Ecological Succession and Community Dynamics - Ecological Systems - page 45

theory into environmental policy. Both examples favor Clementsian successional
approaches in application in sustainability science. A following section will discuss
the application of more Gleasonian approaches to sustainability science.
Succession and the United States Land-use Policy
The importance of succession theory in the land-use policy of the United States is
can be illustrated in human connections associated with F.E. Clements. Clements'
doctoral advisor at the University of Nebraska was Charles Edwin Bessey, a leading
botanist of his era. Bessey came to the University of Nebraska in 1884. He was
a leading college administrator; he wrote high school and college textbooks; he
served as editor for the journal Science . He produced a remarkable set of students:
the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Willa Cather; Frederic Clements and his wife,
Edith; and Roscoe Pound, the leading jurist of his time. Pound and Clements wrote
several papers together. Pound went on to the faculty at Harvard University,
became Dean of the Harvard Law School, and eventually served as an advisor to
President Franklin Roosevelt involved in the structuring of the “New Deal” refor-
mulation of the structure of American government. Among the “New Deal”
legislation came administrative structures and regulations for land-use policies,
conservation and land protection, soil conservation, and other topics which nowa-
days would clearly fall in the rubric of sustainability. Pound eventually wrote an
obituary/recollection for F.E. Clements [ 44 ].
The connections among these remarkable individuals from American
heartlands are indicators of a deeper relationship between the ecology of
Clements, his associates and students, and land-use policies in the United States.
The Great Depression of the 1930s in America was acerbated by a collapse of
agriculture in the “Dust Bowl” states through the middle of the nation. A complex
combination of persistent land abuse, a climatic anomaly in the form of a drought,
and bank collapse accompanying the collapse of family agriculture turned dryland
farmers into unemployed refugees. The universities of the Midwest and the
emergence of focused studies, such as the “Botanical Seminar” of Bessey at
Nebraska (which had collected the Clements, Pound, and other students), had
been in part a larger problem of understanding the difficulties in agriculture in the
United States as farming moved westward from the forest of the East to the central
grasslands [ 45 ]. Range management as an agricultural science grew from this
tradition and particularly from the work of Clements and his colleagues [ 46 , 47 ].
Thus, the emerging science of range management developing at the universities at
the center of an ecological disaster involving the dynamics of grassland
ecosystems produced information and applications on what could and should be
done to restore stability. Political and policy advisors, such as Roscoe Pound, were
in a position to translate this science and to put into laws concerning the sustain-
able use of grasslands, rangelands, and other ecosystems - in American and to
a degree, worldwide.