On Frank Golley’s International and Interdisciplinary Insights for a Twenty-First Century Earth Stewardship Based on Environmental Ethics - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 422

This whole ecosystem view initially also used an early metaphor when biotic
communities were studied as “super organisms: undergoing predictable develop-
ment over time (Kingsland 1995 ; Golley 1993 )”. Although the metaphor of a
“super organism” faded as an infl uence (Burgess 1981 ; MacIntosh 1987 ), it
intrigued community and ecosystem ecologists in their early thinking.
G.E. Hutchinson ( 1940 ) noted that “If … the community is an organism, it should
be possible to study the metabolism of that organism.” He conducted studies of
the “intermediate metabolism” of phosphorus and nitrogen cycles in lakes, using
radioactive phosphorus-32 as a tracer (Hutchinson 1941 ). This shift to biogeo-
chemical cycling became a major emphasis in ecosystem science that relied more
on isotopic tracers. While serving as the fi rst director of the University of Georgia's
Savannah River Ecology Laboratory from 1962 to 1967, Golley worked with a
group of ecologists who developed new concepts using radioactive tracers to
study nutrient cycling and energy fl ows (Odum and Golley 1963 ). These new
techniques were needed to conduct basic research as well as to study any releases
of radioactive materials from nuclear power plants and from atmospheric testing.
This research helped to set the stage for large-scale ecosystem studies in the
International Biological Program (Golley 1993 ; Coleman 2010 ). These studies
compared rates of productivity and measured micro-concentrations (parts per bil-
lion) of essential nutrients and contaminants (Kwa 1993 ; Golley 2001 ; Creager
2013 ).
Golley actively contributed to the concept of biospheric metabolism during the
International Geophysical Year in 1957-1958 that led to the International Geosphere-
Biosphere Program with an increased international research network in the 1980s
and 1990s (Kwa 2005 ; Steffen et al. 2004 ; Mooney et al. 2013 ). This interdisciplin-
ary Earth science program documented daily and seasonal patterns of global metabo-
lism, as concentrations of atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide changed from the
equator to the poles through the year in response to changes in solar energy and
temperatures (Melillo et al. 1993 ; Mooney 1996 ). These discoveries were pushed
forward by high-resolution remote sensing, improved dissolved gas detectors, and
faster computer modeling, all combining to result in a new perspective about life on
“spaceship Earth”, especially once people viewed images of the Earth from the
Moon. This advanced technology still required international programs to conduct
additional local “ground-truth” fi eld studies at multiple scales to test the observations
and the new model predictions. This new technology enhanced studies of local dis-
turbances that created gaps in biotic distributions across the mosaic of habitats
(Shugart 1998 ; Turner and Chapin 2005 ; Turner 2010 ). In that sense the new research
based on remote sensing continued to benefi t from models based on local patchiness,
a concept developed by Monica Turner, one of Golley's former doctoral students.
The responses of many different complex, adaptive ecosystems to disturbance
have stimulated new integrative concepts that relate directly to managing the global
ecosystem (Levin 1998 , 1999 ). Today several national and international programs
(Gosz et al. 2010 ; Waide and Thomas 2013 ) are building collaboration and helping
to organize and provide online data bases. For example, the International Long-Term