Embracing diversity, embracing change

Abstract

Diversity and change have been enduring themes in ecology. They have also been critical elements in the development of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) itself. I attended my first ESA annual meeting in June of 1973. ESA had recently grown to over 5000 members, but only about 10% of that number was in attendance, and of those who did attend, most – over 90% – were men, and I should add, mostly white men. The great majority of us were academics or aspiring academics. With a few notable exceptions, the tenor and focus of that meeting in Amherst, MA, were patently biocentric and basic-science oriented. Most young ecologists of my generation were strongly advised to avoid the taint of application. My doctoral advisor strongly encouraged me to study nature, defined as those systems absent of human influences; not only did human effects confound interpretation, but they contributed little to general ecological understanding. I am, of course, overgeneralizing; important studies, such as the Hubbard Brook project, were well underway, and contrarians like Frank Egler were purposefully doing research in explicitly human-dominated places, such as transmission line rights-of-way. But such studies were not the rule; rather, they were harbingers of what was to come. A decade later, ecologists were coming around to the hard truth that, like it or not, people are everywhere and that their effects are inescapable. Many ESA members were actually beginning to see human influences and the ecological responses to them as matters relevant to basic ecological theory. Amid much debate about its propriety, ESA opened its Public Affairs office in Washington, DC, in 1983. Certainly, this shift in philosophy was accelerated by the growing influence of legislation that cried out for ecological knowledge, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. It was also encouraged mightily by such ESA leaders as Art Cooper, Gene Likens, George Woodwell, Jerry Franklin, and Hal Mooney, to name just a few. It was my honor and pleasure, in August of this year, to preside over ESA's 93rd Annual Meeting. We have grown larger still; last year we welcomed our 10 000th member. There were nearly 3500 of us at the Milwaukee meeting, and our society is increasingly diverse. Over 30% of us are women, and we are racially and ethnically more varied, although much work remains to be done before our membership truly mirrors the society it wishes to represent. We are certainly more diverse from a professional standpoint. Academics and aspiring academics remain plentiful in our ranks, but nearly 30% of us are professional ecologists from the private sector, public agencies, and non-governmental organizations. When I look at our journals, and at the titles of the hundreds of papers that were delivered in Milwaukee, it's hard to believe that we once fretted over the wisdom of studying human effects, or the relative value of basic versus applied research. As we look to the future, people are as important as ever, and issues like climate change and biodiversity loss have truly made arguments about the separation of humans and nature moot. We have come to understand that these changes are being driven not just by our growth in numbers, but by our ever-increasing per capita demands on Earth's resources. That those demands on resources, and the benefits of their use, are unequally shared among the nearly 7 billion of us who cohabit the planet profoundly complicates this issue. Attempts to deal with the biodiversity crisis or global warming that do not simultaneously address the well-being of Earth's 2 billion poorest people simply will not be sustainable. Just as our society has embraced research and education focused on human impacts on ecosystems, we must also now work to align our efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change and sustain Earth's biodiversity with the elimination of poverty. Ellis and Ramankutty's paper in this issue of Frontiers (pp 439–447) provides an interesting template for doing this. As we approach our centennial year, it is fair to say that we – the ESA – have come a long way. Diversity and change remain prominent themes in our science. The diversity within the ESA itself has been central to its capacity for, and willingness to, change. It is this diversity of views that has sustained our science. It is the contrarian voices – whether right or wrong – that have been the catalyst for change in our thinking. It is that diversity and ability to change that have been central to our credibility as a scholarly society and as a discipline.