Local Knowledge, Environmental Politics, and the Founding of Ecology in the United States: Stephen Forbes and "The Lake as a Microcosm" (1887) Author(s): Daniel W. Schneider Source: Isis, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 681-705 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/236820 . Accessed: 27/04/2011 13:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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Schneider* ABSTRACT Stephen Forbes's "The Lake as a Microcosm" is one of the founding documents of the science of ecology in the United States. By tracing the connections between scientists and local fishermen underlying the research on floodplain lakes presented in "The Lake as a Microcosm," this essay shows how the birth of ecology was tied to local knowledge and the local politics of environmental transformation. Forbes and the other scientists of the Illinois Natural History Survey relied on fishermen for manual labor, expertise in catching fish, and knowledge of the natural history of the fishes. As Forbes and his colleagues worked in close contact with fishermen, they also adopted many of their political concerns over the privatization of the floodplain and became politically active in supporting their interests. The close connection between scientists and local knowledge forced the ecolo- gists to reframe the boundaries of ecology as objective or political, pure or applied, local or scientific. * Departmentof Urbanand Regional Planningand Illinois NaturalHistory Survey, University of Illinois, 111 Buell Hall, 611 Taft Drive, Champaign,Illinois 61820. I thankRoberta Farrell and Meg Cederothfor their researchassistance. Glenn Sandifordprovided material on the Illinois and U.S. Fish Commissions. Leslie J. Reagan's suggestions and editing were invaluable.John Hoff- man of the Illinois Historical Survey Library,Bob Bailey of the Illinois State Archives, and William Maher of the University of Illinois Archives were extremely helpful in making collections available. Thomas Rice of the Illinois Natural History Survey helped locate and copy photographs.I thank Chip Burkhardt,Robert Kohler, Eileen McGurty, Richard Sparks, and Ruth Sparks for discussions of this work. Geoff Bowker and Daniel Walkowitz read earlierdrafts of this manuscript.Comments by four anonymousreferees and MargaretRossiter improvedthe manuscriptgreatly. Partsof this study were presentedat the American Society for Environmental History;the Departmentof IntegrativeBiology, University of California,Berkeley; and the Programin Science, Technology, Information,and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.This study was supportedby the University of Illinois Campus Research Board. Isis, 2000, 91:681-705 C) 2000 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/00/9104-0002$02.00 681 682 FOUNDING OF ECOLOGYIN THE UNITED STATES ON 25 FEBRUARY 1887 Stephen A. Forbes delivered "The Lake as a Microcosm," one of the founding papersof the new science of ecology, to a small scientific society in the Illinois River town of Peoria. Forbes spoke of the ecology of "fluviatile"lakes, "situatedin the river bottoms and connected with the adjacentstreams by periodicalover- flows." Less than thirty miles downstream,a battle brewed that same year as membersof the Peoria elite began placing "No Trespassing"signs on several thousand acres of the same types of fluviatile lakes analyzed by Forbes. Local residents who had been hunting and fishing in these lakes for decades shot down signs in protest and claimed the land and resources as theirs by poaching fish, ducks, and muskrat.Over the next several decades the battles over the Illinois River floodplainescalated, culminating in gunfire,armed block- ades, and court fights.' Forbes and the other scientists at the Illinois Natural History Survey had begun their systematic investigation of the Illinois River and its floodplainat the precise moment that the ecosystem became the focus of a struggle over rights to lands and waters. Indeed, the rise of the science of ecology in the United States, from the firstuse of the term"oekologie" in 1866 to the establishmentof the Ecological Society of America in 1915, coincided with and was shaped by a dramatictransformation of society's relation to the naturalworld as subsistence, artisanal,and traditionalpatterns of resource use were supplantedby capital intensive resource extraction,on the one hand, and recreationalfishing and huntingby an urban elite, on the other.2During the period that ecology was developing into a science, Americansfought intense battles over the new science's very object of study. The development and practice of ecology was linked to the politics of environmental transformationfrom the beginnings of the science in the United States. Historiansof sci- ence generally agree that the post-World War II politics of environmentaldegradation, I Stephen A. Forbes, "The Lake as a Microcosm,"Bulletin of the Peoria ScientificAssociation, 1887, pp. 77- 87, on p. 77. I reference the original in this essay, but it is more easily available as reprintedin Illinois Natural History Survey Bulletin, 1925, 15:537-550. On the 1887 conflict downstreamof Peoria see testimony of Fer- dinand Luthy, transcriptof Duck Island Hunting and Fishing Club v. Chester L. Whitnahet al., 306 Ill. 291 (1923), Record Series 901, SupremeCourt Trial Transcripts,Vault 39941, Illinois States Archives, Springfield, Abstract, pp. 109-112, Record, p. 736. For discussion of the conflict in general see Daniel W. Schneider, "Enclosingthe Floodplain:Resource Conflict on the Illinois River, 1880-1920," EnvironmentalHistory, 1996, 1:70-96. 2 The NaturalHistory Society of Illinois, formed in 1858, became the State Laboratoryof NaturalHistory in 1877. In 1917 it was reorganized as the Illinois State Natural History Survey, its current name. I call the organizationthe Natural History Survey throughoutthis essay. For an institutionalhistory see "A Centuryof Biological Research,"Illinois Nat. Hist. Surv. Bull., 1958, 27(2):85-234. On "oekologie" and the Ecological Society of America see Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1985), pp. 2, 66. On the transformationof resource use see RichardWhite, Land Use, Environment,and Social Change: TheShaping of Island County,Washington, rpt. ed. (Seattle:Univ. Washington Press, 1992); William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformationof the American West (Lawrence:Univ. Press Kansas, 1994); and RichardW. Judd, CommonLands, CommonPeople: The Origins of Conservationin NorthernNew England (Cambridge,Mass.: HarvardUniv. Press, 1997). For forests see James Willard Hurst,Law and Economic Growth:The Legal History of the LumberIndustry in Wisconsin,1836-1915, rpt. ed. (Madison:Univ. Wisconsin Press, 1984); and Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A His- torical Geography (New York: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1989). For fisheries see ArthurF. McEvoy, The Fish- erman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the CaliforniaFisheries, 1850-1980 (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986); Schneider, "Enclosing the Floodplain";and MargaretBeattie Bogue, "To Save the Fish: Canada, the United States, the GreatLakes, and the JointCommission of 1892,"Journal ofAmericanHistory, 1993, 79:1429- 1454. For game see Louis Samuel Warren, The Hunter's Game: Poachers, Conservationists,and Twentieth- CenturyAmerica (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1997). For grasslandssee Donald Worster,Dust Bowl; The SouthernPlains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979); Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century,rpt. ed. (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1994); and John Mack Faragher,Sugar Creek:Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1986). DANIEL W. SCHNEIDER 683 and particularlythe politics of nuclear weapons and energy and pesticides, stronglyinflu- enced the science of ecology. Scholars have also traced the influence of environmental politics on ecologists' response to the Depression and Dust Bowl in the United States in the