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 425

29.5 Organizing Professional Societies to Consider

Environmental Ethics

Since the 1970s as awareness of environmental problems accelerated professional
societies developed codes of ethics to deal with socio-environmental challenges.
At his ESA Annual Meeting Presidential Address, Golley criticized the fragmenta-
tion of ecological science (Golley 1978 ). He recognized that ecologists “view the
world as a collection of interlocking systems.” His concern was how ecologists
could better develop new ideas: “It is no surprise that United States ecologists have
been preoccupied with competition theory and have tended to pay less attention
to social interaction, mutualism and symbolism…ecologists have an opportunity to
aid in the revitalization of our society in the largest sense.” Differences in views
among professional ecologists are still strongly debated and create an ongoing
need for development of new ways for dealing with environmental ethics as well as
professional ethics.
There is increased interest in looking back as well as forward to see how much
ecologists have learned during the last century about environmental values as the
Ecological Society of America (ESA) celebrates its centennial in 2015, 2 years after
the British Ecological Society's centenary (Callicott 2015 ). The incubation of many
ideas within professional organizations such as the ESA, has resulted in diverse
groups forming new organizations such as The Nature Conservancy, the Society of
Conservation Biology, and others (Burgess 1981 ; Tjossem 1994 ). These organiza-
tions have considerable overlap in memberships and are creating new ways of com-
municating with the public and a new generation of highly motivated students
regarding environmental ethics.
In the 1970s Golley also served as the president of the International Society for
Tropical Ecology (ISTE) and as the vice president on planning for the Organization
of Tropical Studies. His experience in many tropical countries provided important
opportunities to communicate the value of biodiversity and the importance of large-
scale, long-term studies. This experience also likely contributed to his appreciation
of cultural diversity and the different ways ecological values entered into decision
making in the developing world where traditional ecological knowledge often
remained important and refl ected very different value systems from those of indus-
trialized nations.
During his presidency of ISTE, Golley organized a major symposium in India on
energy fl ow and primary productivity (Golley and Golley 1972 ). Later he helped
organize additional international workshop on tropical ecology in Costa Rica
(Farnsworth and Golley 1974 ) and Venezuela (Golley and Medina 1975 ), resulting
in recommendations to the National Science Foundation for future research to eval-
uate the loss of primary rainforests and their biodiversity. All these activities and the
growing network of tropical researchers contributed to the emerging perspective of
a “fragile ecosystem” concept as part of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere
Program. This research was based on comparing regional differences in an ecosys-
tem's geologic age, soils, and slopes as well as the scales of past and recent