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In the chapter I discuss the development of ecology in America. Our first ecologist was Stephen A. Forbes, who worked in Illinois. In his wake, “ecology became self-conscious” and the four great early ecological schools—the Nebraska school of plant ecology, the Chicago schools of plant and animal ecology, and the Wisconsin school of limnology—were established. These schools emphasized organisms having interactions with each other and their environments. Later, G. Evelyn Hutchinson would define ecology as interactions having organisms, with the result that ecology frequently became a theoretic academic exercise divorced from societal concerns about conservation and preservation. It would take the environmental movement, with its legislative emphasis on organisms and the funding that followed, to re-establish interest and respect for organismal-based ecology.

This chapter narrates how the author has been influenced by Frederic E. Clements, an ecologist who developed a theory of community ecology. According to Clements, a plant community resembles in some ways a community of people, consisting of plants that coexist and interact. He called this theory community succession, in which each plant community started from bare ground and over time the community advances through a series of successional stages until finally it enters into the climax. Many ecologists in Clements's day believed that nature strived constantly toward climax, the ultimate endpoint, guided by an Invisible Hand or Divine Purpose. Philosophers have called this view determinism while some people now might call it Creationism. At the height of Clements's influence in the mid-1900s, ecologist Frank Egler criticized the unquestioning acceptance of succession theory, however, Clements's views prevailed for most of the century.

This chapter focuses on range management plans. It begins by discussing a range management built on the notion of community succession and climax as laid out by Frederic Clements. It then describes the analysis of brush encroachment. Reasons for brush encroachment vary, but cessation of fire tops most lists. On many of the more arid ranges, grazing and the fire reduction that results from grazing stand as the prime collaborators in brush encroachment.

Rangelands comprise between one-third and one-half of all the ice-free land on Earth, one-and-a-half times the area of all forests and two-and-a-half times greater than croplands. But rangelands and the science of rangelands have remained remarkably invisible to the general public and scholars alike. The introduction gives an overview of the history of efforts to understand rangelands scientifically, and it proposes an argument for the importance of rangelands that can also account for their obscurity. Rangelands are vast, sparsely inhabited, and relatively unproductive, qualities that have discouraged or made difficult sustained scholarly research and resulted in a generalized public indifference to these lands. And yet it is precisely rangelands’ manifold marginality that enables them to defy and disrupt social forces that elsewhere seem so powerful, and to thereby illuminate core tendencies, contradictions and limitations in modern ways of knowing, using and governing land and people.

This chapter examines the organic view of Earth in comparison with the scientific and technology-age perception of the planet. It first charts the history of the organic view of Earth before discussing its essence: an idealized (that is, perfect) organism passes through the major life stages from birth to youth, maturation, maturity, reproduction, old age, senility, and death. In particular, it considers the idea that adaptation did not have to be symmetrical and beautiful to be the creation of God, and that God was the only way that such adaptations could come about, in relation to the theological design argument. It also explores Henry David Thoreau's views about nature, the philosophical-religious doctrine of transcendentalism, and his experience in climbing Mount Katahdin in Maine. Finally, the chapter analyzes Frederic Edward Clements's concept of nature as superorganisms.