Ecology is the centerpiece of many of the most important decisions that face humanity. Roots of Ecology documents the deep ancestry of this now enormously important science from the early ideas of Herodotos, Plato, and Pliny, up through those of Linnaeus and Darwin, to those that inspired Ernst Haeckel's mid-nineteenth-century neologism ecology. Based on a long-running series of regularly published columns, this important work gathers a vast literature illustrating the development of ecological and environmental concepts, ideas, and creative thought that has led to our modern view of ecology. Roots of Ecology should be on every ecologist's shelf.

In the course of evolution, a great variety of root systems have learned to overcome the many physical, biochemical and biological problems brought about by soil. This development has made them a fascinating object of scientific study. This volume gives an overview of how roots have adapted to the soil environment and which roles they play in the soil ecosystem. The text describes the form and function of roots, their temporal and spatial distribution, and their turnover rate in various ecosystems. Subsequently, a physiological background is provided for basic functions, such as carbon acquisition, water and solute movement, and for their responses to three major abiotic stresses, i.e. hard soil structure, drought and flooding. The volume concludes with the interactions of roots with other organisms of the complex soil ecosystem, including symbiosis, competition, and the function of roots as a food source.

Nature's Economy is a wide-ranging investigation of ecology's past, first published in 1994.

This book traces the interacting histories of the disciplines of ecology and economics, from their common origin in the ancient Greek concept of oikonomia, through their distinct encounters with energy physics, to the current obstruction of neoliberal economics to responses to the ecological and climate crisis of the so-called Anthropocene. Reconstructing their constitution as separate sciences in the era of fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism, the book offers an explanation of how the ecological sciences have moved from a position of critical collision with mainstream economics in the 1970s, to one of collusion with the project of permanent growth, in and through the thermal crisis of the biosphere.

The ecological sciences are a diverse array of major scientific disciplines. They grew from minor sciences, with little status in 1900, and now occupy crucial areas of research bearing on the future of our planet. This book describes a century of growth and development. A dramatic century-long rise in the status of ecological knowledge was accompanied by the rise of professional ecological organizations, the establishment of university faculties, and the creation of government agencies advising on conservation, natural resources, and the prevention of pollution. Like all sciences, ecology continues to yield new findings and surprising revelations. New technologies now address existential challenges facing our world. This book, documenting the rise of ecology, is an inspiring history portending an important role in the twenty-first century. Key Features: The author is the acknowledged authority on the history of ecology The content is familiar to members of the Ecological Society of America but has not previously been assembled into a single narrative Appropriate for a course in the history of ecology Provides a broad perspective on ecology Related Titles: Egerton, F. N. A Centennial History of the Ecological Society of America (ISBN 978-0-3673-7763-2). Rieppel, O. Phylogenetic Systematics: Haeckel to Hennig (ISBN 978-0-3678-7645-6) Dronamraju, K. A Century of Geneticists: Mutation to Medicine (ISBN 978-1-4987-4866-7)

In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.