The Centennial Return of Stewardship to the Ecological Society of America - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 160

third-order organisms or, as they actually came to be called, “superorganisms.” The
fi rst organisms—fi rst-order organisms—were single-celled. Through close symbi-
otic association, single-celled organisms evolved into multi-celled organisms—
second-order organisms. Likewise, through close symbiotic association, multi-celled
organisms evolved into third-order organisms—superorganisms. Until the invention
of the microscope, we could not perceive single-celled organisms—because they
are too small—nor did we even know that they existed. Neither do we perceive
superorganisms, as organisms, because they are too big. The invention of ecology,
however, provides a conceptual, if not a physical, lens by means of which they may
be revealed and studied. In response to skeptics such as Henry A. Gleason ( 1926 ),
“Clements is quoted [by whom is not specifi ed] as saying that biologists present at
the evolution of multicellular from unicellular organisms would have denied that
they were organisms because they were different ” (Tansley 1935 , p. 305, n. 5).
In any case, by this conceptual device—this paradigm—Clements was able to
organize and subdivide the science ecology by analogy with organismal biology.
Taxonomic ecology would identify “types” of superorganisms, such as piñon-
juniper and post-oak cross-timber forests, long- and short-grass prairies, sphagnum-
tamarack bogs and tupelo-cypress swamps. Ecological ontogeny would trace
how—after catastrophic, usually anthropogenic disturbance—such superorganisms
return to their “adult” or “climax” condition through the process of succession,
which was the specialty that Clements ( 1916 ) made his own. Physiological ecology
would study the functions of the various components of such superorganisms—how
tree-roots hold soil, how bacteria and fungi reduce detritus to minerals ready to be
taken up again by plants, how predators prevent the irruption of prey populations,
and so on. As are all organisms, superorganisms were conceived to be closed,
homeostatic, and self-regulating. Civilized human beings were regarded as external
to them and the principal source of their disturbance. Thus the need to preserve
natural conditions for ecological study free of human interference. For there to
remain only humanly disturbed superorganisms for ecologists to study would be as
if there remained only mutilated organisms for organismal biologists to study.
Note that the “pristine myth”, as geographer William Denevan ( 1992 ) styles it,
privileges American ecology. The so-called “Old World” had been humanized from
time immemorial. Clements's European contemporaries—such as Eugenius
Warming, a Dane, and Oscar Drude, a German—could not have shared such a paro-
chial assumption. Perhaps for this reason, as well as others, British ecologist Arthur
G. Tansley ( 1935 ) criticized and rejected the climatic-climax concept in favor of
multiple climax types, such as “fi re climaxes” and even “mowing climaxes.” Tansley
also criticized and rejected Clements's superorganism paradigm in ecology and
introduced the ecosystem paradigm to replace it. Tansley's rejection of Clementsian
organicism is, however, too often too greatly exaggerated—due in large part to the
misrepresentation of ecosystem ecology by historian Donald Worster ( 1994 ).
Tansley ( 1920 , 1926 , 1935 ) repeatedly declares that what he eventually dubbed
“ecosystems” were, albeit not literally organisms, nevertheless “quasi-organisms.”
Further, he also surmised that those quasi-organismic ecosystems which exhibited
the greatest degree of stability and dynamic equilibrium had evolved by natural