments and thereby create systems for control of fellow human beings was actually carried out by Worthington in the inland waters of Africa. Finally, the human ability to participate in a political and social sphere was actively pursued by all, though Nicholson’s and Huxley’s various human ecological plans for Britain and beyond may serve as the best examples. The Magdalen College idealist Robert G. Collingwood once quoted Immanuel Kant, “out of the crooked timber of human nature nothing quite straight can be made,” in a vain attempt to create resistance to the vocal mechanistic reductionism of Tansley and his realist friends.187 The quotation, made famous by his student Isaiah Berlin, may also serve to remind historians of environmentalism as well as ecologists that their views once were used to promote both conservation and preservation of nature. No straight line of management or Arcadian reasoning emerged among ecologists in the British Empire.

Conclusion: A World without History

When Eugenius Warming introduced ecology as a comprehensive research method in 1895, he was trying to understand the patterns of distributions among types of vegetation, a topic hardly known for its high-ranking status in the academic community or as a newsworthy subject for socially concerned citizens. This book has been a history of how and why this changed: during the subsequent fifty years ecology embraced an enlarged order of nature, knowledge, and society, with ecologists fashioning themselves as the new masters and interpreters of this world. The enlargement of ecology came about thanks to a series of British and South African ecologists who launched a new ecological framework of analysis to meet the British Empire’s environmental problems and social needs. The ecologists mobilized a cluster of new technologies, sciences, and philosophies to establish their discipline. The outcome was a remarkable expansion of ecological reasoning from botany to animals, society, economy, knowledge, history, psychology, science fiction, and even poetry. Three factors explained this process: the ecologists’ ability to entangle the aims of national economy with the economy of nature, their ability to connect with imperial patronage networks, and finally their inclusion of human beings in a framework of analysis helpful to colonial management and population policy. To explain the emergence of the new ecological order this book has compared and contrasted two answers to the question of why humans should be understood as being part of—and not “over against”—nature’s economy; one from South African ecologists and the other from British ecologists. The enlargement of ecology from vegetation research to human societies was driven by two patronage networks that each sought to naturalize and thus legitimize imperial planned economies as well as land and population policies. Yet there were also major differences between the South African ecological politics of holism and the mechanistic reasoning advocated by the British ecologists in the north. In South Africa ecologists such as John Phillips and John William Bews argued that humans should be understood as evolving 237

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from different biotic communities, an argument they used to naturalize the nation’s policy of segregation. British ecologists hardly endorsed such racist views but argued instead that understanding humans as an integrated part of nature’s economy allowed for more efficient scientific steering of human labor and the wealth of nations. This north-south dimension in the ecological debate has been the setting, stretching from the icy north of Spitsbergen to Cape Town at the southern tip of Africa. Ecology as a discipline and way of understanding the human condition grew out of research and intellectual debate along this north-south axis of the British Empire. Graduate students often did their first research in the icy north only to get their first job in the southern colonies. Some of the basic problems of research, such as the structures of vegetation and animal population dynamics, were attempts to survey natural assets of potential or existing territories in the north and south of the empire, and to guide human settlement policy and population management. The airplane was crucial for grand surveys of the northern and southern parts of the empire, and emerged as the most important new technology ecologists used to promote their discipline. Contrary to the common perception of ecologists now, I have argued that the master perspective from above obtained with aviation technology contributed to ecological reasoning. The chief examples are the research of the forestry ecologists Ray Bourne and the animal ecologist Charles Elton, who both used planes to get the proper overview of nature. The result was various methods for mapping the environment into the zones of nature’s household. In the 1920s airplanes were on the cutting edge of aviation technology and popular culture, and the prime icon of imperial power. The ecologists, through collaboration with geographers (who used planes to lay out political borders), sought to survey the empire by developing various ecological maps of vegetation, animal, and human zones. Although aviation was important to the ecological point of view, one has to turn to the social sciences to fully understand the enlargement of ecological reasoning. The sociological work of Elton’s teacher Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders was particularly influential. In his Population Problem of 1922 he used Malthusian and eugenic arguments to analyze social divisions in industrial England; ecologists used the book as an analogy for understanding the natural relations in the environment. Social psychology became an important source of inspiration for early ecologists. The old argument (from Ernst Haeckel, among others) that the evolution of the mind recapitulates the evolution of a species was of profound importance to ecologists, who based their terminology on concepts from this mode of social psychology. In South Africa General Smuts developed his philosophy of holism out of his psychological study of the evolution of the mind of Walt Whitman. Holism, a word Smuts coined, soon became a comprehensive social philosophy

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that he used to build and unite his nation. Phillips used Smuts’s holistic theory about the evolution of human minds and environments to coin and develop the ecological concept of biotic communities. Similarly, Bews used Smuts’s holism as a basis on which to develop vegetation and human ecology. Social psychology was also of some importance in Britain, where the ecologist Arthur George Tansley used Sigmund Freud’s theories to develop the ecosystem theory. Throughout the 1920s he used sweeping analogies to relate the system of the brain, the social systems, and the natural environment. His ecosystem theory of 1935 was a comprehensive theory of energy flows and response mechanisms among the nervous system of the mind, the social systems, and systems of energy in nature. The natural sciences such as physics and chemistry played little role in the ecologists’ understanding of the natural world, despite their use of mechanistic and chemical terminology. None of the ecologists discussed in this book collaborated with scholars in physics or chemistry, and the absence of references to them is notable in much of the ecological literature.1 In the entire body of research by Tansley, for example, there is only one reference to a textbook in chemistry, and it appears quite late, in 1939. The notable exception to this general trend is in the holistic philosophy of Smuts, which was based on the physics of Albert Einstein. The enlargement of ecology required an overreaching philosophy of science that included all the sciences of nature. The holism versus ecosystem controversy played out between Phillips and Tansley in the early 1930s was a debate between idealist organic and realist mechanistic philosophies. At stake in these methodological debates was the question of who should control and carry out the ecological surveys of the British Empire and thereby lay the scientific foundation for economic and social policy. The outcome of the debate was new ecological orders of a series of subjects and themes. In botany, ecology absorbed traditional natural history: the ecologists placed themselves above the natural historians in the hierarchy of knowledge by focusing on relations among plants and thus turned natural history into a means for an ecological end. The establishment of this order in botany coincides with the establishment of ecology as a professional discipline at both British and South African universities at the expense of amateur natural history. The same thing happened in zoology, in which ecologists sought to distance themselves from the practice of taxidermy by understanding the relations among species instead of merely collecting them. As a consequence, the natural environment became a living natural history museum whose maintenance was crucial for protecting the discipline of ecology and the social order of society. The new ecological order in botany and zoology served as a model for re-

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ordering human societies in biological terms. Elton’s research on the population dynamics of lemmings, for example, became a model for regulation of Eskimos and the Canadian native population. Huxley wrote extensively on the balance of nature as a model for a steady-state human community, and used his knowledge of animal ecology to suggest various biologically informed population policies for Africa. Likewise, in South Africa, Phillips advised Smuts, his patron and prime minister, on how to establish an order of people of non-European descent according to the laws of nature. His colleague Bews also wrote extensively on the proper order of a human ecological society, which he modeled on his research on grasses. The new economy of nature also became a model for empowering national economies. In his research on human ecology, Bews explained the division of labor between ethnic groups in the South African economy as following nature’s laws and principles. In Britain, Tansley argued repeatedly that the aim of ecological research was to enforce and remodel the economy of the British Empire. The ecologist Edgar Worthington constructed an ecology of the inland waters of Africa to satisfy the economic aims of his imperial patrons. Max Nicholson used the ecological overview to generate innovative plans for a new national planned economy for Britain. Similarly, Huxley argued that evolutionary synthesis would ensure the success of a planned national and even global economy based on the balances of nature. The famous science popularizer and science fiction writer H. G. Wells was much inspired by this new ecological-economic order and wrote extensively on how a better society of tomorrow could be reorganized according to the principles of human ecology. His writings generated enthusiasm for ecology as a discipline on the cutting edge of social research. Wells was not the only one to write fiction based on ecology: Bews created an ecological order for poetry in his reading of Shakespeare’s plays. Understanding the environmental history of a place and a nation became important in ecological analysis. In Wells’s writings, for example, human ecology was a tool for understanding the evolution and destiny of human societies. Similarly, Tansley’s research on the environmental history of the British Isles from “virgin” to semi-natural ecosystems contained a narrative reflecting his reading of Freudian psychology and discontent with modern society. Several versions of an ecology of knowledge were used by ecologists to administer their engagements with the growing cluster of sciences of nature. As principal of the University of Natal, Bews used human ecology to organize disciplines and to create segregated colleges for its racial groups. Elton suggested ecological ways to organize biological surveys that inspired Worthington’s organization of knowledge in the African Survey. Tansley gave philosophical lectures about systems of knowledge reflecting his ecosystem theory.

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The ecologists were not indifferent to politics in their research. This book has tried to avoid Cold War dichotomies of leftist and rightist views when describing political views of the first half of this century. Smuts’s politics of holism, for example, encompassed a progressive liberal view of the world that can be described as neither conservative nor leftist. Similarly Tansley, Huxley, and Wells had grades of leftist sympathies that were by no means revolutionary and hardly can be understood as simply socialist. This book has instead read the politics of Smuts’s holism versus the politics of the Oxford ecologists as two different imperial views on how to empower and control the British Empire. When the empire gradually broke apart, these views reemerged into two different political visions for the United Nations. Smuts used holism to write a preamble about human rights for the new organization’s charter informed by racist views, whereas Huxley promoted progressive biological management of the world’s population as director-general of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. With growing bipolar Cold War tension and weakening of the empire, ecologists translated their former imperial views into a vocal defense of the environment of their home countries.2 Tansley used the last years of his life to advocate national parks and the protection of remaining “virgin” land from industrialization. He fashioned the social role of ecologists in Freudian terms; the ecologist was to be a social analyst protecting environments so that people with troubled nervous systems could go and find healing in the childhood of Britain’s national heritage: the untouched ecosystem. Such environmental protection zones—separated from the trading zones of knowledge and industrial production—could heal the exhausted or troubled mind.3 The national parks were thus meant to foster mental health with the ecologist in the role of a Victorian therapist. In the parks the “Other Victorians” could enjoy a protected zone of wildness separated from the ordered zones of a modern society.4 This summary challenges some contemporary understandings of the historical role of ecology. The widely accepted distinction between managerial and Arcadian views of nature has been impossible to locate in British and South African ecological research.5 The often-used distinction between conservation and preservation traditions in human relations to nature is historically flawed. More important, scholars of environmental ethics defending biocentric and holistic deep ecological philosophy may find the history of early South African ecological thinking more than challenging.6 Some of the most sophisticated defenders of a policy of racial segregation were philosophers of deep ecology and human ecologists. Smuts’s thinking-like-a-mountain speech, Bews’s human ecology, and Phillips’s “Man at the Cross-Roads” lecture hardly look like a promising moral path for socially concerned environmentalists of today.

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The enlargement of ecology in British research was quite different from its South African counterparts in terms of methodology, but was it less oppressive? One has to turn to the philosophical side of Tansley’s redefinition of ecology in Greek terms to locate an important problem with this expansion of ecology: the scientific paternalism of the new ecological order. In ancient Greek philosophy there is a sharp distinction between the prepolitical sphere of necessity in oikos, the household, and the political sphere of freedom in polis, the city-state. The realm of the household was the domain of uncontested despotic powers and paternal housekeeping, where the forces of life compelled humans to multiply and labor for nourishment and biological survival. The realm of the city-state was the sphere of public life, where humans capable of speech lived a political life of reason and contemplation. When Tansley, like many other ecologists, evoked the Greek term oikos to define ecology, he explained humans in terms of the mechanistic necessities of the household.7 His images of the public sphere, reasoning, and moral life were cast in biological terms—herds of human animals trying to establish equilibrium in their psychic energies and in their social stimuli-response systems to habitats. The scientific herd-leaders could, through housekeeping of the human herd instinct and stimuli-response mechanism, turn former crowds into effective networks of cognitive channels and laboring energy explosions. Such networks would lead to productive social and environmental systems of labor. This credo of human energy housekeeping was also embodied in Huxley’s and Wells’s pleas for organized nature conservation and planning. They were in effect arguing for submitting the political sphere of polis to the realm of oikos. They all explained the human capabilities of having a sense of history, speaking, emotions, reasoning, and contemplation in terms of biological instincts, breeding, energy, mechanistic stimuli-responses, laws of energy equilibrium, and natural labor. Such a perception of the human condition, however qualified, is close to what the philosopher Hannah Arendt argues to be the very precondition for radical evil and the very origin of totalitarianism.8 The primacy of oikos brings about a state of unchangeable necessity that transcends the realm of human affairs, the potentialities of human power, and the ability to create history. Arendt denigrates any politics that takes its concerns from the household, whether the human household or the household of nature, because such politics undermine human freedom and the ability to live a political life. British ecological theories about human labor in the web of nature and British ecologists’ plea for organized nature conservation did precisely that. When humans were explained in terms of animal behavior, the political sphere became an oddity understandable only in terms of animalistic utility.

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Justice became (at least in Tansley’s reasoning) an issue of social balances of energy within human herds. Social debate was explained in banal terms of stimuli-response systems in human “crowds.” A house was not architecture to an ecologist but rather a nest or a zone of social energy interaction explained as an extension of the household of nature. Religion and contemplation were simply mind-energy gone astray. Music was pursued not for its own sake, but as an extension of, say, research on the “songs” of birds, and human speech was simply an extension of animal language.9 Fine arts and design were not worth pursuing for their own sake but instead became (at least in the writings of Huxley) tools for engineering an environment with an efficient flow of energy.10 When reading British attempts to create an ecological understanding of human beings, one is constantly struck by how aesthetic values and political life were measured and defined in terms of proximity to nature and explained in ecological and biological terms. In this order the artificial world became the chief antagonist of human ecology. This is perhaps not surprising, given the topic of ecological research, but it had an important implication: urban culture and way of life became the ecologists’ chief social and political target. Instead of life in destructive cities, the ecologists promoted a country life in a harmoniously planned and conserved landscape. In these plans ecologists envisioned themselves on the board of directors of the economy of nature and society. “The brotherhood of science,” to use H. G. Wells’s phrase, would steer human ecology towards a distant future in which “History becomes Ecology.” This end of history (culture) implied an end to polis (the political sphere) and the creation of a perfect second nature in equilibrium with the mind, the social, the institutional, the national, the colonial, the animal, and the plant economies. This was a dream of a world of small towns with regional minority democracy and plenty of nature reserves planned and maintained by paternal scientific housekeepers. In this world of harmony with nature there was not much room for altering the environment to create social history. It was thus a vision of a world without history (without change), in which the human condition would be maintained and understood in terms of animal labor and life. Such submission of the political sphere to scientific housekeeping was indeed one of Huxley’s explicit goals: his human ecological society was to be an “urban civilization but without any urban culture.”11 The enlargement of both South African and British ecology grew out of a history of patronage by colonial agencies and interests. Holistic as well as mechanistic ecology sought to include human beings in nature’s household to satisfy administrative demands for social control by colonial patrons. In both cases ecology became a way of naturalizing and thus legitimizing impe-

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rialism. This required a synthesis of a whole range of academic disciplines, technologies, and policies that resulted in methods for establishing new ecological orders of nature, knowledge, and society. Ecologists saw their science as a tool for paternal economic planning, social and national engineering, academic management, and preservation of nature for its own sake. Ecology emerged as an imperial science with an environmental order designed to enhance the British Empire.

An Ecology of Ecologists Notes Sources Index

An Ecology of Ecologists

Warder Clyde Allee (1885–1955): Lecturer and professor of zoology at the University of Chicago (1921–1950). He was an animal ecologist who worked with Alfred Emerson and Thomas Park, and a friend of Frederic Clements and John Phillips. Isaac Bayley Balfour (1853–1922): Professor of botany at Edinburgh University from 1888, and keeper of the botanic garden. He was one of the translators of Eugenius Warming’s Oecology of Plants (1909). A friend of Frederick Orpen Bower, he was also a mentor of John William Bews and John Phillips. John William Bews (1884–1938): Professor of botany at Natal University College, Pietermaritzburg, from 1910, and principal from 1930 until his death. A student of Isaac Balfour, he was also a friend of John Phillips, and a close friend and supporter of Jan Christian Smuts, who served as a mentor for Human Ecology (1935) and Life as a Whole (1937). Frederick Orpen Bower (1855–1948): Professor of botany at the University of Glasgow from 1885 until 1925. He wrote Botany of the Living Plant (1919), and was a friend of Isaac Balfour. He criticized Arthur George Tansley, among others, for advocating “Botanical Bolshevism” in 1918. Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders (1886–1966): Studied at Eton with Julian Huxley before he went to Oxford University, where he studied and later taught zoology. As secretary of the Eugenics Education Society, London, he became interested in the evolution of human populations and wrote The Population Problem (1922). He was a mentor of Charles Elton. Thomas Ford Chipp (1886–1931): Student of Francis Wall Oliver and ecologist and forest manager on the Gold Coast. From 1922 until 1931 he served as assistant director of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew. He organized ecological research as secretary for the British Empire Vegetation Committee, the Imperial Botanical Conference, and the fifth International Botanical Congress. He was a friend of Arthur George Tansley. Frederic Edward Clements (1874–1945): Professor of botany at the University of Nebraska (1905–1907) and chair of the Department of Botany at the University of Minnesota (1907–1917). He was a researcher at the Carnegie Institution of Wash247

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ington, Tucson (1917–1925), and from 1925 at the Coastal Laboratory, Santa Barbara, California. His Research Methods in Ecology (1905) was a standard textbook for ecologists. He was a follower of the holistic philosophy of Jan Christian Smuts and a friend of John Phillips and Warder Clyde Allee. Robin George Collingwood (1889–1943): Tutor and professor of philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford (1912–1941). His friends included a group of idealists such as Alexander Lindsay and John Alexander Smith. He was a supporter of holism and of Jan Christian Smuts, and the author of The Idea of Nature (1945). George Claridge Druce (1850–1932): A pharmaceutical chemist, Oxford politician, patron of Arthur George Tansley, environmentalist, and curator of the botanical garden at Oxford. Charles Sutherland Elton (1900–1991): Student and part-time lecturer at the Department of Zoology, Oxford (1918–1932), he was also a researcher for the Hudson’s Bay Company and director of the Bureau of Animal Population (1932–1967). A student of Julian Huxley and Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders, he wrote Animal Ecology (1927) and was a patron and instigator of the Oxford Exploration Club. He was a friend of Max Nicholson and Arthur George Tansley. John Scott Haldane (1860–1936): Gifford Lecturer at Glasgow University (1927– 1928), professor and director of the Mining Research Laboratory at Birmingham University (1924–1928). Haldane was a philosopher, supporter of Jan Christian Smuts, and the father of J. B. S. Haldane. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964): Lecturer at the department of zoology, Oxford (1919–1923). He promoted a mechanistic view of life and was a prominent socialist and friend of Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben. Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975): Lecturer in oology, Imperial College, London (1919–1922), and professor of zoology at the University of Cape Town (1927– 1930). He launched a mechanistic critique of Jan Christian Smuts in 1929, which was published as The Nature of Living Matter (1930), and organized a circle of communists and anti-racists in Cape Town. He was a friend of Julian Huxley. Ellsworth Huntington (1876–1947): Professor in geography at Yale University (1919–1947) and author of Civilization and Climate (1915 and 1924). Huntington was a friend of Charles Elton. Julian Sorell Huxley, (1887–1975): Demonstrator in zoology at Oxford (1919– 1925) and professor of zoology at King’s College, London (1925–1927). He coauthored The Science of Life (1929) with H. G. Wells. Huxley was president of the National Union of Scientific Workers (1926–1929), member of the Political and Economic Planning organization, committee member for the African Survey, and director of UNESCO (1946–1948). He was a mentor of Charles Elton and a friend of Arthur George Tansley, Max Nicholson, Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders, Lancelot Hogben, and J. B. S. Haldane. Edward Max Nicholson (1904–): Ornithologist and ecologist active in the Oxford Exploration Club, author of “A National Plan for Great Britain” (1931), assistant

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editor of Week-End Review (1930–1934), and director of the Nature Conservancy (1952–1966). He was a friend of Julian Huxley, Arthur George Tansley, and Charles Elton. Francis Wall Oliver (1864–1951): Professor of botany at University College, London (1888–1929), and Egyptian University, Cairo (1929–1935). A socialist and mentor of Arthur George Tansley and Edward Salisbury, Oliver patronized early ecological research in London. John Frederick Vicars Phillips (1899–1987): Director of the Department of Tsetse Research at Kondora-Orangi in Tanganyika (1927–1931) and professor of botany at the University of the Witwatersrand (1931–1948). Phillips was a student of Isaac Balfour, and a supporter and friend of Jan Christian Smuts, John William Bews, and Warder Clyde Allee. Illtyd Buller Pole Evans (1879–1968): Mycologist, chief of the Division of Plant Industry, Department of Agriculture in South Africa (1911–1939), director of the Botanical Survey of South Africa (1918–1939), and editor of Flowering Plants of South Africa and Bothalia. He was a supporter and friend of Jan Christian Smuts, John William Bews, and John Phillips. Edward James Salisbury (1886–1978): Lecturer and reader in plant ecology at University College, London (1918–1929), professor from 1929 until 1943, and director of the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew (1943–1956). Salisbury was a student of Francis Wall Oliver and a friend of Arthur George Tansley and Thomas Ford Chipp. Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950): Lawyer, state attorney for the South African government (1898), general in British East Africa (1916–1917), minister of interior and minister of mines (1910–1912), minister of defense (1910–1920), minister of finance (1912–1913), prime minister and minister for native affairs (1919–1924), minister of justice (1933–1939), prime minister and minister of external affairs and defense (1939–1948), and field marshal (1941). Smuts served as chancellor of Cape Town University (1936) and chancellor of Cambridge University (1948). He was the author of Holism and Evolution (1926) and a Rhodes Memorial Lecturer, Oxford (1929). Friend of Illtyd Pole Evans, he was a mentor and friend of John William Bews and John Phillips. Arthur George Tansley (1871–1955): Ecologist and psychologist, demonstrator of botany at University College, London (1893–1906), lecturer at Cambridge University (1906–1923), and professor at Oxford University (1927–1935). He edited the New Phytologist (1902–1932) and Journal of Ecology (1917–1937), wrote New Psychology (1920) and The British Islands and Their Vegetation (1939), and chaired the Nature Conservancy (1949–1953). Tansley was a student of Francis Wall Oliver and Sigmund Freud, and a friend of Thomas Ford Chipp, George Claridge Druce, Max Nicholson, Edward James Salisbury, Robert Scott Troup, Julian Huxley, and Charles Elton. Robert Scott Troup (1874–1939): Professor of forestry at Oxford University (1920– 1935). He wrote Silvicultural Systems (1928) and was a friend of Arthur George Tansley, Ray Bourne, and Julian Huxley.

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Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming (1841–1924): Professor of botany at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (1882–1885) and professor of botany and director of the botanical garden at the University of Copenhagen (1885–1911). He was the author of Plantesamfund (1895), translated into English by Isaac Balfour (among others) as Oecology of Plants (1909). He was honored by Arthur George Tansley as “the father of modern plant ecology” (1911). Herbert George Wells (1866–1946): author of numerous novels and popular science books. Wells used human ecology as his chief organizing tool after the publication of Science of Life (1929), written with Julian Huxley and George Phillip Wells. He was a friend of Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben. Edgar Barton Worthington (1905–): Liminologist and ecologist in charge of surveys of African lakes (1928–1931), demonstrator in zoology at Cambridge University (1934–1937) conducting the African Survey of sciences (1934–1937). He was a friend of Julian Huxley and Charles Elton.

Notes

Introduction 1. Arthur George Tansley, “Problems of Ecology,” New Phytologist, 3 (1904): 191. 2. Letters to the editor of Science from Charles E. Bessey, Lester F. Ward, and Theo Gill (the editor of the Standard Dictionary), see Science, 15 (1902): 593–594. Letters from William F. Ganong, Wallace Craig, and Joseph Jastrow, Science, 15 (1902): 792–793. William M. Wheeler, “Natural History; ‘Æcology’ or ‘Ethology’?” Science, 15 (1902): 371–390, 973–975. 3. John Sheail, Seventy-five Years in Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). For reviews on some of the current literature about history of ecology see Kevin Dann and Gregg Mitman, “Exploring the Borders of Environmental History and the History of Ecology,” Journal of the History of Biology, 30 (1997): 291–302; Sharon Kingsland, “The History of Ecology,” Journal of the History of Biology, 27 (1997): 349–357; Malcolm Nicolson, “No Longer a Stranger? A Decade in the History of Ecology,” History of Science, 26 (1988): 183–200. William Beinart, “African History and Environmental History,” African Affairs, 99 (2000): 269–302. 4. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); William Story (ed.), Scientific Aspects of European Expansion (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996); Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns (eds.), The Lie of the Land (London: The International African Institute, 1996); William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in USA and South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995); David Anderson and Richard Grove (eds.), Conservation in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); John M. Mackenzie, Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics, 11 (1989): 71–83. 5. Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1949), pp. 6–7. Arthur Tansley, Mind and Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), p. vi. 6. Peder Anker, “From Skepticism to Dogmatism and Back,” Philosophical Dialogues, Nina Witoszek and Andrew Brennan (eds.) (Lanham: Rowman & Lit251

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Notes to Pages 6–9

tlefield, 1998); Peder Anker and Nina Witoszek, “The Dream of the Biocentric Community and the Structure of Utopias,” Worldviews, 2 (1998): 239–256. 7. Charles Elton, Animal Ecology (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 17, copy ZE51, Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University.

1. From Social Psychology to Imperial Ecology 1. Harry Godwin, “Sir Arthur Tansley: The Man and the Subject,” Journal of Ecology, 65 (1977): 1–26, p. 25. 2. Ronald C. Tobey, Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 185, 186, 187, 188. 3. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 303, 304. 4. Stephen Bocking, Ecologists and Environmental Politics: A History of Contemporary Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 28. 5. Frank Benjamin Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 34. See also Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 98, 193, and Ludwig Trepl, Geschichte der Ökologie (Berlin: Athenäum, 1987), pp. 177– 188. David R. Keller and Frank B. Golley, The Philosphy of Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), p. 26. 6. Godwin, “Man and the Subject,” 1977, p. 2. Most of Arthur Tansley’s books from the period have been lost except for two now at the PSLCU; Herbert Spencer, The Factors of Organic Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1887), which he got in 1888, and John Gilbert Baker, Botanical Geography (London: Lovell Reeve & Co., 1875), which he received as a Christmas present in 1886. 7. Frank W. Galton (ed.), Workers on Their Industries (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1896); The Tailoring Trade: Illustrating the History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1896); Patricia Pugh, Educate, Agitate, Organize: 100 Years of Fabian Socialism (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 33. 8. Harry Godwin, “Arthur George Tansley 1871–1955,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 3 (1957): 227–246, p. 227. The article is a paraphrase of Tansley’s “Factual Biographical Notes,” written to the Council of the Royal Society in 1953. Harry Godwin, Cambridge and Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 9. Arthur George Tansley, “On the Cleveland District,” Westbury House School Ephemeris, 19 (1883): 69–70. 10. Edward James Salisbury, “Francis Wall Oliver,” Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society, 8 (1952): 229–240, p. 230. 11. Anonymous [Francis Wall Oliver], An Outline of the History of the Botanical Department of University College, London (London: Department of Botany, 1927). Faculties of Arts and Sciences, Notes and Materials for the History of Uni-

Notes to Pages 9–12

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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versity College, London (London: Lewis, 1898), pp. 76–78. Hugh Hale Bellot, University College London 1826–1926 (London: University of London Press, 1929), pp. 393–395, chart 4. Negely Harte and John North, The World of UCL 1828–1990 (London: University College London, 1991), pp. 92–93, with pictures of the first Botany Laboratory from 1891 as well as the Laboratory at Blakeney Point in Norfolk built in 1913. The receivers of the Quain grant were in order: Frederick Ernst Weiss, Arthur George Tansley, Edith Chick, Agnes Robertson (later Agnes Arber), Edward James Salisbury, Sarah Baker, Victor Samuel Summerhayes, and Violet Anderson. Female staff members between 1888 and 1927 included Edith Chick, Dr. Agnes Arber, Dr. Ethel N. Thomas, Dr. Marie Stopes, Dr. Sarah Baker, Winifred Smith, B. Russell-Wells, V. L. Anderson, G. L. Naylor. See Anonymous [Oliver], Outline of the History, 1917, pp. 15, 23–24. Francis Wall Oliver, “On the Effects of Urban Fog Upon Cultivated Plants,” Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, 13 and 16 (1891, 1894): 139–151, and rpt. 1–59, quotation on 139–140. William Henry Lang, “Frederick Orpen Bower,” Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 6 (1948): 347–374, quotation on p. 348. J. Walton, “Prof. F. O. Bower,” Nature, 161 (1948): 753–754. Frederick Orpen Bower, “Isaac Bayley Balfour,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 43 (1923): 230–236. Arthur Donald Boney, The Lost Gardens of Glasgow University (London: Christopher Helm, 1988). There are surprisingly few references to Patrick Geddes in the ecology literature I have dealt with in this book. Only further research may explain why this famous botanist and sociologist was not cited or otherwise included in early British ecology debates. Patrick Geddes, Chapters in Modern Botany (London: John Murray, 1893), chap. 6. Godwin, “Arthur George Tansley,” 1957, p. 228. On Tansley’s early evolutionary views see his “Natural Selection: Considered as a Special Example of the General Principle of Evolution,” MS 1896, PSLCU. Godwin, “Arthur George Tansley,” 1957, p. 228. Ray Edwin Lankester, “The Making of New Knowledge,” Socialism and the Great State, H. G. Wells (ed.) (London: Harper & Brothers Pub., 1912), pp. 121–140. Ray Edwin Lankester, Notes of Embryology and Classification (London: Churchill, 1877); The Advancement of Science (London: Macmillan, 1890), chap. 1; Extinct Animals (London: Henry Holt, 1905). Ray Edwin Lankester, The Relation of Universities to Medicine (London, 1878); Advancement of Science, 1890. Godwin, “Arthur George Tansley,” 1957, p. 229. Tansley’s autobiographical sketch read to the Magdalen Philosophy Club, 5 May 1932, PSLCU. Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell (New York: The Free Press, 1996), pp. 107–108. George Edward Briggs, “Frederick Frost Blackman,” Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society, 5 (1948): 651–657. Helen K. Porter, “Vernon Herbert Blackman,” Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society, 14 (1968): 37–60.

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Notes to Pages 12–13

25. Vernon Herbert Blackman, “Frederick Keeble,” Nature, 171 (1953): 63. 26. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1898), vol. 1, p. vi and vol. 2, p. vi (acknowledgments). 27. Vernon Blackman to Tansley, Sept. 24, 1912, PSLCU; Porter, “Vernon Herbert Blackman,” 1968, p. 40. 28. Among Tansley’s pile of notebooks that he carried around there is a pockmarked edition of De Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, W. H. Bennett (ed.) (London: David Stott, 1889). Whether Tansley actually used or tried opium is unknown. 29. Eustace Miles, Muscle, Brain, and Diet: A Plea for Simpler Foods (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1905), p. 303; Avenues to Health (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902); Alcoholism: Its Causes and Cures (London: Norwich Press), undated pamphlet with advertisements for the restaurant. 30. David Taylor, The Godless Students of Gower Street (London: University College London Union, 1968), pp. 22, 35–47; P. G. Naiditch, A. E. Housman at University College (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), pp. 152–154; Ballot, University College London, 1929, pp. 395–399. 31. Tansley’s point of departure was the existence of species that do not leave a carcass and thus do not die, and he therefore concludes; “Only if we were to return to the simplicity of the Amoebae could we abolish natural death, and I think you will all agree with me when I say that that would be a heavy price to pay even for the privilege of immortality.” Tansley, “The Origin of Death; Popular Lecture,” Autumn 1898, quotation on folio 13, PSLCU. 32. Tansley, “Diary Kept in the East 1900–01,” Sept. 30, 1900–May 4, 1901; “Semi-popular Lecture of the Vegetation of the Egyptian Desert,” Mar. 1909, MS 8 pages, PSLCU. Arthur George Tansley and Felix Eugene Fritsch, “Sketches of Vegetation at Home and Abroad: The Flora of the Ceylon Littoral,” New Phytologist, 4 (1905), no. 1: 1–17, no. 2: 8–16, no. 3: 27–55. 33. Quoted in Taylor, Godless Students, 1968, pp. 37, 39. 34. Anonymous [Oliver], Outline of the History, 1927, pp. 15, 24; Godwin, “Man and the Subject,” 1977, p. 4. Edith Chick, “The Seedling of Terreya Myristica,” New Phytologist, 2 (1903): 83–91. Arthur George Tansley and Edith Chick, “Notes on the Conducting Tissue-System in Bryopyta,” Annals of Botany, 15 (1901): 1–38. 35. Arthur George Tansley, “Eug. Warming in memoriam,” Botanisk Tidsskrift, 39 (1924): 54–56, quotation on p. 54. Eugenius Warming, Lehrbuch der ökologischen pflanzengeographie, Emil Knoblauch (trans.) (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntrager, 1896). On the support of Scandinavian and German ecology see for example Anonymous [Tansley], “Ecological Notes,” New Phytologists, 1 (1902): 81. Thomas Söderqvist, The Ecologists: From Merry Naturalists to Saviours of the Nation (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell Int., 1986); Eugene Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory: Darwinian Plant Ecology in the German Empire, 1880–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For a nice collection of relevant primary sources see Pascal Acot, The European Origins of Scientific Ecology, vols. 1–2 (Amsterdam: Editions des archives contemporaines, 1998). 36. Carl Christiansen, Den Danske botaniks historie (Copenhagen: Hagerups Forlag,

Notes to Pages 13–14

37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

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1924–1926), vol. 1:2, pp. 617–665, 776–806, with bibliography in vol. 2, pp. 367–399. On the importance of Alexander von Humboldt to the history of ecology, see Malcolm Nicolson, “Development of Plant Ecology 1790–1960,” Ph.D. diss., University of Edinburgh 1983, pp. 12–73. See also William Coleman, “Evolution into Ecology? The Strategy of Warming’s Ecological Plant Geography,” Journal of the History of Ecology, 19 (1986): 181–196. Eugenius Warming, Plantesamfund: Grundtræk af den økologiske plantegeografi (Copenhagen: Philipsens Forlag, 1895), pp. 91, 94–95. Christiansen, Danske botaniks historie, vol. 1:2, 1924–1926, pp. 799–800, 806– 832: Eugenius Warming, Lagoa Santa: Et bidrag til den biologiske Plantegeografi (Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos Kgl. Hof-Bogtrykkeri, 1892); [Eugenius Warming (ed.)], Botany of the Færöes, vols. 1–3 (Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag, 1901– 1908). Eugenius Warming and L. Kolderup Rosenvinge, The Botany of Iceland, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: J. Frimodt, 1912–1918). Robert Goodland is simply incorrect when he argues that Warming “suffered from stolen authorship” first by Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper, who allegedly “quoted extensively from more than fifteen of Warming’s works and even reproduced Warming figures” without acknowledging his debt to Warming, and secondly by P. Graebner, who allegedly published his translation without informing Warming, even allegedly “boosting himself to co-authorship” after Warming’s death. I have scrutinized and compared Schimper’s Pflanzen-geography from 1898 with Warming’s Plantesamfund from 1895 and am not able to locate any plagiarism; indeed I suspect that Schimper was unable to read Danish. Warming also praises Schimper’s work in his preface to Oecology of Plants from 1909, so if Schimper had plagiarized Warming, why would he praise his book? Graebner collaborated with Warming on the 600-page expansion of his book and it was thus reasonable for him to figure as co-author on the title page. Warming agreed on co-authorship and gives “einen herzlichen Dank an Prof. Dr. P. Graebner” in his preface. The book with the co-authorship appeared long before Warming’s death, and Graebner was humble enough to include Warming’s name in the very title of the third edition of their work as Eug. Warming’s Lehrbuch de ökologischen Planzengeographie. The first German edition was translated by Emil Knoblauch, who kindly asked Warming for permission despite the fact that Denmark had yet to subscribe to the Bern Convention on copyrights, so his book consequently was public property. See Robert J. Goodland, “The Tropical Origin of Ecology: Eugen Warming’s Jubilee,” Oikos, 26 (1975): 240–245, quotation on p. 243. Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper, Pflanzengeographie auf physiologischer grundlage (Jena: G. Fisher, 1898). Eugenius Warming and P. Graebner, Eug. Warming’s Lehrbuch de ökologischen Planzengeographie, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Verlag von Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1918). Eugenius Warming, Oecology of Plants: An Introduction to the Study of PlantCommunities, assisted by Martin Vahl, Percy Groom, and Isaac Bayley Balfour (eds.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), preface p. vi. Warming, Oecology of Plants, 1909, see prefaces by Warming and Balfour. Henry Chandler Cowles, “Ecology of Plants,” Botanical Gazette, 48 (1909): 149–152, with correction pp. 465–466. Arthur George Tansley, “Oecology of

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42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53.

Notes to Pages 14–17 Plants,” New Phytologist, 8 (1909): 218–227. On the life and work of Cowles see the well-argued article by Eugene Cittadino, “A ‘Marvelous Cosmopolitan Preserve’: The Dunes, Chicago, and Dynamics Ecology of Henry Cowles,” Perspectives on Science, 1 (1993): 520–559. There once existed an “old” Phytologist, edited by Alexander Irvine, which published six volumes ending in 1863. For example, G. Udney Yule, “Mendel’s Laws and Their Probable Relations to Intra-Racial Heredity,” New Phytologist, 1 (1902): 194–207, 222–237. Anonymous [Tansley], New Phytologist (1902): 1, editorial note. Francis Wall Oliver (ed.), Makers of British Botany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), introduction p. 7; Agnes Arber, “Nehemiah Grew,” p. 61; George Henslow, “John Stevens Henslow,” p. 152; W. H. Lang, “William Graffith,” p. 182. George Sarton, “Makers of British Botany,” Isis, 1 (1913): 282–284. Joseph Reynolds Green, History of Botany in the United Kingdom (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1914), pp. 572–590. This was of course a narrative that pleased Bower, who would stubbornly repeat it in his own recapitulation of 1938, where he removes from the canon ecological and botanical research that lacks a firm base in morphology. Frederick Orpen Bower, Sixty Years of Botany in Britain (1875–1935) (London: Macmillan, 1938). Robert John Harvey-Gibson, Outlines of the History of Botany (London: A. & C. Black, 1919). Anonymous [Oliver], Outline of the History, 1927, pp. 18–21, plates 3–5. Francis Oliver[?] “Botanical Expedition to the Bouche D’Erquy,” Sept. 1905, printed folder 3 pp. Francis Oliver, “Erquy Expedition,” printed folder 3 pp., PSLCU. The research eventually resulted in Alfred E. Carey and Francis Wall Oliver, Tidal Lands: A Study of Shore Problems (London: Blackie and Son, 1918). Godwin, “Arthur George Tansley,” 1957, p. 231. For a review see Kaat Schulte Fischedick, “Practices and Pluralism: A Socio-Historical Analysis of Early Vegetation Science, 1900–1950,” Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam 1995 (Amsterdam: Centrale Drukkerij UvA, 1995), pp. 111–113. Salisbury, “Francis Wall Oliver,” 1952, pp. 234, 230. Salisbury was a member of the Limerick Society of Arts, Science, and Literature, and a student of Oliver’s since 1905. Arthur Ray Clapham, “Edward James Salisbury,” Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, 26 (1980): 503–541. Laura Cameron, “Histories of Disturbance,” Radical History Review, 74 (1999): 4–24. Anonymous [Tansley] “Ecological Notes,” New Phytologist, 1 (1902); 4 (1905): 23–26, 254–258; 6 (1907): 103; 8 (1909): 203. Edward James Salisbury, “The Origin and Early Years of the British Ecological Society,” Journal of Ecology (suppl.), 52 (1964): 13–18. Arthur George Tansley, “Phytogeographical Excursion in the British Isles,” New Phytologist, 10 (1911): 271–291; “The Early History of Modern Plant Ecology in Britain,” Journal of Ecology, 35 (1947): 130–137. John Sheail, Seventy-five Years in Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Kaat Schulte Fischedick and Terry Shinn, “International Phytogeographical Excursions, 1911–1923,” in Dena-

Notes to Pages 17–19

54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

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tionalizing Science, Elisabeth Craford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin (eds.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub., 1993); Fischedick, Practices and Pluralism, 1995, pp. 173–201; John Sheail, “Grassland Management and the Early Development of British Ecology,” British Journal of the History of Science, 19 (1986): 283–299. George Claridge Druce, The Flora of Oxfordshire (London, 1886). Francis Watkins and Serena Marner (eds.), Memorial Day Held for George Claridge Druce (Oxford: Ashmolean Natural History Society of Oxfordshire, 1996). Tansley to Druce, Sept. 28, 1901, MSS Druce Collection, Autographs, vol. 6, PSLOU. See attached letter from Tansley to Druce, 21 Jan. 1910, in [Tansley (ed.)], International Phytogeographical Excursion (Cambridge: Botany School, 1913), with dedication to Druce from Tansley, 581.5 TA 7, PSLOU. See also Tansley to Carl Lindman, May 22, June 16, July 17, RSAS. Tansley to Druce, Sept. 9 (quotation), Oct 17, 23, and 28 1911, MSS Druce Collection, Autographs, vol. 6, PSLOU. Claridge Druce, “The Floristic Results,” in [Tansley (ed.)], International Phytogeographical Excursion, 1913. The cards are attached to Druce’s own copies of International Phytogeographical Excursion, 581.5 TA 7 and 581.5 TA 6, PSLOU. Tansley to Carl Lindman, May 22, June 16, July 17, 1911, RSAS. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971), pp. 45– 46. Tansley to Carl Lindman, Sept. 9, 1911, Jan. 24, Mar. 1, Mar. 16, 1912, Jan. 22, 1913, RSAS. Carl Lindman, “Some Cases of Plants Suppressed by Other Plants,” New Phytologist, 12 (1913): 1–6. Undated letters from Tansley, Clements, Rübel, and Cowles related to the international phytogeographical excursions, MSS Druce 16, PSLOU. The Druce archive has yet to be cataloged and organized. It consists of at least thirty-six boxes of folios. Only further research may reveal his importance to the history of botany and ecology in the British Empire. Henry C. Cowles, Jean Massart, and Carl Lindman, “Impressions of the Foreign Members of the Party,” New Phytologist, 11 (1913): 25–28. Arthur George Tansley (ed.), Types of British Vegetation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911). The members of the committee were Francis John Lewis, Charles Moss, Francis Wall Oliver, Marietta Pallis, W. Munn Rankin, and W. G. Smith. Other authors included Grenville Cole, Reginald William Scully and George Stephen West. Ibid., pp. 6–10. Ibid., pp. 65, 66. Ibid., pp. 91, 92. John Perlin uses this imbalance as a truism in Forest Journey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Perlin’s narrative, in which Chapter 10 about England is particularly interesting, suffers from the fact that he has not questioned his ecological assumption that in the beginning of human history there was an established forest climax in the world. Tansley (ed.), Types of British Vegetation, 1911, p. 130. Ibid., “Diagram Illustrating the Relationships of the Fourteen British Plant-for-

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70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

77. 78.

79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

Notes to Pages 19–21 mations,” final plate at the end of the book. Arthur George Tansley, “Modern Views on Heredity and Evolution,” lecture 1909, MS 21 pages, PSLCU. Arthur George Tansley, “Introduction,” in Harold Stuart Thompson, Flowering Plants of the Riviera (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914). Tansley, “Notes on Provincial Vegetation,” MS, PSLOU, MS Sherard H.100, fols. 24–31. Cameron, “Histories of Disturbance,” 1999, p. 9; Godwin, “Man and the Subject,” 1977, p. 13. Arthur Donald Boney, “The ‘Tansley Manifesto’ Affair,” New Phytologist, 118 (1991): 3–21, p. 14. Vernon Herbert Blackman to Tansley, Nov. 12, 1912, PSLCU. Godwin, “Man and the Subject,” 1977, p. 15. The documents are in the custody of the Royal Society. Tansley joined the Society for Promotion of Nature Reserves in 1914, but became active only after the war. John Sheail, Nature in Trust: The History of Nature Conservation in Britain (London: Blackie, 1976), pp. 63–64; David Evans, History of Nature Conservation in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 53. Carey and Oliver, Tidal Lands, 1918, chap. 13. They refer to the sad destiny of Hallsands (Slapton Sands) fishing community, Stuart Bay, and the work of the entrepreneur John Jackson, who in 1896 squandered the beaches to construct Devenport Dockyard. Tansley to the agent-general for New South Wales, May 30, 1912; Vernon Herbert Blackman to Tansley, Sept. 12, 1912, PSLCU. For an excellent review of the controversy see Arthur Donald Boney’s article, which is based on correspondence available in the archives of the University of Glasgow. He argues convincingly that morphologists in Scotland, with Bower and Balfour as the main force behind the scenes, reacted negatively to the genetically oriented camp in the South. In the following paragraphs I follow Boney, but place greater emphasis on the political side of the controversy than he is willing to do. Boney, “‘Tansley Manifesto’ Affair,” 1991. See also John Farley, Gametes and Spores (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 252– 258; Golley, History of the Ecosystem Concept, 1993, pp. 208–209. Frederick Frost Blackman, Vernon Herbert Blackman, Frederick Keeble, Francis Wall Oliver, and Arthur George Tansley, “The Reconstruction of Elementary Botanical Teaching,” New Phytologist, 16 (1917): 241–252. John Laker Harley, “Geoffrey Emett Blackman,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 27 (1981): 45–82, see pp. 45–46. Anonymous [Tansley], “The National Union of Scientific Workers,” New Phytologist, 17 (1918): 1–2. Letter to Tansley from the National Union of Scientific Workers, Feb. 21, 1918, PSLCU. Blackman, Blackman, Keeble, Oliver, and Tansley, “Reconstruction,” 1917, pp. 241, 242, 243, 248. Ibid., pp. 248–249. Ibid., pp. 249–250. Ibid., pp. 247, 250. The textbook was published two years later and is based on the morphological

Notes to Pages 21–23

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

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education program. It received few and mixed reviews. Frederick Orpen Bower, Botany of the Living Plant (London: Macmillan, 1919). Anonymous, “The Living Plant,” Times Literary Supplement (Sept. 18, 1919), p. 494. William Jesse Goad Land, “Botany of the Living Plant,” Botanical Gazette, 68 (1919): 478– 479. Anonymous, “Botany of the Living Plant,” New Phytologist, 19 (1919): 259– 261. Five Wise Men, “The Examination of a Witness,” New Phytologist, 7 (1918): 3– 8, quotation on p. 3. Robert Colquhoun McLean, “A Plea for Freedom” (letter to the editor), New Phytologist, 7 (1918): 54–56. Frederick Orpen Bower, “Botanical Bolshevism,” New Phytologist, 17 (1918): 106–107. Francis Wall Oliver, “No Department the Door of Which Should Not Be Opened,” New Phytologist, 18 (1919): 58. Quoted in Boney, “Tansley Manifesto,” 1991, p. 17. Arthur George Tansley, The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920). Anonymous, “The New Psychology,” Times Literary Supplement (Jan. 17, 1920), p. 386. Anonymous, “New Psychology,” The Scotsman (June 10, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” The Times (June 19, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Aberdeen Free Press (June 21, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Lancet (July 3, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Truth (July 7, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Glasgow Herald (July 9, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” L’hallenge (July 1, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” The Medical Press and Circular (July 21, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Yorkshire Post (Aug. 4, 1920). Anonymous, “Biological psycho-pathology,” Birmingham Post (Sept. 9, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Inquirer (Sept. 4, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” London Mercury (Sept. 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Journal of Education (Sept. 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Athenæum (Sept. 17, 1920). Anonymous, “Human Nature,” Nation (Oct. 3, 1920). Anonymous, “Modern Psychology,” The Times of India (Oct. 20, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Book-Post (Oct. 15, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Daily Telegraph, Sydney (Oct. 2, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Liverpool Daily Post (Oct. 9, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Expository Times (Oct. 4, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Daily Herald (Dec. 22, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Mind (Jan. 1, 1921). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Inquiries (Jan. 15, 1921). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Education (Jan. 28, 1921). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Holben Review (Jan. 1921). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” National Outlook (Mar. 1, 1921). Anonymous, “The New Psychology,” Life (Sept. 1921). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Medical Press and Circular (Aug. 2, 1922), pp. 85–87. Anonymous, “At the Periphery,” The Medical Press and Circular (Mar. 1923), 205–206. F. B., “New Psychology,” Cambridge Review (Jan. 17, 1921). Charles E. Hooper, “Below the Surface,” Literary Guide (May 1923). W. L. “An Outline of Psychology,” New Republic, 25 (1920): 112–113. H. S., “The Theoretic

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93.

94.

95. 96. 97.

98.

99. 100.

101.

Notes to Pages 23–24 Basis of Psychotherapy,” Nature, 1905 (Aug. 19, 1920): 770–771. Ordway Tead, “New Psychology,” The Dial (June 1921), pp. 705–709. A. White, “New Psychology,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 8 (1921): 221. Adam Gowns Whyte, “Psycho-analysis explained,” Literary (Sept. 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Aye (Aug. 21, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” Church Times (Aug. 6, 1920). Anonymous, “Minds Wholesale and Retail,” The Outlook (Aug. 14, 1920). Anonymous, “New Psychology,” School Guardian (Aug. 1920). Anonymous, “Unit and Group,” The Westminster Gazette (July 10, 1920). A. E. B., “The Christian Idea of Sin,” Commonwealth (Mar. 1923). Wilfrid J. Moulton, “Psychology and Christian Experience,” London Quarterly Review (July 1921), pp. 72–80. Prudentia, “Psycho-Analysis,” Church Times (Mar. 24, 1921). F. J. Rae, “Religious Experience and the New Psychology,” The Expository Times (July 1923), pp. 459–464. Arthur George Tansley, “New Psychology” (letter to the editor), The Westminster Gazette (July 31, 1920). Arthur George Tansley, “The Christian Doctrine of Sin and the New Psychology,” British Weekly (Jan. 14, 1922). J. A. M. Alcock, “De Novo,” The New Age (Jan. 27, 1921), p. 152. Anonymous, “New Psychology: The Education of the Herd Mind,” Southport Guardian (Sept. 1, 1920). G. J. Gould, “The Moral Dynamic in Comte’s View of Education,” Positivist Review (July 1, 1921), pp. 149–153. H. S. Redgrove, “New Psychology,” The Occult Review (Sept. 1921). N. T. W., “Psycho-Analysis in the School-Room,” Scottish Educational Journal (July 22, 1921). Eden and Cedar Paul, “New Psychology,” The Plebs (Dec. 1, 1920), pp. 222– 224, quotation on p. 224. Ernst Jones, “The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1 (1920): 478–480. Ernst Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, [1953–1957] 1961), pp. 433–434. “Recollections by Sir Arthur Tansley,” file 135, SFALC. Arthur George Tansley, “Freud’s Theory of Sex considered from the Biological Standpoint,” lecture Oct. 13, 1920, International Journal for Psycho-Analysis, 1 (1920): 340. For a philosophical and biological review of how biology influenced Freud see Frank Jones Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Tansley, New Psychology, 1920, preface p. 6. See also his preface to the fifth impression of the 2nd revised edition of New Psychology from 1924, p. 5. Tansley, New Psychology, 1920, p. 22. Tansley’s chief reference for this practical solution to the mind-body problem was to Bernard Hart, a colleague of Tansley at University College, London. In Hart’s little book on insanity he suggests, for the sake of scientific utility, that the laws of the mind are analogous to the laws of the brain cells. Bernard Hart, The Psychology of Insanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), pp. 11–20. Tansley, New Psychology, 1920, p. 24. Tansley was building his theory of instincts on the social psychology of his colleague at Cambridge, William McDougall. See McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology (London: Methuen & Co., 1908).

Notes to Pages 24–30

261 261

102. Tansley, New Psychology, 1920, pp. 23–25. See also McDougall, Social Psychology, 1908, pp. 22, 44. 103. Tansley, New Psychology, 1920, pp. 26–32. Tansley was inspired here by Edwin Bissell Holt, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1915). 104. Tansley, New Psychology, 1920, pp. 33–35. 105. Ibid., pp. 38–45. 106. Ibid., pp. 59–76, quotation on p. 76. 107. Ibid., p. 83. 108. Ibid., p. 86. 109. Ibid., pp. 100–101. 110. Ibid., pp. 177–192. Tansley uses the words complexes and systems interchangeably. 111. Ibid., pp. 193–194. Tansley’s emphasis. Tansley refers to Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (New York: Macmillan, 1916). 112. Ibid., pp. 194–195. 113. Ibid., p. 197. 114. Ibid., pp. 199–201. Tansley’s emphasis. He is probably alluding to a disagreement with Bertrand Russell on the issue of conscientious objections to the war. See Godwin, “Man and the Subject,” 1977, p. 19. 115. Jones to Freud, 6 May 1921, in R. Andrew Paskauskas (ed.), The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernst Jones 1908–1939, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 421. Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1961, p. 433. 116. Freud to Jones, Apr. 6, 1922, in Paskauskas (ed.), The Complete Correspondence, 1993, p. 468. 117. For a full review of Tansley’s dream and Vienna visit see an excellent article by Laura Cameron and John Forrester, “‘A nice type of the English scientist’: Tansley and Freud,” History Workshop Journal, 48 (1999): 65–100. See also “Recollections by Sir Arthur Tansley,” file 135, SFALC. 118. Tansley’s autobiographical sketch, May 5, 1932, MS PSLCU. Godwin, “Man and the Subject,” 1977, p. 14. Arthur George Tansley, Vegetation: Miscellaneous Reconnaissance Records 1921–1924, notebook, PSLCU. 119. Arthur George Tansley, “Psycho-Analysis,” The Nation and the Athenæum (suppl.), June 13, 1925, p. 348. Letters to the editor by E. C. Allmond, July 4; Arthur Tansley, Aug. 8; Bryan Donkin, Aug. 22; R. G. Randall, Aug. 29; Arthur Tansley, Sept. 12; A. Wohlgmuth, Sept. 19; Bryan Donkin, Oct. 3; Arthur Tansley, Oct. 3; A. Wohlgmuth, Oct. 10; Ex-patient, Oct. 10, 1925. See also Tansley’s “Critical Notice,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, 6 (1926): 228–235. 120. Arthur George Tansley, “The Classification of Vegetation and the Concept of Development,” Journal of Ecology, 8 (1920): 118–149, p. 133. 121. Ibid., p. 124. 122. Ibid., p. 120. 123. Ibid., p. 120. 124. Ibid., p. 123.

262 262

Notes to Pages 30–34

125. Ibid., p. 127. 126. Arthur George Tansley, Elements of Plant Biology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922), pp. 22, 55. Tansley’s emphasis. 127. Ibid., p. 402. Tansley’s emphasis. 128. Tansley had throughout his life argued for a unified biological science based on energy transformations and chemistry. See the final pages of his “Natural Selection Considered as a Special Example of the General Principle of Evolution,” MS 1896, PSLCU. Arthur George Tansley, “The Unification of Pure Botany,” Nature, 113 (Jan. 13, 1924): 85–88. 129. William C. Lewis, A System of Physical Chemistry, vols. 1–2, (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1916); Kyun Kim, Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 130. Arthur George Tansley, Practical Plant Ecology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923). George Damon Fuller, “A Text Book of Ecology,” Ecology, 5 (1924): 197–198. Frederic Clements, Research Methods in Ecology (Lincoln, Nebr.: The University Publishing Company, 1905). 131. Tansley’s student Godwin recalls “the shock of seeing so eminent a man so poorly housed” in this period. Godwin, “The Man and the Subject,” 1977, p. 14. 132. Arthur George Tansley, “Versuch einer Genitaltheorie,” (review), British Journal of Medical Psychology, 4 (1924): 156–161, p. 157. 133. I. H. Burkhill, “Thomas Ford Chipp,” Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 144–145 (1931–1932): 169–174. Miscellaneous notes, obituary, Kew Bulletin, 1931, pp. 397–398. 134. MSS Chipp s.311 (1–10, and articles), RHLOU. 135. Ibid. (4), RHLOU. 136. Ibid. (5), see also (6) and (7), RHLOU. 137. Ibid. (1), Chipp’s diary from 1911, RHLOU. 138. Ibid. (8), RHLOU, the file includes a collection of these forms. 139. According to Burkhill, “Thomas Ford Chipp,” 1931–1932, p. 171. 140. Thomas Ford Chipp, The Gold Coast Forest: A Study in Synecology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), MSS Chipp s.311 (9), RHLOU. 141. MSS Chipp s.311 (10), pp. 31–38, RHLOU. Ray Desmond, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanical Gardens (London: Harvill Press, 1995), p. 316; Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion (New York: Academic Press, 1979). 142. MSS Chipp s.311 (10), pp. 65–66, RHLOU. 143. Ibid., p. 72, RHLOU. 144. David Prain, “Presidential Address,” in F. T. Brooks (ed.), Imperial Botanical Conference: Report of Proceedings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. xii. 145. G. C. Lawrence (ed.), The British Empire Exhibition 1924: Official Guide (London: Fleetway Press, 1924). British Empire Exhibition Central Committee of Tanganyika, Tanganyika Territory: Exhibition Handbook (London: Jas. Truscott & Son, 1924). 146. Arthur William Hill, “The best way of promoting a complete botanical survey of the different parts of the Empire,” Imperial Botanical Conference, Brooks (ed.),

Notes to Pages 34–36

147.

148.

149.

150.

151.

152.

153.

154. 155. 156. 157.

263 263

1925, pp. 196–204, quotation on p. 198. Arthur George Tansley, “Experiment in Genetics” (review of Charles Chamberlain Hurst’s book with the same title), The Nation and the Athenæum (Oct. 3, 1925), pp. 19–20. On the Swedish contribution to the conferences see Nils Roll-Hansen, “The role of genetic theory in the success of the Svalöf plant breeding program,” Journal of Swedish Seed Association, 107 (1997), pp. 196–207. Andrew Thomas Gage, comment, pp. 205–208. Thomas Ford Chipp, “Summary of Works Done in the Crown Colonies,” pp. 242–252. Arthur George Tansley, “Summary of Vegetational Work and Problems in the Dominions,” pp. 252–259. Leonard Cockayne, “New Zealand Economic Plant Botany,” pp. 259–269, all in Brooks (ed.), Imperial Botanical Conference, 1925. Illtyd Buller Pole Evans, comment, pp. 208–213; Selmar Schonland, “Some Difficulties of the Botanical Survey of the Union of South Africa,” Imperial Botanical Conference, Brooks (ed.), 1925, p. 213. John William Bews, “Training for Field Work in the Dominions,” Imperial Botanical Conference, Brooks (ed.), 1925, pp. 269–274, quotation on pp. 270– 271. Conference resolutions, Imperial Botanical Conference, Brooks (ed.), 1925, pp. 383–384, resolutions 7–13. The committee included Tansley, Oliver, Chipp, John Ramsbottom, and Edward James Salisbury. Arthur George Tansley and Thomas Ford Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation (London: The British Empire Vegetation Committee & The Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1926). William Dallimore, “Aims and Methods,” Empire Forestry Journal, 5 (1926): 313–314. D. Fuller, “Aims and Methods,” Ecology, 8 (3, 1927): 379–380. J. R., “Aims and Methods,” Journal of Botany, 65 (1927): 18–21. B. J. Rendle, “Aims and Methods,” Science Progress (1926), p. 724. The Fabian view on imperialism is summarized by Leonard Wolf: “The European State, if it remains in Africa, is necessarily an instrument of that exploitation; if it withdraws, it merely hands over the native to the more cruel exploitation of irresponsible white men. The question then is, how the European State can be changed from an instrument of economic exploitation into an instrument of good government and progress, not for a few hundred white men, but for the millions of Africans.” Leonard Wolf, Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (London: Labour Research Department, 1920), p. 358. The book was distributed through the Crown Agent partly to get official sanction, but also to avoid bookseller’s charges so that the committee would earn more money to produce more handbooks. Yet the profit never materialized, since the first stock was destroyed by fire. Notes in Journal of Botany, 64 (1926): 168, 200. Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, p. v. Ibid., p. vii. Ibid., pp. 8–13. Niklas Luhmann, Ecological Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

264 264

Notes to Pages 37–39

158. Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, pp. 46–47, 58–59. 159. David Turnbull Maps Are Territories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Denis Wood, Power of Maps (New York: The Guilford Press, 1992). 160. Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, pp. 63–71; Tim Ingold, “Globes and Spheres: The Topology of Environmentalism,” in Environmentalism, Kay Milton (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1993). 161. Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, p. 145. On environmental possibilism see Ian G. Simmons, Changing the Face of the Earth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Environmental History, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 162. Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, p. 140. 163. Ibid., p. 141. Quoted in Golley, History of the Ecosystem, 1993, p. 32. 164. Ernst Haeckel, who had a Darwinian approach to ecology, emphasized ecological interaction among natural enemies. This was what Haeckel called ExistenzBedingungen im Kampf um das Dasein. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle morphologie der organismen (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1866), vol. II, p. 287. See Robert Clinton Stauffer, “Haeckel, Darwin, and Ecology,” The Quarterly Review of Biology, 32 (1957): 138–144. 165. “Unter Oecologie verstehen wir die gesammte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt, wohin wir im weiteren Sinne alle ‘Existenz-Bedingungen’ rechnen können . . . Jeder Organismus hat unter den übringen Freunde und Fiende, solche, welche seine Existenz begünstigen und solche, welche sie beeintächtigen.” (By ecology we understand the entire body of scientific knowledge about the interaction between organisms and the environment, in which we in a broader sense may include all “conditions of existence” . . . Each organism has among the other organisms its friends and its enemies, those that favor its existence and those that harm it.) Haeckel, Generelle morphologie, 1866, vol. II, p. 286, my trans. 166. On the Chicago school of ecology is Gregg Mitman’s penetrating book The State of Nature; Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The social role of energy in nation building has a long and interesting history that cannot be dealt with here. In my reading of British ecologists I have been inspired by M. Norton Wise’s excellent article “Architecture for Steam,” in Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (eds.), Architecture of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 107– 140. 167. John Ramsbottom, “Special Groups of Plants,” in Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, pp. 152–186. 168. A. D. Cotton, “Seaweeds,” in Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, p. 186. 169. Chipp, “Aims and Methods of Study in Tropical Countries,” in Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, p. 194. See also Chipp, Gold Coast, 1927, pp. 12–16. 170. Chipp, in Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, pp. 229–230. 171. Ibid., pp. 230–235, quotation on p. 234. 172. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 173. Similarly with the term economic botany, or “the study of plants and plant prod-

Notes to Pages 39–42

265 265

ucts, which directly or indirectly are of service to man.” This term had been used by The Association of Economic Biologists as a substitute for “ecology” at least since 1904. See, for example, Cockayne, “Notes on Ecological Field Work,” in Tansley and Chipp (ed.), Aims and Methods, 1926, p. 275. The Association of Economic Biologists was founded in 1904. See New Phytologist, 6 (1907). 174. Leonard Cockayne, “Ecological-Economic Investigation,” in Tansley and Chipp (eds.), Aims and Methods, 1926, p. 331. 175. British Empire Vegetation Committee, “Scheme for abstracting publications on British Empire Vegetation,” Journal of Ecology, 15 (1927): 376–377; British Empire Vegetation Abstracts, 12, supplements to Journal of Ecology, 16–21 (1928–1933).

2. General Smuts’s Politics of Holism and Patronage of Ecology 1. I have used the microfiche copy of Smuts’s papers and correspondence available at Cambridge University Library (CUL), as well as papers and correspondence at the Rhodes House Library at Oxford University (RHLOU) and New Bodleian Library at Oxford University (BLOU). Fortunately, some of this material has been published by William Keith Hancock and Jean van der Poel as Selections from the Smuts Papers, vols. 1–7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966 and 1973), hereafter Smuts Papers, and I will refer to this widely available collection rather than to the archive whenever possible. Most of the best-known speeches are collected in Smuts, Greater South Africa: Plans for a Better World: The Speeches of General the Right Honorable J. C. Smuts, hereafter Speeches. William Keith Hancock, Smuts: The Sanguine Years 1870–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); Smuts: The Fields of Force 1919–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). Judy Anne Sinclair Scott, Jan Christian Smuts: Bibliography of Prefaces, Forewords and Introductions by Smuts (Cape Town: School of Librarianship, 1953); this collection is incomplete. Ursula Brigish, The Library of Jan Christian Smuts (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Library, 1972). Jacqueline Audrey Kalley, Jan Christian Smuts—a Bibliophile? (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Library, 1985). Theodore Johannes Haarhoff, Smuts the Humanist (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970). Joan Joseph, South African Statesman Jan Christian Smuts (Folkestone: Bailey Bros. & Swinfen, 1970). 2. Ernst Mayr is one of the few practitioners of biology who remembers the significance of Smuts’s holistic philosophy. He emphasizes that the debate about holism that Smuts generated was important to the development of his own work in the 1950s. Personal conversation; Ernst Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 66–67. See also a journalistic pamphlet by Piet Beukes, Smuts the Botanist (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1996), and anonymous note, “Jan Christiaan Smuts,” South African Biological Society, pamphlet no. 15 (1951), pp. 39–41. Compare with Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 158. 3. Hancock, Smuts, 1962, p. 3.

266 266

Notes to Pages 42–46

4. Piet Beukes, The Holistic Smuts (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1989); The Religious Smuts (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1994). 5. Jan Christian Smuts, “Foreword,” in John Hutchinson, A Botanist in Southern Africa (London: P. R. Gawthorn, 1946). Asa Gray, Structural Botany (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co., 1880). Rudolf Marloth’s expeditions resulted in a voluminous work, The Flora of South Africa, vol. 1–4 (Cape Town: Darter Bros & Co., 1913–1932). 6. Johannes Izak Marais to Smuts, Jan. 26, 1892, Aug. 8, 1892, Dec. 20, 1892, May 29, 1894, Aug. 1, 1894, Smuts Papers, vol. 1, pp. 23–28, 31–33, 34–35. 7. Smuts, “Law, A Liberal Study,” Christ’s College Magazine, 1893, reprinted in Smuts Papers, vol. 1, pp. 35–41, quotation on p. 35. 8. Ibid., p. 40. 9. Ibid., p. 41. 10. Smuts, “On the Application of Some Physical Concepts to Biological Phenomena,” unpublished, 1892–1893, Smuts Papers, vol. 1, pp. 48–50, quotation on p. 49. 11. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 1, p. 47. 12. Oswald Crawford to Smuts, May 16, 1895. Smuts Papers, vol. 1, p. 53. The book was later published as Walt Whitman: A Study in the Evolution of Personality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973). 13. Undated draft of a letter to a potential publisher, Smuts Papers, vol. 1, p. 53. 14. Smuts, Whitman, [MS 1895] 1973, pp. 23–24, 40, quotation on p. 26. 15. Ibid., p. 27. 16. Ibid., p. 30. 17. Ibid., p. 31. 18. Ibid., pp. 31, 32, 36–37. Smuts’s emphasis. Smuts regularly used analogies between the human mind and plants; see especially pp. 34–35. 19. Walt Whitman, from “Passage to India,” Leaves of Grass (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1891), p. 315. Smuts, Whitman, [MS 1895] 1973, pp. 173– 177. 20. Smuts, Whitman, [MS 1895] 1973, pp. 50–51, 54. 21. Ibid., p. 56. Smuts was of course mistaken. There exists little knowledge about Shakespeare’s personal life, but Goethe’s faustian experience and Whitman’s homosexuality can certainly be described in terms of crisis. 22. Ibid., p. 78. 23. Smuts, “A Great South African Nationality,” Oct. 29, 1895, Speeches, 1940, pp. 2, 3. 24. Ibid. 25. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (London: Macmillan, 1918), preface. I am grateful to Matthew L. Jones for this reference. 26. On his nationalism see Jan Christian Smuts, A Century of Wrong: The Boer-British Case Stated, issued by F. W. Reitz, state secretary of the South African Republic (London, 1899); Jan Christian Smuts, Memoirs of the Boer War (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Pub., 1966). N. Levi, Jan Smuts (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1917). 27. Henry James Wolstenholme to Smuts, Mar. 15, 1912, Smuts Papers, vol. 3,

Notes to Pages 46–49

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

267 267

pp. 66–68; see also marginal comments in MS 520, pp. 71–83. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 1, 1962, chap. 15. Smuts, “An Inquiry into the Whole,” Smuts Papers, vol. 3, pp. 71–72. F. S. Crafford, Jan Smuts: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1943), p. 70. For a full review of the conflict see Maureen Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985). Letter from Smuts to A. B. Willington, Feb. 4, 1932. Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 508. Edward Roux, S. P. Bunting: A Political Biography (Belleville: Mayibuye, [1944] 1993), p. 92. Jan Christian Smuts, The Syndicalist Conspiracy in South Africa (Cape Town: Cape Times Limited, 1914), p. 30. Roux, Bunting, 1944, p. 67. Quotation by John Xavier Merriman, in Crafford, Jan Smuts, 1943, p. 93. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Jan. 19 and 20, 1919, Smuts Papers, vol. 3, pp. 47, 49–50. Arnold Toynbee was very inspired by Smuts and referred to him as an outstanding spokesman for the physical sciences. I am grateful to Bruce Mazlish for this reference, see Riddle of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 373n52, 378. Jan Christian Smuts, The British Commonwealth of Nations (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917). Smuts’s opposition to low culture was also directed towards Germany during the war. In London the Goethe-lover used the opportunity to attack German “Kultur” as being below even “the rudiments of the Mosaic law.” Jan Christian Smuts, The Coming Victory (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917). This self-confidence on behalf of the British forces and European races made one contemporary historian complain that his thoughts were “more interesting on the future organisation of the British Empire and of peace than on our objects in the war.” Smuts, “The White Man’s Task,” speech at Savoy Hotel, London, May 22, 1917, pp. 16, 17. Pollard, “War-time Speeches,” History, 1918, p. 55. Margaret Gillett, “Notes Relating to General J. C. S.’s Life in England 1917– 1919,” MSS Afr. s. 1414 file 30B, RHLOU. Ibid. Margaret Gillett, “J. C. S. In England—Relation to Life in the Country about Oxford and the Berkshire Downs, 1917–19 and Later,” MSS Afr. s. 1414 file 30C, p. 3, RHLOU. Ibid., pp. 3, 5. Ibid., pp. 1a, 6. Smuts to Alice Clark, Nov. 3, 1917, Smuts Papers, vol. 3, p. 568. Alice Clark to Smuts, Nov. 14, 1917, Smuts to Alice Clark, Nov. 17, 1917, Smuts Papers, vol. 3, pp. 569–573, quotations on pp. 570, 573. Smuts to Gilbert Murray, Nov. 12, 1918, MSS Gilbert Murray 38, folio 8, BLOU. Smuts to Agnes Murray, Dec. 10, 1918, MSS Gilbert Murray 540, folio 172, BLOU. Smuts to T. Jones, Apr. 21, 1917, Smuts Papers, vol. 3, p. 477. Robert Lansing,

268 268

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

Notes to Pages 49–54 The Big Four (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1921), pp. 188–189. David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), pp. 166–173. Jan Christian Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (New York: The Nations Press, 1919), pp. 24–26, quotation p. 26. Smuts to Lady Murray, June 2, 1919, MSS Gilbert Murray 540, folio 191, BLOU. Smuts to Margaret Clark Gillett, Paris, May 1, 1919, Smuts Papers, vol. 3, p. 139. Smuts to Alice Clark, Paris, May 16, 1919, Smuts Papers, vol. 3, pp. 161–162. Smuts’s statement on the peace treaty, June 28, 1919, Smuts Papers, vol. 3, MS 1043, pp. 256–259. Carl Russell Fish, “League of Nations,” History, 5 (1920): 124. Anonymous, “Book Notes,” Political Science Quarterly, 33 (1918): 317. Smuts to Lady Murray, Jan. 1920, MSS Gilbert Murray 541, folio 2–3, BLOU. Roux, Bunting, 1944, p. 91. Ibid., p. 101. Crafford, Jan Smuts, 1943, p. 92. Crafford, Jan Smuts, 1943, pp. 186–187, quotation on p. 198. Quoted in Crafford, Jan Smuts, 1943, p. 197; Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 87–88. Gilbert Murray to Smuts, Oct. 8, 1921, MSS Gilbert Murray 188, folio 65–70, BLOU. Smuts to Lady Murray, May 4, 1923, MSS Gilbert Murray 542, folio 122, BLOU. See for example C. A. Lückhoff, Table Mountain: Our National Heritage after Three Hundred Years (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1951). Smuts, “The Spirit of the Mountain,” 1923, Speeches, 1940, p. 32. For a nice discussion of parallel patterns of thought in the United States, see Everett Mendelsohn, “‘Thinking Like a Mountain’: The Epistemological Puzzle of Environmentalism,” Grenzüberschreitungen in der Wissenschaft, Peter Weingart (ed.) (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), pp. 152–167. Smuts, “The Spirit of the Mountain,” 1923, Speeches, 1940, pp. 32–33. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Letter to Margaret Gillett, May 11, 1925, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 248–249. See Shelley, Adonais XLII: “He is made one with Nature.” Smuts to S. M. Smuts, June 26, 1927, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 356–358. Smuts, “The Spirit of the Mountain,” 1923, Speeches, 1940, p. 35. John Phillips, “A Brief Historical Sketch of the Development of Botanical Science in South Africa and the Contribution of South Africa to Botany,” South African Journal of Science, 27 (1930): 31–79. Much of the following biographical information is based on Mary Gunn and L. E. Codd’s informative “Dictionary of Plant Collectors,” in Botanical Exploration of South Africa, pt. 2 (Cape Town: The Botanical Research Institute, 1981); Arthur A. Bullock, Bibliography of South African Botany (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1977). There was a lectureship in botany at Victoria College from 1902, a lectureship in

Notes to Pages 54–57

71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82.

269 269

Natural Science at Grey University College in Bloemfontain since 1905 (with a separate chair in botany from 1912), a lectureship in zoology and botany at Transvaal University College from 1910 (with a separate chair in botany from 1917), and a lectureship in botany at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1910. John William Bews got the first professorship in botany at Natal University College established in 1910. George W. Gale, John William Bews (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1954), p. 37. Jan Christian Smuts, “Foreword” [1950] in Dudley Bertie David Meredith (ed.), The Grasses and Pastures of South Africa (Johannesburg?: Central News Agency, 1955), p. viii. Illtyd Buller Pole Evans, “Rudolf Marloth 1855–1931,” in Marloth, Flora of South Africa, vol. 4, 1932. Kathleen Mincher, I Lived in His Shadow (Cape Town: H. Timmins, 1965), pp. 25, 38. See also Pole Evans to Smuts, June 7, 1923, vol. 27, folio 55, CUL. Smuts to S. M. Smuts, Sept. 19 and Oct. 18, 1923, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 184, 191. Margaret Gillett, Journal 1923, MSS Afr. S. 1414, file 20, pp. 32, 42, 44, RHLOU. Smuts, “Foreword,” in Hutchinson, Botanist in Southern Africa, 1946. Pole Evans to Smuts, folio 115 vol. 20 (1918), folio 170 vol. 23 (Dec. 2, 1920), folio 212–214 vol. 24 (May 13, 1921), folio 180–184 (June 12, 1922), folio 54 vol. 27 (Mar. 28, 1923), folio 56 vol. 27 (June 10, 1923), folio 29 vol. 33 (July 15, 1925), CUL. Smuts to Pole Evans, Mar. 29, 1923, Mar. 26, 1924, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 171, 233. Described by Verdoorn, see Meredith (ed.), Grasses and Pastures of South Africa, 1955, description and picture of Digitaria smutsii Stent., pp. 405, 408. It is not clear whether Smuts sent botanists to the United States to spy, but the tone of the letter suggests that Pole Evans was against it. Pole Evans to Smuts, Mar. 26, 1925, June 1, 1927, folio 28 vol. 33, and folio 123 vol. 38, CUL. Pole Evans, “Preface,” The Flowering Plants of South Africa, vol. 1 (1920), poem on front cover of all editions from 1920 until 1944. Ronald Cambell Macfie, “Ex unitate vires,” in War: An Ode and Other Poems (New York: Dutton & Co., 1920), pp. 164–167. The rhyme of “fair” and “air” was more than poetic. Macfie was well known for his many books and articles on the importance of fresh air to create fair cities and a healthy life, and he believed that “desert air” was particularly good for his own well-being. The sub-language of the poem thus also evokes the idea that odors of flowering plants could improve public health. Ronald Campbell Macfie, Air and Health (New York: Dutton & Co., 1909), p. 283. Illtyd Buller Pole Evans, “Introduction,” Botanical Survey, 4 (1922): 5. Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 97. See also Denison, “Obituary,” Natal University College Newspaper, Nov. 17, 1938, p. 1. A. W. Bayer, “John William Bews,” South African Journal of Science, 36 (1939): xviii—xix. A. W. Bayer, “John Bews: One of the Burgh School’s Professors,” 1939, in Kirkwall Grammar School, William P. L. Thomson (ed.) (Kirkwall: Kirkwall Press, 1976), pp. 25–28. Gale, Bews, 1954, pp. 7–8, 12–13. Bews was proud of his grandmother’s name, Turfus, a family that claims to descend from the famous Viking. Gale writes of

270 270

83. 84.

85.

86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91.

92.

93. 94.

95.

96. 97.

Notes to Pages 57–61 the parallel lives of Bews and his patron Smuts: they had “much in common . . . besides name and childhood on a farm” (pp. 15, 18). The Nordic heritage of Bews is a common theme in his friends’ recollections. See Alfred J. Gray, “John William Bews: Notes on His School Days at Kirkwall School,” MS 1938, 3 pp., UNA BIO-P 1/1/4; F. Marion McNeill, “Burgh School Days,” MS 8 pp., UNA BIO-P 1/1/3. Gale, Bews, 1954, chap. 2. Philip Mairet, Pioneer of Sociology (London: Lund Humpheries, 1957), p. 111. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (London: Williams & Norgate, 1915), pp. 321–328. John William Bews, Human Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 31–32, 42, 279. Bews refers to Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, Evolution (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1912), a book that offers an evolutionary explanation of social life. Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 28. Bews’s own curriculum vitae, UNA BIO-P 1/1/11. According to A. W. Bayer, Bews was “informed [by a doctor] that he would never again be able to work, but would be a permanent invalid.” Bayer, “The Life and Work of J. W. Bews,” MS 1939, p. 3, UNA BIO-P 1/1/10. Gale, Bews, 1954, chap. 3. Letters of recommendation from Isaac Balfour (Aug. 9, 1909), the headmaster of Kirkwall Burgh School, John McEwen (Apr. 29, 1907), professor of geology at University of Edinburgh, James Geikie (Feb. 20, 1907), professor of botany at University of Manchester, F. E. Weiss (Mar. 23, 1908), UNA BIO-P 1/1/11. Ibid., pp. 41–46. Ibid., pp. 47–48. A. W. Bayer, “The Life and Work of J. W. Bews,” MS 1939, pp. 4–8, UNA BIO-P 1/1/10. Maurice Smethurst Evans and John William Bews, “John Medley Wood,” Annals of the Bolus Herbarium, 2 (1916): 33–36. John Medley Wood, Handbook to the Flora of Natal (Durban: Bennet & Davis, 1907). Bews, “Dr. T. R. Sim” (undated obituary note), UNA BIO-P1/4/7. Thomas Robertson Sim, Forest Flora and Forest Resources of Portuguese East Africa (Aberdeen: Taylor & Henderson, 1909); The Ferns of South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915). Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 50. John William Bews, “The Vegetation of Natal,” Annals of the Natal Museum, 2 (3, 1912): 253–331. John William Bews, “An Æcological Survey of the Midlands of Natal, with Special Reference to the Pietermaritzburg District,” Annals of the Natal Museum, 2 (4, 1913): 485–545. Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 58. Not much is known about Bews’s wife, except that she studied botany with him in Edinburgh and, according to one historian, she was “never in the way and never out of the way” when she served her husband. See Edgar Harry Brooks, History of the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1966), p. 37. John William Bews, “The Plant Ecology of Drakensburg Range,” Annals of the Natal Museum, 3, (3, 1917): 511–565. John William Bews, “The Growth Forms of Natal Plants,” Transactions of the

Notes to Pages 61–64

98. 99. 100.

101.

102.

103. 104. 105.

106.

107.

108.

109. 110.

271 271

Royal Society of South Africa, 5 (1916): 605–636; “An Account of the Chief Types of Vegetation in South Africa, with Notes on the Plant Succession,” Journal of Ecology, 4 (1916): 129–159; “Plant Succession in Thorn Veld,” South African Journal of Science, 14 (1917): 153–172; “South African Phytogeography,” South African Geographical Journal, 1 (1917): 11–22. John William Bews, The Grasses and Grasslands of South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: P. Davis & Sons, 1918). Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 65. John William Bews, “The Plant Ecology of the Coast Belt of Natal,” Annals of the Natal Museum, 4, (2, 1920): 367–469; “The Mont-aux-Sources National Park. Notes on Its Vegetation,” Journal of the Botanical Society of South Africa, 4 (1920): 11–13; “Plant Succession and Plant Distribution in South Africa,” Annals of Botany, London, 34 (1920): 287–297; “Some General Principles of Plant Distribution as Illustrated by the South African Flora,” Annals of Botany, London, 35 (1921): 1–36; “The South African Flora: Its Origin, Migrations and Evolutionary Tendencies,” Annals of Botany, London, 36 (1922): 209–223; “Notes on the Evolution of Plant Growth Forms,” South African Journal of Science, 20 (1923): 290–303; An Introduction to the Flora of Natal and Zululand (Pietermaritzburg: City Printing Works, 1921). John William Bews, “Some Aspects of Botany in South Africa and Plant Ecology in Natal,” South African Journal of Science, 18 (1921): presidential address section C, pp. 63–80, quotation on p. 63. Quoted in Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 62. The quotation is by Gale himself. It appears in A. W. Bayer, “The Life and Work of J. W. Bews,” MS Aug. 1939, p. 14, UNA BIO-P 1/1/10. An undated and anonymous newspaper cutting, “Science and a Sense of Humour,” perhaps from The Natal Mercury, portrays Bews as an entertaining professor. Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 63. Bews to Smuts, Dec. 1, 1922, vol. 25, folio 7, CUL. John Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah and the Future of Africa (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 15. Chapter 1 of this book is Phillips’s autobiography; see also Emsie du Plessis, “John Frederick Vicars Phillips,” Bothalia, 17 (1987): 267– 268. John Phillips, “A Tribute to Frederic E. Clements and His Concepts in Ecology,” Ecology, 35 (1954): 114–115. Frederic Clements, Research Methods in Ecology (Lincoln: University Publishing Company, 1905). John Phillips, “Experimental Vegetation: A Second Contribution,” South African Journal of Science, 24 (1927): 259–268; “Dendrographic Experiments: Ocotea Bullata E. Mey (Stinkwood),” South African Journal of Science, 24 (1927): 227–243. John Phillips, “The Principal Forest Types in the Knysna Region—an Outline,” South African Journal of Science, 25 (1928): 188–201; “Plant Indicators in the Knysna Region,” South African Journal of Science, 25 (1928): 202–224. John Phillips, “Olea laurifolia Lam. (‘Ironwood’): An Introduction to Its Ecology,” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 16 (1928): 169–190. John Phillips, “The Biology, Ecology, and Silviculture of ‘Stinkwood,’” South

272 272

111.

112.

113. 114.

115.

116. 117.

118. 119.

Notes to Pages 64–65 African Journal of Science, 21 (1924): 275–292; “The Propagation of ‘Stinkwood’ (Ocotea bullata E. Mey.) by Vegetative Means,” South African Journal of Science, 23 (1926): 418–434. John Phillips, “Virgilia capensis Lamk. (Keurboom): A Contribution to its Ecology and Silviculture,” South African Journal of Science, 23 (1926): 435–453; “General Biology of the Flowers, Fruits and Young Regeneration of the More Important Species of the Knysna Forests,” South African Journal of Science, 23 (1926): 366–417; “Faurea McNaughtonii Phill. (‘Terblanz’): A Note on Its Ecology and Distribution,” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 14 (1927): 317–336; “Ekebergia capensis Sparrm (‘Essenhout’) in the Knysna Region: A Preliminary Ecological Note,” South African Journal of Science, 24 (1927): 216–224; “The Rôle of the ‘Bush Dove,’ Columbia arquatrix T. & K., in the Fruit-dispersal in the Knysna Forests,” South African Journal of Science, 24 (1927): 435–440; “Fossil Widdringtonia in Lignite of the Knysna Series, with a Note on Fossil Leaves of Several Other Species,” South African Journal of Science, 24 (1927): 188–197; “Curtisia faginia Ait. (‘Assagaai’): An Ecological Note,” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 17 (1928): 29–41. John Phillips, “The Behaviour of Acacia melanoxylon R.Br. (‘Tasmanian Blackwood’) in the Knysna Forests: An Ecological Study,” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 16 (1928): 31–43; “The Influence of Usnea sp. (near barbata Fr.) upon the Supporting Tree,” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 17 (1929): 101–107; Anonymous, “South African Forest Research Station and Preservation of Indigenous Forests,” Ecology, 4 (1923): 434. Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah, 1960, p. 17. Allee to Phillips, May 10, 1928, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. John Phillips, “Mortality in the Flowers, Fruits and Young Regeneration of Trees in the Knysna Forests of South Africa,” Ecology, 8 (1927): 435–444. Allee to Phillips, Jan. 29, Oct. 30, Dec. 15, 1929; Phillips to Allee, Oct. 28, 1929; Tansley to Allee, Nov. 13, 1929, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. John Phillips, Forest Succession and Ecology in the Knysnia Region, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 14 (Pretoria: The Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1931). Bews, “The Botanical Survey of S. Africa,” MS (6 folio) [1928?] UNA Bio-P 1/4/3. Robert Aitken Douglas and George W. Gale, Botanical Survey of Natal and Zululand, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 2 (Pretoria: The Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1921). Advisory Committee for the Botanical Survey of South Africa, A Guide to Botanical Survey Work, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 4 (Pretoria: The Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1922). The committee included Pole Evans as director, Margaret Bolus (Curator, Bolus Herbarium, Cape Town), Rudolf Marloth, Prof. Schönland (Grahamstown), Bews, Prof. Potts (Bloemfontien, Orange Free State), Arnold Theiler (Director of Veterinary Research) and C. E. Legat (Chief Conservator of Forests). Illtyd Buller Pole Evans, “Introduction,” in advisory committee, Guide to Botanical Survey, 1922, p. 5. Illtyd Buller Pole Evans, “The Plant Geography of South Africa,” The Official Year Book, Department of Agriculture, no. 5, 1922, p. 1, photos 1–36.

Notes to Pages 65–67

273 273

120. John William Bews, “Methods of Botanical Survey. Suggestions for the Beginning of the Work,” in advisory committee, Guide to Botanical Survey, 1922, p. 59. See also “The South East African Flora, Its Origin, Migrations and Evolutionary Tendencies,” Annals of Botany, London, 36 (1922): 209–223; “Notes on the Evolution of Plant Growth Forms,” South African Journal of Science, 20 (1923): 290–303. John William Bews and Robert Aitken Douglas, “The Measurement of the Hydrogen Ion Concentration in South African Soils in Relation to Plant Distribution and Other Ecological Problems,” South African Journal of Science, 19 (1922): 196–206; Researches on the Vegetation of Natal, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 5 (Pretoria: The Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1923). 121. Bews, “Methods of Botanical Survey,” 1922, p. 59. 122. Ethel Mary Doidge, A Preliminary Check List of Plant Diseases, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 6 (Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1924). Ernest Edward Galpin, The Native Timber Trees, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 7 (Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1924). Edwin Percy Phillips, A Preliminary List of the Known Poisonous Plants, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 9 (Pretoria: The Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1926); The Genera of South African Flowering Plants, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 10 (Cape Town: Cape Town Limited, Government Printers, 1926). 123. The American botanist William Austin Cannon noticed such a division of labor between ecology and botany in South Africa. See his General and Physiological Features of the Vegetation of the More Arid Portions of Southern Africa (Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1924), p. 3. 124. Pole Evans’s statement in the session, “The Best Means of Promoting a Complete Botanical Survey of the Different Parts of the Empire,” Imperial Botanical Conference, Brooks (ed.), 1925, pp. 208–213, quotation on p. 208. The members of the South African delegation included, besides Pole Evans and Bews, Dr. Ethel Doidge, V. A. Putterill, and Prof. Schönland. 125. John William Bews, “Training for Field Work in the Dominions,” Imperial Botanical Conference, Brooks (ed.), 1925, pp. 269–274, 315–316. Advisory committee, Guide to Botanical Survey, 1922. 126. Arthur George Tansley, “Survey and Study of Vegetation, and Training in Ecological Field Work,” Imperial Botanical Conference, Brooks (ed.), 1925, pp. 240–242, quotation in comment on p. 254. 127. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 159–163. 128. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Nov. 30, 1927, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 362–363. 129. Frederick Charles Kolbe, A Catholic View of Holism: A Criticism of the Theory Put Forward by General Smuts in his Book, “Holism and Evolution” (New York: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 8–9. 130. Jan Christian Smuts, “South Africa in Science,” South African Journal of Science, 22 (1925), presidential address, p. 1. 131. Smuts, “South Africa in Science,” 1925, pp. 2, 3. 132. Smuts to Pole Evans, May 8, 1925, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 247. Charles Ernest Pelham Brooks, The Evolution of Climate (London: Benn Brothers, 1922). Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924).

274 274

Notes to Pages 67–70

133. Smuts, “South Africa in Science,” 1925, pp. 9, 7. 134. Marloth, Flora of South Africa, 1913–1932. Jan Christian Smuts, “Introduction” [1950] to Elise Garrett Rice and Robert Harold Compton, Wild Flowers of the Cape of Good Hope (Newlands: The Botanical Society of South Africa, 1951). 135. Smuts, “South Africa in Science,” 1925, p. 17. 136. Smuts to E. F. C. Lane, July 1, 1925, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 250–251. Smuts to Pole Evans, May 27, 1925, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 249. 137. Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah, 1960, pp. 17–18. 138. Ibid., p. 18. 139. John William Bews and Robert Aitken Douglas, Researches on the Vegetation of Natal, Botanical Survey Memoir no. 8 (Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1925). 140. John William Bews, Plant Forms and Their Evolution in South Africa (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1925), p. 35. Bews to Smuts, July 13, 1924, vol. 29, folio 21, CUL. 141. Bews, Plant Forms, 1925, pp. 162–164. 142. Anonymous, “Our Bookshelf,” Nature, 117 (Apr. 24, 1926): 583–584. Anonymous, “South African Plants,” Times Literary Supplement, Feb. 12, 1925. Anonymous, “Plant Forms and Their Evolution,” Journal of Botany, 63 (1925): 152. E. M. C., “Plant Forms and Their Evolution,” Science Progress, Oct. 1925, p. 357. Thomas Ford Chipp, “Plant Forms and Their Evolution in South Africa,” Empire Forestry Journal, 4 (1925): 120–121. E. W. S., “Plant Forms and Their Evolution,” Journal of the African Society, 24 (1924–1925): 377. Robert Adamson, “South African Plant Forms,” Journal of Ecology, 14 (1926): 167– 168. 143. Smuts, “Introduction,” in Bews, Human Ecology, 1935, p. ix. Smuts refers to Bews’s works as essential in a letter to John Hutchinson of Dec. 8, 1945, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 31–33, 357–361, and in his introduction (from 1950) to Rice and Compton, Wild Flowers of the Cape, 1951. 144. Smuts to Murray, Oct. 23, 1923, July 17 and Nov. 25, 1924, Apr. 23, 1925, MSS Gilbert Murray 47 folio 138, 48 folio 120, 195 folio 40–41, 49 folio 112– 113, BLOU. Julian Huxley once attended one of these séances at Murray’s house; see Julian Huxley, Memories (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 139– 140. 145. He also recommended that Murray hand the manuscript to J. S. Haldane (senior) at New College, because “his writings make me think that his opinion on the MS. might be worth having.” Smuts to Murray, Oct. 20, 1925, MSS Gilbert Murray 50, folio 73, BLOU. However, Haldane probably never saw the manuscript, except in print. J. S. Haldane to Smuts, Dec. 13, 1928, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 385–386. 146. Jan Christian Smuts, Holism and Evolution (London: Macmillan & Co., 1926), p. 187. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 648. Joel B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 147. Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 1926, p. 340. 148. Ibid., p. 343.

Notes to Pages 70–72 149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163.

164. 165. 166.

167.

168.

275 275

Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 36 (quotation), 45–54. Ibid., pp. 82, 83. Compare with Gregg Mitman’s article, “From the Population to Society: The Cooperative Metaphors of W. C. Allee and A. E. Emerson,” Journal of the History of Biology, 21 (1988): 173–194. Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 1926, pp. 83–84. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., pp. 137–138. Ibid., pp. 138–139. Ibid., p. 246. Ibid., p. 303 and chap. 10. Ibid., pp. 343–344. See reviews by E. E. W. S., “Holism and Evolution,” Journal of the African Society, 27 (1927–1928): 95–96. J. L. Stocks, “Philosophy,” London Mercury, 16 (1927): 552–554. George P. Conger, “Holism and Evolution,” Journal of Philosophy, 24 (1927): 136–137. H. G. Townsend, “Holism and Evolution,” Philosophical Review, 37 (1928): 85–86. C. D. Burns, “Holism and Evolution,” International Journal of Ethics, 37 (1926–1927): 314. J. E. Boodin, “Holism and Evolution,” The Personalist, 9 (1928): 66–67. Smuts coined the word “holism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 8, p. 307. C. Lloyd Morgan, “Holism and Evolution,” Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2 (1927): 93–97. C. Lloyd Morgan to Smuts, Nov. 15, 1926, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 333. C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution (London: Williams & Norgate, 1923); Life, Mind and Spirit (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1925). On Lloyd Morgan’s philosophy and its similarities and differences with Smuts’s see David Blitz, Emergent Evolution (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub., 1992), pp. 136– 137. Blitz argues that “Smuts avoided the theological question entirely,” which is mistaken as one will see from the subsequent discussion. J. Graham Kerr, “Evolutionary Philosophy,” Nature, 119 (2991, Feb. 26, 1927): 307–309. Francis Younghusband, “Holism and Evolution,” Herbert Journal, 25 (1926–1927): 377–379. Anonymous, “Holism and Evolution,” Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 14, 1926, p. 688. Anonymous, “Holism and Evolution,” Boston Transcript, Nov. 6, 1926, p. 1. Anonymous, “Holism and Evolution,” New Republic, Dec. 8, 1926, pp. 88–89. Anonymous, “Holism and Evolution,” Outlook, Dec. 22, 1926, p. 144. Anonymous, “Holism and Evolution,” Saturday Review, Oct. 9, 1926, p. 142. There are no references to Smuts in Henri Bergson’s published works; Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). The vitalism versus mechanism debate was also seen as the very cutting edge of biological research by Erik Nordenskiöld, The History of Biology (New York: Tudor Pub., 1928), pp. 603–616.

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Notes to Pages 73–76

169. For a review see William Morton Wheeler, Emergent Evolution and the Development of Societies (New York: Norton & Co., 1928). 170. A. Wyatt-Tilby, “General Smuts’ Philosophy,” The Nineteenth Century, 101 (1927): 242–254, see pp. 244, 250, 252. A. G. Barlow at Stellenbosch College also believed that holism was an atheist philosophy; see Smuts to S. M. Smuts, May 4, 1927, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 352–353. Samuel Alexander does not mention Smuts’s work in Beauty and Other Forms of Value (London: Macmillan, 1933), and Philosophical and Literary Pieces (London: Macmillan, 1939). 171. Smuts to A. Wyatt-Tilby, Apr. 27, 1928, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 377–379. 172. Kolbe, Catholic View of Holism, 1928, pp. xi, 7, 103. 173. Ibid., pp. 10, 22, 36–51, 85. 174. Kolbe to Smuts, Dec. 31, 1926, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 339–340 (quotation). Smuts’s “Foreword” in Kolbe, Catholic View of Holism, 1928, pp. v–xii. Smuts to Kolbe, Mar. 17 and Oct. 18, 1926, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 284–285, 331– 332. 175. Smuts, “The Theory of Holism,” University of the Witwatersrand, Sept. 21, 1927, Speeches, 1940, p. 132. 176. Smuts, “The Theory of Holism,” 1927, Speeches, 1940, p. 133. 177. Winston Churchill to Smuts, Feb. 21, 1927, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 343. Churchill, The World Crisis, vols. I–II (New York: Scribner, 1923). 178. Bews to Smuts, Oct. 3, 1926, vol. 35, folio 25A, CUL. See also Hutchinson to Smuts, Oct. 1, 1926, vol. 35, folio 200A, CUL. 179. Lewis Reynolds to Smuts, Mar. 21 and Apr. 10, 1926, vol. 36, folio 47–47A, CUL. Smuts to the editor of Voorslag, Apr. 26, 1926, Smuts Papers, vol. 5., pp. 288–289. Editor of Voorslag to Smuts, May 1, 1926, vol. 36, folio 289, CUL. 180. Jan Christian Smuts, “Beauty in Nature,” Voorslag, 1 (1, 1926): 12, 13. Smuts’s article received a favorable review by Sarah Gertrude Millin, “A South African Magazine: Is Voorslag What It Should Be?” Rand Daily Mail, June 26, 1926. 181. Smuts, “Beauty in Nature,” 1926, p. 15. 182. Roy Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography (London: Hollis & Carter, 1951), p. 256. 183. Roy Campbell, The Wayzgoose (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), pp. 12, 38. 184. Ray Campbell to C. J. Sibbett, July 1926, in Colin Gardner and Michael Chapman (eds.), Voorslag: Facsimile Reprint of Numbers 1, 2 and 3 1926 (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1985), appendix F, p. 51. Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse, 1951, p. 255. 185. Roy Campbell, Adamastor (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), p. 103. 186. Smuts to Arthur Gillett, Nov. 10, 1926, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 332. 187. Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 1926, p. 20.

3. The Oxford School of Imperial Ecology 1. Fraser Darling in a comment about Charles Elton, in Anne Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972), p. 41. For a general survey of science at Oxford see Jack Morrell’s excellent book Science at Oxford 1914–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

Notes to Pages 77–81

277 277

2. I use the word “cannibalize” in the same sense as Edward O. Wilson: “Having cannibalized psychology, the new neurobiology will yield an enduring set of principles of sociology.” Sociobiology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 575. 3. “We often hear that ‘argument by analogy’ is likely to be fallacious. I do not think anyone can successfully dispute the proposition. But when it is used as a weapon to oppose all use of analogy in argument I think it wholly misses the mark . . . [T]he construction of an analogy between two series of phenomena is often most helpful in enabling us to focus the phenomena in a new way.” Arthur George Tansley, “Succession: The Concept and Its Values,” Proceedings of the International Congress of Plant Sciences, B. M. Duggar (ed.), vol. 1., Ithaca, New York, Aug. 16–23, 1926 (Menasha: George Banta Publishing Company, 1929), pp. 677–686, quotation on p. 679. 4. Tansley’s autobiographical sketch read to the Magdalen Philosophy Club, May 5, 1932, PSLCU. 5. George Claridge Druce, My Eightieth Birthday, scrapbook, PSLOU. Gertrude Foggitt, “Dr. Druce’s Eightieth Birthday,” The Botanical Society and Exchange Club of the British Isles, 9 (1930): 479–496. 6. In the School of Botany Cyril R. Carter, George Claridge Druce, and Herbert Warren retired in 1926, whereas Francis J. Lys, Arthur W. Pickard-Cambridge, and Edward Armstrong were expected to retire in 1929. Both Carter, Druce, and Warren agreed to work as curators until 1932, though retired. Lys, a provost of Worcester, also continued as an associate until 1935. Oxford University Calendar (1926–1932). For a general survey of botany at Oxford see Morrell, Science at Oxford, 1997, pp. 233–244. 7. Harry Godwin, “Sir Arthur Tansley: The Man and the Subject,” Journal of Ecology, 65 (1977): 1–26, p. 16. 8. Arthur George Tansley, The Future Development and Functions of the Oxford Department of Botany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 5, 17–18. 9. Tansley, Future Development, 1927, pp. 21–22. 10. Ibid., pp. 5, 11. 11. Robert Scott Troup to Denis Harcourt, Nov. 20, 1920. Frederick Keeble to Denis Harcourt, Nov. 20, 1920, folio 222, MS Harcourt, dep. 450, folio 222– 223, BLOU. Anonymous, “Forestry at University of Oxford,” 6 pp., History of the Department box, PSLOU; M. V. Laurie, “The Commonwealth Forestry Institute,” Commonwealth Forestry Review, 46 (1967): 206–211. Morrell, Science at Oxford, 1997, pp. 142–160. 12. Prince of Wales, Speech by H. R. H. The Prince of Wales, Mar. 16, 1926 (London: The Empire Forestry Association, 1926), p. 3. 13. R. S. Pearson, “Professor Robert Scott Troup,” Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, May 24, 1940, pp. 378–381. Edward Percy Stebbing, “Robert Scott Troup,” Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 3 (1940– 1941), pp. 217–219. 14. Arthur George Tansley, “General Course: Lectures Notes” (1928), and “Forestry Ecology Lectures” (1928), “Ecology in the Training of Foresters” (read at the meeting of the British Ecological Society), Oxford, Jan. 2, 1932, PSLCU.

278 278

Notes to Pages 81–84

15. Robert Scott Troup, Silvicultural Systems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), pp. v, 1. 16. D. W. Young, “Silvicultural Systems,” Empire Forestry Journal, 7 (1928): 284– 286. 17. Troup continued until his death in 1939 to teach his and Tansley’s students how to manage silvicultural systems, and this system approach became the major theme in a whole series of monographs and theses on forest management. On the use of sylvicultural systems method see especially the Oxford Forestry Memoires, which Troup edited for the Clarendon Press; see also Robert Scott Troup (ed.), Forestry Bibliography to 31st December 1933, pts. 1–3 (Oxford: Hall the Printer, 1936–1938). 18. Ray Bourne, Aerial Survey in Relation to the Economic Development of the New Countries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). 19. John Moore Brabazon, The Brabazon Story (London: William Heinemann, 1956), pp. 95–96; Forty Years of Flight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949). The owner and managing director of the H. Hemming Company had surveying experience from the war, and the director in charge, Major C. K. Cochran-Patrick, had previous experience in forest surveying from the air in Burma. On the short history of this company see two pamphlets made by its successor Hunting Aerosurveys, Ltd., in the 1950s: Air Survey (Harvard University, Loeb Library, VF NAC 1244H) and Resource Inventory, MSS Afr. s. 1425 Worthington 6, RHLOU. For a general discussion about the panoramic view of nature and some resistance to it see Gregg Mitman’s “When Nature Is the Zoo: Vision and Power in the Art and Science of Natural History,” Osiris, 2nd ser., vol. 2 (1996), pp. 117–143, and Reel Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 20. David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane (London: Macmillan, 1991). See also Robert Wohl, Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Peter Fritzsche, Nation of Fliers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 21. Tansley to Crawford, Sept. 18, 1955, MSS Crawford 107, folio 155, BLOU. Osbert Stanhope Crawford, Air Survey and Archæology (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1924). Osbert Stanhope Crawford and Alexander Keiller, Wessex From the Air (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), chap. 1. 22. Osbert Stanhope Crawford, Said and Done (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1955), pp. 49–50, 107–126. Morrell, Science at Oxford, 1997, pp. 153–155. 23. Bourne, Aerial Survey, 1928, p. 5. One of Bourne’s chief sources of inspiration was Bennett Melvill Jones and Major J. C. Griffiths’s Aerial Surveying by Rapid Methods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), a book about the new method of mosaic aerial surveying. Ray Bourne, “Aerial Surveying by Rapid Methods,” Empire Forestry Journal, 5 (1926): 317–319. 24. Ibid., p. 19. 25. Ibid., p. 5. 26. Ibid., p. 16, Bourne’s emphasis. 27. Ibid., p. 17. 28. Ibid., pp. 15, 17, n. 1.

Notes to Pages 85–88 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

279 279

C. E. C. Fischer, “Aerial Survey,” Empire Forestry Journal, 7 (1928): 292–294. Anonymous, “New Books Received,” Journal of Ecology, 17 (1929): 182–183. Bourne, Aerial Survey, 1928, p. 11. Aeronautical correspondent, “Air Surveys: Value for the Empire: The Case of Northern Rhodesia,” The Times, Oct. 9, 1928. The numbers were corrected by H. Hemming, managing director of the Aircraft Operating Company, in a letter to the Editor of the Times, Oct. 1928. Aeronautical correspondent, “Air Surveys,” The Times, 1928. Henry Phelps Brown, “Carr-Saunders,” Dictionary of National Biography, 1961–1970, pp. 175–176 (quotation). Frank Cecil Roberts (ed.), Obituaries from the Times, 1961–1970, pp. 126–127. On the history of the eugenics movement see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Julian Huxley, Memories (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 7. For a review of Huxley’s life and work see Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys (New York: McGrawHill, 1968); Jens-Peter Green, Krise und Hoffnung (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universiteätsverlag, 1981); John Rendal Baker, “Julian Sorell Huxley,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 22 (1976): 207–238. On Huxley’s endorsement of eugenics see David Hubback, “Julian Huxley and Eugenics,” Evolutionary Studies, Milo Keynes and G. Ainsworth Harrison (eds.) (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 194–206. Garland E. Allen, “Julian Huxley and the Eugenical View of Human Evolution,” and Elizar Barkan, “The Dynamics of Huxley’s Views on Race and Eugenics,” in Julian Huxley, C. Kenneth Waters and Albert Van Helden (eds.) (Houston: Rice University Press, 1992), pp. 193–222, 223–237. Morrell, Science at Oxford, 1997, pp. 273–286. Huxley, Memories, 1970, pp. 41, 54, 97. Huxley also had a nervous breakdown at Oxford in 1913. He wrote several love poems—“including one about the ‘Cupid’s bow’ of his mouth”—to Eric Forbes-Adam, who later committed suicide. Huxley was married and did not openly admit that he was homosexual, only that he had “unresolved conflicts about sex” (p. 153). Huxley, Memories, 1970, p. 55. Cox and Crowcroft state that Huxley was Elton’s mentor and ignore the importance of Carr-Saunders. The evidence for this is in Huxley’s account in his Memories, and in his preface to Animal Ecology. A closer look at the sources reveals that Elton could not have graduated from Oxford without two independent mentors, of which the other one was Carr-Saunders. On the exam requirements at the Department of Zoology see Economy Advisory Council, Education and Supply of Biologists (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), pp. 54–55. For an extensive review of zoological literature in the context of Elton’s research see Cox, Charles Elton, 1979. David L. Cox, Charles Elton and the Emergence of Modern Ecology, Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1979, p. 8. Elton in interview with Cox, Nov. 2, 1977. See also Peter Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists: A History of the Bureau of Animal Population (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 1–3. Huxley, Memories, 1970, pp. 128–134. Trygve Mathisen, Svalbard in International Politics 1871–1925 (Oslo: Brøggers

280 280

41. 42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

Notes to Pages 88–89 Boktrykkeries Forlag, 1954); Svalbard in the Changing Arctic (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1954). For a review of the debate from the American perspective see Louis Gray, Spitsbergen and Bear Island, confidential report, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919). Adolf Hoel, Svalbard (Oslo: Sverre Kildahls Boktrykkeri, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 71–110. For a critical review of diplomatic arguments concerning the Spitsbergen Treatise negotiations see Ellen C. Singh and Artemy A. Sauguirian, “The Svalbard Archipelago,” Polar Politics, Oran R. Young and Gail Osherenko (eds.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 56–95. Adolf Hoel, “Bjørneøens kulturfelter og mineralforekomster,” MS 1915, NPRI SM-3142. This was the opinion of Colonel Sir Charles Yate; see James Mann Wordie, “Present Conditions in Spitsbergen,” Geographical Journal, 58 (1921): 45–49, especially pp. 47–48. Martin Conway, No Man’s Land: A History of Spitsbergen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906). William S. Bruce, “Prince Charles Foreland,” The Scottish Geographical Magazine, Mar. 1907, pp. 141–156. Kurt Wegener, “Introduction,” in By Airplane towards the North Pole: An Account of an Expedition to Spitsbergen in the Summer of 1923, Walter Mittelholzer (ed.) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925), pp. 46–47 (quotation). Mathisen, Svalbard in International Politics, 1954, pp. 101–150. On the arctic Gibraltar see The Daily Express, Dec. 1918. Robert Rudmose Brown, Spitsbergen: An Account of Exploration, Hunting, the Mineral Riches & Future Potentials of an Arctic Archipelago (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1920). This was the opinion of Robert Rudmose Brown in the Geographical Society; see Wordie, “Present Conditions in Spitsbergen,” 1921, pp. 45–46. The Foreign Office, Spitsbergen (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1920), p. 9. The Council of the Royal Geographical Society, “British Interests in Spitsbergen,” Geographical Journal, 51 (1918): 245–249. Wordie, “Present Conditions in Spitsbergen,” 1921, pp. 25–49. Comment by Colonel Charles Yate, p. 48. On the rich history of Spitsbergen exploration and annexation see Hoel, Svalbard, 1966–1967, vols. 1–3. Seton Gordon, Amid Snowy Wastes (London: Cassell & Co., 1922), pp. 3, 8, 77; see also George Binney, With Seaplane and Sledge in the Arctic (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1925), p. 265. Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, appendix A, pp. 257–258. Summerhayes was born in 1897 and graduated in 1920 with a first-class honors degree in botany from University College, London, and continued his studies with a grant from the Quain trusteeship. After finishing his Spitsbergen studies in 1924, he joined Chipp at the Botanical Gardens, Kew, where he was in charge of the orchid herbarium until his retirement in 1964. Anonymous, “In Memoriam—Victor Samual Summerhayes,” American Orchid Society Bulletin, 44 (1975): 200. Elton to Huxley, Aug. 31, 1921, RUW; Tom Longstaff, This My Voyage (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), p. 240; Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, pp. 13–17.

Notes to Pages 89–93

281 281

53. Elton, “The Oxford University Expedition to Spitsbergen,” MS 1978–1983, NPRI 91(08);(*32)1921, quotation on p. 6. 54. Julian Huxley, “Spitsbergen Summer” (1921), The Captive Shrew (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1932), pp. 27–28. On Huxley’s activities at Spitsbergen see Clark, Huxleys, 1968, pp. 187–190. 55. Elton, “Expedition to Spitsbergen,” MS 1978–1983, NPRI 91(08);(*32)1921, p. 13. 56. Adolf Hoel, “Eiendomsretten til Bjørnøya,” MS 1919, NPRI SM-0172. Johan Gunnar Andersson, “Några drag af Beeren Eilands koloniastionshistoria,” Ymer, 21 (1901): 35–58. 57. Adolf Hoel, A. Kvalheim, and Claus Schive, “Bjørnøya,” MS 1918, NPRI SM1699, see also SM-0172. Adolf Hoel, “The Coal Deposits of Spitsbergen and Bjørnøya and Their Importance to Norway,” Anglo-Norwegian Trade Journal, Aug. 1922, pp. 171–173; “Kullforekomstene på Svalbard,” Norsk Tidsskrift for Sjøvesen, 42 (1924): 163–184. On the plan for development of Bear Island see the report from Fennell, Green & Booth, “Inberetning om Bjørnøen,” Print 1919, NPRI SM-0091. 58. Elton, “Expedition to Spitsbergen,” MS 1978–1983, NPRI 91(08);(*32)1921, pp. 23–30. See also Longstaff, This My Voyage, 1950, p. 241. Hoel, Svalbard, vol. 3, 1967, pp. 1388–1393. The mining manager was John Brook and the manager in charge was Thor Haabeth. 59. Victor Samuel Summerhayes and Charles Sutherland Elton, “Contributions to the Ecology of Spitsbergen and Bear Island,” Journal of Ecology, 11 (1923): 214–286, illustration on p. 232. 60. Elton, “Expedition to Spitsbergen,” MS 1978–1983, NPRI 91(08);(*32)1921, p. 30. 61. Ibid., pp. 64–66, 157. 62. Ibid., p. 81. In the summer of 1921 the Scottish Spitsbergen Syndicate sent a coal mining expedition to Bruce City. See Hoel, Svalbard, vol. 3, 1967, pp. 1067–1070. 63. F. C. R. Jourdain, “The Birds of Spitsbergen and Bear Island,” Ibis, 4 (1922): 159–179. On the results of Huxley’s research on birds at Spitsbergen see Richard W. Burkhardt, “Huxley and the Rise of Ethology,” Julian Huxley, C. Kenneth Waters and Albert Van helden (eds.) (Houston: Rice University Press, 1992), pp. 139–150. For an excellent review of Huxley’s research on bird courtship see Mary Bartley, “Courtship and Continued Progress: Julian Huxley’s Studies on Bird Behavior,” Journal of the History of Biology, 28 (1995): 91–108. On research by the sledge party see R. A. Frazer, “The Topographical Work of the Oxford University Expedition to Spitsbergen (1921),” Geographical Journal, 60 (1922): 321–336. 64. Elton, “Expedition to Spitsbergen,” MS 1978–1983, NPRI 91(08);(*32)1921, pp. 81–155. John Walton, “A Spitsbergen Salt Marsh: With Observations on the Ecological Phenomena Attendant on the Emergence of Land from the Sea,” Journal of Ecology, 10 (1922): 109–121. Longstaff, This My Voyage, 1950, p. 247. 65. Elton to Huxley, July 16, Aug. 19, and Aug. 30 (quotation), 1921, RUW.

282 282

66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

Notes to Pages 93–95 Charles Elton, “On the Colours of Water-Mites,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 90 (1922): 1231–1239. Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders, The Population Problem: A Study in Human Evolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), pp. 5, 17. Carr-Saunders, Population Problem, 1922, chap. 6. Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, p. 14: “Such as Britain was then, so is Spitsbergen now.” Carr-Saunders, Population Problem, 1922, pp. 80–81, 290 (quotation). Malthus was clearly a chief source of inspiration for Carr-Saunders, but unlike Malthus he thought industrial production and not food was the limiting factor for human reproduction (p. 201). Carr-Saunders, Population Problem, 1922, chap. 12. Carr-Saunders based his argument on calculations done by G. H. Knibbs, “The Problems of Population: Food Supply and Migration,” Scientia Rivista di Scienca, 26 (1919): 485–495. Anonymous, “Malthus Up to Date,” The Saturday Review, 134 (1922): 385– 386. Anonymous, “Crowding and Crossing,” Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 30, 1922, p. 733. Anonymous, “Population Problem,” Boston Evening Transcript, Aug. 19, 1922, p. 6. Anonymous, “Population Problem,” Nation, Sept. 27, 1922, p. 115. Anonymous, “Population Problem,” Nation and Athenæum, 31 (1922): 378. Anonymous, “Population Problem,” New Statesman, 19 (1922): 302. Anonymous, “Population Problem,” American Reviews of Reviews, 66 (1922): 447. Anonymous, “Population Problem,” Spector, 129 (1922): 731. Anonymous, “Population Problem,” Survey, 49 (1922): 192. E. H. Sutherland, “Population Problem,” American Journal of Sociology, 28 (1923): 498. Edwards Alsworth Ross, “Population Problem,” New Republic, Nov. 29, 1922, pp. 15–16. Alexander Morris Carr-Saunders and P. A. Wilson, The Professions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). R. A. Frazer, “Central Spitsbergen and North-East Land,” Geographical Journal, 64 (1924): 193–204. E. R. Relf, “The Cruise of the Terningen,” in Geographical Journal, 64 (1924): 204–213. Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, appendix B, pp. 259–260. Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, pp. 30–34, 38, appendix D, p. 254. George Binney, “The Oxford University Arctic Expedition,” Geographical Journal, 66 (1925): 9–37, with appendices by expedition members on pp. 111–134; on patronage see p. 11. Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, p. 18. Ibid., p. 31. Air Ministry, Half-Yearly Report on the Progress of Civil Aviation (London: Department of the Controller-General of Civil Aviation, 1921), p. 39. Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, p. 13–17, quotation on p. 13. The expedition was in competition with a Swiss-German airplane expedition; see Mittelholzer (ed.), By Airplane towards the North Pole, 1925. Charles Elton, “The Nature and Origin of Soil-Polygons in Spitsbergen,” Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 83 (1927): 163–194. Charles Elton, “The Dispersal of Insects to Spitsbergen,” Transactions of the Entomological Society of London (1925), pp. 289–299. He did describe some of the insects himself. See his articles “Coleoptera and Lepidoptera from Spitsbergen,” Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 9 (16, 1925): 357–359, and “Aphids

Notes to Pages 95–100

79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

92.

93.

283 283

and Hover-flies in North-East Land (Spitsbergen) in 1924,” Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London, 4 (1929): 76–77. Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, p. 35. K. S. Sandford, “Summer in the North-East Land, 1924: The Climate and Surface Changes,” Geographical Journal, 68 (1926): 200–225. Binney, With Seaplane, 1925, pp. 149, 252 with the subtext of the photo. Ibid., p. 40 with photo of a bird nest below the airplane; on Elton see p. 183. Charles Elton, “Periodic Fluctuations in the Numbers of Animals,” British Journal of Experimental Biology, 2 (1924–1925): 119–163, quotation on p. 125. “Lemming-years in Norway have the status of great floods or terrible winters.” Elton, “Periodic Fluctuations,” 1924, p. 126. Robert Collett, Norges Pattedyr (Kristiania: Aschehoug, 1911–1912), pp. 144–159. Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists, 1991, p. 4. Elton maintained the lemming fable for years; see Charles Elton, Animal Ecology (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 133. For a scientific account of Elton’s research on lemmings in the 1920s and early 1930s and the survival of the fairy tale among animal ecologists see Dennis Chitty, Do Lemmings Commit Suicide? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Elton, “Periodic Fluctuations,” 1924, quotations on pp. 152, 153. Elton to Huxley, Apr. 2, 1923, RUW. Cox, Charles Elton, 1979, pp. 29–31. Arthur J. Ray, Canadian Fur Trade in the Industrial Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 171–198. One of those collectors recalls that he had no clue what to collect except something on “life cycles of the lemming.” He consequently sent some boxes of lemmings from Lake Harbour in Canada to Elton in Oxford. Whether Elton used these specimens is unknown. Dudley Coplan, Coplalook: Chief Trader, Hudson’s Bay Company 1923–1939 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer Pub., 1985), pp. 130– 131. Elton to Huxley, undated 1925, RUW. Charles Sutherland Elton, Voles, Mice and Lemmings (Oxford: Oxford University, 1942), chap. 13 and appendix. Ellsworth Huntington, Matamek Conference on Biological Cycles (Canadian Labrador: Matamek Factory, 1932), p. 15. The plate was produced by the Hudson’s Bay Company based on Elton’s research in the late 1920s. Elton to Huxley, Apr. 8, 1924, RUW. On the paternalistic treatment of native people by the Hudson’s Bay Company see Ray, Canadian Fur Trade, 1990, pp. 199–228. Anonymous (ed.) [The Organizing Committee of the Oxford University Expedition/Charles Elton], Spitsbergen Papers, vol. 1–2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925, 1929). J. B. S. Haldane, like Huxley and Carr-Saunders, was also from Eton and about the same age as his Oxford colleagues. Born in 1892, he was the son of J. S. Haldane, who will emerge later in this book as a true follower of Smuts’s holism. Junior was no holist, and to his father’s despair championed a radical left, mechanism, and social revolution. He began teaching physiology at Oxford in 1919 and left for Cambridge in 1921, but he continued to collaborate with Huxley and the Oxford ecologists. J. B. S. Haldane and Julian Huxley, Animal Biology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927). Huxley, “Fragments from a ‘Freudian Faustulus’” (1929), Captive Shrew, 1932,

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94.

95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101.

102.

103.

104.

105.

Notes to Pages 100–103 pp. 61–74; see also “Repression: After Reading Freud” (1928), p. 43. Huxley, Memories, 1970, p. 179. Cox, Charles Elton, 1979, 74–75, 78–79; Huxley, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Elton, Animal Ecology, 1927, pp. xiii–xiv. Elton was very grateful to Huxley for his education; see Elton to Huxley, Sept. 19, 1925, RUW. Elton, Animal Ecology, 1927, “Author’s Preface,” quotations on pp. vii and viii. Elton, Animal Ecology, 1927, pp. 5–18, quotation on p. 19, plate 1, photo by Captain C. R. Robbins, praise of Tansley on pp. 3, 23, 32, 168. Whereas Edward O. Wilson maintains the Martian perception, Elton prefers the more modest view from a balloon. The chronological difference between them is apparent in the increasing distance one needs from the Earth to maintain an ecological overview, as well as the need for new technologies to achieve the distance. See Wilson, Sociobiology, 1975, p. 271. Elton, Animal Ecology, 1927, pp. 63–64, 113–114. Carr-Saunders, Population Problem, 1922, pp. 106–162, 197–242, 407–436. Elton, Animal Ecology, 1927, pp. 61, 121. Elton refers to hunting of storkobbe (Erignathus barbatus). Ibid., p. 190. Robert Ezra Park and Ernst W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921), p. 559. They argued that “the ecological conception of society is that of a society created by competitive cooperation” along the lines of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Roderick Duncan McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community,” in Robert Ezra Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick Duncan McKenzie (eds.), The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), pp. 63–73. Roderick Duncan McKenzie, “The Scope of Human Ecology,” Papers and Proceedings: The American Sociological Society, 20 (1925): 141–154. Harlan Barrows, “Geography as Human Ecology,” Association of American Geographers, 13 (1923): 1–14, reprinted in Gerald L. Young (ed.), Origins of Human Ecology (Stroudsburg: Hutchinson Ross Publishing Company, 1983). Ellsworth Huntington and Stephen Sargent Visher, Climatic Changes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), p. 279. They based their argument on astronomical observations of the patterns of sunspots and on geological and biological strata in the earth. Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate, 3rd rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), figs. 43–44, p. 295. See also Huntington’s WorldPower and Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), especially chap. 3: “Business Cycles in Foreign Countries.” Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer have written an interesting and influential conceptual history of the institutionalization of the ecology of trading within life-zones. This article successfully explores the ecology of trading, but seems to lack a deeper conceptual and contextual discussion of “life-zones” with human ecological division of labor; see “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects,” 1989; see especially pp. 404–406. Huntington, Civilization and Climate, 3rd ed., 1924, chap. 11, “The Distribution of Civilization.” Victor Samuel Summerhayes and Charles Elton, “Further Contributions to the Ecology of Spitsbergen,” Journal of Ecology, 16 (1928): 193–268.

Notes to Pages 103–107

285 285

106. In the experiments they took topless teenage girls with tuberculosis on skiing trips in the sun. Leonard Hill and Argyll Campbell, Health and Environment (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1925), plates 5 and 7, pp. 109–110, 150. 107. Elton, Animal Ecology, 1927, p. 191. 108. W. L. Taylor, “Animal Ecology,” Empire Forestry Journal, 9 (1930): 157–159. Walter Penn Taylor, “Animal Ecology,” Science, Nov. 9, 1928, pp. 455–456. 109. Anonymous, “The New Natural History,” New York Herald Tribune Books, Jan. 22, 1928, p. 15. See similarly anonymous reviews: Anonymous, “Animal Ecology,” Saturday Review of Literature, Jan., 21, 1928. Anonymous, “Animal Ecology,” New Statesman, Apr. 2, 1928. Anonymous, “Animal Ecology,” Springfield Republican Spectator, Apr. 23, 1928. 110. Anonymous, “Natural History of the General Reader,” Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 8, 1927, p. 931. 111. Arthur George Tansley, “Animal Ecology,” Journal of Ecology, 16 (1928): 163– 169, quotations on pp. 168, 169. 112. Arthur George Tansley, “Botany as a University Subject for Candidates for Colonial Appointments,” School Science Review, 39 (Mar. 1929): 179–183, quotation on pp. 182–183. 113. Elton’s first female graduate student was Gillian Godfrey; see Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists, 1991, pp. 58–59. 114. Arthur George Lowndes, “The Occurrence of eurytemora lacinulata and diaptomus gracilis: A Critical Note,” Journal of Ecology, 17 (1929): 380–382, quotation on p. 382. 115. Charles Elton, “The Ecological Relations of Certain Freshwater Copepods,” Journal of Ecology, 17 (1929): 383–391, quotation on p. 391. 116. Elton to Huxley, July 23, 1928, RUW. 117. Charles Elton, “Notices of Publications on Animal Ecology,” Journal of Ecology, 16 (1928): 172–177, 399–411, quotation on pp. 172–173. Similarly in vols. 17–19 (1929–1931) in Journal of Ecology; from 1932 this series of notices continued in every volume of Journal of Animal Ecology. 118. Cox, Charles Elton, 1979, p. 153. Frederic Clements, “The Nature of the Problem of Cycles,” and “Climatic Cycles and Changes in Vegetation”; Andrew Elliott Douglass, “General Methods in the Advance of Cycle Studies”; Ellsworth Huntington, “Cycles and Health” and “Causes of Cycles”; W. C. White, “Life Cycles and Disease”; C. F. Marvin, “Characteristics of Cycles”; H. L. Moore, “Economic Cycles”; all in Carnegie Institution of Washington, Reports on the Conferences on Cycles (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1929). See also Geoffrey J. Martin, Ellsworth Huntington (Hamden, Conn.: Archan Books, 1973), pp. 214–215. 119. Elton, Voles, Mice and Lemmings, 1942, p. 184. 120. The conference seems to have inspired Leopold; his book about game management, written shortly after the conference, is filled with the details of how to coordinate nature’s life cycles with human economy in the most efficient way. At the conference Leopold advocated his famous land ethic, which took as its departure the aims and values of his patrons or the “people with whom I am associated” (the ammunition manufacturers). For a nature out of balance he suggested developing rather harsh management schemes by enforcing a “kill curve”

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121. 122. 123.

124.

125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

Notes to Pages 107–110 parallel to disease curves for over-populated species. He explains that one has to be effective and tough since “nothing is usually to be gained by killing less than two-thirds” of an animal population to get an ecological effect. Leopold, comments, Foundation for the Study of Cycles (ed.), Matamek Conference on Biological Cycles (Canadian Labrador: Matamek Factory, 1933), pp. 25, 53–54, 244– 245. Leopold refers to bird populations in relation the British Red Grouse. A patronage perspective may provide a different reading of Leopold’s land ethic, which was made famous by a series of environmental philosophers and historians during the 1970s and beyond; see for example Max Oelschalger, Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 205–242. Baird J. Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). Aldo Leopold, Game Management (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933). The best discussion of the patronage of Leopold’s land ethic is in Curt Meine’s book Aldo Leopold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 259– 289. Huntington, “The Ebb and Flow of Human Population,” in Foundation for the Study of Cycles (ed.), Matamek Conference, 1933, pp. 88–97, 102. Elton in a comment on Huntington’s paper, Foundation for the Study of Cycles (ed.), Matamek Conference, 1933, p. 98. Charles Elton, “Fluctuations in Wild Life,” Foundation for the Study of Cycles (ed.), Matamek Conference, 1933, pp. 14–18, quotation on p. 18. Elton refers to (unspecified) works by the Italian mathematician Vito Volterra; on his importance to the history of population ecology see the penetrating book by Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 106–116. The history of the Bureau of Animal Population has been reviewed by David Cox, Peter Crowford, and Jack Morrell; readers interested in Elton’s subsequent life should look into their work. Notice also that Phillips tried unsuccessfully to convince Elton to apply for a professorship in zoology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Phillips to Allee, Dec. 26, 1932, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. Crowcroft, Elton’s Ecologists, 1991. Cox, Charles Elton, 1979, pp. 158–161. Morrell, Science at Oxford, 1997, pp. 268–304. Charles Elton, Animal Ecology and Evolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); The Ecology of Animals (London: Methuen & Co., 1933); Exploring the Animal World (London; George Allen & Unwin, 1933). Arthur George Tansley, “Ecology of Animals [and] Exploring the Animal World,” Journal of Ecology, 22 (1934); 318. Nicholson to Huxley, Jan. 29, Oct. 28, 1928, RUW. Tom Harrison (ed.), Borneo Jungle: An Account of the Oxford Expedition to Sarawak (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938), p. 23. Oxford University Exploration Club, Annual Report, 1928–1938, with final list of members in the 1938 Report, pp. 24–31. Harrison in Borneo Jungle, 1938, p. 14. See Alexander R. Glen, Young Men in the Arctic (London: Faber & Faber, 1935); Under the Pole Star (London: Methuen Pub., 1937). Edward Shackleton, Arctic Journeys (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1936). A. S. T. Godfrey, The Cradle of the North Wind (London: Methuen & Co., 1938).

Notes to Pages 110–112

287 287

131. Oxford University Exploration Club, British Guiana Papers, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), preface, p. 1. 132. Oxford University Exploration Club, Annual Report, 1933, p. 13. 133. Nicholas Polunin, The Isle of Auks (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1932), pp. 118, 155–157; “The Vegetation of Akpatok Island,” Journal of Ecology, 22 (1934): 337–395; Arctic Unfolding (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949); “Arctic Aerobiology,” Nature, 168 (1951): 718–721; “Seeking Airborne Botanical Particles About the North Poles,” Svensk Botanisk Tiddskrift, 45 (1951): 320– 354. Anonymous, “Nicholas Polunin,” Daily Telegraph, Dec. 15, 1998. Norman Mayers, “Nicholas Polunin,” in Population and Global Security, Nicholas Polunin (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. vii–ix. 134. Gilbert White, Natural History of Selborne, edited with an introduction and notes by Edward Max Nicholson and illustrated with engravings by Eric Daglish (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929). On this Arcadian tradition in ecological reasoning see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chap. 1. Oelschalger, Idea of Wilderness, 1991, pp. 104–107. 135. Tansley to Huxley, July 17, 1927, RUW. Huxley, Memories, 1970, pp. 135–154. 136. Julian Huxley, “Biology and Utopia” (1923), in Essays in Popular Science (New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 71. 137. H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 91, 98, 106, 260–315. Peter Kemp, H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (New York: St. Martins Press, 1982). 138. Huxley, “Biology and Utopia,” 1923, p. 73. 139. Baker, “Julian Sorell Huxley,” 1976, p. 211. The final agreement between Wells and Huxley was nailed down in a memorandum dated Nov. 18, 1925, in David C. Smith (ed.), The Correspondence of H. G. Wells (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), vol. 3, p. 201, hereafter Correspondence. Huxley, Memories, 1970, pp. 155–178. 140. Huxley, Memories, 1970, pp. 147, 156, 158. Huxley was guaranteed £4,000 as a minimum, and the £10,000 stipulation was conservative. Wells had just earned £60,000 on his Outline of History, vols. 1–2 (New York: Macmillan, 1920). 141. Wells to Huxley, July 14, 1927, Aug 6, 1927, Dec. 22, 1927, Feb. 12, 1928, Feb. 23, 1928, mid-March 1928, Oct. 3, 1928, Oct. 29, 1928, early Nov. 1928, end of 1928, Wells, Correspondence, vol. 3, 1998, pp. 201, 241, 244, 254–255, 258–260, 270–272, 274–275, 290. 142. H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G. P. Wells, The Science of Life (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1931), vols. 1–2, first published as thirty fortnightly segments from March 1929 until May 1930 by The Amalgamated Press Ltd., London. For a discussion of the importance of social progress in the book see Green, “Interaction of Science and World View,” 1990. 143. Wells, Huxley, Wells, Science of Life, issue 21/30, Dec. 12, 1929, front cover with text on reverse side (not in the 1930 or 1931 editions). 144. Elton to Huxley, Feb. 18, 1929, RUW. Wells to Huxley, Oct. 3, 1928, Wells, Correspondence, 1998, vol. 3, pp. 270–272. Herbert George Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York: The Macmillan, 1934), p. 617. 145. Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, 1930, vol. 2, p. 961.

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Notes to Pages 113–116

146. Ibid., pp. 961–962. 147. Eugene Cittadino argues that “human ecology was largely an American enterprise” in the 1930s; see his “The Failed Promise of Human Ecology,” Science and Nature, Michael Shortland (ed.) (Oxford: BSHS Monographs, 1993), pp. 252–253. 148. Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, 1930, vol. 2, p. 973. On some of the philosophical context with respect to nature’s agency see Helen Denham, “The Cunning of Unreason and Nature’s Revolt: Max Horkheimer and William Leiss on the Domination of Nature,” Environment and History, 3 (1997): 149–175, see pp. 166–168. 149. Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, 1930, vol. 2, p. 1027. 150. Ibid., pp. 1027, 1028. 151. Ibid., p. 1028. 152. Ibid., pp. 1028, 1029. 153. Ibid., p. 1029. 154. Ibid., p. 1030. 155. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 157. Robert Skidelsky argues convincingly that H. G. Wells was not a follower of Keynes, nor were Huxley and Nicholson, as members of the Political and Economic Planning organization inspired by the famous economist. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 161, 438, 518–519. On the gold standard and the economic depression see Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919– 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 158. On the discipline of labor and nature in the tradition from Helmholtz, see Robert M. Brain and M. Norton Wise, “Muscles and Engines,” Universalgenie Helmholtz, Lorenz Krüger (ed.) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), pp. 124–145. See also Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), especially chap. 1: “Society as Factory.” 159. Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, 1930, vol. 2, book 7, chaps. 2–4, book 8, chaps. 5–8. 160. Ibid., pp. 1030–1032, 1088–1090, 1465, 1475–1476. 161. Interestingly, in a novel Wells wrote while working with his son and Huxley, he describes the famous Oxford Bodleian Library in terms of “the brain of God.” The novel itself mirrors the activity of the Oxford Exploration Club; a young Oxford student suffers shipwreck on a small island (an icon of ecology) where he discovers a tribe of barbarians whom he introduces to the vice and virtues of western civilization. H. G. Wells, Mr. Blattsworthy on Rampole Island (New York: Doubleday, 1928), p. 191. 162. Anonymous, “Wells at His Best,” American Mercury, 22 (1931): 381–383. Anonymous, “Biology and Human Life,” Nature, 127 (1931): 477–479. Anonymous, “Science of Life,” Times Literary Supplement, Mar. 14, 1929, p. 211. Anonymous, “Our Booking-Office,” Punch, 180 (1931); 306. Anonymous, “The Living World,” Nature, 140 (1937): 484–485. W. A. B., “Books,” Canadian Forum, 15 (1935): 196. Howard Wilcox Haggard, “Stream of Life,”

Notes to Pages 116–121

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Yale Review, 20 (1931): 834–835. J. Johnstone, “Science of Life,” Philosophy, 6 (1931): 506–507. Stuart Petre Brodie Mais, “Mr. Wells Looks at Life,” Bookman, 80 (1931): 22–23. 163. On these editions see Huxley to Wells, letter end of 1928, Wells, Correspondence, 1998, vol. 3, p. 283, editorial note 1. 164. Elton to Huxley, Feb. 18, 1929, RUW.

4. Holism and the Ecosystem Controversy 1. Jean-Marc Drouin, Réinventor la nature: L’écologie et son histoire (Paris: Desdée de Brouwer, 1991), pp. 92–94. See also Pascal Acot, Histoire de l’ecologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988). 2. J. S. Haldane, The Sciences and Philosophy (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1929), pp. 120–149. 3. J. S. Haldane to Smuts, Dec. 13, 1928; Smuts to Haldane, Feb. 6, 1929, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 385–387. Haldane to Smuts, Jan. 4, Mar. 25, and June 20, 1929, vol. 42, folio 2–4, CUL. Report of the British Association, South Africa 1929, pp. 384–400. 4. Bews to Smuts, Oct. 3, 1926, vol. 35, folio 25A, CUL. John William Bews, Studies in the Plant Ecological Evolution of the Angiosperms (London: Wheldon & Wesley, 1927). 5. John Phillips, “Ecological Evolution of the Angiosperms,” Ecology, 11 (1930): 224–226. 6. Bews to Pole Evans, June 1924, vol. 38, folio 122, CUL. John William Bews, The World Grasses: Their Differentiation, Distribution Economics and Ecology (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1929). 7. Anonymous, “Agricultural Science and Grassland,” Nature, 125 (Jan. 25, 1930): 119–121. E. B., “The World’s Grasses,” Journal of the African Society, 29 (1929–1930): 319–320. A. B. R., “The World’s Grasses,” The Journal of Botany, 68 (1930): 121–123. L. D. Stamp, “The World Grasses,” Economica, 10 (1930): 350–351. A. Z., “The World Grasses,” Der Tropenpflanzen, 33 (1930): 435. 8. John Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah and the Future of Africa (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 19. 9. John Phillips, “The Application of Ecological Research Methods to the Tsetse Problem in Tanganyika Territory,” Journal of South African Research, 26 (1929): 438–440. 10. Allee to Phillips, May 10, 1928, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. Gregg Mitman, State of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11. Phillips to Allee, Nov. 12, 1929, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. 12. John Phillips, “Fire: Its Influence on Biotic Communities,” South African Journal of Science, 27 (1930): 352–367. 13. John Phillips, “The Influence of Usnea sp. (Near barbata Fr.) upon the Supporting Tree,” Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 17 (1929): 101– 107. 14. John Phillips, “Some Important Vegetation Communities in the Central Prov-

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

Notes to Pages 121–123 ince of Tanganyika Territory,” Journal of Ecology, 18 (1930): 13. For criticism of this article in relation to settlement policy, see Clement Gillman, “East African Vegetation Types” (letter to the editor), Journal of Ecology, 24 (1936): 503–505. Phillips to Allee, Jan. 1, 1930, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 2, p. 210. Phillips to Smuts, May 24, 1929, vol. 42, folio 164, CUL. Phillips to Smuts, June 13, 1929, vol. 42, folio 165, CUL. Tansley to Allee, Nov. 13 1929. Allee passed this compliment along to Phillips in a letter dated Dec. 18, 1929, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. Phillips to Allee, June 5, 1931; Tansley to Allee, Nov. 13, 1929, MSS Warder Clyde Allee Papers 21, folder 3, UCL. George Philip Wells, “Lancelot Thomas Hogben,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 24 (1978): 183–221, quotation on p. 184, motto on p. 190. Gary Werskey argues that Hogben was an intellectual “outsider.” This may be the case in relation to the “visible college” but not with respect to Hogben’s activity in Cape Town, see Gary Werskey, Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (London: Free Association Books, 1988), pp. 101–114. Huxley to Smuts, May 23, 1926, vol. 35, folio 201, CUL; Smuts to Margaret Gillett, June 30, 1926, Smuts Papers, vol. 5., pp. 302–304; Huxley to Smuts Oct. 15, 1927, vol. 38, folio 41, CUL; Smuts to Huxley, Nov. 22, 1927, RUW. See also comment by Elton to Huxley, July 15, 1925, RUW. Biographical information about Adamson is very sparse; the best but still insufficient entry is in “Dictionary of Plant Collectors,” in Mary Gunn and L. E. Codd, Botanical Exploration of South Africa, pt. 2 (Cape Town: The Botanical Research Institute, 1981), pp. 77–78. See also Howard Phillips, The University of Cape Town 1918–1948 (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1993), pp. 349–352. It is telling that in his article about plant communities on Table Mountain (the very icon of Smuts’s holism) he makes no allusion to holism or reference to Smuts, Phillips, or Bews. Robert Adamson, “The Plant Communities of the Table Mountain,” Journal of Ecology, 15 (1927): 278–309, and 19 (1931): 304–320. Adamson had worked together with Tansley on several papers; see “The Chalk Grasslands of the Hampshire Sussex Border,” Journal of Ecology, 13 (1925): 177–223; “Studies of the Vegetation of the English Chalk,” Journal of Ecology, 14 (1926): 1–32. He had previously defended Tansley’s research principles from the Imperial Botanical Conference of 1924; see “Some Problems of Vegetation in South Africa,” South African Journal of Science, 24 (1927): 37–49. Adamson later published The Vegetation of South Africa (London: British Empire Vegetation Committee, 1938) with Tansley’s support as the only monograph paid for by the Empire Vegetation Committee. George P. Wells, “Lancelot Thomas Hogben,” 1978, pp. 196–197. Hogben knew all too well the fate of Roy Campbell, who was chased out of South Africa because of his provoking poetry. Hogben subsequently published, under the pseudonym Kenneth Calvin Page, A Journey to Nineveh (London: Noel Douglas, 1932), a collection containing anti-racist poetry. These verses are taken from “Church Parade on Deck” and “Fellow Passengers,” pp. 34–35.

Notes to Pages 123–126

291 291

25. Smuts in a diary note to his wife, July 31, 1929, vol. 43, folio 122, CUL. Report of the British Association, South Africa 1929, pp. 373, 380–381. Lancelot Hogben, The Nature of Living Matter (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co., 1930), p. vii. 26. Edward and Win Roux, Rebel Pity (London: Rex Collings, 1970), p. 76. 27. Hogben, Nature of Living Matter, 1930, pp. 8–10, quotation on p. 8. Roy Campbell is quoted in the beginning of Chapter 8. 28. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Aug. 31, 1927, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 358. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927). 29. Hogben, Nature of Living Matter, 1930, pp. 192, 290–294. Hogben’s reference is not precise, but he is probably thinking about J. B. S. Haldane, “A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection,” Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 23 (1924): 19–41. 30. Hogben, Nature of Living Matter, 1930, p. 215. See also Lancelot Hogben, Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science (London: Williams and Norgate, 1931). Hogben eventually convinced Huxley to take a more moderate stand on eugenics, see Werskey, Visible College, 1988, p. 241. 31. Phillips to Smuts, Sept. 28, 1929, vol. 42, folio 166, CUL. 32. Calvin Page (pseudonym) [Hogben], “Portrait of an Emeritus Professor,” Journey to Nineveh, 1932, p. 28. Howard Phillips, a historian of the University of Cape Town, glosses over the tension Hogben created with his communist and anti-racist views by quoting from a polite resignation letter from Hogben to the Principal J. C. Beattie. It seems clear, however, from Hogben’s later writings and the recollection of Wells (Jr.) that he was indeed very critical of the university policy and culture. Lancelot Hogben, Dangerous Thoughts (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939), chap. 3, “Race and Prejudice,” pp. 44–58. Wells (Jr.), “Lancelot Hogben,” 1978. Phillips, University of Cape Town, 1993, pp. 57–59. 33. Tansley to Allee, Nov. 13, 1929, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. 34. Fisher to Smuts, Apr. 27, 1926 and June 15, 1926, Smuts to Fisher, May 26, 1926 and Oct. 26, 1929, MS Fisher 149, folio 32–33, 41, 46, 59–60, 67, BLOU. 35. On the philosophy of the idealists at Magdalen College, Oxford, see James Patrick, Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford 1901–1945 (Mercer: Mercer University Press, 1985). Gilbert Murray to Smuts, Mar. 1, and Smuts to Gilbert Murray, Apr. 8, 1926, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 283–287. Drusilla Scott, A. D. Lindsay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), p. 97. 36. Haldane to Smuts, Sept. 25, 1929 and Oct. 1930, vol. 42, folio 5, and vol. 44, folio 188, CUL. 37. Smuts to Sybella Smuts, Oxford Nov. 18, 1929, Smuts Papers, vol. 5., pp. 424– 425. 38. Jan Christian Smuts, “African Settlement,” Nov. 2, 1929, in Africa and Some World Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 51. 39. Ibid., pp. 43 (quotation), 56. 40. Ibid., p. 46.

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Notes to Pages 126–128

41. Ibid., p. 47. Smuts, “Livingstone and After,” Nov. 21–22, 1929, Africa, 1930, p. 26. 42. Smuts, “African Settlement,” Africa, 1930, p. 48. The cheering is reported in Joseph Houldsworth Oldham, White and Black in Africa: A Critical Examination of the Rhodes Lectures of General Smuts (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1930), p. 28. 43. Smuts, “Native Policy in Africa,” 2nd Rhodes Memorial Lecture, Nov. 9, 1929, Smuts, Africa, 1930, pp. 74–75. 44. Ibid., p. 75. 45. Ibid., pp. 76 (quotation), 79–80. 46. Smuts, “World-Peace,” 3rd Rhodes Memorial Lecture, Nov. 16, 1929, “Future Tasks of the League,” Speech at League of Nations Union, Nov. 14, 1929, Smuts Africa, 1930. 47. Smuts to Sybella Smuts, Oxford, Oct. 24, 1929, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 422– 423. Smuts visited the king from November 23–25. 48. In January 1930, Smuts spoke in New York to the Zionist Organization of America in defense of the Balfour Declaration. He saw a historical parallel between the foundation of the Union of South Africa and a possible foundation of Israel. Both countries, he thought, struggled with white settlement in a country of people with “low” personalities (Africans and Arabs). Smuts argued that there should be no barrier for Jews in Palestine because of their historic and Biblical right to their biologic homeland. There was a close friendship between Chaim Weizmann and Smuts from 1917 to 1950, and there exists an extensive correspondence between them. For Weizmann’s summary of their agreements see Weizmann to Smuts, Nov. 28, 1929, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 426–431. For a review of their relationship see Richard P. Stevens, Weizmann and Smuts (Beirut: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1975). Jan Christian Smuts, A Great Historic Vow (London: Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1930). 49. Smuts to Sybella Smuts, Dec. 29, 1929, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 435–437. Paul M. Atkins, “Africa and Some World Problems,” Social Science, 7 (1932): 92. William H. Robson, “Africa and Some World Problems,” The American Journal of International Law, 2 (1930): 849–850. 50. Anonymous, “Africa and Some World Problems,” Journal of Negro History, 16 (1931): 477–478. 51. Oldham, White and Black in Africa, 1930, pp. 4, 12, 56 (quotation). Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, p. 224. 52. H. G. Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1931), vol. 2, p. 740. 53. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 210–211. 54. Eric A. Walker, “Africa and Some World Problems,” The American Political Science Review, 25 (1931): 204–205; a long version of the review appeared in The Political Quarterly, 1 (1930): 446–452. 55. Oldham, White and Black in Africa, 1930, p. 1. John D. Hargreaves, “History: Africa and Contemporary,” African Research and Documentation, 1 (1973): 3–8.

Notes to Pages 128–131

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56. Edgar Barton Worthington, Ecological Century: A Personal Appraisal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 28. 57. Huxley to Smuts, Oct. 15, 1927, vol. 38, folio 41, CUL. Huxley to Smuts, Jan. 28, 1928, vol. 40, folio 97, CUL. Julian Huxley, Memories (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 138, 179–196. Julian Huxley, African View (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), pp. 442–449. 58. Huxley, African View, 1931, pp. 88, 107, 238, 239 (quotation), Huxley’s emphasis. 59. Ibid., pp. 249–252. Lancelot Hogben did not read Huxley as having racist views in his review of the book, “Civilization and the Negro,” Week-End Review, Mar. 7, 1931, pp. 360–362, with comment, Mar. 14, 1931, p. 388. Similarly in A. Z., “Africa View,” International Affairs, 10 (1931): 568. George Sarton, “Africa View,” Isis, 28 (1938): 150–151. Julian Huxley, Essays in Popular Science (New York: Knopf, 1927). 60. John W. Cell, “Lord Hailey and the Making of the African Survey,” African Affairs, 88 (1989): 481–505; Hailey: A Study in British Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 215–222. 61. Edgar Barton Worthington, “Lord Hailey on the African Survey: Some Comments,” African Affairs, 89 (1990): 579–583. Frederick Lugard to Smuts, June 13 and July 25, 1933, vol. 50, folio 92, 94, CUL. 62. The chairman of the Survey Committee was Philip Kerr Lothian, a warm defender of racial segregation and systems of indirect rule in the colonies. The committee consisted of an Oxford professor in colonial history (Reginald Coupland), an expert of international politics from the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Lionel Curtis), the longtime editor of Nature (Richard Gregory), an African administrator (Lord Lugard), an Oxford professor in political theory (Arthur Salter), the director of the Rowett Research Institute at Aberdeen (John Orr), and the secretary of the Zoological Society (Julian Huxley). Worthington, Ecological Century, 1983, p. 29. Philip Kerr Lothian’s foreword in William Malcolm Hailey, An African Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. v. 63. Carnegie Commission, The Poor White Problem in South Africa, vols. 1–5 (Stellenbosch: Pro Ecclesia-Drukkery, 1932). Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 14, 222, 224. 64. Phillips to Smuts, Dec. 14, 1929, vol. 42, folio 167, CUL. 65. Phillips to Smuts, Feb. 12, 1930, vol. 45, folio 107, CUL. Smuts to Phillips, Mar. 10, 1930, vol. 46, folio 117, CUL. Pole Evans to Smuts, May 12, 1931, vol. 48, folio 41, CUL. 66. Phillips to Smuts, June 22, 1930, vol. 45, folio 108, CUL, Phillips’s punctuation and emphasis. 67. Albert Charles Seward, Plant Life Through the Ages, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 2. Smuts was well aware of Seward’s work; see Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Oct. 8, 1937, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 95–97. 68. F. T. Brooks and Thomas Ford Chipp (eds.), Report of Proceedings [of the] Fifth

294 294

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85.

86. 87.

88.

Notes to Pages 131–136 International Botanical Congress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 48. F. T. Brooks and Thomas Ford Chipp (eds.), Fifth International Botanical Congress: Abstracts of Communications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930). A. B. Reudle, “The International Botanical Congress,” The Journal of Botany, Oct. 1930, pp. 289–293. Eduard Rübel, comment, Brooks and Chipp (eds.), Proceedings, 1931, p. 79. John Phillips, comment, Brooks and Chipp (eds.), Proceedings, 1931, pp. 81, 83. There was no antagonism between Clements and Tansley; during the war they had exchanged several letters of friendship. See letters from Clements to Tansley between 1914 and 1919, PSLCU. Tansley, comment, Brooks and Chipp (eds.), Proceedings, 1931, p. 83, conference resolution no. 3, p. 17. John Phillips, comment, Ibid., p. 86. John Phillips, “The Biotic Community,” Journal of Ecology, 19 (1931): 1–24, quotation on p. 20. Ibid., p. 19. See also “Some Important Vegetation Communities,” 1930. Phillips, “Biotic Community,” 1931, p. 3. Eduard Rübel, comment, Brooks and Chipp (eds.), Proceedings, 1931, p. 84. Arthur George Tansley, comment, Ibid., p. 85. Phillips to Smuts, Aug. 21, 1930, vol. 45, folio 109, CUL. H. Brockman-Jerosch, “Vorschläge zu einer einhetlichen Kartierung der Planzengesellschaften von Europa,” Brooks and Chipp (eds.), Proceedings, 1931, pp. 122–126, and John Phillips on p. 127. See also congress resolution 2, p. 16. Ray Bourne, “Mapping Vegetation from the Air,” Ibid., pp. 133–134. Arthur George Tansley, “A Uniform Scheme for Mapping,” Ibid., pp. 130–133, comments from the audience including Phillips on pp. 134–137. Ray Bourne, Regional Survey and Its Relation to Stocktaking of the Agricultural and Forest Resources of the British Empire (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931), preface. On the sample method in relation to type area see pp. 14–15, on its relevance to land settlement policy, see pp. 63–64. The title of Chapter 3 was “A Scientific Survey of the Empire.” The Brobdingnagian view is opposite of the Lilliputian view, as in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. A. S. W., “Regional Survey,” Journal of Ecology, 20 (1932); 223–225. Phillips to Allee, June 5, 1931, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. Ludwig Diels, Elmer Drew Merill and Thomas Ford Chipp (eds.), International Address Book (London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox, 1931). Brooks and Chipp (eds.), Proceedings, 1931, resolution 8, p. 19. Chipp to G. Samuelsson, Dec. 24, 1930, RSAS. “Plea for Contributions to the Thomas Ford Chipp Memorial Fund from the Royal Gardens, Kew, November 1931,” Semi-Historical Letters, SH 1, Thomas Ford Chipp file, GHLHU. As a final honor, Garden Illustrated filled its front page with a lecture by Chipp in the form of an exhortation. Here Chipp begs his listeners to “aid the assistance of trees in all matters of personal cleanliness. [Since t]he great traditions of

Notes to Pages 136–140

89.

90.

91. 92.

93.

94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

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race, based on all forms of sport and recreation, which aim at keeping a healthy body and mind, show absolute dependence on trees in every direction.” Human beings, he claimed, were “determined by the extent to which they have been associated with trees” that provide heat and protection. It was urgent to protect them from damage caused by the advancement of civilization. Chipp, “Trees and Man,” Garden Illustrated, 53(2727) (June 13, 1931), front page. Robert George Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 165. On Collingwood’s philosophy see Patrick, Magdalen Metaphysicals, 1985, pp. 100–101, 135–137. Unfortunately, Patrick does not discuss the Smuts lectures, the activity in the Magdalen Philosophy Club where Tansley became active, or Magdalen realists. See the works of Magdalen scholars such as Reginald Lane Poole (medievalist), James Matthew Thompson (history and theology in relation to miracles), Frank Edward Brightman (English rites and prayers), Noel Denholm-Young (medievalist). Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). John Frederick Wolfenden, The Approach to Philosophy (London: Edward Arnold, 1932). H. B. Acton, “Approach to Philosophy,” Mind, 43 (1933): 248– 250. Thomas Dewar Weldon, Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945). Theodore M. Greene, “Introduction to Kant’s Critique,” Journal of Philosophy, 44 (1947): 473–474. W. H. Walsh, “Introduction to Kant’s Critique,” Philosophy, 21 (1946): 177–178. Charles S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nerve System (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906). John C. Eccles, and William C. Gibson, Sherrington: His Life and Thought (Berlin: Springer International, 1979). John Zachary Young, The Memory System of the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). Joseph Alois Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, Redvers Opie (trans.) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). Thomas D. Weldon, “Experience and Experiment in Ethics,” MS 17 pp., Weldon to Tansley, undated letter, PSLCU. Anonymous, “Criticism of Weldon’s ‘Experience and Experiment in Ethics,’” Jan. 22, 1932, MS 7 pp., attributed to Tansley from the handwriting. John Horace Woodroffe, untitled review of the discussion at Magdalen Philosophy Club, Mar. 3, 1932, MS pp. 12–13. The content of the quotation indicates that “John” must be John Zachary Young. T. W. Mitchell to Tansley, Jan. 18, 1933, PSLCU. Mitchell refers to a tripartite paper that may be the paper in question or a later version of it. Arthur George Tansley, “The Temporal Genetic Series as a Means of Approach to Philosophy,” May 5, 1932, p. 1. The original MS is in the Tansley Archive, PSLCU, and a handwritten copy is in the Smuts Archive, vol. 53, folio 130, CUL. The ecologist G. Clifford Evans argues rightly that Tansley’s ecosystem “flowed naturally from his thought on the philosophy of science,” though it is puzzling that Evans does not discuss what that philosophy was about. See G.

296 296

101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113. 114.

115.

116.

117.

Notes to Pages 140–144 Clifford Evans, “A Sack of Uncut Diamonds: The Study of Ecosystems and the Future Resources of Mankind,” Journal of Ecology, 63 (1976): 1–39, quotation on p. 1. Tansley, “Temporal Genetic,” MS 1932, pp. 6, 8, Tansley’s emphasis. J. B. S. Haldane, “The Origin of Life,” The Rationalist Annual, 1929, pp. 3–10. Tansley, “Temporal Genetic,” MS 1932, p. 10. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 20. Tansley’s emphasis. An objection from Wolfenden he addressed with respect to his own metaphor was on the subject of Kant’s famous critique of David Hume’s philosophy: “Who holds the electric torch, and sees and interprets what its beam reveals[?]” to which Tansley replied: “No one, it is simply held.” According to Tansley Kantian idealists were victims of a “verbal circle” leading to a false solipsism, and lack of psychological understanding of the human subject. Ibid., pp. 16, 18. Ibid., p. 16. Tansley repeats his argument on p. 21, where he again understands “knowledge, as system, or rather system of systems.” Ibid., p. 17. Tansley’s emphasis. The quotation is evidence against a claim made recently by the historian of ideas, Kurt Jax, that “[Tansley] characterized . . . the ecosystem, as an abstraction, a mental isolate according to the purpose of the (particular) investigation.” The lack of contextual and archival research in Jax’s discussion of the Phillips versus Tansley controversy seriously hinders his reading of the topic. Kurt Jax, “Holocoen and Ecosystem—On the Origin of Historical Consequences of Two Concepts,” Journal of the History of Biology, 31 (1998): 113–142, quotation on p. 125, Jax’s emphasis. Tansley, “Temporal Genetic,” MS 1932, pp. 24. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., pp. 27, 31. John Zachary Young, “Biological Knowledge,” Magdalen Philosophy Club, Nov. 16, 1932, with attached comments by Tansley; Patrick Johnson, “The Basic Assumption of Physics,” MS 22 pp.; Tansley, “Discussion on Pat Johnson’s paper on “The Basic Assumption of Physics,” Nov. 2, 1932, 1 page; Malcolm Henry MacKeith, “Notes on the Physiological Concomitants of Sensation,” Jan. 1933, with attached notes by Tansley, PSLCU. Anonymous, “Value,” MS 17 pp., 1933. PSLCU. Tansley’s introduction to Christen Raunkiaer, The Life Forms of Plants and Statistical Plant Geography, H. Gilbert-Carter, A. Fausbøll, and Arthur George Tansley (trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). Phillips to Smuts, Sept. 29, 1930, vol. 45, folio 110, CUL. Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah, 1960, p. 21. Smuts to Mrs. Smuts, [undated] 1930, vol. 46, folio 215, CUL. Phillips to Allee, June 5, 1931. Smuts told Tansley in 1929 that if he “came into power again he would be able to get him [Phillips] back [to South Africa].” Tansley to Allee, Nov. 13, 1929, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. Pole Evans to Smuts, May 12, 1931, vol. 48, folio 41, CUL. Phillips was looking beyond Witwatersrand towards an even more prestigious

Notes to Pages 144–147

118.

119. 120.

121. 122. 123. 124.

125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133.

297 297

professorship in plant ecology at Chicago where Allee, pleased with the biotic community paper, tried in secrecy to secure him Henry Chandler Cowles’s professorship. Cowles was about to retire and Phillips was very excited about the prospect of inheriting the chair of the famous ecologist. Allee to Phillips, Apr. 23, Oct. 8, and Dec. 18, 1931; Phillips to Allee, June 5 and Nov. 11, 1931, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. Phillips to Allee, Nov. 11, 1931, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. The enthusiasm has been pointed out by the historian of the University of the Witwatersrand; Bruce Murray, Wits: The Early Years (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1982), pp. 282–283, with photo. Phillips to Allee, Dec. 26, 1931 (quotation), June 5, 1934 (quotation), June 14, 1936, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. John Phillips, “Ecological Investigation in South, Central and East Africa: Outline of a Progressive Scheme,” Journal of Ecology, 19 (1931): 474–482, quotation on p. 478. Elton to Huxley, Sept. 9, 1931, RUW. Phillips, “Ecological Investigation,” 1931, pp. 474–475. Phillips’s emphasis, on the empire see pp. 477–479. Smuts, “Recent Scientific Advances,” in Anonymous (ed.), Our Changing World-View (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1932), p. 11. Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah, 1960, p. 22; J. P. Dalton, “The Material World— Yesterday and Today,” Robert Broom, “Evolution—Design or Accident?” Ian Douglas MacCrone, “Psychology in Perspective,” John Young Thomson Greig, “Literature in the Machine Age,” Theodore Johannes Haarhoff, “The Holistic Attitude in Education,” C. S. Richards, “Our Changing Economic World,” Sally Herbert Frankel, “Africa in the Re-making,” R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, “Old Truths and New Discoveries,” all in Anonymous (ed.), Our Changing WorldView, 1932. Broom, “Evolution—Design or Accident?” in Anonymous (ed.), Our Changing World-View, 1932, p. 47. Broom’s religious view of evolution (inspired by his patron Smuts) may provide one explanation for why Huxley rarely referred to Broom, even though he was inspired by his view on the end of evolution. See Marc Swetlitz, “Julian Huxley and the End of Evolution,” Journal of the History of Biology, 28 (1998): 181–217. John Phillips, “Man at the Cross-Roads,” in Anonymous (ed.), Our Changing World-View, 1932, pp. 51–70, quotation on p. 60. Phillips to Allee, Dec. 26, 1932, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. Phillips, “Man at the Cross-Roads,” 1932, p. 51. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 52, Phillips’s emphasis. Phillips does not refer to the infamous Science at the Cross-Roads monograph by Soviet historians of science from 1931, though the title of his paper may hint at this book; see N. Bukharin (et al.), Science at the Cross Roads (London: Frank Cass & Co., [1931] 1971). Phillips, “Man at the Cross-Roads,” 1932, p. 69. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 53.

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Notes to Pages 147–152

134. Ibid. 135. Ibid., pp. 51–52. 136. Ibid., p. 52, Phillips’s emphasis (headline). Gregg Mitman, “From the Population to Society: The Cooperative Metaphors of W. C. Allee and A. E. Emerson,” Journal of the History of Biology, 21 (1988): 173–194. 137. Phillips, “Man at the Cross-Roads,” 1932, p. 53. 138. Ibid., p. 54. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid. 141. Ibid., p. 55. 142. Ibid., p. 56. 143. Ibid., pp. 67, 68. 144. Thomas Park, “Ecological Sociology,” Ecology, 14 (1933): 318–319. Compare with Eugene Cittadino, “A ‘Marvelous Cosmopolitan Preserve,’” Perspectives on Science, 1 (1993): 520–559, see pp. 523–525. 145. Allee to Phillips, Feb. 13, 1933, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. 146. Alfred Philip Galabin Michelmore, “Letter to the Editor: Vegetation Succession and Regional Surveys, with Special Reference to Tropical Africa,” Journal of Ecology, 22 (1934): 313–317. Michelmore refers to Phillips, “Some Important Vegetation Communities,” 1930. Michelmore, “Botany of the Cambridge Expedition to Edge Island,” pt. 1, Kew Bulletin, 1 (1934): 30–39, pt. 2, Journal of Ecology, 22 (1934): 156–176. 147. Arthur George Tansley, editorial note to Michelmore’s “Letter to the Editor,” Journal of Ecology, 22 (1934): 317. Michelmore would take Tansley’s advice and later emerge as a Tansley follower; see Michelmore, “Observations on Tropical African Grasslands,” Journal of Ecology, 27 (1939): 282–312. 148. John Phillips, “Succession, Development, the Climax, and the Complex Organism: An Analysis of Concepts,” Journal of Ecology, pt. 1, 22 (1934): 554–571; pt. 2, 23 (1935): 210–246; pt. 3, 23 (1935): 488–508. See part 1, 1934, p. 555. 149. Phillips does not mention the sources of the comments. Phillips to Smuts, Jan. 20, 1934, vol. 52, folio 1934, CUL. 150. Phillips to Smuts, Jan. 22, 1934, and an undated letter from Phillips to Smuts, probably from early February 1934, vol. 52, folder 64–65, CUL. 151. Phillips, “Succession, Development,” 1935, pt. 2, p. 216. 152. Ibid., pt. 3, pp. 489, 492. 153. Ibid., p. 498. 154. Ibid., pp. 498, 504. 155. Tansley to Phillips, Feb. 16, 1935, attached to a letter from Phillips to Smuts, Mar. 13, 1935, vol. 53, folio 128, CUL. 156. Phillips to Smuts, Mar. 13, 1935, vol. 53, folio 128, CUL. 157. Clements to Tansley, Jan. 8 and Mar. 3, 1931, PSLCU. See also Frank Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 8–34, 209–211. 158. Smuts to Phillips, Mar. 19, 1935, vol. 53, folio 160, CUL. 159. Phillips to Smuts, June 14, 1935, vol. 53, folio 190, CUL.

Notes to Pages 152–154

299 299

160. Phillips to Smuts, Aug. 8, 1935, vol. 53, folio 130, CUL. 161. Arthur George Tansley, “The Use and the Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Ecology, 16 (1935): 284–307, quotation on p. 285. 162. Tansley is listed together with Clements and several others as vice-presidents for the section on ecology and geobotany, but it is uncertain whether they were actually there. Continental and Scandinavian scholars dominated the Congress. The section including ecology eventually passed a vague resolution in favor of using “sociation,” “association,” and “alliances” as the key ecological terms “in the sense of Scandinavian plant sociologists.” Neither Tansley, Clements, or Phillips presented a paper or contributed to the discussions. Marius Jacob Sirks, Zesde Internationaal Botanisch Congres, proceedings, vol. 1 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1936), pp. 192, 216–221, 402–403, quotation on p. 403. On the Scandinavian tradition of plant sociology see Thomas Söderqvist, The Ecologists (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1986). 163. Charles C. Adams, “The Relations of General Ecology to Human Ecology,” Ecology, 16 (1935): 316–335, quotation on p. 328. 164. Adams, “Relations of General Ecology to Human Ecology,” 1935, pp. 331– 332. 165. Unfortunately, Clements does not provide the reference for the Smuts quotation, and I have been unable to trace it. The quotation may come from Smuts’s political interest in Bews’s research on human ecology, and Clements most likely got it from Phillips. Frederic Edward Clements, “Experimental Ecology in Public Service,” Ecology, 16 (1935): 342–363, quotation on p. 342; quoted in Robert McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 303. On the wider context of ecological research in the States see Mark Madison’s fascinating work, ‘Green Fields’: The Agrarian Conservation Movement in America, 1890–1990, Ph.D. diss., Department of History of Sciences, Harvard University, 1995. 166. Tansley, “Use and the Abuse,” 1935, p. 287. 167. Tansley refers to Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe to underline his point. What Lucretius does in his famous work is to expose all the evils of the natural world (plagues, earthquakes, and so on) in a polemic against ideas of a harmony of nature. Tansley is obviously inspired by this book and transfers the critique into an attack on holism. Tansley, “Use and the Abuse,” 1935, p. 300. 168. Tansley, “Use and the Abuse,” 1935, p. 299. 169. John Phillips, “A Tribute to Frederic E. Clements and His Concepts in Ecology,” Ecology, 35 (1954): 114–115. 170. Tansley, “Use and the Abuse,” 1935, p. 299. Hyman Levy, The Universe of Science (London: Watts & Co., 1932). For an excellent review of the social context of Levy’s work see Werskey, Visible College, 1988, pp. 115–127. 171. Julian Huxley, Scientific Research and Social Needs (London: Watts & Co., 1934), pp. 1–33, 251–279, with foreword by Levy on pp. v–vii. Reviewed as “a reflection of our utilitarian age” by Robert K. Merton, “Science and Social Needs,” Isis, 24 (1935): 188–189. 172. Levy, Universe of Science, 1932, pp. 77–81, 191. Anonymous, “The Universe of Science,” The Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 6 1932, p. 715. See also Sidney

300 300

173. 174. 175. 176.

177. 178.

Notes to Pages 154–159 Hook, “Science and the Crisis,” The Nation, 136 (June 21, 1933): 705–706. Gerald Wendt, “The Aspects and Limitations of Science,” New York Herald Tribune Books, Apr. 16, 1933, p. 3. Levy, Universe of Science, 1932, p. 80. Tansley, “Use and the Abuse,” 1935, p. 303. Ibid. William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in USA and South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995). Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). The American, South African, and British understandings of the environments were, I believe, social and cultural constructions. Tansley, “Use and the Abuse,” 1935, p. 304. Phillips to Allee, Dec. 13, 1938, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL.

5. The Politics of Holism, Ecology, and Human Rights 1. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Apr. 4, 1933, Dec. 10 and 14, 1934, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 555–556, vol. 6, pp. 4–7, quotation on p. 5. 2. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Nov. 25, 1930, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 464–465. 3. Smuts to Thomas Holland, Mar. 12, 1930, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 454–455. 4. Gilbert Murray to Smuts, June 22, 1931, MSS Gilbert Murray 284, folio 16, BLOU. Smuts to Gilbert Murray, July 18, 1931, MSS Gilbert Murray 59, folio 14, BLOU. 5. Anonymous, “Narrative of the Century Meeting,” Report of the British Association, London, 1931, pp. xvii–xx. See also Anonymous, “London and the British Association” (review), Nature, 3234 (Oct. 24, 1931): 687. 6. Smuts quoted in “Narrative of the Century Meeting,” Report, 1931, p. xviii. 7. Smuts, “The Presidential Address,” 1931, Speeches, 1940, p. 161. “The Presidential Address: The Scientific World-Picture of To-Day,” Report of the British Association, London, 1931, pp. 1–18. 8. Smuts, “The Presidential Address,” 1931, Speeches, 1940, p. 161. Smuts was probably alluding to Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (London: Watts & Co., 1925), which enjoyed overwhelming popularity at the time of his speech. 9. Smuts to Florence Lamont, Oct. 4, 1931, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 491–492. Anonymous (ed.), “The Evolution of the Universe,” Supplement to Nature, 3234 (Oct. 24, 1931): 699–722, Smuts’s paper is published on pp. 718–719. 10. Harold James Ralston, Emergent Evolution and Purpose, Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1930 (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1933), pp. 66–68. 11. Smuts to Florence Lamont, Jan 22, 1932, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 504–506. 12. Hutchinson to Smuts, June 30, 1933, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 561. 13. John Hutchinson, “General Smuts’ Botanical Expedition to Northern Rhodesia, 1930,” Kew Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information, 5 (1931): 225–254, quotation on p. 239. John Hutchinson, A Botanist in Southern Africa (London: P. R. Gawthorn, 1946). Pteronia Smutsii must not be confused with Digitaria smutsii, a unknown type of grass Smuts once discovered near his home at

Notes to Pages 159–163

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

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Doornkloof. See David Meredith (ed.), The Grasses and Pastures of South Africa (Johannesburg?: Central News Agency, 1955), pp. 405, 408. Margaret Gillett and Tona Gillett’s letters and diaries from the expedition, see Margaret’s diary, June 1930, p. 77, MSS Afr. s. 1414, file 22, RHLOU. Tona Gillett’s diary, p. 83. The comment was by a hotel manager in Laisaka, MSS Afr. s. 1414, file 22, RHLOU. Smuts to Pole Evans, May 30, Smuts to Sybella Smuts, June 26, 1927, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 355–358. Harold Armstrong, Grey Steel: J. C. Smuts: A Study in Arrogance (London: Arthur Barker, 1937), pp. 369–370. John William Bews, “University Development in Natal: What a University Is” [undated], MS 10 pp., UNA BIO 1/4/6. In the following I also rely on the UNA BIO 1/4/7 file, which contains various letters and notes about his administration of the University of Natal. See also Brooks, History of the University of Natal, 1966, pp. 36–42. Gale, Bews, 1954, pp. 79–82. Smuts quoted in Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 82. Brooks, History of the University of Natal, 1966, p. 37. Two scientific articles emerged in this period in collaboration with other scholars, but they are both left over from previous fieldwork. See John William Bews and J. E. Vanderplank, “Storage and Other Carbohydrates in a Natal Succulent and a Natal Geophyte and Their Behaviour Before, During and After the Winter Season,” Annals of Botany, London, 44 (1930): 689–719. John William Bews and A. W. Bayer, “Researches on the Vegetation of Natal—Series III. Section I. On the Reaction of Digitaria eriantha var. stolnifera (Stapf) and Themeda triandra (Forsk.) to the Winter Season,” South African Journal of Science, 28 (1931): 158–168. Bews, “The Botanical Survey of Africa,” undated MS, 7 pp., UNA BIO-P 1/4/ 3, p. 1. John William Bews, “The Ecological Viewpoint,” South African Journal of Science, 28 (1931): 1–15, quotation on p. 4. Ibid., p. 13. John William Bews, “The Natal University College 1909–1934,” Natal University College Commemoration, no. 1934, pp. 25–29, quotation on p. 28. Bews, “University Development,” undated MS, pp. 7–8, UNA BIO-P 1/4/6. Brooks, History of the University of Natal, 1966, pp. 38, 43–47. Bews, “Natal University College,” 1934. Brooks, History of the University of Natal, 1966, pp. 38–39. George W. Gale, John William Bews (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1954), chap. 5, p. 85. Jan Christian Smuts, Freedom (London: A. MacLehose, 1934), p. 30. Smuts to Fisher, MS Fisher 70, folio 29–30, BLOU. Smuts to Florence Lamont, Apr. 29, 1934, Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Oct. 20, 1934, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 598– 599, 608. Smuts to Bews, Aug. 30, 1932, UNA BIO-P 1/3/1, Smuts’s emphasis. Ibid. Smuts to Bews, Sept. 5, 1932, UNA BIO-P 1/3/1. Jan Christian Smuts, “Climate and Man in Africa,” lecture on July 6, 1932, South African Journal of Science, 29 (1932): 98–131, quotation on p. 98.

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

Notes to Pages 163–166 Beukes, Smuts the Botanist, 1996, p. 27. The lecture was inspired by, among others, Professor John Myres at Oxford. See Smuts to Myres, May 1, 1930, MS Myres 73, folio 52, BLOU; Smuts to Riet Lowe, Feb. 3, 1932, Smuts Papers, vol. 5., pp. 506–507. Another source of inspiration was Louis Leakey’s The Stone Age Culture of Kenya Colony, rpt. (London: F. Cass, 1971). See Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Dec. 2, 1931, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 501–502. See also a lecture along the same lines by Bews’s friend Thomas Robertson Sim, “Some Effects on Man’s Influence on the South African Climate,” South African Journal of Science, 23 (1926): 492–507, which got a favorable review by Thomas Ford Chipp, “The South African Journal of Science,” Empire Forestry Journal, 6 (1927): 142–143. Smuts, “Climate and Man in Africa,” 1932, p. 129. Ibid. Matthew Robertson Drennan to Smuts, Dec. 2, 1932, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 525–526. Robert Broom, The Coming of Man (London: H. F. G. Whiterby, 1933), pp. 198, 210–211; “The Early Man of South Africa,” The African World, Nov. 7, 1931. Jan Christian Smuts, “Preface,” [1944] in Robert Broom, The South African Fossil-Ape-Man (Pretoria: Transvaal Museum, 1946). Smuts to Margaret Gillett, June 4, 1932, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 510–512. Whitehead never referred to Smuts’s holism in his published works, not even in his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University in 1927–1928. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1930). Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Khartoum, Aug. 28, 1933, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 563–564. Quoted in William Keith Hancock, Smuts: The Fields of Force 1919–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 474. Smuts would later reflect on how the evolution of human personalities somehow may be connected to Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933). Smuts to Gillett, Apr. 3, 1937, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 68–71. Andries Cilliers, South African Nationalism or British Holism? (Stellenbosh: Pro Ecclesia-Drukkery, 1938), pamphlet. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Dec. 10, 1934, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 4–5. Tengo Jabavu to Smuts, 1935, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 12–13. See also Smuts to Gilbert Murray, June 29, 1934, MSS Gilbert Murray 220, folio 52–53, BLOU. Smuts to Lord Cecil, Nov. 8, 1938, MSS Gilbert Murray 233, folio 235, BLOU. Lewis Sowden, The Union of South Africa (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1943), p. 61, see chap. 3 “Holism and Politics.” Kenneth Potter (director of Longmans, Green & Co.) to Bews, July 19, 1933, with attached five pages of comments by anonymous peer reviewer dated May 30, 1933. Smuts to Sybella Smuts, June 15, 1934, vol. 52, folio 175, CUL. Bews to Smuts, July 14, 1934, vol. 51, folio 20, CUL. Jan Christian Smuts, “Introduction,” in John William Bews, Human Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. x. Ibid., p. xi.

Notes to Pages 166–171

303 303

45. Bews, Human Ecology, 1935, pp. 8 (quotation), 132–134. 46. Ibid., pp. 18–20, 54, quotation on pp. 155, 256. Bews used these terms throughout his book, often with emphasis. He based his arguments on works like Richard Thurnwald, Economics in Primitive Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932). John Storck, Man and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1926). Franz Mayr, “Languages of Colours Amongst the Zulus,” Annals of the Natal Museum, 1 (1907). Notes by Bews in UNA BIO-P 1/4/6–7. 47. Bews, Human Ecology, 1935, p. 245, headings in chap. 11. 48. Ibid., pp. 16, 256 (quotation). 49. Bews willed an amount of his fortune to the University of Natal. John Phillips quoted in William Bizley, “John William Bews: A Commemorative Note,” Natalia, 14 (Dec. 1984): 17–21, UNA BIO-P 1/1/9. 50. George Pitt-Rivers, “The New Apocalypse of Man the Social Animal,” Nature, 137 (Apr. 25, 1936): 681–682. Similarly in Edward F. Haskell, “Ecology in the Study of Men,” Ecology, 18 (1937): 442–443. James A. Quinn, “Human Ecology,” American Sociological Review, 1 (1936): 1006–1008. Compare with Cittadino, “Failed Promise of Human Ecology,” 1993, pp. 271–272. 51. Malcolm Burr, “Human Ecology,” Discovery, 17 (Nov. 1936): 1936. 52. Anonymous, “A New Path in Ethnology,” The Times Literary Supplement, Mar. 21, 1936, p. 240. 53. Anonymous [Charles Elton], “Short Reviews,” Journal of Animal Ecology, 5 (1936): 196. C. E. Lucas, “Human Ecology,” Scrutiny, 4 (1935): 455–457. 54. Bews, “Human Ecology,” undated MS 22 pp., lecture to the Durban Library Group given after the publication of Human Ecology, UNA BIO-P/4/4, quotation on p. 1. 55. Ibid., p. 14. 56. Unpublished poem by Bews quoted in A. W. Bayer, “The Life and Work of J. W. Bews,” MS 1939, p. 12, UNA BIO-P 1/1/10. 57. Gale, Bews, 1954, p. 95. 58. Smuts quoted in John William Bews, Life as a Whole (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1937), preface, p. v. 59. Bews, Life as a Whole, 1937, pp. 1–6, quotation p. 5. 60. Ibid., p. 251. 61. Ibid., p. 8. 62. Ibid., pp. 230–250. 63. Ibid., pp. 251–271. 64. Ibid., pp. 272–291, quotation on p. 273. 65. Ibid., pp. 294–313, quotation on pp. 294–295. 66. Ibid., pp. 217, 228, 320–328, quotation on p. 321. 67. Ibid., p. 28. 68. Ibid., pp. 29–77, quotation on p. 66. 69. Ibid., p. 83. 70. Ibid., pp. 136–139, quotation on p. 138. 71. Ibid., pp. 101, 102, 105, my emphasis. 72. Ibid., p. 110.

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Notes to Pages 171–175

73. Ibid., p. 111. 74. Ibid., pp. 149–150. 75. Smuts was the patron of Gale’s book about Bews. Smuts’s praise of Life as a Whole is preserved in an autobiographical sketch probably written partly by Bews, “Professor John W. Bews,” MS undated, 10 pp., Smuts quoted on p. 10, UNA BIO-P 1/1/12. 76. Edward Roux, Grass: A Story of Frankenwald (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 1–9. H. B. Gilliland, “On the History of Plant Study Upon the Witwatersrand,” The Journal of South African Botany, 19 (1953): 93–104. See also John Phillips, “The Flora of the Golden City,” The Golden City, Allister Macmillan (ed.) (London: Collingridge, 1932?). 77. John Phillips, “Foreword,” in Roux, Grass, 1969, p. xi, Phillips’s emphasis. 78. Phillips to Allee, Dec. 13, 1938, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. John Phillips, “Some Problems Presented by South African Grasses and Grass Communities,” Journal of South African Botany 1 (1935): 47–63. 79. John Phillips, “Fire in Vegetation: A Bad Master, a Good Servant, and a National Problem,” Journal of South African Botany, 2 (1936): 35–45, quotations on pp. 35, 36, 38. 80. Friedrich Schiller quoted (on p. 25) in John Phillips, “Plant Biology and Industry: With Special Reference to the Mining Industry,” presidential address, South African Journal of Science, 33 (1937): 24–45. See also Phillips’s articles “Botany, Pure and Applied, in Relation to Industry, with Special Reference to the Mining Industry of South Africa,” South African Journal of Science, 33 (1937): 356–358; “Studies of Vegetation on Mine Dumps,” a summary of recent work by J. J. van Nouhuys, South African Journal of Science, 33 (1937): 431–433. 81. Phillips, “Plant Biology and Industry,” 1937, p. 25, Phillips’s emphasis. 82. Ibid., p. 43. 83. Phillips to Allee, Dec. 7, 1936. There exists a whole series of correspondence between Allee and Phillips dealing with the practical side of his visit, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. 84. Frederic Clements, “Nature and Structure of the Climax,” Journal of Ecology, 24 (1936); 252–284. Frederic Clements and Victor Shelford, Bio-Ecology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1939). See also Robert A. Croker’s interesting work Pioneer Ecologist: The Life and Work of Victor Ernst Shelford (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 83–90. For a review of Clements’s research in comparison with the French ecologist J. Braun-Blanquet, see Malcolm Nicolson, “National Styles, Divergent Classifications: A Comparative Case Study from the History of French and American Plant Ecology,” Knowledge and Society, 8 (1989): 139–186. For a general review of early French ecologists see Patrick Matagne, Aux origines de l’ecologie: Les naturalists en France de 1800 a 1914 (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 1999). 85. Clements to E. F. Denny, Mar. 10, 1937 (quotation); Clements to Pestell, Oct. 11, 1937; Clements to Graber, Oct. 18, 1937, Clements to Potzber, Oct. 18, 1937, UOW. 86. Phillips is referring to President Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Phillips to Smuts, Oct. 12, 1937, vol. 55, folio 55, CUL. 87. Phillips to Allee, Oct. 3, 1938, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL.

Notes to Pages 175–178

305 305

88. Robert Adamson to Tansley, Aug. 31 and Oct. 11, 1937, PSLCU Tansley Archive. 89. Phillips to Allee, Dec. 13, 1938, MSS Warder Clyde Allee 21, folder 3, UCL. 90. Phillips’s bitter comment to Allee quoted at the end of Chapter 4 reflects his frustration about not seeing his book in print. See also Phillips, “Tribute to Frederic Clements,” 1954, p. 115. Phillips defended holism throughout his life; his last conceptual defense of Smuts came in his book The Development of Agriculture and Forestry in the Tropics (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961). 91. Phillips, “Preface,” South African Journal of Science, 35 (1938): 451, with subsequent papers from the symposium on pp. 453–506. Ian Scoons, “Range Management Science and Policy,” The Lie of the Land, Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns (eds.) (London: The International African Institute, 1996), pp. 34–53. William Beinart, “The Politics of Colonial Conservation,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 15 (1989): 143–162. 92. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). Social fear is not constructed from nature’s economy, nature is instead best understood as a social construction. 93. Alex L. du Toit, “Geological and Soil Characteristics in Relation to Deterioration and Conservation of Natural Resources,” South African Journal of Science, 35 (1938): 470–476, quotation on p. 470. E. M. Robinson, “Problems of the Preservation of Wild Animals in South Africa,” South African Journal of Science, 35 (1938): 484–490. 94. Raymond A. Dart, “Problems in Protection of Features of Anthropological, Archeological and Ethnological Interest in Relation to Changes in Native Sociology and General Economics in the Union,” South African Journal of Science, 35 (1938): 490–496, quotation on p. 494. 95. John Phillips, “Deterioration in the Vegetation of the Union of South Africa,” South African Journal of Science, 35 (1938): 476–484, quotations on pp. 477, 484; Phillips’s emphasis. 96. Two new journals were founded: The Journal of South African Botany (1935), edited by R. H. Compton (professor of botany at the University of Cape Town and director of the National Botanical Gardens), and Journal of the South African Forestry Association (1938). The president of the Forestry Association was Deneys Reitz (minister of agriculture and forestry) and the chief patron was Governor-General Patrick Duncan. 97. Smuts to Thomas Lamont, Mar. 24, 1936 (quotation), Aug. 9, 1938, June 2, 1939, bMS Eng 1023 HLHU, by permission. See also Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 300–304. 98. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 259 (quotation), 490–491. 99. Smuts, Speeches, 1940, p. 36. Hancock fails to discuss the relevance of the speech in Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 264–266. 100. Smuts, “Coalition and the Fusion,” Mar. 1933, Speeches, 1940, p. 75, see also p. 52. 101. Smuts, “The South African Spirit,” Mar. 22, 1935, Speeches, 1940, p. 102. 102. Smuts, “Forward, March!” Speech to the Parliament, Nov. 3, 1939, Speeches, 1940, pp. 107–122. 103. Smuts to A. Wyatt-Tilby, Apr. 27, 1928, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 377–379.

306 306

Notes to Pages 178–179

104. It was their mutual friend J. L. Landau that initiated a correspondence between Smuts and Einstein. He had earlier pleased Smuts by naming the settlement Kfar Jochanan Smuts in the Emek Zebulun region near Haifa after him. Smuts to J. L. Landau, Jan. 21, 1934, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, pp. 349–350. Albert Einstein, About Zionism (New York: Macmillan, 1931). Anonymous (ed.), “The Evolution of the Universe,” supplement to Nature, 1931. 105. “Mit Freude habe ich gesehen, dass Sie bei den verschiedensten Gelegenheiten sich für Gerechtigkeit und wahren Fortschritt selbstlos eingesetzt haben; darum preise ich mich besonders glücklich. Mit aller Hochachtung, Ihr A Einstein” Einstein to Smuts, July 23, 1934, vol. 51, folio 58, CUL, my trans. I have enjoyed reading Andrew Warwick’s excellent article “Cambridge Mathematics and Cavendish Physics: Cunningham, Campbell and Einstein’s Relativity 1905– 1911,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 23 (1992): 625–656, and 24 (1993): 1–25. He argues, with respect to the reception of Einstein’s theory, that “the nation state is not the most appropriate unit by which to characterize styles of physics” (p. 626). I think the reception of Einstein’s theory in South Africa may indicate a case to the contrary of Warwick’s interesting claim. 106. Smuts to Einstein, Aug. 6, 1936, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 37–38. Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, Alan Harris (trans.) (New York: Covici Friede Pub., 1934). 107. Einstein to Smuts, June 24, 1936, vol. 54, folio 33, CUL. 108. Sarah Gertrude Millin, General Smuts, vols. 1–2 (London: Faber & Faber, 1936). Armstrong, Grey Steel, 1937. Needless to say, Smuts preferred Millin’s work, although he thought Armstrong—“the advocatus diaboli”—was “a piquant and amusing fellow.” Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Apr. 7, 1937, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 75–77. 109. War pamphlets about Smuts: William Burbidge, Field-Marshal Smuts: Soldier and World Statesman: An Appreciation (London: W. S. Cowell, 1942?). Reginald Kiernan, General Smuts (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1943), 2nd ed. 1944. René Kraus, Old Master: The Life of Jan Christian Smuts (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1944). Dorothy Wilson, Smuts of South Africa: Soldier and Peacemaker (London: S. C. M. Press, 1946). 110. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Sept. 21, 1939, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 192–194. 111. David Matless argues in his superb book that some British national socialists enforced their views through holistic ecological views that appreciated an organic reasoning and an agricultural lifestyle. A similar argument is found in Anna Bramwell’s less successful attempt to legitimize this reactionary agricultural green ethic as “morally superior.” Unfortunately, both use the concept of holism anachronistically and out of historical context in their analyses. As far as I can see none of the British national socialists mention the word “holism” or “holistic” in their writings. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), pp. 103–170. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. xii, 39–63. Henry Williamson, The Story of a Norfolk Farm (London: Faber & Faber, 1941). Eve Balfour, The Living Soil (London: Faber & Faber, 1943). 112. Gert Gröning and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, “Politics, Planning and the Pro-

Notes to Pages 179–180

113. 114.

115.

116.

117.

118. 119.

307 307

tection of Nature: Political Abuse of Early Ecological Ideas in Germany, 1933– 45,” Planning Perspectives, 2 (1987): 127–148. Raymond H. Dominick III, The Environmental Movement in Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 81–119, 215–229; Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil (Buckinghamshire: The Kensal Press, 1985); Jutta Ditfurth, Feuer in Herzen (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1994), pt. 3. Peter Staudenmaier, “Fascist Ideology: The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and Its Historical Antecedents,” in Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier (ed.) (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1995), pp. 5–31; Elim Papadakis, Green Movement in West Germany (New York: St. Martins Press, 1984), pp. 32–36; Robert A. Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (London: Croom Helm, 1986). For a critique of Bramwell see Andrew Jamison, “National Political Cultures and the Exchange of Knowledge,” Denationalizing Science, Elisabeth Craford, Terry Shinn, and Sverker Sörlin (eds.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Pub., 1993), pp. 187–208. Smuts to Gilbert Murray, Apr. 20, 1933, MSS Gilbert Murray 63, folio 207– 208, BLOU. Smuts to Gilbert Murray, Oct. 11, 1936, MSS Gilbert Murray 226, folio 89–91, BLOU. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, July 27, 1936, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 57– 59. The latest English translation of Vladimir Vernadsky’s book about the biosphere misleadingly uses “holism” as one of its key words when perhaps “integration” or “indivisible” (in the mechanistic sense) would be more appropriate, especially since the word “holism” did not exist when Vernadsky wrote his book. Another perhaps more accurate translation is indicated by Kendall E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 190. I am grateful to Michael Gordin for pointing this out to me. For a similar confusing use of concepts see Jean-Paul Deléage, Histoire de l’écologie (Paris: La Decouverte, 1991), pp. 197–221, and Jacques Grinevald, “On a Holistic Concept for Deep and Global Ecology: The Biosphere,” Fundamenta Scientiae, 8 (1987): 197–226. Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, David B. Langmur (trans.) (New York: Copernicus, 1998). Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Feb. 27, 1937, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 66–68. Wells once wrote to Smuts to get his support for an intellectual movement in favor of the Spanish coalition, but he apparently never replied. Wells to Smuts, Aug. 17, 1936, vol. 54, folio 265, CUL. Wells also wrote to Smuts to get support for his encyclopedic “World Brain” (see chap. 6), Wells to Thomas Lamont, late 1935, Wells, Correspondence, vol. 4, 1998, p. 56, note 2. H. G. Wells, The Fate of Man (New York: Alliance Books Corp., 1939), pp. 191–192. Wells and Smuts corresponded on friendlier terms during the war, though Wells kept trying to convince Smuts to abandon racist views; Wells to Smuts, Oct. 22, 1943, Wells, Correspondence, vol. 4, 1998, pp. 454–455. Alfred Adler to Smuts, Jan. 31, 1931, vol. 47, folio 1, CUL. Adler, The Science of Living (New York: Greenberg Publisher, 1929). Smuts to Adler, Mar. 5, 1931, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, p. 472. Smuts to Adler, Apr. 30 and May 26, 1931, vol. 48, folio 93, 102, CUL. Alfred Adler, Individual

308 308

120.

121.

122.

123. 124.

125.

126.

Notes to Pages 180–181 Psychology (London: C. W. Daniel Co., 1932). Heinz L. Ansbacher, “On the Origin of Holism,” Journal of Individual Psychology, 17 (1961): 142–148. Michael Lee Hensley, Holism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Jan C. Smuts and the Psychology of Abraham H. Manslow, Ph.D. diss., School of Human Behavior, United States International University, 1973. Adler to Smuts, June 11, 1931, vol. 47, folio 3, CUL. Jan Christian Smuts, “Das wissenschaftliche Weltbild der Gegenwart,” Erwin O. Krauss (trans.), Internationale Zeitschrift für Individual Psychologie, vol. 10 (1932), pp. 244– 261, “holismus” on p. 253. Næss was a keen reader of Adler, but he did not read Smuts, nor any other ecological literature in this period. For personal conversation with Næss, and his personal archive (Notebook F8, F12, F15), see David Rothenberg, Is it Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Næss (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993), pp. 21–56, quotation on p. 32; Arne Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, David Rothenberg (trans. and ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Upon his return to Oslo Næss supervised Peter Wessel Zapffe’s famous doctoral dissertation in philosophy, Om det tragiske [On The Tragic] (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1941), which outlines the human condition from a biological point of view in the writings of the German biologist Jakob Uexkull. Zapffe was of great importance in the further development of Næss’s deep ecological views. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, June 26, 1936, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 49–51. Smuts refers to an unidentified Dutch professor. Smuts to Helmut Minkowski, Apr. 8, 1938, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 126–127. In an interesting paper the historian Jonathan Harwood points to an antireductionist tradition in German biology (especially in the research by Alfred Kühn and Richard Woltreck) that subscribed to “holistic” views, though it is not clear whether they also endorsed views promoted by Smuts. Jonathan Harwood, “Metaphysical Foundations of the Evolutionary Synthesis,” Journal of the History of Biology, 27 (1994): 1–20. The historian of ideas Kurt Jax has also pointed to some German ecologists who were inspired by Smuts. See Kurt Jax, “Holocoen and Ecosystem—On the Origin of Historical Consequences of Two Concepts,” Journal of the History of Biology, 31 (1998): 113–142. Jan Christian Smuts, Die holistische Welt (Berlin: Alfred Metzner Verlag, 1938), with foreword by Adolf Meyer-Abich. Smuts to Helmut Minkowski, Apr. 8, 1938, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 126–127. The council-general of South Africa in Hamburg was Fritz Brehmer. I am grateful to Thomas Potthast for comments and for making Die holistische Welt available to me. Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 179–180, 190, 193–194; “Metaphoric Connections: Holistic Science in the Shadow of the Third Reich,” Social Research, 62 (1995): 357–385. See also Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Adolf MeyerAbich wrote an article called “Der Holismus unter dem Nazi Regime,” which he sent to Smuts in June 1945. I have not been able to find this article.

Notes to Pages 182–185

309 309

127. Phillips to Smuts, Apr. 19, 1939, vol. 59, folio 169, CUL, with attachment by Phillips, “Proposed National Register for Scientific Workers.” 128. Phillips to Smuts, Apr. 22, 1939, vol. 59, folio 170, CUL, with attached draft of letter to all South African scientists. 129. Phillips to Smuts, Apr. 25, 1939, vol. 59, folio 171, CUL, with attached draft of letter from Phillips to Brigadier-General John Collyer, Apr. 25, 1939. 130. Phillips to Smuts, Sept. 3 and 4 (quotation), 1939, vol. 59, folio 172–173, CUL. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 319–325. 131. Smuts to Thomas Lamont, Sept. 6, 1939, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 189–190. 132. Phillips to Smuts, Oct. 10, 1939, vol. 59, folio 174, CUL. Smuts to R. Stuttaford, Oct. 14, 1939, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, p. 196. Edward Roux, Time Longer Than Rope—A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, [1944] 1964), pp. 302–317. Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah, 1960, p. 24. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 330–331, 370–371. 133. Alan Hofmeyr, Hofmeyr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). Tom Macdonald, Jan Hofmeyr: Heir to Smuts (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1948). 134. Jan Hofmeyr, “Introductory Remarks,” South African Journal of Science, 36 (1939): 500–501. Hofmeyr was not able to carry his liberal views into civic laws. Faced with political opposition he would sometimes fall “conveniently sick” when the House of Assembly was to vote on Smuts’s racist laws. See Roux, Time Longer than Rope, 1948, p. 292, and Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 297– 298, 412. 135. John Phillips, “Human Ecology: With Special Reference to Man in Relation to his Environment and the Disturbance of Such Inter-relations,” South African Journal of Science, 36 (1939): 556–562, quotation on p. 558. 136. Smuts, “Greater South Africa,” Apr. 1940, Speeches, 1940, pp. 123–130. 137. Phillips, Kwame Nkrumah, p. 24. 138. Phillips to Smuts, May 6, 1942, vol. 69, folio 22, CUL. 139. Smuts, “The Basis of Trusteeship in African Native Policy,” address to the South African Institute for Race Relations, Jan. 21, 1942, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 331–342, quotation on p. 332. The speech was published as a pamphlet in 1942 that was met with odium by C. G. Woodson in “Book Reviews,” Journal of Negro History, 28 (1943): 96–100, and with interest by Margaret Wrong, “Classified Book,” International Affairs, 19 (1942–1943): 565–566. 140. Smuts, “The Basis of Trusteeship,” 1942, p. 333. He based his argument of trusteeship on Article 22 of the League of Nations covenant: “the lot, the advancement, the upliftment of the backward peoples is the sacred trust of civilization.” (Smuts was referring the word “trust” when talking about trusteeship.) 141. Smuts’s private secretary to Phillips, May 27, 1942; Phillips to Smuts, May 28, 1942, vol. 69, folio 22–23, CUL. 142. Smuts to Phillips, June 8, 1942, published as “Message from the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. J. C. Smuts,” South African Journal of Science, 39 (1942): 313–314. 143. Jan Hofmeyr, “Remarks” and “Summary” of the symposium “Science and Postwar Reconstruction,” South African Journal of Science, 39 (1942): 315–380.

310 310

Notes to Pages 185–189

144. Phillips to Smuts, Sept. 18, 1942, copy of letter from Phillips to Cap. F. R. Lang, Sept. 16, 1942; copy of letter from Lang to Phillips, Sept. 22, 1942, vol. 69, folio 24–25, CUL. John Phillips, “Some Methods of Control of Unwanted Vegetation” (unpublished), South African Journal of Science, 49 (1943): 134. On grasses for landing grounds see Roux, Grass, 1969, p. 5. On the battles in North Africa see Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 364–384. 145. Smuts’s secretary to Phillips, Oct. 12, 1942 and Apr. 9, 1943, Phillips to Smuts, Dec. 10, 1942 and Mar. 25, 1943, vol. 69, folio 25–26, vol. 71, folio 186, CUL. Roux, Grass, 1969, pp. 8–9. 146. Anonymous, “News and Views,” Nature, 146 (July 27, 1940): 124; 150 (July 11, 1942): 51; 150 (Oct. 31, 1942): 517; Anonymous, “Colonial Development: The Progress of Partnership,” Nature, 150 (Aug. 8, 1942): 161–164. 147. Sarah Gertrude Millin, Fire Out of Heaven (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), diary notes of speeches by Smuts, Dec. 5, 1943, May 20, 1944, pp. 71, 184–185. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, pp. 385–434. Jan Smuts, “The Big Four: Co-operation May Build Up a Common Understanding” (radio speech, Dec. 28, 1943), Vital Speeches, vol. 10 (1944), pp. 209–211. Notice, Christian Century, 62 (1945): 780. 148. Quoted in P. A. Reynolds and E. J. Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat: Charles Kingsley Webster and the United Nations 1939–1946 (London: Martin Robertson, 1976), appendix E, pp. 166–167, undated. 149. Charles K. Webster, The Art of Practice of Diplomacy (London: London School of Economics, 1952), pp. 17–19. 150. Webster’s draft, Apr. 12, quoted in Reynolds and Hughes, Historian as Diplomat, 1976, pp. 57, 166–167. 151. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Mar. 4, 1945, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 526–528. A collection of Smuts’s speeches was reviewed in April 1944 as being of moral importance; F. H. U., “Toward a Better World,” Canadian Forum, 24 (Apr. 1944): 21. 152. Smuts to Jan D. Smuts, San Francisco, Apr. 24, 1945, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 529–530. 153. Quoted in Stuart Chevalier, The World Charter and the Road to Peace (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1946), p. 10. 154. Virginia Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 345. 155. Ibid., p. 344. 156. Ruth B. Russell, A History of the United Nations Charter (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1958), pp. 910–918, quotation by the U.S. delegate Sol Bloom, p. 913. Bloom clearly had a patriotic spirit in San Francisco on behalf of the United States’ Constitution; see Bloom, The Autobiography of Sol Bloom (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1948), pp. 3–7, 278. Reynolds and Hughes, Historian as Diplomat, 1976, p. 69. 157. Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade, 1954, p. 344. The official preamble to the Charter approved by the General Assembly on June 26, 1945: We the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

Notes to Pages 189–191

311 311

—to affirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and —to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and —to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends —to practice tolerance and live together in peace with another as good neighbors, and —to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and —to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and —to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, —have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.

158.

159.

160. 161.

162. 163.

164.

United Nations Information Office, United Nations Conference on International Organization (New York: United Nations Information Office, 1945), p. 34. Smuts reported to Hofmeyr that there were some objections to a policy of trusteeship that some delegates thought should be replaced with a system of mandates. Nevertheless, Smuts was able to secure South Africa their “rights” to South West Africa. Smuts to Sybella Smuts, May 5, 1945; Smuts to Jan Hofmeyr, May 6, 1945, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 532–534. Herbert Ellison, “Big Shots of UNICIO,” recorded on May 18, broadcasted on May 21 on the station WINX, in Eugine Meyer (ed.), Report on San Francisco (Washington: The Washington Post, 1945), p. 43. United Nations Information Office, United Nations Conference, 1945, p. 23 (photo), 34 (quotation). Gordon Hamilton, “Smuts: Golden Tonic for a Sick Empire” (interview), Newsweek, Nov. 10, 1947, pp. 35–36. G. Elaine Giddings, A Critical Study of the Speaking Career of General Jan C. Smuts with Special Reference to his World Peace Address, Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1949. Smuts to Thomas Lamont, May 22, 1945, bMS Eng 1023 HLHU, by permission. Smuts to Sybella Smuts, May 21, 1945, Smuts Papers, vol. 6, pp. 537–538. Roux, Rebel Pity, 1970, p. 190. On the life and work of Edward Roux, see Peder Anker, “The Ecology of Resistance: The Life and Work of Edward Roux,” unpublished 1999. Tom Regan, Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, (New York: Random House, 1975). Regan and Singer do not hold racist views, but instead push gradualism one step further. Rather than create a gradual scale between different human races like Smuts did, they develop a gradual scale between different species from a deontological and a utilitarian perspective respectively. They both develop a gradual system of rights (or liberation in the case of Singer) to avoid the pitfalls of anthropocentrism.

312 312

Notes to Pages 192–193

165. Smuts to Chung-shu Lo, July 29, 1947, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 154–156. 166. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). On the expansion of communitarian philosophy beyond anthropocentrism see especially the philosophy of Baied Callicott, who uses the concept of biotic communities as a key in his In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); and Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989. On contemporary politics of holism inspired by Smuts, see Allan Savory with Jody Butterfield, Holistic Management, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999), pp. 19–20. 167. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–172. 168. Roux, Time Longer than Rope, 1948, p. 317. Smuts would later support the police when they killed some black African miners on strike; see Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, 1968, p. 484. 169. Quoted in Alastair Matheson, The Coloured People of the Cape (London: The Public Relations Office, South Africa House, 1947), p. 51. Matheson thought this was “the most encouraging message received for many years,” p. 50. Interestingly, Eugene P. Dvorin argued that the apartheid policy represented a continuation of racial policy in South Africa long before 1948; see Dvorin, Racial Segregation in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). 170. Smuts, “Introduction” [1950], Rice and Compton, Wild Flowers of the Cape of Good Hope, 1951, p. 4. Smuts to M. C. Gillett, Feb. 1, 1947, Smuts to John Hutchinson, Dec. 8, 1945, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 120–122, 31–33. Smuts, “Foreword,” in Hutchinson, Botanist in Southern Africa, 1946. 171. Niels Bohr to Smuts, Feb. 22, 1946, Smuts to Bohr, Nov. 13, 1947, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 41–22, 166. Bohr wrote to Smuts to gain support for his article concerning atomic energy and weapons; see “A Challenge to Civilization,” Science, 102 (1945): 363–364. 172. After the war Phillips tried to create a holistic survey of soil erosion in Africa and enrolled more students to carry it out, and built larger buildings than the University of the Witwatersrand could afford. Phillips overspent his budget, and his relationship with the rest of the university became increasingly hostile. In the end Phillips resigned from his professorship and took a job with the Overseas Food Cooperation managing groundnut production in Tanganyika. Phillips to Smuts, Jan. 18, Apr. 15, 30, and May 18, 1948, vol. 87, folio 34–37, CUL. Smuts to Phillips, Jan. 22 and May 4, 1948, vol. 88, folio 89, 188, CUL. Bruce K. Murray, Wits: The “Open” Years (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), pp. 67–71. 173. Ernst A. Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, 1 (1945): 99–120, see pp. 108–109. Interestingly, when Willard Van Orman Quine published his famous From a Logical Point of View in 1953 a reviewer (misleadingly) used lingo from Cassirer to describe his philosophy. Quine initially sought to disassociate his logic from any “-ism” and insisted on using terminology like “corporate body” and “connections” to describe logical structures. Yet the word holism soon became the label both fol-

Notes to Pages 193–196

174.

175.

176.

177.

178.

179.

180.

181.

182.

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lowers, critics, and eventually Quine himself used to discuss his reasoning, whereas Smuts and the ecological meaning and history of the concept was swept under the carpet and thus forgotten. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 41. Albert Hofstadter, “The Myth of the Whole: A Consideration of Quine’s View of Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy, 51 (1954): 397–417. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), p. 13. The most important source of inspiration for Quine was Pierre Duhem and not Smuts. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Aug. 27, 1945, Smuts to K. von Neergaard, Nov. 13, 1947, Smuts to Adolf Meyer-Abich, July 27, 1948, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 4– 6, 167, 219–220. Smuts to D. Moore, June 8, 1948; Smuts to Leo S. Amery, Feb. 12, 1948, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 209–210, 180. Charles E. Raven was one of the “highbrows” who became inspired by Smuts on this occasion; see Natural Religion, vols. 1–2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1945], 2nd ed., 1950), p. 225. Popper refers to Smuts’s, Henry Bergson’s, and Samuel Alexander’s reading of evolution, note 6, p. 624. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 744. Russell discussed Smuts’s holism in his exposé of Hegel’s philosophy. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Feb. 6, 1947, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 122–124. The correspondence indicates that Smuts late in life would admire Gandhi’s work. Smuts to Sybella Smuts, Sept. 21, 1946, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 85–87. Hancock, Smuts, 1968, pp. 468–472. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, “Pan-African Movement,” Oct. 1945, “Behold the Land,” Oct. 1946, in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks, Philip S. Foner (ed.) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), pp. 178, 197. Smuts to Jan Hofmeyr, Sept. 28, 1946, Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Feb. 1, 1947 (quotation), Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 92–93, note 2, pp. 122–124, Smuts’s emphasis. U.N.O. is the United Nations Organization. Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Jan. 14, 1947, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 115–118. Notice how Hancock’s interpretation of this paragraph contradicts my reading: “[Smuts] was caught in a contradiction; but he was not its creator. History had created it.” I have argued that Smuts was indeed the creator of the apparent contradiction through his philosophy of holism. See Hancock, Smuts, vol. 2, pp. 450–451. Deus sive natura means “God or nature”; Smuts to Margaret Gillett, Sept. 8, 1948, Smuts Papers, vol. 7, pp. 228–229. For a discussion of Spinoza’s work in relation to contemporary holistic philosophy of ecology see Peder Anker, “Ecosophy: An Outline of Its Metaethics,” The Trumpeter, 15 (1998) [iuicode: 6.15.1].

6. Planning a New Human Ecology 1. For a general review of human ecology see Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 301–308; Emin Tengström, Human Ecology—A New Discipline? (Göteborg: Institutionen för

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2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

Notes to Pages 196–200 Fredsforskning och Humanekologi, 1985). On human ecology in American sociology see Eugene Cittadino, “The Failed Promise of Human Ecology,” Science and Nature, Michael Shortland (ed.) (Oxford: BSHS Monographs, 1993), pp. 251–283; Gerald L. Young (ed.), Origins of Human Ecology (Stroudsburg, Pa.: Hutchinson Ross, 1983). Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy, 2nd. ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Max Oelschalger, Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Bob Pepperman Taylor, Our Limits Transgressed (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992). The distinction refers back to Lynn White Jr., “Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, 155 (Mar. 10, 1967): 1203–1207. British Ecological Society, summer meeting 1914, quoted in McIntosh, Background of Ecology, 1985, p. 302. H. G. Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, vols. 1–2 (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1931), vol. 1, pp. 35–36. See also What Are We to Do with Our Lives? (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1931), p. 17. H. G. Wells, The Idea of a World Encyclopedia (London: Hogarth Press, 1936), p. 6. Philip Raven in H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 425–426. Raven’s view corresponds with Wells’s interpretation of his own book on pp. 430–431. Ibid., pp. 426, 429. Cabal to scientists in Everytown, in H. G. Wells, Things to Come: A Film (New York: Macmillan, 1935), p. 55. This book is the shooting script of the film that was released in 1936. Leon Stover, The Prophetic Soul (Jefferson: McFarland, 1987). Passworthy to Cabal, in ibid., p. 109. Theotocopulos to Everytown, in ibid., pp. 126, 131. Christopher Frayling, Things to Come (London: British Film Institute, 1995), p. 50. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932). A Scottish physician named Thomas Robertson became inspired by the film. He wrote a 500-page treatise about human ecology in which he argued that a grand economic conspiracy was hampering humankind and that one should turn to the wisdom of Indian mystics for relief. Though Robertson received the most beheading review, his work may serve as an example of how ecological reasoning began to capture a larger public. Thomas Robertson, Human Ecology: The Science of Social Adjustment, MS 1941–1942 (Glasgow: William McLellan, 1948), p. xvi. D. J. Ryan, “Human Ecology,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 2 (1951), pp. 262–263. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1934), pp. 552, 617; The Outline of History, vols. 1–2 (New York: Macmillan, 1920). On the use of Wells in colleges and universities see Hilaire Belloc, A Companion to Mr. Wells’s ‘Outline of History,’ (London: Sheed & Ward, 1926). Condé B. Pallen (ed.), Symposium of Opinions upon the Outline of History by H. G. Wells (New York: National Civic Federation, [1922]). Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934, pp. 618–619. See also Wells’s The New Teaching of History (London: Cassell & Co., 1921).

Notes to Pages 200–204

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15. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 1934, p. 552. 16. Ibid., p. 553. 17. Ibid., p. 611; the last chapter of the book “The Idea of a Planned World” captured this new world order, pp. 549–707. 18. H. G. Wells, The Fate of Man (New York: Alliance Books, 1939), pp. 15, 27. J. C. H., “The Future of Mankind” (review), Nature, 144 (Sept. 2, 1939): 397– 398. 19. Wells, Fate of Man, 1939, pp. 65–67, quotations pp. 65 and 12; The Time Machine (London: W. Heinemann, 1895). 20. Wells, Fate of Man, 1939, pp. 37, 39–41. 21. Ibid., chap. 3, pp. 27 (quotation), 65. 22. Ibid., pp. 219, 221. W. R. Inge, “Victorian Socialism,” Nature, 145 (Jan. 13, 1940): 45–46, reply by Wells in the same journal, Jan. 27, 1940, p. 152. 23. H. G. Wells, “Biology for the Million” (review of Huxley’s Uniqueness of Man), Nature, 147 (Mar. 1, 1941): 247–248. 24. Huxley, Memories, 1970, p. 173; H. G. Wells, The Outlook for Homo Sapiens (London: Secker & Warburg, 1942). This book largely recycles earlier works; see especially pp. 17–35. 25. Anonymous [Max Nicholson], “A National Plan for Great Britain,” supplement to Week-End Review, Feb. 14, 1931, pp. i–xvi. Authorship admitted in Edward Max Nicholson, “The Proposal for a National Plan,” in Fifty Years of Political and Economic Planning, John Pinder (ed.) (London: Heinemann, 1981), pp. 5– 8, 32–53, on p. 6. 26. Nicholson, “The Proposal for a National Plan,” 1981, p. 6. Nichsolson was not alone in promoting economic planning, and the relevance of this document in the larger “social relations of science movement” cannot be dealt with here. Several historians of science have written extensively and brilliantly on how economic planning became a leading theme in British social and intellectual life in this period. None of them have discussed how nature came to be a model for human ecological planning. Gary Werskey, Visible College (London: Free Association Books, 1988), pp. 240–243; William McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State: The Social Relations of Science Movement in Great Britain 1937–1947 (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1984). See also Gordon E. Cherry, Environmental Planning 1939–1969, vol. 2 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1975). 27. Anonymous [Nicholson], “National Plan,” 1931, p. i. 28. Ibid., pp. viii–xvi. 29. Kenneth Lindsay, “PEP through the 1930s: Organisation, Structure, People,” in Fifty Years of Political and Economic Planning, John Pinder (ed.) (London: Heinemann, 1981), pp. 9–31, quotation on p. 10. 30. “Comments on the National Plan,” Feb. 14, 1931, H. G. Wells, “More Comments on the National Plan,” Week-End Review, Feb. 21, 1931, pp. 201–204, 256. 31. William Ellis quoted in Israel Sieff, Memoirs (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p. 166. 32. For a full review see Fifty Years of Political and Economic Planning, John Pinder (ed.) (London: Heinemann, 1981). See also Ronald W. Clark, The Huxleys

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33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

Notes to Pages 204–207 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 200–209; Sieff, Memoirs, 1970, pp. 162– 176. Robert Scott Troup, Forest and State Control (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938). Ray Bourne, “Soil Survey as a Basis for National Planning,” MS 10 pp., Loeb Library VF NAC 1382, Harvard University. Bourne, “Forestry,” in Physical Planning, Ian R. M. McCallum (ed.) (London: Architectural Press, 1944), pp. 156–166. Will Dyson, “Our Betters—I” (cartoon), Week-End Review, vol. 3 (1931), p. 177. Virginia Woolf may have used Tansley’s New Psychology to create the fictional Oxford character “Charles Tansley” in her novel To the Lighthouse of 1927. I believe “Charles Tansley” was a blend of the poet Charles Elton (1839– 1900), Arthur Tansley, and a good deal of her own imagination. See Laura Cameron’s excellent article “Histories of Disturbance,” Radical History Review, 74 (1999): 4–24; see p. 11 and note 40. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1927). Arthur George Tansley, The New Psychology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920). Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, J. C. M. Hubback (trans.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1922). Julian Huxley, “Science and Psychological Research,” Week-End Review, 6 (1932): 278–279, 303 (quotation). Huxley is referring to experiments at the International Metaphysical Institute in Paris. Julian Huxley, “The Biology of Human Nature,” Week-End Review, 7 (1933): 85–86, 114–115, 138–139, 166–168, quotation on p. 85. Ibid., p. 167. Ronald Aylmer Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). Ibid. See also Huxley’s If I Were Dictator (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934), p. 20. Julian Huxley, “Diffusion of Culture,” Week-End Review, 8 (1933): 318–319. I have enjoyed reading Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis’s review of the evolutionary synthesis historiography and John Greene’s excellent article about Huxley in my reading, though neither of them deals directly with the context of ecological planning. Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Unifying Biology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); John C. Greene, “The Interaction of Science and World View in Sir Julian Huxley’s Evolutionary Biology,” Journal of the History of Biology, 23 (1990): 39–55. See also Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine (eds.), Evolutionary Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Max Nicholson, “A Factual Basis for Territorial Planning,” Journal of Town Planning Institute, 22 (1936): 287–291. Max Nicholson, “A Yardstick for Industry,” Week-End Review, 7 (1933): 530– 531. Max Nicholson, “The Political Omnibus,” Week-End Review, 7 (1933): 598. On the history of garden cities in Britain see Dennis Hardy, From Garden Cities to New Towns (London: Chapman & Hall, 1991). Max Nicholson, “Laissez-Faire and After” (review), Week-End Review, 8 (1933): 694. Max Nicholson, “An Able and Devastating Document,” Town and Country Planning, 6 (1938): 92–93. Nicholson is discussing the work of the Royal Commission on the Geographical Distribution of the Industrial Population, Minutes of Evidence (London: His Majesties Stationery Office, 1937–1938).

Notes to Pages 207–211

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44. Julian Huxley, Ants (London: Ernest Benn, 1930), pp. 22–27; What Dare I Think? (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), pp. 2, 16–18, 25 (quotations), 40, 46, 166. On a parallel strain of ecological reasoning in the United States, see Paolo Palladino, Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Pub., 1996), pp. 103–126. 45. Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 59–84. 46. Julian Huxley and Edward Neville Da Costa Andrade, More Simple Science: Earth and Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936), pp. 124–153. 47. Julian Huxley, “Science and Its Relation to Social Needs,” in Scientific Progress (New York: Macmillan, 1936), pp. 189–190. 48. Huxley, If I Were Dictator, 1934, pp. v–vi. 49. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932. Sieff, Memoirs, 1970, p. 166. Clark, Huxleys, 1968, p. 202. Stover, Prophetic Soul, 1987, p. 6. 50. Huxley, If I Were Dictator, 1934, p. 24, see also pp. 82–98. 51. Ibid., pp. 40, 81. 52. Ibid., p. 77. 53. Ibid., p. 84. 54. This was of course nothing new in ecological reasoning; see Stephen Forbes, “The Lake as a Microcosm,” Bulletin of the Peoria Scientific Association (1887), pp. 77–87. It is unclear whether Worthington ever read Forbes. Stephen Bocking, “Stephen Forbes, Jacob Raighard and the Emergence of Aquatic Ecology in the Great Lakes Region,” Journal of the History of Biology, 23 (1990): 461– 498. Robert Allyn Lovely, Mastering Nature’s Harmony: Stephen Forbes and the Roots of American Ecology, Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1995. 55. Edgar and Stella Worthington, Inland Waters of Africa (London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 171. Michael Graham, The Victoria Nyanza and Its Fisheries (London: The Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1929), appendix 2, pp. 13–15, 41–52. 56. William A. Cunnington, “The Fauna of the African Lakes,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1920, pt. 4, pp. 507–622. 57. Edgar Worthington, “The Lakes of Kenya and Uganda,” Geographical Journal, 79 (1932): 277–297, quotation on p. 293, from the discussion of Worthington’s paper read at the evening meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in London on Jan. 25, 1932. 58. Edgar Barton Worthington, Ecological Century: A Personal Appraisal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 1. 59. Ibid., pp. vii, 2–3. 60. Edgar Worthington, A Report on the Fishing Survey of Lakes Albert and Kioga (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies on behalf of the Government of the Uganda Protectorate, 1929), pp. 11, 13 (quotation), 14, 120, Fig. 3. Worthington and Worthington, Inland Waters of Africa, 1933, pp. 120, 133. 61. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1983, p. 7 62. R. E. Dent quoted in Worthington and Worthington, Inland Waters of Africa, 1933, p. 194. 63. Worthington and Worthington, Inland Waters of Africa, 1933, pp. 174– 176. For an excellent discussion of the notion of wilderness, see William

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64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

Notes to Pages 211–214 Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground, William Cronon (ed.) (New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 69–90. Worthington, Fishing Survey of Lakes Albert and Kioga, 1929, p. 49. Edgar Worthington, “Observations on the Temperature, Hydrogen-ion Concentration, and Other Physical Conditions of the Victoria and Albert Nyanses,” Internationale Revue der gesamten Hydrobiologie und Hydrographie, 24 (1930): 328–357; “Vertical Movements of Freshwater Macroplancton,” Internationale Revue der gesamten Hydrobiologie und Hydrographie, 25 (1931): 394–436. Edgar Worthington and Leonard C. Beadle, “Thermoclines in Tropical Lakes,” Nature, 129 (1932): 55–56. Worthington, Fishing Survey of Lakes Albert and Kioga, 1929, pp. 18, 19. Worthington’s emphasis. Edgar Worthington, A Report on the Fisheries of Uganda (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies on behalf of the Government of Uganda Protectorate, 1932), pp. 38–46, 58–59. Worthington and Worthington, Inland Waters of Africa, 1933, pp. 137–138. Worthington, Fisheries of Uganda, 1932, pp. 52–53. Tracey J. Phillips, “Mufúmbiro: The Birunga Volcanoes of Kigezi-Ruanda-Kivu,” Geographical Journal, 61 (1923): 233–258, 241. Worthington, Fisheries of Uganda, 1932, pp. 63, 67 (quotations). Worthington, “Lakes of Kenya and Uganda,” 1932; Dent’s views are discussed on page 291. Ibid., p. 292. Stella Johnson was one of five daughters of the Reverend Menasseh Johnson, a man known for not believing in university education for women. She had gone to St. Paul’s School, and later to Roedean (where she introduced tennis to women). It was the headmaster of Roedean who convinced Stella’s father that she should go to Cambridge (Newnham College), where she studied geography under Frank Debenham. The president of the Royal Geographical Society, William Goodenough, suggested that Stella Worthington should get an “honorary degree” for sacrificing her academic career in favor of her husband. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1983, p. 4; “Lakes of Kenya and Uganda,” 1932, p. 297. Worthington and Worthington, Inland Waters of Africa, 1933, chap. 3, pp. 30, 32, 33. Stella Worthington, “Surveying on Lake Rudolf,” Empire Survey Review, 1 (1932): 217–220. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1989, pp. 50–68. Gordon E. Fogg, Freshwater Biological Association 1929–79 (Ambleside: Freshwater Biological Association, 1979). Christopher D. Taylor, Portrait of Windermere (London: Robert Hale, 1983), p. 23. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1989, pp. 30–31. For an argument focusing on natural instead of human agency in imperial ecology see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds.), Ecology and Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

Notes to Pages 215–218

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77. Worthington, “Lakes of Kenya and Uganda,” 1932, p. 275. 78. Worthington, Fisheries of Uganda, 1932. The scientific results of the expedition were published in Journal of the Linnean Society, 38 (1933): 99–350. 79. Worthington, Fishing Survey of Lakes Albert and Kioga, 1929, pp. 114–121. 80. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1989, pp. 30–31. 81. Malcolm Hailey, Diary, Sept. 8 and Oct. 2, 1935, MSS Afr. s. 1425 Worthington 1, RHLOU. 82. Malcolm Hailey, Diary, Oct. 2, 1935. See also MSS Afr. s. 1425 Worthington 1, RHLOU. 83. Malcolm Hailey, “Foreword,” in Edgar Worthington, Science in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. v., and lecture Mar. 1, 1939 at the League of Nations Union, addresses 1939–1941, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 334, RHLOU. 84. Malcolm Hailey, “Foreword,” in Worthington, Science in Africa, 1938, p. v. 85. Worthington, Science in Africa, 1938, p. 1, diagram on p. 2. 86. Ibid., p. 4. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1989, pp. 32–33. 87. Worthington, Science in Africa, 1938, pp. 3–15, quotation p. 3. 88. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1989, p. 49. The movie metaphor is Worthington’s own. On the panoramic view of nature see Mitman’s penetrating studies “When Nature Is the Zoo: Vision and Power in the Art and Science of Natural History,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 2 (1996): 117–143, and Reel Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 89. Worthington, Science in Africa, 1938, pp. 17–24, quotation on p. 17. 90. Wells, Fate of Man, 1939, p. 189. Wells, World Brain (London: Methuen & Co., 1938). 91. Worthington, Science in Africa, 1938, pp. 113–117, 137–141, 177, 187–197, 212–233, 378–382. See also Worthington’s own review in Ecological Century, 1989, pp. 36–49. 92. One cannot help noticing the lack of historical sensitivity in the works of Raymond L. Bryant, who argues that “it was only in the 1980s that Third-World political ecology emerged as a research agenda”; see his “Political Ecology: An Emerging Research Agenda in Third-World Studies,” Political Geography 11 (1992): 12–36, quotation on p. 13. 93. William Malcolm Hailey, An African Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938). John W. Cell, Hailey: A Study in British Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 215–240. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1989, p. 36. 94. Anonymous, “Science in Africa,” New Technical Books, 24 (Apr. 1939): 29. Anonymous, “Science in Africa,” Manchester Guardian, Jan. 17, 1939, p. 7. Anonymous, “Science in Africa,” Foreign Affairs, 18 (1939–1940): 172. Pierre Charles, “Science in Africa,” International Affairs, 18 (1939): 250–251. Robert Scott Troup, “Science in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society, 38 (1939): 227–239. 95. M. S., “Science in Africa,” African Studies, vol. 2 (1943), pp. 175–177, quotation on p. 177. 96. A. G. Church, “Science and Trusteeship in Africa,” Nature, 143 (May 6, 1939):

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97. 98.

99.

100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

105. 106.

Notes to Pages 218–219 740–741. C. E. P. B., “Science in Africa,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 65 (1939): 288–289. Hailey, Diary, Jan. 1939, addresses 1939–1941, MSS Brit. Emp. s. 334, RHLOU. On Worthington’s views on the historical evolution of human civilization, see Worthington, “Primitive Craft of the Central African Lakes,” Mariner’s Mirror, 19 (1933): 146–163. Paul W. Richards, Arthur George Tansley, and Alexander S. Watt, “The Recordings of Structure, Life Form and Flora of Tropical Forest Communities,” Journal of Ecology, 28 (1940): 224–239. William H. Pearsall, “A Milestone in Plant Ecology,” Journal of Ecology, 28 (1940): 241–244. Edward J. Salisbury, “The Study of British Vegetation,” Nature, 144 (Aug. 19, 1939): 305–306. Anonymous, “News and Views,” Nature, 147 (May 31, 1941): 669–670. William Pearsall, “The Development of Ecology in Britain,” Journal of Ecology, supplement, 52 (1964): 1–12. Arthur George Tansley, “British Ecology During the Past Quarter-Century: The Plant Community and the Ecosystem,” speech, Apr. 4, 1939, Journal of Ecology, 27 (1939): 513–530, quotation on p. 529. Tansley, The British Islands and Their Vegetation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), pp. 232 note 1, 233. Tansley, “British Ecology During the Past Quarter-Century,” 1939, pp. 514–515. Tansley, “British Ecology During the Past Quarter-Century,” 1939, p. 514 note 1. William C. Lewis, A System of Physical Chemistry, vols. 1–2 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1916). Frank Golley argues correctly that Tansley depended upon physical sciences in his ecosystem theory, though one may add that he did so privately after the debates at the Magdalen Philosphy Club and publicly only after 1939. His chief source of inspiration was of course Freudian psychology. See Frank Benjamin Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 17–34. The use of Greek terminology by Tansley and several other ecologists in defining their terms have misled historians of ideas to trace the origin of ecosystems in the philosophy of Aristotle, as well as holistic ecology in the reasoning of Plato. Such anachronistic philosophical exercises are not only historically flawed but also an obstacle to understanding current ecological debates. The science and philosophy of holism, ecology, and ecosystems emerged in the twentieth century, and not in 300 bce. Timothy Mahoney, “Platonic Ecology, Deep Ecology”; Owen Goldin, “The Ecology of the Critias and Platonic Metaphysics”; Laura Westra, “Aristotelian Roots of Ecology”; all in Laura Westra and Thomas Robinson (ed.), The Greeks and the Environment (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). See also Johnson Donald Hughes, “Ecology in Ancient Greece,” Inquiry 18 (1975): 115–125; Pan’s Travail (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Tansley, British Islands, 1939, pp. 228, 232 note 1. Tansley to Crawford, Oct. 31 and Nov. 22, 1940; Crawford to Tansley, Nov. 6, 1940, MSS Crawford 3, folio 111–112, 135–136, BLOU.

Notes to Pages 220–223

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107. National Atlas Box, PSLCU, Report of the British Association, Cambridge, 1938, p. lv. 108. Tansley, British Islands, 1939, pp. 127–128, Tansley’s emphasis. 109. Ibid., p. 128. 110. Ibid., pp. 174–178, 183–184. A similar argument is found in Tansley and Chipp (ed.), Aims and Methods, 1926, p. 145. 111. Tansley, British Islands, 1939, pp. 188, 190–191 (quotation). 112. John Perlin, Forest Journey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 25. 113. Donald Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in Ends of the Earth, Donald Worster (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 290. 114. On the history of the fall from grace narrative see Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Environmental debate and history is imbedded in Christian religious mythologies, as shown in Tarjei Rønnow, Den nye pietismen (Oslo: Institutt for Kultur og Samfunn, 1998). 115. Tansley, British Islands, 1939, chap. 11, pp. 243–246 and plate 46. 116. Tansley’s argument recruited an important follower in his old Cambridge student Reginald George Stapledon. Inspired by his teacher’s psychological understanding of humanity’s relation to the Earth, Stapledon, the director of the Welsh Plant Breeding Station, tried to build a new ground for ecological administration and conservation through human ecology. Reginald George Stapledon, The Hill Lands of Britain (London: Faber & Faber, 1943); Human Ecology (London: Faber & Faber, 1964). The latter book was written between 1946 and 1948 and published posthumously. 117. Tansley, “British Ecology During the Past Quarter-Century,” 1939, p. 527. 118. For a full history of Tansley’s nature conservation advocacy see Stephen Bocking’s brilliant article “Conserving Nature and Building a Science: British Ecologists and the Origin of the Nature Conservancy,” Science and Nature, Michael Shortland (ed.) (London: British Society for the History of Science, 1993), pp. 89–114. 119. Tansley, British Islands, 1939, p. 192, Tansley’s emphasis. 120. Tansley, “British Ecology During the Past Quarter-Century,” 1939, p. 528. 121. Ibid., p. 529. 122. Ibid. 123. Huxley to the Editor of The Times, Sept. 21, 1939; Wells to the Editor of The Times, Sept. 26 and 30, Oct. 25, 1939, in Peace and War Aims: A Correspondence from The Times (London: Peace Book Co., 1939), pp. 22–23, 24–27, 31, 51–54. 124. Tansley, “British Ecology,” 1939, p. 529. 125. Tansley, “Biology and Psychology,” undated MS 9 pp.; “The Historical Foundation of Psychoanalysis,” undated MS 50 pp.; “preface,” undated, PSLCU. 126. Arthur George Tansley, “Sigmund Freud 1856–1939,” Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 3 (1939–1941): 247–275, quotations on pp. 255, 256, 259, 260.

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Notes to Pages 224–226

127. McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State, 1984, chap. 9, pp. 265–306. See also Bocking, “Conserving Nature and Building a Science,” 1993, pp. 102–105. 128. John R. Baker, The Scientific Life (New York: Macmillan, 1943); Science and the Planned State (New York: Macmillan, 1945). James Gerald Crowther, The Social Relations of Science (New York: Macmillan, 1941). John Desmond Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London: Routledge, 1939). 129. All the pamphlets (except one from April 1945) and all the bulletins from the Society for Freedom in Science were published after the war, most of them in the 1950s. McGucken seems to follow the narrative provided by Society for Freedom in Science in Society for Freedom in Science: Its Origin, Object, and Constitution, July 1953, pamphlet. Society for Freedom in Science, List of Members, June 1947. McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State, 1984, pp. 278, 300. 130. Arthur George Tansley, The Values of Science to Humanity (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942), Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford University, June 2, 1942, p. 31. Tansley’s chief target was Crowther’s Social Relations of Science of 1941. Julian Huxley, “Evolutionary Ethics,” [1943] in Touchstone for Ethics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), pp. 113–166. 131. Tansley, “Science in the Liberal State,” undated MS 6 folios, PSLCU, p. 1. The content of the MS indicates that it was written as a reflection on the writings of Bernal and Crowther, and that it probably was written sometime during the war. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid., p. 4, Tansley, Values of Science, 1942, p. 27. 134. Frank Kendon, The Flowless Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), pp. 7, 11, Kendon’s emphasis. Tansley to Kendon, Feb. 23, 1943, Add 9251/T/1, CUL. 135. Tansley to Kendon, Oct. 27, 1943, Add 9251/T/3, CUL. 136. Tansley to Kendon, Apr. 8, 1943, Add 9251/T2, CUL, Tansley’s emphasis. 137. Raymond L. Lindeman, “The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology,” Ecology, 23 (1942): 399–418. The paper met with resistance and was initially rejected; see Robert Edward Cook, “Raymond Lindeman and the Trophic-Dynamic Concept in Ecology,” Science, 198 (Oct. 7, 1977): 22–26. 138. Several historians have written extensively and brilliantly on the institutional and geographical development of the nature conservation movement in Britain, though they have failed to appreciate the psychological assumptions Tansley utilized in his argumentation. John Sheail, Nature in Trust (London: Blackie, 1976); “From Preservation to Conservation: Wildlife and the Environment, 1900–1950,” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 32 (1987): 171–177; Nature Conservation in Britain (London: The Stationery Office, 1998). David Evans, History of Nature Conservation in Britain (London: Routledge, 1992); Norman Moore, Bird of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 139. British Ecological Society, “2nd draft report of the Committee on Nature Conservation and Nature Reserves,” May 26, 1942, 33 pp., PSLCU. British Ecological Society, Nature Conservation and Nature Reserves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943). See also Nature Reserves Investigation Committee, “Nature Conservation and Nature Reserves,” Journal of Ecology, 32 (1944): 45–82; both Elton and Worthington were involved in producing this article.

Notes to Pages 226–230

140.

141. 142. 143.

144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153.

154.

155. 156. 157.

158.

323 323

British Ecological Society, “Ecological Principles Involved in the Practice of Forestry,” Journal of Ecology, 32 (1944): 83–115. Anonymous, “News and Views,” Nature, 147 (Jan. 18, 1941): 83. Ecological Society, Nature Conservation, 1943, p. 3. David Matles argues in an excellent study that the landscape forms an identity of national heritage in England. He has also briefly pointed out the connection between Tansley’s psychology and his ecological studies; see Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 99. Ecological Society, Nature Conservation, 1943, quotations in this paragraph on pp. 5, 7. Ibid., pp. 7, 13, 21, 22, 24, 26. Anonymous, “Planning the Country,” Times Literary Supplement, Apr. 28, 1945, p. 201. See also W. H. P., “Our Heritage of Wild Nature,” Journal of Ecology, 33 (1945): 285. Arthur George Tansley, Our Heritage of Wild Nature: A Plea for Organized Nature Conservation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), p. 6. Ibid., quotations on pp. 1, 60–61. Tansley, “The Future of the Forest,” The Times, July 30, 1945, p. 5. Tansley, Our Heritage, 1945, p. 3. Ibid., pp. 1, 33, 42, Tansley’s emphasis. Tansley, “Land Utilisation and Nature Reserves,” MS pre-1944, p. 8. John Sheail, “Applied Ecology and the Search for Institutional Support,” Environmental Review, 13 (1989): 65–79. Worthington, Ecological Century, 1989, pp. 63 (quotation), 64–65. Michael Graham, The Fish Gate (London: Faber & Faber, 1943). Graham was one of the organizers of the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk with local fishing boats. In the final years of the war he became a scientific advisor for the Air Force. See Wimpenny, “Michael Graham,” 1974, pp. x–xi. Keith A. H. Murray, “Preface,” in Worthington, Middle East Science (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946), pp. iii–v. See also Worthington, Ecological Century, 1989, pp. 69–90, map p. 70. Worthington, Middle East Science, 1946, pp. 6–37. Middle East Supply Centre, “Agricultural Report,” unpublished manuscripts 1943–1944, engineering collection: Sci 1615.115, Cabot Library, Harvard University. See also Middle East Supply Centre, Middle East Agricultural Development, Proceedings of the Cairo Conference, Feb. 7, 1944 (Cairo: Shara Tolumbat, 1944). Martin Wilmington, Middle East Supply Centre (New York: State University of New York Press, 1971). Worthington, Middle East Science, 1946, pp. 38–81. Ibid., pp. 82–140. Bernard Augustus Keen, Agricultural Development of the Middle East (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946). Worthington, Middle East Science, 1946, pp. 140–195, quotation on p. 188. See also Harold B. Allen, Rural Education and Welfare in the Middle East (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946). Worthington recalls that “in 1951 it fell to my lot to assist the Scientific Council for Africa South of the Sahara in applying Smuts’ holistic approach to the scien-

324 324

159. 160.

161. 162. 163. 164.

165.

166. 167.

168.

169.

Notes to Pages 230–232 tific problems of Africa which he had advocated in 1929.” Worthington, Ecological Century, 1983, p. 129. Ibid., p. 132. Huxley’s preparatory work on taxonomy was inspired by ecologists and published in the context of ecological debates for an audience of ecologists. Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942); see especially chaps. 5 and 6 on geographical speciation in relation to ecology and genetics, pp. 151–381. Huxley, “Ecology and taxonomic differentiation,” Journal of Ecology, 27 (1939): 408–420. Arthur George Tansley, “A Symposium on the Reciprocal Relationship of Ecology and Taxonomy,” Journal of Ecology, 27 (1939): 401–402. Huxley (ed.), The New Systematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940); this volume contains several contributions from ecologists, including one by Worthington. Julian Huxley, “Science, Christianity and Truth,” Nature, 152 (July 17, 1943): 79. Julian Huxley, Democracy Marches (London: Chatto & Windus, 1941), pp. 11– 17; On Living in a Revolution (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942). Huxley, Memories, 1970, pp. 265–280. Julian Huxley and Phyllis Deane, The Future of the Colonies (London: Pilot Press, 1944), pamphlet. Huxley, Democracy Marches, 1941, p. 75 (quotation); “Evolution: The History of Life,” in Science Looks Ahead, A. M. Low (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 17–34; “Science and the House” (BBC radio), in Science at Your Service, E. C. Bullard (ed.) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945). Huxley, Democracy Marches, 1941, pp. 74–85. H. G. Wells, The Rights of Man (London: Penguin, 1940); Guide to the New World (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941); Phænix (London: Secker & Warburg, 1942). Huxley, “The Society of Planning” (review), Nature, 146 (July 6, 1940): 3–4. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society (New York: Harcourt, 1940). Julian Huxley, “The Future,” in Anonymous (ed.), Reshaping Man’s Heritage (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1944), pp. 89–96, see also Wells, “Man’s Heritage,” pp. 7–13. Julian Huxley, TVA Adventure in Planning (Surrey: The Architectural Press, 1943); Anonymous, “Work of the Tennessee Valley Authority,” Nature, 152 (July 17, 1943), p. 73. R. Brightman, “Judgment on Planning,” Nature, 153 (Apr. 29, 1944), pp. 508–509. Huxley, Democracy Marches, 1941, pp. 74–84. On the interesting environmental history of the Tennessee Valley Authority see contributions in Erwin C. Hargrove and Paul Conlin (eds.), TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). William U. Chandler, The Myth of TVA (Cambridge: Ballinger Pub., 1984). Walter L. Creese, TVA’s Public Planning (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990). Oak Ridge served as a model for British country planners; it was a successful example of how a community of highly specialized nuclear physicists and technicians could flourish in a clean environment outside dirty cities. The prospect of having such a peaceful place abandoned after the war filled British town and country planners with dismay. Anonymous, “Oak Ridge—A New Town

Notes to Pages 232–234

170. 171. 172.

173.

174.

175. 176. 177.

178.

179.

180.

325 325

Planned for Destruction,” Town and Country Planning, 13 (1945–1946): 183– 185. On the use of the ecosystem approach at Oak Ridge, see Stephen Bocking’s excellent discussion in Ecologists and Environmental Politics, 1997, pp. 63–115. Julian Huxley, “Why We Must Plan,” The Architects’ Journal, 97 (Mar. 25, 1943): 211–212. Max Nicholson, “Democracy,” in Physical Planning, Ian R. M. McCallum (ed.) (London: Architectural Press, 1944), pp. 16–21. Julian Huxley, “The National Planning Basis,” Town and Country Planning, 10 (1942): 97–98 (quotation); “War and Reconstruction,” Nature, 145 (1940): 288–289, 330–334; Reconstruction and Peace (New York: New Republic, 1941); “Relief and Reconstruction,” in When Hostilities Cease, The Fabian Society (ed.) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1943), pp. 18–29. Huxley, Memories, 1970, pp. 287–290; Standing Committee on National Parks, The Case for National Parks in Great Britain (London: Hobart Place, 1938). Anonymous, “National Parks,” Nature, 142 (Dec. 17, 1938): 1087. John Dower, National Parks in England and Wales (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1945). Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (London: Preparatory Commission of UNESCO, 1946), p. 8. Huxley, Memories, vol. 2 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), chaps. 1 and 3. Ibid., pp. 13, 17. Ibid., p. 45. “It would be of the greatest interest to bring together some of the world’s leading comparative neurologists with a group of experts in administration, to see how far the study of what we may call ‘the machinery of government’ in the animal body can help us in solving the same problem on the social plane.” Ibid., pp. 44–47, quotations on p. 47. The study was carried out by Arne Næss with the assistance of his student Stein Rokkan (preface and personal conversation with Næss). Richard McKeon (ed.), Democracy in a World of Tensions, copyright UNESCO (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 447–512. The monograph received the most damaging reviews; see Ferdinand A. Hermens, “Democracy in a World of Tensions,” Review of Politics, 13 (1951): 375–381. Frank K. Klingberg, “Democracy in a World of Tensions,” Western Political Quarterly, 4 (1951): 337–338. Joseph S. Roucek, “Democracy in a World of Tensions,” American Sociological Review, 16 (1951): 425–426. See also Arne Næss, Interpretation and Preciseness (Oslo: Dybwad, 1953); Democracy, Ideology and Objectivity (Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1956). Arthur George Tansley, The Psychological Connexion of Two Basic Principles of the Society for Freedom in Science, Society for Freedom in Science, pamphlet no. 12 (London, 1952). Further historical research may indicate whether or not there is a parallel history in Britain to nature protection in the Soviet Union; see Douglas Weiner, Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection From Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Arthur George Tansley, Britain’s Green Mantle: Past, Present and Future, 2nd. ed revised by M. C. F. Proctor (London: George Allen and Unwin, [1947]

326 326

181.

182. 183. 184.

185.

186.

187.

Notes to Pages 234–239 1968). Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Arthur George Tansley and E. Prince Evans, Plant Ecology and the School (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946), pp. 7, 8, 88. Tansley, “National Parks and Nature Reserves,” lecture at the Philosophical and Literature Society, Nov. 9, 1948, MS 20 pp.; “The Changing Flora of Britain,” conference paper, Apr. 5, 1952, MS 14 pp., PSLCU. Tansley, “The Conservation of British Vegetation and Species,” in The Changing Flora of Britain, J. E. Lousley (ed.) (Oxford: Department of Botany, 1953), pp. 188–196. Arthur George Tansley, Oaks and Oak Woods (London: Methuen & Co., 1952), p. 11. Arthur George Tansley, Mind and Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), pp. 25, 47, 81–82. Arthur George Tansley, “What is Ecology?” [1951], Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 32 (1987): 5–16, quotation on p. 13. Compare with Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). Charles Elton, for example, wrote about the dangers of the population problem and the need for conservation of nature in pessimistic terms. Similarly, Tansley’s student Nicholas Polunin became a prominent advocate for environmentalism and population control as founding editor of the journals Biological Conservation (1968–1973) and Environmental Conservation (1974–1998), and wrote or edited several books and monographs about the ecological crisis. Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions (London: Methuen, 1958). On the work of some other Oxford students in ecology, see William C. Kimler, “Advantage, Adaptiveness, and Evolutionary Ecology,” Journal of the History of Biology, 19 (1986): 215–234. Nicholson, The System: The Misgovernment of Modern Britain (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); The Environmental Revolution: A Guide for the New Masters of the World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). The passage from Kant was quoted in a lecture by Collingwood that Berlin attended in 1929; see Henry Hardy’s foreword to Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Henry Hardy (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. xi note 2. Berlin was greatly inspired by Collingwood during his Oxford years from 1928 to 1932, see Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), p. 58.

Conclusion: A World without History 1. The historian Lynn White Jr., among others, has argued that there is a problematic element of Newtonian physics in the contemporary understanding of nature that enforces capitalistic industrial exploitation of natural resources and causes environmental problems. I have discussed several ecologists and biologists, such as Arthur Tansley, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells, who should have been the perfect illustrations of this argument. However, the sources indicate that it was Freudian psychology rather than Newtonian physics that inspired a mechanistic view of nature in modern biology, and that this mechanism was associated with

Notes to Pages 239–241

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

327 327

progressive views of social justice and planned economy rather than industrial exploitation and capitalism. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science, 155 (Mar. 10, 1967): 1203–1207. Several historians of early modern science have pointed out that challenges to social order often translate into threats to nature itself. In this book I have argued that this argument can be extended to the modern society. I have been inspired by the excellent study of Simon Schaffer, “The Earth’s Fertility as a Social Fact in Early Modern Britain,” Nature and Society in Historical Context, Mikuláš Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998). Further research may indicate whether ecosystems in national parks can be understood as modern-day versions of the old Wunderkammern. I am in great debt to Peter Galison’s fascinating discussion of trading zones, which I have alluded to in several places in this book. The trading zone terminology is inspired by two prominent historians of ecology and their discussion of institutional ecologies of knowledge; see Peter Galison, Image and Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 47 note 48, 781–844; “Wastelands and Wilderness,” working paper for the 1997 Sommerakademie, Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Max Planck Gesselschaft, Berlin, August 1997. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science, 19 (1989): 387–420. I am also in debt to Mario Biagioli’s discussion of patronage and terminology of self-fashioning in his fine study Galileo Courtier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). I am in debt to Roy Porter’s interesting discussion of “Other Victorians” in Social History of Madness (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). I am not sure if Porter will agree with me that the experience of wildness in environmental protection zones can be understood within a larger social history of madness in a modern society. See also Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, Facts of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 155–201. Donald Worster argues, in a well-known and beautifully written book, that there exists an Arcadian view of nature that may serve as an alternative to a managerial, industrial view of the life world. Tansley and the Oxford school of imperial ecology should, according to this argument, have been a perfect example of the latter managerial approach, whereas South African defenders of holism should have been an example of the first. However, members of the Oxford school of imperial ecology defending ecological management and industrialization were equally keen defenders of preserving nature, even for its own sake (like Huxley). Likewise, the South Africans, whose deep ecological terminology of thinking like a mountain endorsed a harsh ecological trusteeship of people of non-European descent, do not really fit the Arcadian ideal. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). On contemporary politics of holism see, for example, Baied Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). Arne

328 328

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Notes to Pages 241–243 Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, David Rothenberg (trans. and ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Allan Savory with Jody Butterfield, Holistic Management (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999). Under the heading “The Essence of Ecology” Tansley wrote: “The word ecology is derived, like the common English word economy, from the Greek oikos, a house, abode, dwelling, and this etymology gives the key to the meaning of the word. In its most general sense ecology may be defined as the study of plants and animals as they live in their natural homes, and this implies the study of all they are and do when they are ‘at home.’” Tansley, “What is Ecology?” [reprint 1951], Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 32 (1987): 5–16, quotation on p. 6. See also Tansley, The British Islands and Their Vegetation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), pp. 228, 232 note 1. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle morphologie der organismen (Berlin: Verlag von Georg Reimer, 1866), p. 286 note 2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, [1951] 1976), part II. Julian Huxley and Ludwig Koch, Animal Language (London: Country Life, 1938), p. 1. Max Nicholson and Ludwig Koch, Songs of Wild Birds (London: Witherby, 1937). Julian Huxley, TVA Adventure in Planning (Surrey: The Architectural Press, 1943), see the chapter entitled “The Architecture of TVA,” pp. 77–104, and Huxley, “Origins of Human Graphic Art,” Nature, 149 (June 6, 1942): 637. Julian Huxley, “Social Amenities and the Arts in Country Towns,” in Country Towns in the Future England, Stanley Baron (ed.) (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), pp. 95–98, quotation on p. 98. Huxley paraphrases a remark by John Boynton Priestley.

Sources

BLOU CUL GHLHU HLHU NPRI PSLCU PSLOU RHLOU RSAS RUW SFALC UCL UNA UOL UOW

New Bodleian Library, Oxford University Cambridge University Library. Includes a complete copy of the Smuts Archive at the National Archives of South Africa in Pretoria. Gray Herbarium Library, Harvard University Houghton Library, Harvard University Norwegian Polar Research Institute, Tromsø Plant Sciences Library, Cambridge University. Includes the Tansley Archive. Plant Sciences Library, Oxford University. Rhodes House Library, Oxford University Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm Rice University, Woodson Research Center—MS 215. Includes the Huxley Archive. Sigmund Freud Archives, Library of Congress University of Chicago Library, Dept. of Special Collections University of Natal Archives, Pietermaritzburg University of Oslo Library University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center. Includes the Clements Archive.

329

Index

Academia: ecology of knowledge and, 78, 104–105, 145, 216–218; Bews’s deep ecology and, 171 Action, Harry Burrows, 139 Adams, Charles, 152–153 Adamson, Robert Scott, 122, 290n22 Aerial photography: Oxford school of ecology and, 82–86; vegetation mapping, 134; Tansley’s survey of Britain and, 219. See also Aviation technology Aerial Surveying by Rapid Methods (Jones and Griffiths), 278n23 Aerial Survey in Relation to the Economic Development of the New Countries (Bourne), 82, 83–85 Africa: Gold Coast, 32, 33, 38–39; Rhodesia, 125–126; Smuts’s Oxford lectures on, 125–128; John Phillips’s survey project, 145–146, 185; inland fisheries, Worthington and, 209–213. See also Central Africa; Northern Rhodesia; South Africa Africa and Some World Problems (Smuts), 127 African Explosives and Chemical Industries Limited, 172, 174 African National Congress, 122, 125 African Research Survey Committee, 129– 130, 293n62 African Survey, An (Hailey), 218 African Surveys: Worthington and, 208, 213, 214–218, 230. See also Botanical Survey of South Africa African View (Huxley), 128–129 Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation, 35, 36–40 Aircraft Operating Company Limited, 82, 83, 84, 134, 219

330

Air Ministry, Civil Aviation Department of (Great Britain), 94–95 Airplanes. See Aerial photography; Aviation technology Air pollution. See “Urban fog” Alexander, Samuel, 72, 276n170 Allee, Warder Clyde, 64, 121, 144, 146, 148, 149, 175, 304n83 Amory, Copley, 107, 108 Analysis of Matter (Russell), 123 Animal Biology (Huxley and Haldane), 100 Animal ecology: emergence at Oxford University, 78, 80; Elton and, 80, 97–98, 100–102; Oxford expeditions to Spitsbergen and, 89, 91–92; fur industry economy and, 98–99. See also Human ecology Animal Ecology (Elton), 100–105, 106 Annals of Botany (journal), 10, 15 Apartheid policy, 312n169 “Arcadian” tradition, 110, 197, 213 Armstrong, Edward, 277n6 Armstrong, Harold, 179, 306n108 Ashmolean Natural History Society, 17, 79 Association Internationale des Botanistes, 33–34 Autobiography: H. G. Wells’s experiment in, 200–201 Aviation technology: impact on ecology, 3, 238; Oxford school of ecology and, 77, 82–86, 116; Spitsbergen expeditions and, 94–95, 96–97. See also Aerial photography Balfour, Isaac Bayley, 79; background of, 10; morphological approach to botany and ecology, 10, 13, 14; conflict with Tansley, 13, 14, 20, 22; Warming’s ecology and,

Index 13; as editor of Annals of Botany, 15; Bews and, 57–58; John Phillips and, 63, 152 “Basis of Trusteeship in African Native Policy,” (Smuts), 309nn139,140 Bear Island, 88, 89, 90–92 “Beauty in Nature” (Smuts), 74 Bergson, Henri, 72, 73, 275n168 Berlin, Isaiah, 236, 326n187 Bews, John William, 41; human ecology and, 3, 160, 161, 162–163, 164–168, 169–172, 240; on botanical surveys, 35; early life, 57; Gale’s biography of, 57, 304n75; Smuts and, 57, 60, 62, 68–69, 74, 119–120, 157, 160, 162–163, 164–166, 169, 172, 192; university education, 57–58; early career in botany and ecology, 58, 59–62; career at Natal University College, 58–59, 60, 61– 62, 269n70; John Phillips and, 63, 144, 172; Botanical Survey of South Africa and, 65–66, 272n117; book on plant evolution, 68–69; British Association for the Advancement of Science and, 119; holism and holistic ecology and, 119–120, 160, 161, 163, 164–172, 239; eugenics and, 123; racial ecology and, 123, 161–162, 171–172; human gradualism and, 157, 164, 178; African survey debate and, 160; reorganization and ecological segregation of Natal University College, 160, 161–162, 240; South African Association for the Advancement of Science and, 160; on environmental protection, 167; financial investments and, 167; deep ecology of, 168, 169–172; ecological order of poetry, 168, 240; poetry of, 168–169; health problems, 169, 270n87; death of, 172; biotic communities and, 237–238; Nordic heritage of, 269n82; wife of, 270n95; bequest to Natal University College, 303n49 Binney, George, 89, 94, 98 Bio-Ecology (Clements and Shelford), 174– 175 Biological Conservation (journal), 326n185 “Biology of Human Nature” (Huxley), 206 Biotic communities: John Phillips and, 121, 130–131, 132–133, 144, 148–149, 192, 237–238, 239; racial ecology and, 121, 130–131, 148–149; trusteeship policy and, 121; holism and, 151, 239; Frankenwald project and, 172–173; segregation policies and, 192, 193, 238

331 331

“Biotic Community,” (Phillips), 130, 132– 133 Bjønøya Kullompani I/S, 90–91 Blackman, Frederick Frost, 11–12, 17, 20, 21 Blackman, Vernon Herbert, 11–12, 17, 20, 21, 224 Boer War, 42, 45 Bondelwaart, 51 Botanical Survey of South Africa, 35; Pole Evans and, 55, 62, 65; Botha and, 56–57; Smuts and, 57; goal and agenda of, 65–66; Imperial Botanical Conference and, 66; Advisory Committee, 272n117 Botanical Survey of South Africa Memoir, 55, 56, 64, 65 Botanical surveys: of the British empire, 34– 35; Tansley’s survey of British vegetation, 219–223. See also Botanical Survey of South Africa; Ecological surveys Botany: socially responsible, 9, 10–11, 12, 17, 19; intellectual cannibalization by ecology, 239; economic, 264n173. See also British botany; South African botany; Natural history Botany of the Living Planet (Bower), 63 Botha, Louis, 35, 46, 47, 54, 56–57 Bothalia (journal), 55, 56–57, 65 Bourne, Ray, 3, 82, 83–85, 134, 135, 204, 238, 278n23 Bower, Frederick Orpen, 10, 15, 20, 21, 22, 31, 63 Brave New World (A. Huxley), 208 Britain’s Green Mantle (Tansley), 234 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 158, 201, 220; “Nature of Life” debate in South Africa, 119, 123–124 British botany: conflict between approaches in London and Scotland, 7, 10, 15–16; women in, 9; London botanists, 9–10, 11– 12; manifesto on reconstruction of botanical teaching and, 20–22. See also British ecology British Ecological Society, 2, 19, 20, 197, 219, 222, 226 British ecology: debate between Scottish and London schools, 7; Warming and, 13–14; conflict between geographical and morphological approaches, 14, 16, 20–22; ecological survey of Britain, 17–19; Tansley and, 19, 29–31. See also individual ecologists; Oxford school of imperial ecology

332 332

Index

British Empire Exhibition, 34 British Empire Vegetation Abstracts, 106 British Empire Vegetation Committee, 32, 35, 36–40 British Islands and Their Vegetation (Tansley), 219–223; popular version of, 234 British Journal of Medical Psychology, 140 British Petroleum Company, 94, 98 British Society for the Study of SexPsychology, 23 Broom, Robert, 146, 163–164, 297n125 Bruce City, 92–93 Bulhoek, 50–51 Bunyoni, Lake, 212 Bureau of Animal Population, 108, 286n124 Business cycles, 107–108 Butterfield, Herbert, 5, 234 Cambridge Ecology Club, 17 Cambridge University, 193–194, 214 Campbell, Roy, 74–75, 123, 290n24 Cannibalization. See Intellectual cannibalization Cape (periodical), 73 Carr-Saunders, Alexander Morris: Elton and, 86, 87, 97, 101, 102, 279n38; eugenics and, 86; university education, 86; Julian Huxley and, 87; Oxford expeditions to Spitsbergen and, 89, 92, 93–94; human population dynamics and, 93–94, 97; Nicholson’s national economic plan and, 203; impact on ecological reasoning, 238; Malthus and, 282n68 Catholic View of Holism (Kolbe), 73 Central Africa: Smuts’s botanical expedition to, 159–160; inland fisheries, Worthington and, 209–213 Central Committee for the Survey of British Vegetation, 17–19 Chemistry, 219, 239 Chicago school of ecology, 38, 120, 148, 296n117 Chick, Edith, 13, 21 Chipp, Thomas Ford, 106; ecological research in the Gold Coast, 32–33, 38–39; International Botanical Conference and, 34; Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation, 35, 38–39; botanical survey of the British Empire and, 35; survey of vegetation abstracts, 40; Imperial Botanical Conference and, 66; Fifth International Botanical Congress and, 131; address book

of ecologists and, 135; death of, 135–136; Summerhayes and, 280n51; “Trees and Man,” 294n88 Churchill, Winston, 73, 185, 187, 194 Clark, Alice, 49, 50 Clements, Frederic, 31, 107, 117, 130, 148, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 166, 174, 175, 294n70 Climate: Elton’s human ecology and, 103– 104; Smuts’s notions of holistic evolution and, 125, 163. See also Climatic cycles “Climate and Man in Africa” (Smuts), 163, 166 Climatic Changes (Huntington), 103 Climatic cycles: Elton’s animal population ecology and, 98; Huntington’s notions of economic cycles and, 108 Climax, 150–151 Collingwood, Robert George, 137, 143, 236 Colonial management, 35–40; Oxford school of ecology and, 77–78; Worthington’s fisheries work in Africa and, 211–213; Worthington’s Science in Africa and, 214– 218; Tansley and, 218–219. See also Ecological management Colonization: ecological perspectives of Huxley and Wells, 113–114. See also Settlement policies Committee for Nature Conservation, 226 Communitarianism, 192, 312n166 Conservation: of natural resources, 175–176; of human resources, 176, 183. See also Nature conservation Cowles, Henry Chandler, 14, 131, 152, 297n117 Crawford, Osbert Stanhope, 82–83, 219 Crocker, Robert A., 174, 175 Darwin, Charles, 69 Darwin, Francis, 11 De Beers Debating Society, 45 Deep ecology: Bews’s notions of human culture and, 168, 169–172; Arne Næss and, 180, 181 Deforestation, 18–19 Democracy, 231, 233 Dent, Dick, 210, 211, 213 Department of Zoology, Oxford University, 78, 80, 86–87, 106 Development of Agriculture and Forestry in the Tropics (Phillips), 305n90 Digitaria smutsii, 55, 300n13

Index Druce, George Claridge, 17, 18, 79, 277n6 Druce archive, 257n62 Dumbarton Oaks meeting, 186, 187 Durban Library Group, 168 Ecological colonization, 113–114 Ecological communities, 37–38 Ecological determinism, 61 Ecological management: perspectives of J. Huxley and Wells on, 114–116; scientific paternalism and, 114–116, 207–208, 242– 243; biotic communities concept and, 130–131; Worthington’s fisheries work in Africa and, 211–213; Tansley’s notions of, 227–228; of Windermere fishery during World War II, 228–229. See also Colonial management; Environmental management; Forest management Ecological mapping: Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation on, 36–37; aerial surveying and, 134, 238. See also Aerial photography Ecological pedagogy, 144–145 Ecological surveys: of the British empire, 34– 35; John Phillips’s proposed survey of Africa, 145–146, 185; Worthington’s survey of the Middle East, 229. See also African Surveys; Botanical Survey of South Africa Ecology: debate on spelling of, 1; enlargement and expansion of, 1–4, 237– 244; patronage networks and, 2, 237; aviation technology and, 3, 238; northsouth relations in research, 4, 238; Warming and, 13–14; Haeckel’s Darwinian approach, 38, 264nn164,165; scientific paternalism and, 114–116, 207–208, 242– 243; terminology debate, 131–132; deep, 168, 169–172, 180, 181; legitimatization of imperialism and, 243–244; of trading, 284n104; Tansley on etymology of, 328n7. See also Animal ecology; British ecology; Ecology of knowledge; Forest ecology; Holistic ecology; Human ecology; Mechanism vs. holism debate; Oxford school of imperial ecology; Population ecology; Racial ecologies and ideologies; South African ecology Ecology (journal), 64, 152 Ecology of knowledge: Oxford school of ecology and, 78; Elton’s scheme for, 104– 105; John Phillips and, 145; Bews’s deep

333 333

ecology and, 171; Worthington’s Science in Africa and, 216–218; uses for, 240 Economic cycles, 107–108, 115 Economic ecology: British notions of colonial ecology and, 38, 39–40; Elton and, 77–78, 98–99, 107, 108; human trade cycles, 107–108; perspectives of Huxley and Wells on, 112–116. See also Economy of nature Economic planning, 202–204, 206–207. See also Social planning Economy of nature: Huxley’s notions of social planning and, 204, 206, 207–208, 230–232; Worthington’s management of in Africa, 211–213; Worthington’s economy of knowledge and, 216–218. See also Economic ecology Ecosystem theory (of Tansley): Freudian psychology and, 3, 239, 320n103; notions of physical systems and equilibrium in, 8, 30–31, 38; influences on Tansley at Oxford and, 78; Tansley’s formulation of, 139– 143, 154–156, 295n100; mechanismholism debate and, 154–156; in Tansley’s survey of the British Isles, 219, 220–221; virgin and semi-natural systems, 219–220; Lindeman and, 226; Jax on, 296n106 Educational segregation, 161–162 Einstein, Albert, 178–179, 239, 306n104 Elton, Charles, 6, 284n97, 326n185; aviation technology and, 3, 96, 97, 238; animal population ecology and, 19, 80, 97–98, 108; economic ecology and, 77–78, 98– 99, 107, 108; Carr-Saunders and, 86, 87, 101, 102, 279n38; Julian Huxley and, 86, 87, 100–101, 106, 111, 117, 279n38; Oxford Department of Zoology and, 86, 87; Spitsbergen expeditions and, 89, 90– 93, 94, 95–96, 97; population dynamics of lemmings, 97–98, 240, 283nn84,87; human ecology and, 102–105; ecology of knowledge and intellectual cannibalization, 104–105, 106–107, 109, 240; academic career, 106, 107, 108; female students of, 106, 285n113; zoology abstracts prepared by, 106–107; human trade cycles and, 107, 108; Oxford University Exploration Club and, 108, 109; on Bews’s human ecology, 168; Worthington and, 214; Society for Freedom in Science and, 224; Committee for Nature Conservation and, 226; Vito Volterra and, 286n123; John Phillips and, 286n124

334 334

Index

Emergent Evolution (Morgan), 72 Empire Forestry Association, 81 Empire Vegetation Committee, 290n22 Environmental Conservation (journal), 326n185 Environmental crisis: ecological perspectives of Huxley and Wells, 114; John Phillips’s description of, 147 Environmental history: Tansley and, 220– 222, 234 Environmentalism: Julian Huxley’s scientific propaganda and, 207; Tansley’s Britain’s Green Mantle and, 234; Nicholson and, 235. See also Environmental protection; Nature conservation Environmental management: ecological perspectives of Huxley and Wells, 114– 116; Tansley’s notions of, 227–228. See also Colonial management; Ecological management; Forest management Environmental protection, 20, 167, 241. See also Environmentalism Epistemology: Tansley’s notions of, 140–141 Eugenics, 86, 116, 123, 291n30 Evolution. See Holistic evolution; Human evolution; Plant evolution Evolution of Climate (Brooks), 67 Experiment in Autobiography (Wells), 200– 201 “Ex Unitate Vires” (Macfie), 56 Fabians, 8, 11, 22, 263n152 Fate of Man (Wells), 201 Fifth International Botanical Congress, 131– 135 Fisheries. See Inland fisheries Flora of South Africa (Marloth), 54 Flowering Plants of South Africa (journal), 55, 56 Food chains, 211–213 Forbes-Adam, Eric, 87, 279n36 Forest ecology: John Phillips and, 63–64; Oxford Imperial Forestry Institute and, 81–82 Forest Journey (Perlin), 257n67 Forest management: Chipp’s Gold Coast research, 32–33, 38–39; Troup and, 278n17 Frankenwald research station, 172–173, 184, 185 Freedom: Smuts’s notions of, 71–72, 192 Freemasons, 33, 136 Freshwater Biological Association, 213

Freud, Sigmund, 3, 7, 23, 28–29, 100, 139, 180, 223, 239 Freudian psychology. See Psychology Fur industry, 98–99, 107, 108 Gale, George, 57, 304n75 Galton, Francis, 8, 86 Gandhi, Mahatma, 41, 46–47, 194, 313n178 Garden Illustrated (magazine), 294n88 Geddes, Patrick, 10, 57, 253n16 Genetical Basis of Natural Selection (Fisher), 206 Genetics: British ecology and, 15–16, 19 Geographical ecology: conflict with morphological approach, 14, 16, 20–22 German East Africa, 47 German Southwest Africa, 47 Germany: Smuts’s rejection of Nazism, 179; holism in, 180–181, 308n124 Gestalt psychology, 180, 181 Gillett, Margaret, 48, 164, 195 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 44, 45, 51, 126 Gold Coast, 32, 33, 38–39 Gold standard, 115 Gradualism, 311n164. See also Human gradualism Graham, Michael, 229, 323n152 Gray Steel: J. C. Smuts (Millin), 179 Great Britain: gold standard and, 115; Nicholson’s national economic plan, 202– 204, 206–207; Osbert Crawford’s proposed national atlas for, 219–220; Tansley’ survey of vegetation, 219–223; Windermere fishery during World War II, 228–229; postwar reconstruction planning, 232; national socialism and, 306n111. See also British botany; British ecology; Oxford school of imperial ecology Grey University College, 269n70 Guide for the New Masters of the World, A (Nicholson), 235 Guide to Botanical Survey Work (South Africa), 65 Haeckel, Ernst, 38, 238, 264nn164,165, 300n8 Hailey, Malcolm, 215, 218, 230 Haldane, J. B. S., 100, 123, 140, 203, 283n92 Haldane, John Scott, 119, 123, 125, 128, 274n145 Hancock, William Keith, 42, 177

Index Hart, Bernard, 19, 260n100 Health and Environment (Hill and Campbell), 103 Hertzog, James Barry, 46, 51, 125, 150, 177, 182 Hofmeyr, Jan, 183, 185, 309n134 Hogben, Lancelot, 112, 119, 122–123, 124, 154, 290nn20,24, 291nn30,32, 293n59 Holism and Evolution (Smuts), 193, 195; argument of, 69–72; critical reception, 72– 75; publication of, 124–125; relativity theory and, 178; German reception of, 180, 181; notions of freedom in, 192 Holism philosophy (of Smuts), 238–239; “An Inquiry into the Whole” and, 46, 49; manuscript on, 46; racial policies and, 48, 125–126, 127, 177–178; nature mysticism and, 49, 51; Table Mountain speech, 51– 53; criticisms of, 72–75, 127, 149, 150, 151–155, 154, 179–180, 194; Bews and, 119–120, 160, 161, 163, 164–172, 239; Oxford lectures, 124–128; holistic monism, 146; John Phillips’s defense of, 146–148, 149, 150–152, 305n90; Tansley’s criticism of, 149, 150, 151–155; Hyman Levy’s criticism of, 154; Tree of Knowledge speech, 158–159; human gradualism and, 177, 178; Einstein’s response to, 178–179; German reception of, 180–181, 308n124; human rights and, 191–193; unification of South Africa and, 194–195; considered an atheist philosophy, 276n170; Quine and, 312n173; Russell and, 313n177. See also Holistic evolution; Mechanism vs. holism debate; Politics of holism Holistic ecology: Smuts and, 2, 69–72, 125– 126; John Phillips and, 66, 120–122, 146– 149, 149, 150–151, 156; “Nature of Life” debate and, 119, 123; Bews and, 119–120, 160, 161, 163, 164–172; racial ecology and, 123, 125–126; Tansley’s criticism of, 133, 149, 150, 151–155; ecosystem concept and, 154–156; demise of, 156. See also Holism philosophy Holistic evolution (of Smuts): of personality, 43–45, 71–72, 126, 302n35; overview of, 67–72; politics of holism and, 125, 126, 127 Holistic monism, 146 Die holistische Welt (Smuts), 181 Hudson’s Bay Company, 98–99, 107, 108 Human conservation, 176, 183

335 335

Human ecology: Smuts and, 3, 44, 157, 164–166, 168; Bews and, 3, 160, 161, 162–163, 164–168, 169–172, 240; John Phillips and, 3, 64, 172–174, 175–176, 183–184; mechanism vs. holism controversy and, 3; Oxford school of ecology and, 78, 196–197, 235–236; Elton and, 102–105; H. G. Wells and, 113–116, 197–201, 242, 243; Julian Huxley and, 113–116, 196, 207–208, 240, 242, 243; scientific paternalism and, 114–116, 207– 208, 242–243; biotic communities concept and, 130–131; Frankenwald project and, 172–173; politics of holism and, 172–174, 175–176; Tansley and, 196–197, 222–228, 233–235; mechanistic-Arcadian dichotomy and, 197; Nicholson’s national economic plan, 202–204, 206–207; Worthington and management of economy of nature in Africa, 211–213; Worthington’s Science in Africa and, 214–218; World War II and, 228–230; Eugene Cittadino on, 288n147. See also Animal ecology; Social planning Human Ecology (Bews), 162–163, 164–168, 169 Human evolution: Smuts’s politics of holism and, 125, 126, 127, 163; Bews and, 167, 171–172 Human gradualism: Smuts and, 41, 46–47, 157, 164, 166, 177, 191; racial policies and, 46–47, 157, 164, 177, 178, 191; Bews’s research and, 157, 164, 178; politics of holism and, 164, 177, 178 Human herds, 28, 242 Human rights: Smuts and, 41, 45, 191–193 Human trade cycles, 107–108 Huntington, Ellsworth, 103, 108 Huxley, Aldous, 208 Huxley, Julian, 22; UNESCO and, 3, 114, 197, 232–232, 241; Elton and, 86, 87, 93, 97, 100–101, 106, 111, 117, 279n38; Oxford Department of Zoology and, 86, 87; “cosmic vision” of, 87; homosexuality and, 87, 279n36; nervous breakdown of, 87, 279n36; background of, 87–88; Oxford expeditions to Spitsbergen and, 89, 90, 92; psychology and, 100, 204, 206; Science-for-All movement and, 100; ecological perspectives, 110–116; academic career, 111; Tansley and, 111; H. G. Wells and, 111–112, 201–202, 231; human ecology and, 113–116, 196, 207–208, 240, 242, 243; International Union for

336 336

Index

Huxley, Julian (continued) Conservation of Nature and, 114; scientific paternalism and, 114–116, 207–208, 242, 243; eugenics and, 116, 291n30; Hogben and, 122, 291n30, 293n59; John Phillips and, 128; response to Smuts’s Oxford lectures on Africa, 128–129; view of settlement policies in Africa, 129; African Research Survey Committee and, 129– 130, 293n62; socially responsible science and, 154; mechanistic-Arcadian dichotomy in ecology and, 197; Nicholson’s national economic plan and, 203–204; Political Economic Planning organization and, 203–204; evolutionary synthesis of, 204, 205, 231, 240; social planning and, 204, 206, 207–208, 224–225, 230–232; environmentalism and scientific propaganda, 207; influence on science policy issues, 208; Worthington and, 213, 230; country planning and, 222; nature conservation and, 226, 232, 233; Wild Life Conservation Special Committee and, 226, 232; Nature Conservancy and, 233; politics of, 241; Broom and, 297n125 Huxley, Thomas, 10 Idealists: Smuts’s holistic philosophy and, 124–125; in Magdalen Philosophy Club, 137; Kantian, Tansley on, 296n105 Idea of Nature (Collingwood), 137 If I Were a Dictator (Huxley), 208, 231 Imperial Botanical Conference, 32, 33–35, 66 Imperial College of Science and Technology, 34 Imperial Forestry Institute, 80, 81–82 Imperialism: views of Fabians on, 263n152 India: botanical survey, 34–35 Inland fisheries: African, 209–213; British, 213–214, 228–229 “Inquiry into the Whole, An” (Smuts), 46, 49 Intellectual cannibalization, 77, 104–105, 106–107, 109, 116, 239 International Biological Programme, 105 International Botanical Conference, 123 International Botanical Congress, 33, 130 International Commission on Concepts in Plant Sociology, 131, 132, 152 International Union for Conservation of Nature, 114 Isis (journal), 15

Jax, Kurt, 296n106, 308n124 Johnson, Patrick, 138, 139, 143 Johnson, Stella, 213, 318n73 Journal of Animal Ecology, 107 Journal of Ecology, 20, 40, 85, 105, 106, 149, 151, 152, 219 Journal of Negro History, 127 Journal of South African Botany, 305n96 Journal of the South African Forestry Association, 305n96 Kaffirs, 62, 63 Kant, Immanuel, 138, 139, 236, 296n105 Keeble, Frederick William, 12, 20, 22, 79, 224 Kenya: inland fisheries and, 209–210, 211 Kenya Angling Association, 211 Kew Gardens, 32, 33, 40, 280n51 Keynes, John Maynard, 288n157 “Kill curve,” 285n120 Klein Swartberg, 52 Knowledge, ecology of. See Ecology of knowledge Knysna forests, 63–64 Kühn, Alfred, 308n124 Labor unions: Smuts’s suppression of, 47, 50 Labour Party (South Africa), 47, 67 Lake ecology: Worthington and Africa’s inland fisheries, 209–213; Lake Windermere, 213–214, 228–229 Land distribution policy, 134 Land ethic: of Aldo Leopold, 285n120 Lankester, Edwin Ray, 9, 11 “Law, A Liberal Study” (Smuts), 42–43 League of Nations, 41, 49–50, 51, 69, 72, 73, 127, 180, 193 Lemmings, 97–98, 240, 283nn84,87 Leopold, Aldo, 107, 285n120 Levy, Hyman, 154, 219 Lewis, C. S., 137 Lewis, William, 31, 219 Life as a Whole (Bews), 169–172 Linnean Society, 219 Literature: Bews’s deep ecology on, 170 Macfie, Ronald Campbell, 56, 269n79 MacKeith, Malcolm Henry, 138, 139, 143 Magdalen College: Tansley’s career at, 76, 78 Magdalen Philosophy Club, 78, 136–139, 143 “Man at the Crossroads” (Phillips), 146–149

Index Mapping. See Ecological mapping; Vegetation maps Marloth, Rudolf, 42, 54, 68, 272n117 Matamek Conference on Biological Cycles, 107–108 Mechanism vs. holism debate: human ecology and, 3; social order of society and, 4; “Nature of Life” debate, 119–124; Smuts’s Oxford lectures and, 124–131; Fifth International Botanical Congress and, 131–135; John Phillips’s defense of holism, 146–148, 149, 150–152, 305n90; Tansley’s criticism of holism, 149, 150, 151–155; ecosystem concept and, 154– 156 Mechanistic ecology: Tansley and, 2, 7; “Nature of Life” debate and, 119, 122, 123–124; mechanistic-Arcadian dichotomy, 197. See also Mechanism vs. holism debate Mechanistic philosophy: John Phillips’s criticism of, 147; Freudian psychology and, 326n1 Mein Welthild (Einstein), 178 Men Like Gods (Wells), 111–112, 113 Meyer-Abich, Adolf, 181, 308n126 Michelmore, Alfred, 149–150, 298n147 Middle East, 229–230 Middle East Science (Worthington), 229 Middle East Supply Centre, 229–230 Millin, Sarah Gertrud, 179, 276n180, 306n108 Morality: Tansley’s notions of, 28, 142 More Simple Science (Huxley), 207 Morphological ecology, 13; conflict with geographical approach, 14, 16, 20–22 Muir Woods, 190 Murray, Gilbert, 49, 51, 69, 125 Music: Bews’s deep ecology on, 170 Næss, Arne, 180–181, 233, 308nn121,122 Natal University College, 58–59, 60, 61–62, 160, 161–162, 269n70, 303n49 National economic planning, 202–204, 206– 207, 240, 315n26. See also Social planning National Herbarium (South Africa), 56, 57 Nationalist Party (South Africa), 46, 67, 164 National parks, 234, 241. See also Nature reserves “National Plan for Great Britain” (Nicholson), 202–204 National socialism, 179, 193; British, 306n111

337 337

National Union of Scientific Workers, 21, 22 Native Representative Council, 194 Natural history: intellectual cannibalization by ecology, 77, 106–107, 239 Natural History of Selborne (White), 110 Natural law: Smuts on, 41, 43 Natural resources conservation, 175–176. See also Nature conservation Nature (journal), 69, 168, 178, 186, 215 “Nature and Function of Law in the History of Human Society” (Smuts), 42–43 Nature Conservancy, 233, 235 Nature conservation: Tansley and, 196–197, 221–222, 226–228, 233–234, 235, 241; Freudian psychology and, 196–197, 221– 222; Worthington and, 230; Julian Huxley and, 232; UNESCO and, 233. See also Natural resources conservation “Nature is the Art of God” (Kendon), 225 Nature mysticism: Smuts and, 48–49, 51, 176–177 “Nature of Life” debate, 119–124 Nature reserves, 226, 227–228. See also National parks Nazi Germany, 179, 181 Nazism, 179, 193 New Phytologist (journal), 13, 14–15, 17, 18, 20–22, 136 New Psychology and its Relation to Life (Tansley), 23–28, 153, 155, 204 Newsweek (magazine), 190 New York Zoological Society, 108 Nicholson, Edward Max, 196, 208; Oxford University Exploration Club and, 108; “Arcadian” tradition and, 110; national economic plan, 202–203, 206–207, 240, 315n26; Middle East Supply Centre and, 229; Worthington and, 230; social planning and, 232; environmentalism and, 235 Nile perch, 213 Nile River, 229, 230 Nitrogen cycle: of Bear Island, 91–92 Northcote, G. A. S., 209–210 Northern Rhodesia: Bourne’s aerial survey of, 83–85; Smuts’s botanical expedition to, 159–160 North London Working Men’s College, 8, 9 Norway: Spitsbergen and, 88; Bear Island and, 90 Oak Ridge, 232, 324n169 Oak symbolism, 234

338 338

Index

Oikos concept, 242 Oldham, Joseph Houldsworth, 127, 128, 129 Oliver, Francis Wall, 9–10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 22, 32 “On the Application of some Physical Concepts to Biological Phenomenon” (Smuts), 43 On the Nature of the Universe (Lucretius), 299n167 Opium, 12, 254n28 Origin of Continents and Oceans (Wegener), 67 Origin of life: Tansley on, 140 Origin of Species (Darwin), 15, 69 Orr, John, 129, 293n62 “Our Changing World View” (lecture series), 146–149 Our Heritage of Wild Nature (Tansley), 227 Outline of History (Wells), 200, 287n140 Outlines of the History of Botany (HarveyGibson), 16 Overseas Food Cooperation, 312n172 Oxford Forestry Memoirs (journal), 82 Oxford school of imperial ecology: Tansley and, 76, 78, 80; aviation technology and, 77, 82–86, 116; intellectual cannibalization and, 77, 104–105, 106–107, 109, 116; aims of, 77–78, 110–116; colonial management and, 77–78; ecological order of knowledge and, 78; human ecology and, 78, 196–197, 235–236; forestry research, 81–82; Spitsbergen expeditions, 87, 89– 93, 94–97; women and, 106; Oxford University Exploration Club, 108–110; Smuts’s lectures and, 116–117; broadening of ecology to include humans, 118, 135– 136; preservation of nature and, 327n5. See also individual ecologists Oxford University: Tansley’s career at, 76, 78, 79–80; Department of Zoology, 78, 80, 86–87, 106; George Druce and, 79; Bureau of Animal Population, 108; Exploration Club, 108–110; Smuts’s lectures at, 116–117, 124–128, 130. See also Oxford school of imperial ecology Oxford University Exploration Club, 108– 110, 288n161 Palestine, 127, 292n48 “Passage to India” (Whitman), 44 Patronage: Smuts and, 2, 41, 57, 176, 192; networks of, 2, 237; of Botanical Survey of South Africa, 35; Tansley and, 80

Pedagogy: ecological, 144–145 Perlin, John, 221, 257n67 Personality, theory of holistic evolution in, 43–45, 71–72, 126, 302n35. See also Personology Personology: Smuts and, 41, 72, 163, 191; critics of, 73; Nationalist Party and, 164; Bews’s deep ecology of human culture and, 171; politics of holism and, 191. See also Personality, theory of holistic evolution in Pharmaceutical economy, 17, 18 Phillips, John Frederick, 41; Tansley and, 2, 117, 121–122, 133, 149, 151, 152, 153– 154, 155, 175; human ecology and, 3, 64, 172–174, 175–176, 183–184; Botanical Survey of South Africa and, 62, 65; family history, 62; Bews and, 63, 120, 172; racial ideology and ecology of, 63, 64, 123, 148– 149, 176, 183–184; forest ecology and, 63–64; racial miscegenation and, 64; holistic ecology and, 66, 120–121, 146– 149, 150–151, 156; Smuts and, 68, 121, 130, 132, 133, 143–144, 157, 165, 184, 185, 192, 193, 305n90; British Association for the Advancement of Science and, 119; biotic communities and, 121, 130–131, 132–133, 144, 148–149, 192, 237–238, 239; eugenics and, 123; Julian Huxley and, 128; Fifth International Botanical Congress and, 131, 132–133; academic career, 144; ecological pedagogy of, 144– 145; African survey project and, 145–146, 185; holism and, 146–148, 149, 150–152, 239, 305n90; presentation at “Our Changing World” lecture series, 146–149; Chicago school of ecology and, 148, 174, 296n117; Frankenwald project and, 172– 173; South African Association for the Advancement of Science and, 173, 175; symposium on botanical research and the mining industry, 173–174; Clements and, 174, 175; on pure and applied ecology, 174; symposium on conservation of natural resources, 175–176; National Register of Scientists, 182, 184; ecological mobilization against Nazism, 182–185; symposium on conservation of human resources, 183; symposium on postwar reconstruction, 184–185; broadening of ecology to include humans, 237–238; ecological ordering of human societies and, 240; Elton and, 286n124; Allee and, 304n83; later career of, 312n172 Phytologist (journal), 256n42

Index Plantesamfund (Warming), 13, 14, 255n39 Plant evolution, 68–69 Plant Forms and Their Evolution in South Africa (Bews), 68–69, 119 Plant geography, 10, 13, 14, 16 Plant morphology, 10, 11, 14, 15–16 Plant Societies (Warming), 13, 14, 255n39 Pole Evans, Illtyd Buller, 130; Botanical Survey of South Africa and, 35, 62, 65, 272n117; South African botany and, 54– 56, 57; Smuts and, 57, 67, 176; John Phillips and, 64, 121; British Association for the Advancement of Science and, 119; Bews and, 120; in Smuts’s botanical expedition to Northern Rhodesia and Central Africa, 159, 160; Frankenwald project and, 173 Polis concept, 242, 243 Political and Economic Planning organization, 202, 203–204, 208, 222, 229 Politics of holism (of Smuts): major themes in, 41, 157, 241; racial ecology and policies, 48, 68, 125–126, 127, 177–178, 184, 191–192; formulation of, 73; notions of holistic evolution and, 125, 126, 127, 163; lectures at Oxford and, 125–128; goal of, 127; Wells’s critique of, 127; biotic communities concept and, 130–131; human gradualism and, 164, 177, 178; Bews’s deep ecology of human culture and, 171; John Phillips’s human ecology and, 172–174, 175–176; John Phillips’s notions of pure and applied ecology, 174; conservation of natural resources and, 175–176; segregation policies and, 176, 191–192; Einstein’s response to, 178–179; notions of human rights and, 191–193; communitarianism and, 192; rejection of war and, 192–193; unification of South Africa and, 195 Polunin, Nicholas, 110, 326n185 Population control, 114–115, 326n185 Population dynamics: Carr-Saunders and, 93– 94, 97; of lemmings, 97–98, 240, 283nn84,87; ecological perspectives of Huxley and Wells on, 114–115; Tansley’s concern for “dangers,” 235 Population ecology: Elton and, 80, 97–98, 108; fur industry economy and, 98–99. See also Animal ecology Population Problem (Carr-Saunders), 93–94, 238 Practical Plant Ecology (Tansley), 101

339 339

Primitive hunters, 171–172 Principles of Botany (Spencer), 12 Professions (Carr-Saunders), 94 Psychology: Tansley and, 3, 23–31, 141–142, 223, 234, 239; Julian Huxley and, 100, 204, 206; gestalt, 180, 181; nature conservation and, 196–197, 221–222; environmental history and, 221–222; mechanism and, 326n1 Pteronia Smutsii, 159, 300n13 Pure ecology, 174 Quain Studentship, 9, 13, 253n12 Quain Trusteeship, 9 Racial ecologies and ideologies: human gradualism and, 46–47, 157, 164, 177, 178, 191; of Smuts and the politics of holism, 48, 68, 125–126, 127, 177–178, 184, 191–192; John Phillips and, 63, 64, 123, 148–149, 176, 183–184; biotic communities concept and, 121, 130–131, 148–149; holistic ecology and, 123, 125– 126; Bews and, 123, 161–162, 171–172; aerial surveys and, 134; notions of human conservation and, 176; South African wartime mobilization and, 183. See also Segregation policies; Trusteeship policies Reel Nature (Mitman), 207 Relativity theory, 70, 178 Research Methods in Ecology (Clements), 31 Reynolds, Lewis, 74, 75 Rhodes, Cecil, 45, 125–126 Rhodesia, 125–126. See also Northern Rhodesia Rhodes Memorial Lectures, 125–127 Rhodes Trusts, 108, 129 Riddle of the Universe (Haeckel), 300n8 Royal Botanical Garden. See Kew Gardens Royal Geographic Society, 88, 89, 94 Royal Society, 19–20, 158 Royal Society of Arts, 186 Rübel, Eduard, 131, 133 Russell, Bertrand, 11, 123, 194, 261n114, 313n177 St. Andrews University, 162 Salisbury, Edward James, 16, 256n50 Savanna grasses, 54, 55 Schiller, Friedrich, 174 Science at the Cross-Roads (Soviet monograph), 297n130 Science-for-All movement, 100 Science in Africa (Worthington), 214–218

340 340

Index

“Science in the Liberal State” (Tansley), 224 Science of Life (Huxley, Wells, and Wells), 112–116, 129, 198, 235, 287n142 Science of Living (Adler), 180 Scientific paternalism, 114–116, 207–208, 242–243 Scientific planning, 224–226. See also Social planning Scientific propaganda, 207 Scientific Research Association, 20 Scottish botany: conflict with London botanists, 7, 10, 15–16. See also Balfour Seaplanes, 95 Segregation policies: at Natal University College, 161–162; human gradualism and, 164, 177, 191; notions of human conservation and, 176; John Phillips’s notions of racial ecology and, 183–184; Smuts’s politics of holism and, 191–192; biotic communities concept and, 192, 193, 238; South African ecological thinking and, 241. See also Racial ecologies and ideologies; Trusteeship policies Settlement policies: Smuts’s Oxford lectures on, 125–128; Huxley’s view of, 129; African Research Survey Committee and, 129–130. See also Colonization Shakespeare, William, 45, 168 Shape of Things to Come (Wells), 198. See also Things to Come Shelford, Victor, 174–175 Silviculture, 63–64. See also Forest ecology Silviculture Systems (Troup), 81–82 Sixth International Botanical Congress, 152 Smith, John Alexander, 124, 137, 139 Smocovitis, Vassiliki Betty, 316n38 Smog. See “Urban fog” Smuts, Jan Christian: holistic ecology and, 2, 69–72, 125–126; patronage of botany and ecology, 2, 57, 176, 192; human ecology and, 3, 44, 157, 164–166, 168; notions of personology and holistic evolution in personality, 3, 41, 43–45, 71–72, 72, 126, 163, 191, 302n35; preamble to UN Charter and, 3, 157, 186–189, 190–191, 241; Botanical Survey of South Africa and, 35, 57; human gradualism and, 41, 46–47, 157, 164, 166, 177, 191; human rights and, 41, 45, 191–193; League of Nations and, 41, 49–50, 51, 69, 72, 73, 180, 193; Gandhi and, 41, 46–47, 194, 313n178; on natural law, 41, 43; Boer War and, 42, 45; botany and, 42, 53, 54, 55, 57, 67–68,

157–158, 159–160, 300n13; early life, 42; political career in South Africa, 42, 45–46, 47, 67, 150, 177, 182; treatise on law, 42– 43; unification of South Africa and, 46, 186, 194–195; suppression of labor unions, 47, 50; international reputation, 47–48, 51, 72, 186, 190; racial policies and ideology, 48, 68, 125–126, 127, 177–178, 184, 191–192; World War I and, 48, 49; nature mysticism and, 48–49, 51, 176– 177; use of domestic violence, 50–51, 193; Table Mountain speech, 51–53; Pole Evans and, 55, 67, 176; Macfie’s “Ex Unitate Vires” and, 56; Bews and, 57, 60, 62, 68– 69, 74, 119–120, 157, 160, 162–163, 164–166, 169, 172, 192; holistic evolution and, 67–72, 125, 126, 127, 163; John Phillips and, 68, 121, 130, 132, 133, 143– 144, 157, 165, 174, 184, 185, 192, 193, 305n90; Holism and Evolution, 69–75, 124–125, 178, 180, 181, 192, 193, 195; notions of human freedom, 71–72, 192; as statesman philosopher, 72, 188; white supremacy and, 75; Elton and, 108; lectures at Oxford, 116–117, 124–128, 130; “Nature of Life” debate and, 119, 123; Hogben and, 122; Russell and, 123; Tansley and, 124; offered position of high commissioner for Palestine, 127; African Research Survey Committee and, 129; British Association for the Advancement of Science and, 158; Royal Society and, 158; Tree of Knowledge speech, 158–159; expedition to Northern Rhodesia and Central Africa, 159–160; St. Andrews University and, 162; lecture on climate and human culture, 163; process philosophy and, 164; Broom and, 164; Frankenwald research station and, 173; trusteeship policy and, 178, 184, 309nn139,140, 311n158; Zionism and, 178, 292n48; Einstein and, 178–179, 306n104; biographies of, 179; rejection of Nazism and national socialism, 179, 193; H. G. Wells and, 179–180, 307nn116,117; Adler and, 180; World War II and, 182, 184, 185–186; advocacy of white settlement, 184; Churchill and, 185, 187, 194; Dumbarton Oaks meeting, 186; Versailles Treaty and, 188, 193; in the United States, 190; biotic communities and, 192, 193; communitarianism and, 192; elected chancellor of Cambridge University, 193–

Index 194; final years of, 193–194; critics of, 194; Worthington’s Science in Africa and, 215; African Surveys and, 230; use of analogies, 266n18; Toynbee and, 267n34; opposition to low culture, 267n35; Balfour Declaration and, 292n48; Chaim Weizmann and, 292n48; Alfred Whitehead and, 302n35; Gale’s biography of Bews and, 304n75. See also Holistic evolution; Holism philosophy; Politics of holism Socialism: manifesto on reconstruction of botanical teaching and, 21, 22; Smuts’s rejection of, 179. See also Fabians Socially responsible botany, 9, 10–11, 12, 17, 19 Social planning: Julian Huxley and, 204, 206, 207–208, 230–232; notions of democracy and, 231; Nicholson and, 232. See also Economic planning; Scientific planning Social psychology, 29–32, 238–239. See also Psychology Society for Freedom in Science, 223, 224, 225, 322n129 Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, 20, 258n75 South Africa: Smuts’s political career, 42, 45– 46, 47, 67, 150, 177, 182; unification, 46, 186, 194–195; defeat of German Southwest and German East Africa, 47; suppression of labor unions, 47, 50; Rand revolt, 50; domestic violence and, 50–51, 193; Macfie’s “Ex Unitate Vires” and, 56; elections of 1924 and, 66–67; African National Congress and, 125; Union flag proposal, 159–160; educational segregation at Natal University College, 161–162; ecological mobilization against Nazism, 182–185. See also Politics of holism; Smuts; South African botany; South African ecology South African Association for the Advancement of Science, 67–68, 160, 173, 175, 182, 183, 184 South African botany: Smuts and, 42, 54, 55, 57, 67–68, 159–160; philosophy of holism and, 53, 54; prior to unification, 53–54; Pole Evans and, 54–56; journals of, 55–57; Bews and, 58, 59–60; nonprofessional experts, 59. See also Botanical Survey of South Africa South African ecology: Bews and, 57, 60–61, 61, 62; John Phillips and, 63–64; broadening of ecology to include humans,

341 341

118, 237–238; mechanism versus holism controversy, 119–124. See also individual ecologists South African Institute of Race Relations, 184 Southern Cross (periodical), 73 South West Africa, 311n158 Spencer, Herbert, 12, 28 Spinoza, Baruch, 50, 195 Spitsbergen: Oxford expeditions to, 87, 89– 93, 94–97; history and political circumstances of, 87–89; Elton’s human ecology and, 103–104 Spitsbergen Treaty, 88–89, 90, 94 Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturer’s Institute, 107 Standing Committee on National Parks, 232 Studies in the Plant Ecological Evolution of Angiosperms (Bews), 120 Succession, 150, 153 Summerhayes, Victor Samuel, 89, 90–92, 93, 104, 280n51 Sweden: Bear Island and, 90 System (Nicholson), 235 System of Physical Chemistry (Lewis), 219 Table Mountain, 193 Tanganyika, 120 Tansley, Arthur George: John Phillips and, 2, 64, 117, 121–122, 133, 144, 149, 151, 152, 153–154, 155, 175; mechanistic ecology and, 2, 7; psychology and, 3, 23– 31, 141–142, 223, 234, 239; Freud and, 3, 7, 23, 28–29, 139, 223; British ecological debates and, 7; family history, 8; education of, 8–9, 10–12; Francis Oliver and, 11, 12, 16; friendships at Cambridge, 11–12; opium and, 12, 254n28; socially responsible botany and, 12, 17, 19; vegetarianism and, 12; as lecturer at Cambridge, 12–13, 20; Balfour and, 13, 14, 20, 22; marriage to Edith Chick, 13; introduction to ecology, 13–14, 16; New Phytologist and, 14–15, 20, 136; research activities at Cambridge University, 16–17; ecological survey of Britain, 17, 18–19; British Ecological Society and, 19, 20; World War I and, 19; election as Fellow of the Royal Society, 19–20; environmental protection and, 20, 241; Bower and, 20, 21, 22; Scientific Research Association and, 20; manifesto on reconstruction of botanical teaching and, 20–22; political

342 342

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Tansley, Arthur George (continued) views, 22, 241; New Psychology and its Relation to Life, 23–28, 153, 155, 204; plant biology text book, 30–31; Imperial Botanical Conference and, 34, 66; Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation, 35, 36, 38; colonial research, 35–36; at Oxford University, 76, 78, 79–80, 224; patronage networks and, 80; aerial surveys and, 85; Elton and, 101, 105; collaboration with zoologists, 105–106; Oxford University Exploration Club and, 108, 109; Julian Huxley and, 111; Smuts and, 124; Fifth International Botanical Congress and, 131–132, 133, 134; “dot system” for vegetation maps, 134; Magdalen Philosophy Club and, 136, 138, 139; John Wolfenden and, 138; “Temporal Genetic Series as a Means of Approach to Philosophy,” 139–143, 152, 295n100; criticism of holism, 149, 150, 151–155; American response to, 152–153; human ecology and, 196–197, 222–228, 233– 235; nature conservation and, 196–197, 226–228, 233–234, 235, 241; mechanistic-Arcadian dichotomy in ecology and, 197; colonial management and, 218–219; ecotope concept, 219; British Islands and Their Vegetation, 219– 223; country planning and, 222; Society for Freedom in Science and, 223, 224, 225; World War II and, 223, 226; scientific planning and, 224–226; Kendon and, 225; notions of environmental and ecological management, 227–228; Worthington and, 230; Nature Conservancy and, 233, 235; Britain’s Green Mantle, 234; environmental history and, 234; concern for population “dangers,” 235; national economic planning and, 240; use of Greek terminology, 242, 320n104; Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves and, 258n75; Hart and, 260n100; McDougall and, 260n101; Russell and, 261n114; unified biological science and, 262n128; on arguments on analogy, 277n3; Adamson and, 290n22; Clements and, 294n70; on Kantian idealists, 296n105; Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe and, 299n167; on etymology of ecology, 328n7. See also Ecosystem theory “Temporal Genetic Series as a Means of Approach to Philosophy” (Tansley), 139– 143, 152, 295n100

Tennessee Valley Authority, 231–232 Things to Come (film), 199–200, 231. See also Shape of Things to Come Time Machine (Wells), 201 Times Literary Supplement, 69, 72, 105, 168, 227 Tolkien, J. R. R., 137 Toynbee, Arnold, 48, 267n34 Trade cycles, 107–108 Trading, ecology of, 284n104 Trading zones, 327n3 Transvaal University College, 269n70 “Trees and Man” (Chipp), 294n88 Trinity College, Cambridge, 11 Troup, Robert Scott, 80, 81–82, 85, 204, 278n17 “Truly Wise” (Bews), 168–169 Trusteeship policies: biotic community concept and, 121; Smuts and, 178, 184, 309nn139,140, 311n158; Worthington’s human ecology and, 211–212; Worthington’s Science in Africa and, 218. See also Racial ecologies and ideologies; Segregation policies Tsetse flies, 120–121, 132–133 Types of British Vegetation (Tansley), 18–19, 101 Union Botanists, 54–55 Unionist Party (South Africa), 46, 66–67 Union of South Africa. See South Africa United Nations Charter, 157; Smuts’s preamble for, 3, 186–189, 190–191, 241; official preamble, 310n157 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 3, 114, 197, 230, 232–232, 241 United Nations Organization (U. N. O.), 313n181 Universe of Science (Levy), 154 University College, London, 9, 12–13 University of Edinburgh, 57–58, 64 University of South Africa, 62 University of Witwatersrand, 144, 146–149, 172, 269n70 “Urban fog,” 9–10 “Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms” (Tansley), 149 Vegetation maps, 134. See also Ecological mapping Versailles Treaty, 50, 188, 193 Victoria, Lake, 209, 213 Victoria College, 268n70

Index Virgin ecosystems, 219–220 Voorslag (journal), 74, 75 Wales, Prince of, 81, 159 Warming, Eugenius, 2, 13–14, 18, 237, 255n39 Water management, 229–230 Webster, Charles, 187, 188 Week-End Review (magazine), 202, 203, 204, 206, 231 Weldon, Thomas Dewar, 137, 138, 139 Wells, George Philip, 112, 122 Wells, Herbert George, 22, 196; Tansley and, 11; ecological perspectives, 110–116; Julian Huxley and, 111–112, 201–202, 231; human ecology and, 113–116, 197– 201, 240, 242, 243; scientific paternalism and, 114–116, 242, 243; criticism of holism, 127, 179–180; Smuts and, 179– 180, 307nn116,117; mechanistic-Arcadian dichotomy in ecology and, 197; Nicholson’s national economic plan and, 203; Worthington’s Science in Africa and, 218; on the end of history, 228, 243; politics of, 241; earnings on Outline of History, 287n140; description of Bodleian Library, 288n161 Westbury House School Ephemeris, 9 What Dare I Think? (Huxley), 207 Whitehead, Alfred North, 72, 164, 302nn34,35 White supremacy, 75. See also Racial ecologies and ideologies Whitman, Walt, 3, 43–45, 49, 51, 126, 238 Wild Life Conservation Special Committee, 226, 232 Wilson, Edward O., 277n2, 284n97 Windermere, Lake, 213–214, 228–229 Wolfenden, John Frederick, 137–138 Women in ecology, 9, 106, 285n113

343 343

Work, Wealth and Happiness (Wells), 198 World Crisis (Churchill), 73 World’s Grasses (Bews), 120 World War I: Tansley and, 19; Smuts and, 48, 49 World War II: Smuts and, 182, 184, 185– 186; South African ecological mobilization against Nazism, 182–185; Tansley and, 223, 226; British inland fishery and, 228– 229; Middle East water management and, 229–230 World-wide planning, 222–223 Worster, Donald, 110, 221, 327n5 Worthington, Edgar, 105, 323n158; human ecology and, 196, 211–213; mechanisticArcadian dichotomy in ecology and, 197, 213; African Survey and, 208, 213, 214– 218, 230; International Biological Programme and, 208; Julian Huxley and, 208; African inland fisheries and, 209–213; social and scientific background of, 210; management of economy of nature in Africa, 211–213, 240; Freshwater Biological Association and, 213; Windermere fishery and, 213–214, 228– 229; at Cambridge University, 214; activities during World War II, 228–230; Middle East Supply Centre and, 229–230; nature conservation and, 230 Yosemite Valley, 190 Young, John Zachary, 138, 143 Zapffe, Peter Wessel, 308n122 Zionism, 178 Zionist Organization of America, 292n48 Zoology: Tansley’s collaboration with, 105– 106; intellectual cannibalization by ecology, 239. See also Department of Zoology, Oxford University