political undercurrents of modern ecology

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Political undercurrents of modernecologyYrjö Haila aa Teaches environmental policy at the Department of RegionalStudies and Environmental Policy , University of Tampere , POBox 607, Tampere, 33101, Finland E-mail:Published online: 23 Sep 2009.

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Science as Culture, Volume 7, Number 4, 1998 465

POLITICAL UNDERCURRENTS OFMODERN ECOLOGY

YRJÖ HAILA

What relation does the science of ecology bear to environmentalissues? This question does not have a single answer. Since the'environmental awakening' of the 1960s/70s, the term 'ecology' hasbecome inherently multifaceted and used with reference to manysubject areas—for instance, the organization of nature, studies andtheorization of the natural order, management of natural resources,and political or ideological ideas related to human-nature interac-tions (Haila and Levins, 1992). Environmental problems stem fromdynamic interpenetration of human activities and natural processesand from how these relations are viewed, whether in specific mani-festations or clumped together into a comprehensive image of societyvs nature. One can legitimately speak of the ecology of SO2 emis-sions, the ecology of forest management, or the ecology of housingand life-style, but commonalities among these approaches may beslight.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that society and naturewould carve into pieces in a perfectly parallel fashion, and thesepieces then interact pairwise. In contrast, different layers and por-tions of society connect with different processes of nature in variousand historically changing ways. Environmentally motivated 'ecolo-gies' are established around problems, and the perception of prob-lems is a cultural and political process. In addition, the politicizationof the environment is inherently heterogeneous, despite apparentunification due to the gathering of most variable kinds of problemsunder the general umbrella of the 'environment' (Haila, 1998a;Laine et al, 1998).

My focus in this paper is on how 'ecology proper' has respondedto this profusion of meanings attached to its subject matter in thecontext of environmental problems. I understand ecology proper tobe what academic ecologists do. Since the 1960s, there has been a

Address correspondence to: Yrjö Haila, Department of Regional Studies and Environmental Policy,University of Tampere, PO Box 607, 33101 Tampere, Finland, E-mail: [email protected]

0950-5431/98/040465-27 © 1998 Process Press

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466 SCIENCE AS CULTURE

social demand for ecologists to participate in environmental discus-sions; Mclntosh (1985) described the early responses. A feeling ofenthusiastic commitment in the early 1970s was muted by a soberingrealization that basic ecology does not, after all, provide ready recipesfor recognizing and understanding, let alone solving the problems;see Boucher (1998; in this issue). On the other hand, some ecolo-gists, usually of the more firmly established breed, viewed theenvironmental demand as an illegitimate intrusion from the outsideto the sphere of disinterested inquiry.

The belief that fundamental and practical research are two separ-ate realms is, of course, based on a claim of autonomy for basicresearch. However, I am not primarily interested in this claim perse—and it has been, furthermore, convincingly challenged over andover again—but rather in what social relevance ecology is supposedto get on the basis of such autonomy. Defence of autonomy isultimately a political act, although it appears as a justifiable, if notnecessary conclusion from the organization of research. A centralrole here is played by dynamics of disciplinary closure; I start fromhistorical considerations but move closer to the present day later on.1

• FROM BOUNDING OF PROBLEMS TO STABILIZATIONOF RESEARCH

An elementary decision in all research is bounding of the problem(Levins, 1998, this issue): the problem is defined within the contextof some set of factors which are considered external to the problemitself. How this happens is an integral part of the research process.Problems cannot be intelligibly defined without an idea about theircontextual surroundings, although this need not be firmly articu-lated. In this way, the bounding of problems naturally occurs withinestablished fields and leans upon commonly shared assumptions.This is analogous to the role of presuppositions in language: everycomprehensible sentence accepts as given a great number of linguis-tic conventions.

Two additional mutually related concepts clarify the process ofproblem bounding. First, contrast space defines alternative explana-tory possibilities relative to the phenomenon to be explained (Dyke,1988, p. 13).2 Every explanation is relative to a contrast spacedefined in advance, as it were. By fixing relevant alternatives, a

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POLITICAL UNDERCURRENTS OF MODERN ECOLOGY 467

contrast space excludes others as irrelevant. In this way contrastspace is naturally related to explanatory closure, another useful con-cept (Dyke, 1988, pp. 41-2). In the most elementary case, explana-tory closure is achieved when only two alternative explanations areavailable: refuting one immediately lends support to the other. Thiscorresponds to the paradigmatic ideal of hypothesis testing: con-struct situations such that observed results unambiguously eitherrefute or support predictions. However, an either-or closure is rareand strictly relative to the contrast space upon which it is built. A testis usually irrelevant to alternative explanations which are backed byalternative contrast spaces.

This ideal of unambiguous closure has, despite its implausibility,gained great authority in the sciences. As Dyke notes, it has workedin the Galileo-Newton-Descartes tradition of mathematical physics,and has been transferred to other disciplines through the adoption offormally similar mathematical models. An explanation is deemedacceptable whenever a formal model can be constructed which issimilar to those deployed in mathematical physics.

Successful bounding of research problems facilitates graduallywhat Hacking (1992a), using laboratory sciences as his case, charac-terized as stabilization of research. Stabilization is a pervasivecharacteristic of the sciences that needs to be explained; as Hackingnotes: 'My explanation of this stability is that when the laboratorysciences are practicable at all, they tend to produce a sort ofself-vindicating structure that keeps them stable' (pp. 29-30). InHacking's view, stabilization is inherently heterogeneous and isbased on a whole range of different elements—he named 15 alto-gether—that can be grouped into three categories, namely: (1) ideas;(2) things; and (3) marks and manipulation of marks.

In the following I briefly evaluate these categories in the develop-ment of modern ecology. Laboratory research in the strict senseplays only a minor role in ecology. Ecology is a science of historicallyconstituted interconnectedness and, hence, primarily observational.Although specific ecological processes and mechanisms can be stud-ied experimentally in the field and even brought into the labora-tory—experiments on population growth in micro-organisms,pioneered by G. F. Gause on Paramecium in the 1920s, are a classicexample—the relevance of specific findings and conclusions fornatural situations always requires separate assessment. But as Hack-

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ing's list of factors does not refer to just one type of research to beginwith, this is not a serious restriction; the argument can be extended,mutatis mutandis, to also cover observational science.

• 'Ideas'Ideas include in Hacking's list the following elements: (i) questions;(ii) background knowledge; (iii) systematic theory; (iv) topicalhypotheses; and (v) modelling of the apparatus.

It seems 'ideas' have mainly entered ecology in the shape ofmetaphors that have been used to characterize an object of researchconsidered typically ecological. The earliest and most famous meta-phor is the 'economy of nature' which, of course, derives fromLinnaeus and was used by Ernst Haeckel in his Generelle Morphologie(1864) simultaneously with the coining of the term 'ecology'(Okologie), under the direct influence of Darwinian evolutionarytheory.

Metaphors abound in all sciences, but I suspect they have beenparticularly important in the life sciences because of the particular'nature' of the object field, i.e. living nature. Living nature has alwaysbeen characterized through metaphoric ideas that have developed inclose resonance with cultural history (Collingwood, 1945; Glacken,1967; Williams, 1980). It would be extraordinarily strange indeed, ifthe science dealing with the 'economy of nature' had been uncoupledfrom cultural ideas of nature.

Metaphors of living nature function on several levels: on a higherlevel are those related to the nature of life and what makes itpossible, on a lower level those that define the specific character ofthe subject field. These should be in harmony with each other, inaccordance with Plato's doctrine of macrocosmos/microcosmos putforward in the Timaeus. People such as Linneus, Buffon, von Hum-boldt, Lamarck, Cuvier and Darwin elaborated and transformedhigher-level metaphors in the life-sciences and defined the back-ground from which ecology proper took off in the late 19th century."

Within ecology, an enduring challenge has been to distinguish inthe total complexity of the 'economy of nature' such entities that canserve as objects of focused studies and upon which specificallyecological theories can be built. In the decades after Haeckel'sgroundwork, the 'economy of nature' was conceptualized through

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physiological metaphors. 'Biotic community', understood in physio-logical terms, became the first specifically ecological study object,defined in the most beautiful and poetic terms for instance by theAmerican pioneer naturalist Stephen Forbes in his 'The Lake as aMicrocosm' (1887).

The organismic metaphor was gradually challenged in ecologicalthinking during the first decades of this century, on the one handthrough an individualistic approach, and on the other hand throughan emphasis of the 'systems' character of ecological communities(Kingsland, 1985; Hagen, 1992; Golley, 1993).

• "Things'Things are specified in Hacking's list as follows: (i) target; (ii) sourceof modification; (iii) detectors; (iv) tools; and (iv) data generators.

The identification of typically ecological 'things' has presentedformidable problems to ecologists. The problem is to identify 'natu-ral kinds', that is, ecological entities that are interchangeable withone another within the explanatory framework adopted so the theoryis not restricted to one entity at a time. Actually, a more appropriateexpression is 'scientific kinds', because scientific practice is whatdefines the units used in theories (Hacking, 1991). Metaphoric ideasdo not do the job alone because of their vagueness. For instance,when biotic communities are viewed in physiological terms withoutconsidering the (semi-)independent dynamics of the componentspecies, every community looks ultimately unique.

In other words, a dynamic analysis of the 'economy of nature'required more unambiguously defined basic entities than the bioticcommunity. The more established sciences were used as a model inthe search for such primitives. An important step was taken by AlfredLotka through the idea that communities consist of mutually inter-acting populations, and that the dynamics of populations can beanalyzed by assuming that individuals are identical to each other; hisstatement to this effect is worth citing in full: "... what is needed isan altogether new instrument; one that shall envisage the units of abiological population as the established statistical mechanics envisagemolecules, atoms and electrons; that shall deal with such averageeffects as population density, population pressure, and the like, after

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the manner in which thermodynamics deal with the average effects ofgas concentration, gas pressures, etc.;...' (Lotka, 1956, pp. 39-40).

Lotka also made a sophisticated effort to integrate the growth andinteractions of populations and the energetics of ecological com-munities; he discussed the former under the title of 'kinetics' and thelatter under the title of 'dynamics', in accordance with the vocabu-lary of turn-of-the-century physical chemistry. However, the effortfailed, apparently because hardly anybody understood it at the time.Lotka remains known through his contribution to population 'kinet-ics' (and has his name inscribed in the so-called Lotka-Volterraequations), but his work on ecological 'dynamics', i.e. energetics, isall but forgotten. This is due to several mutually enforcing reasonswhich need not occupy us in this context. What happened is thatmainstream ecology focused on 'kinetics' and adopted populationsand individuals as basic 'ecological kinds' to work with.3

The 'modern synthesis', i.e. the merging of classical Darwinismwith population genetics in the 1930s and 1940s, has been the singlemost important theoretical development in evolutionary biology inthis century. Ecology did not have any direct contribution to thesynthesis. However, the synthesis has proven important for ecologythrough its emphasis on the gene as the fundamental unit of biologi-cal evolution. The gene has become a serious candidate for a basic'ecological kind' through the conceptualization of ecological pro-cesses as interactions of individuals which are controlled by theirgenes; this is certainly the spirit of Richard Dawkins' metaphor of the'selfish gene'. Genetic reductionism is also the basis for the strongestunificatory program in ecology to date, as will become apparent lateron.

An energetic approach to ecology would, in contrast, mean thatparticular types of processes were viewed as 'ecological kinds', insteadof entities.4 This is theoretically a demanding task and requires amove away from traditional Newtonian science. Organismal physi-ology cannot be used as a straightforward model because ecologicalsystems are no 'superorganisms'. Ecosystems ecologists have tried tosolve the problem by adopting a cybernetic systems metaphor, butthe results have not been particularly encouraging. Ecosystems ecol-ogy has remained a descriptive science in which accurate recordingof systems metabolism is assumed to describe the dynamics of thosesystems as well, but this is suspect (Taylor, 1988).

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Thus, the search for typically ecological 'things' is continuouslybranching into two competing traditions. On the one hand, popu-lation and community ecology—in Lotka's parlance, 'kinetics'—dealwith relatively unambiguous 'ecological kinds' but bracket off under-lying energetic processes. On the other hand, ecosystems ecology—inLotka's parlance, 'dynamics'—builds upon energetics but has bigdifficulties in identifying any operationalizable 'ecological kinds' atall.

• 'Marks'Marks and manipulation of marks, i.e. methodology, is specified inHacking's list as follows: (i) data; (ii) data assessment; (iii) datareduction; (iv) data analysis; and (v) interpretation.

Methodology has, inevitably, developed in a close resonance with'ideas' and 'things'. Measurement is a practical act that defines theobject that is measured. However, this requires not only instrumentsand an ability to use them but also a conception of the 'thing' whichthe measurements characterize. Conceptual and methodological in-novations go hand in hand. Thus, systematic field research startedwith the establishment of field stations from the early 1870s on-wards, when it became accepted that there are measurable entitiesand processes in the 'economy of nature' (Haila, 1992).

Lotka and others introduced mathematical models into ecologyduring the 1920s and 1930s. This did not go unchallenged. Kings-land (1985) describes criticisms voiced from early on by morenaturalistically inclined researchers who regarded the models as toounrealistic to be useful. However, analytic models can also serve aheuristic function in research by showing what follows when particu-lar assumptions are fulfilled, regardless of whether this will actuallyhappen (Levins, 1966); for good primers demonstrating the value ofthe approach when it is backed by sound naturalistic knowledge, seeWilliamson (1972) and Slobodkin (1980).

Physics-style mathematical models obtained a central position inthe development of what became known as 'theoretical ecology' inthe Anglo-American community between the mid-1960s and early1980s; the essay collection with the same title edited by Robert May(1976) is a notable exemplar. The authors who participated in thecreation of this program differed in the specifics but a certain pioneer

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feeling was shared. The common theme was the elaboration ofmathematical models with the purpose of "helping to construct abroad theoretical framework within which to assemble an otherwiseindigestible mass of field and laboratory observations" (in May'swords from the introduction to the 1976 collection). No distinctionwas drawn between 'mathematical' and 'theoretical', no doubt underthe inspiration of the assumed universality of mathematical analyticmodels, in good correspondence with Newtonian ideals.5

I I Productive needsI have omitted society from the story thus far, but in reality socialpractice has had a crucial role in the background of modern ecology.When struggling with the stabilization of their work, ecologists havebeen subjected to a long-standing pressure from the productiveneeds of agriculture, forestry, fisheries and game management. Aclose relationship between knowledge of nature and productiveneeds is, of course, ancient. In a systematic fashion, the connectionbegan to consolidate at western European monasteries toward thelate Middle Ages, for instance, in the natural history works ofAlbertus Magnus (Glacken, 1967, pp. 313-18).

It seems, however, that the applied pressures have not beenhelpful in identifying typically ecological units of analysis. Thedemand on the applied side has been to control composite variablessuch as 'yield'—which is not a 'kind' but a product of a heteroge-neous set of processes. Furthermore, the nature of'yield' depends onwhat biological system is the producer. A simple case such asthe yield of a continuous culture or a single fish stock can bemodelled using simple differential equations (e.g. Williamson, 1972,pp. 40-50).

More commonly, however, yield is a non-linear function ofseveral interacting terms and analytically intractable (as are thedynamics offish populations in any realistic multispecies situation).This may be the reason for the curious dominance of descriptive andcorrelative research, and the virtual absence of analytical modellingin the established agricultural and forestry sciences (Levins, 1973;Haila and Levins, 1992). In traditional applied research, 'yield' wasdefined within a contrast space that did not recognize questions of

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dynamics at all. Nowadays this is changing, for instance withthe development of models of plant growth, based on photosyn-thesis.

Anyway, applied issues have provided ecologists with questionsthat have inspired some of the basic ideas of their science. Thiscan be amply demonstrated with examples from the early stagesof ecology: Karl Mobius adopted the concept of biologicalcommunity (biocoenosis) in 1877 in his study of oyster culture offthe German North Sea coast; Eugenius Warming initiated plantcommunity ecology and ecological plant geography around theturn of the century from the background of agricultural problemsin Jutland (Denmark); the pioneers of American plant ecologywere worried about cultivation of the prairies; the strong Russianresearch tradition in soil ecology originated with agricultural re-search; and so on. Also population-oriented ecology got inspirationfrom applied problems: the importance of human demography (in-surance statistics), fisheries and applied entomology in the foundingstages of modern population research early this century is wellknown.

To conclude, stabilization of research traditions has occurred inmodern ecology but amidst a general picture of increasing hetero-geneity. This is due to several reasons, already touched upon above.First of all, ecological thinking tends to bifurcate into theoriesemphasizing entities vs processes—individual-population-com-munity ecology on the one hand, and ecosystems ecology on theother—which hardly seem to fit in a unified framework at all.Another factor is the heterogeneous nature of applied problems.Finally, the 1970s program of methodological unification under thebanner of 'theoretical ecology' did not bear fruit either. In contrast,analytical models have inspired diversification of research intoseparate traditions such as behavioural ecology, functional ecology,landscape ecology, and sociobiology.

Studies on environmental issues do not fit smoothly together withany of the old traditions, although strong efforts have been made tobuild such a connection in the new field of 'conservation biology'(see below). In other words, the multiplicity of characterizationsof ecology, all equally legitimate, seems to get support from thedevelopment of ecology proper.

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• FROM STABILIZATION OF RESEARCH TO UNIFICATIONOF DISCIPLINE

Suppose we were confronted with the following argument: theambiguity in characterizing the relationship of ecological science toenvironmental issues does not really matter, rather, it is sufficient tostick to established practices in specific research fields. As thisstrategy has worked to the extent of stimulating important andinteresting research within various research traditions, the successfulresearch traditions can be elevated to a general standard to follow,also in the environmental sphere.

I do not think this is a viable alternative. As the French sociolo-gist Pierre Bourdieu (1988) has argued, science is, among otherthings, a power play in which credibility and prestige are centralassets. Competition for scientific prestige is going on all the time.One form this takes is that established research traditions tend toclaim theoretical universalism. It is not enough that a traditionproduces interesting results: every tradition seeks to spread itsinfluence to neighbouring traditions and, ultimately, to become aunifying core of a whole discipline.

LI Optimization as a unification principleIn this section I analyze optimization research in behavioural ecologyas an example of disciplinary unification. The notion of optimizationwas introduced into ecology and evolutionary biology in the 1960s,after the conviction became widely shared that individuals are thereal actors on the ecological scene and that individuals are controlledby 'selfish' genes which maximize their fitness. The optimizationmetaphor was borrowed from microeconomic models. Within thisframework, optimization is the mechanism producing adaptation(Levins and Lewontin, 1985; Dyke, 1988). The favourite type ofbehaviour that the early models dealt with was foraging: individualstrying to find/capture suitable food items often faced alternatives thatwere mutually exclusive. Optimization research has sought to findrules that the animals should follow to achieve a good result withmaximal efficiency.6 Game theory has been used as a modellingresource in situations in which the optimal behaviour of differentindividuals is expected to lead to a conflict of interests between them(Maynard Smith, 1982).7

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As my primary material, I use a review essay 'Optimization inecology' by John Krebs and A. I. Houston (1989). The essay is aparadigmatic example of a program of theoretical unification. Firstthe authors spell out the main assumptions of the approach, brieflybut adequately. Over half of the paper is a section entitled 'Someexamples': these relate to topics such as winter body mass of birds,diet choice in herbivores, choice of habitat, and competition betweenspecies. A very brief concluding section ends with the followingcredo: "Some examples of the use of optimization models in ecologyshow how processes at the individual, population and communitylevel can be analysed and brought together in a unified approach".

Optimization models have stimulated fruitful research in ecologyas shown by the Blackwell essay collections (see note 6). However,that the models bring "individual, population and communityecology ... together in a unified approach" is a different and muchstronger claim. With their concluding credo of the essay, Krebs andHouston hand the burden of proof to the examples: they persuadethe reader to believe that once the examples are accepted, theoreticalunification follows. In other words, they do not address theboundaries of the research tradition by asking: When is optimizationnot expected to happen? Are such situations prevalent enough torequire attention? Optimization models cannot be applied 'outwards'if their domain of validity is not assessed.

I I Closure in optimization explanationHow stable is the closure in optimization research? The closure isachieved by three sets of assumptions that are made to seem purelytechnical; citations in the following are from the introductory sectionof Krebs and Houston's essay. First, 'decision assumptions' whichdefine the situations in which organisms make their decisions. Inforaging models, for example, organisms decide 'which food itemsto eat when they are encountered' and 'how long to spend foragingin a patch which is gradually being depleted'. Second, 'currencyassumptions' which define the criterion by which alternative choicesare evaluated, for instance, 'net rate of energy intake' or 'number ofeggs laid per season'. This also includes a decision on an adequate'choice principle' such as maximization, minimization or stability(the last one 'in the case of problems with frequency dependent

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payoff). 'The currency may be chosen a priori because it is thoughtto relate to survival or reproduction, or a posteriori, because it givesa good description of what the organism does.' Third, 'constraintassumptions' which define 'the limit of feasible choices and the limitsof the payoffs that can be obtained by the organism.' Some con-straints arise due to 'properties of the organism', others 'arise fromthe environment'.

These sets of assumptions essentially postulate that organismsthemselves make decisions within well-defined closure conditions. Inother words, the organisms are assumed to know thoroughly thefactors that influence their life-time reproductive success, whateverthe situation in which they face alternative options. Is this assump-tion credible? For a human observer who is familiar with the opti-mization vocabulary, it is certainly possible to build up a closureon behalf of the organisms, particularly if different criteria areconsidered one at a time; but how about the organisms themselves?

There is no straightforward empirical answer to this questionbecause of what can be called a bookkeeping fallacy: once an optimiza-tion closure is accepted, any credible outcome can afterwards bepresented as concordant with the assumptions. This is because anoptimization closure entails an unambiguous cost-benefit calculationover every possible situation within that closure. "The natural im-mediate inference from bookkeeping to explanation is forced uponus, since there are virtually no plausible alternative explanationsavailable" (Dyke, 1988, p. 43).

Experiments do not really solve the issue because realisticassumptions can be reproduced in an experimental situation, while itdoes not make sense to construct experiments on unrealistic assump-tions. In other words, by establishing experimental conditions thatfulfil the assumptions required by a particular optimization model,organisms can be made to obey the model—simply because they donot have any feasible alternatives.8 The bookkeeping fallacy is in-herent in genetic selectionism too, as pointed out by Sober andLewontin (1982).

Ultimately, the optimization closure is tied to genetic reduction-ism: 'behaviour' consists of discrete acts, conducted one at a timeand controlled by genes—and, hence, moulded by genetic selectionthat has occurred in the past. Krebs and Houston spell this out withthe following declaration: "Compatibility with natural selection

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should act as a kind of filter through which ecological theories mustpass." This is a strange statement indeed. The Darwinian theory ofnatural selection is usually presented as an upper-level theory whichis tested through the success vs failure of its implications withinspecific research traditions. Yet this testing cannot happen in ecolog-ical theorizing if only those explanations are taken seriously whichfirst pass the filter of natural selection.

I I Challenging optimizationIs it possible to challenge this closure? Yes, of course, in severalways. First, from within. An obvious alternative is to destabilize thebounding by incorporating such elements as previous experience ofthe organisms, and contrasting needs that the organisms must satisfyeither sequentially or simultaneously (Mangel and Clark, 1988).

Another alternative is to ask, what are the conditions that organ-isms need to avoid to achieve a satisfactory performance ('satisfactoryperformance' being evaluated in this case by the same criteria asunder an optimization approach). The latter can be developed withina selectionist framework, and it may be a fruitful approach moreoften than is commonly thought (Williams, 1992); for instance, dataon the year-to-year shifts in territory locations of breeding birds inthe southern Finnish taiga suggest that avoidance of unsuitable sitesis a more consistent pattern than preference for suitable sites (Hailaet al.s 1996). The point is that the main condition for 'satisfactoryperformance' may not be the ability to choose the best, but theability to avoid the worst. If the contrast between the best and therest is big enough, these alternatives are symmetrical and, hence,indistinguishable: the rule is 'opt for the best, and avoid the rest'.This usually happens in experimental situations. However, in situa-tions with a range of alternatives grading into one another alonga continuum, choosing the best and avoiding the worst are notsymmetric any more.

In a more fundamental fashion the optimization closure can bechallenged from the outside. Natural selection is not the only poss-ible explanation for the unfolding of behavioural patterns in organ-isms during their life-course. For instance, spontaneousself-organization is a good alternative (Goodwin, 1996); this is again,however, vastly too large a topic to be taken up here.9 Ironically, the

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optimization models give a rather weird image of 'decision-making':organisms optimizing their behaviour do not make decisions at allbut function rather as rule-following calculating machines (see thecitation in note 6). This, as an aside, makes understandable thereluctance of behavioural ecologists to allow 'consciousness' to ani-mals (as attested by the same citation; see also Griffin, 1992).Consciousness implies the possibility of making mistakes, whichimplies irrational, sub- or unoptimal behaviour. This is not allowedin optimality thinking. The animals are 'rational' through andthrough: foraging birds, say, are attracted to an optimal behaviouralpattern, defined by the researcher, as stones and apples are attractedto the surface of the earth.10

The appeal of the idea of optimization draws ultimately uponfactors from outside the biological field, as is discussed by Dyke(1988): optimization is built upon the theory of rational agents(although, in this case they are really the genes that do the 'rationalcalculations'). That factors that lie outside of science are relevant fortheory choice is commonly accepted these days; see, e.g. Kuhn(1977, p. 325), for ecological examples, see Haila and Levins (1992).

Thus, Krebs and Houston want to unify ecological research byexpanding outwards from their own research tradition, yet, paradox-ically, the enterprise closes back in: the assumptions accepted withinthe research tradition become more and more restrictive. In fact,they push aside alternatives to the optimization closure by deferenceto the authority of neo-Darwinism, through a disciplinary act. Thiscase does not give much credibility to the idea that ecologicalresearch traditions might ripen according to their 'internal' needsand then be successfully applied to solve 'external' problems. Rather,this case illustrates how a tradition pre-defines the external worldaccording to concepts which exclude alternative possibilities.

• DISCIPLINARY PROMISEIn the previous section I suggested that the search for academicprestige and recognition has influenced ecological research and,among other things, motivated the consolidation of research tradi-tions into disciplines. Disciplinarity can be advanced through twomutually reinforcing mechanisms. The first is to secure the back-ground by deference to authority. In the case of behavioural ecology,

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this means neo-Darwinism; but, as Gould (1983, p. 89) notes,deference to experts has been characteristic of the hardening of themodern synthesis all along, so this just continues a venerable tra-dition. The second is to establish criteria that research within theparticular discipline in question has to fulfil; this normally happensthrough textbooks, learned societies, journals, and a system of refer-ees committed to the canon (C. Dyke, personal communication; alsosee note 9).

We can now refer back to Hacking's notion of stabilization andnote that this process has, of course, a 'rational kernel': to achieveanything at all, researchers who are interested in a particular set ofproblems have to create and ensure a shared methodology andvocabulary. This necessity has a price, however: an establishedvocabulary sets limits to what can be articulated within the disci-pline.

My assumption has been all along that the consolidation ofdisciplines, and the accompanying disciplinarity, is basically a socio-logical, societal and political process. In a post-Kuhnian, post-Foucauldian and 'post-Crombiean'11 world it is not possible anymore to imagine that scientific disciplines are dictated by nature.Rather, they are historically formed. The default is that the moreapplied the discipline, the stronger the social and overtly politicalpressures.

I—I Disciplinary dynamicsTo get further along this path, a dynamic vocabulary is needed. Inthe following I apply ideas of Pierre Bourdieu (1988; see Bourdieuand Wacquant 1992 for a general introduction) using Dyke (1998)as my guide in this endeavour; Dyke (1988) is also continuouslyrelevant.

First of all, we have to ask 'What are the dimensions of significantchange?' (Dyke, 1998). Change is usually depicted as a movement ina 'state space' defined by 'state variables', in classical dynamicsystems position and momentum. The question now is whether thereare analogous concepts that can be applied to characterize socialchange. Bourdieu's analogy for a state space is 'field'. The society isdivided into several subfields, overlapping to various degrees, andeach subfield is defined by a particular type of 'symbolic capital'.

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Capital can be acquired and accumulated and, hence, gives rise tocompetition and struggle. Symbolic capital exists in the society atlarge in several forms: economic, cultural and social. Capital isunderstood as a generalized capacity to 'command activity' (inanalogy with the ability of economic capital to command labour;Dyke, 1998). Capital is, of course, unevenly distributed whichcreates tensions within each field as well as among the fields. Onecan further distinguish between 'boundary conditions' which shapeeach field as if from the outside, and 'dynamic attractors' whichdetermine dominant strategies in competition for the accumulationof capital and power within each field.

The whole point is to analyze social change without getting tiedto particular explanatory models which usually assume the form ofreductive one-cause one-effect chains. For instance, when we notethat competition for recognition and prestige has influenced ecologi-cal research, we do not mean that ecologists have been psychologi-cally 'prestige-hungry'. In contrast, we want to say that recognitionand prestige constitute one type of symbolic capital which character-izes the scientific field irrespective of the psychological features of thescientists. Competition for the dominant form of symbolic capital isa necessity. For instance, ecologists may think that without gettingrecognition they cannot continue doing the research they want to do,which is, by and large, true. This is how competition for symboliccapital works; there is nothing particularly 'psychological' about it.

The Academia constitutes a field dominated by a particular typeof cultural capital. The next question is, what are the characteristicsof 'capital' in the academic field, and where does this capitaloriginate from?

First of all, the academic field as a whole is far from homogenous.A basic division goes between what Kant called 'higher' and 'lower'faculties (in his The Conflict of the Faculties), i.e. two poles of theuniversity field that are fundamentally opposed according to theirdegree of dependence on the field of power (Bourdieu, 1988, pp. 53-54). At one pole are faculties which are close to the reproduction ofpower but scientifically subordinate—traditionally medicine andlaw—at the other pole are scientifically dominant but socially subor-dinate faculties. In other words, the types and sources of capitaldiffer across scientific fields. A close alliance with social and politicalstructures implies heteronomy, and relative distance from them

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autonomy. However, "the most heteronomous positions are neverentirely free of the specific demands of a field officially orientatedtowards the production and reproduction of knowledge, and themost autonomous positions are never entirely free of the externalnecessities of social reproduction" (Bourdieu, p. 53).

Scientific autonomy is an important value per se, and definitelyworth defending (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, pp. 183-4). It is inthe more autonomous disciplines that a striving for genuine inno-vation, intellectual curiosity and love of their subject matter areimportant motivations for scientists; Marjorie Grene (1995) gives abeautiful exposition of this position. In a sense, of course, theintellectual part of science is what really matters. Even in corporateinstitutions the research scientists are often motivated primarily byintellectual curiosity; this is demonstrated by Rabinow (1996) whoalso shows, paradoxically, that corporate institutions may in thesedays offer equal if not better possibilities for this than academicinstitutions. Anyway, as a social phenomenon science is greatlyinfluenced by the institutional side, which has a powerful control onwhat researchers actually can do - probably increasingly so in ourincreasingly market-oriented world.

The sciences, by and large, belong to the 'lower faculties'. Theydo not have much to offer in terms of symbolic capital to thedominant political and economic field. Nevertheless, we have toconsider the possibility that some ecological traditions might becloser to the 'higher faculties' than ordinary basic research. This,indeed, seems to be possible. An example I can offer is forestresearch in Finland. It has had an exceptional relationship with socialpower, no doubt due to the prominent role of forests and forestindustries and, by implication, forestry professionals in the economicdevelopment of the country.12 A similar situation, or at leastpronounced heteronomy, may have been true of agricultural andmanagement research in other historical contexts.

Sources of capital need to be reproduced; this is what maintainsthe whole field. What is at stake is the authority of science in thesociety at large, and the position of particular disciplines among thesciences. In this sense, as is well known, the situation is in flux;laboratory sciences get an ever more prominent position among thelife sciences, while previously important subdisciplines occupied withthe biology of whole organisms have all but disappeared. Bourdieu

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can be further consulted for the new forms this competition takes,for instance, through the media.

I I Promise of social relevanceMy hypothesis is that a dominant response in ecology to the chang-ing situation is disciplinary promise, i.e. an effort to persuade thesociety at large to believe that what ecologists within a particulardiscipline are doing will prove valuable in the end. A type of promisejudged successful tends to become an 'intellectual attractor' withinecological thinking. That is, the discipline becomes viewed asthrough a prism which distorts everything that comes within sight.Disciplinary promise can take several alternative forms. The promiseof unification is one form of disciplinary promise; as we have seen,this can be built around either a theoretical core (optimizationresearch, previous section), or a methodological core (theoreticalecology, note 5).

More important, however, is a promise of social relevance. Thisis granted automatically to disciplines belonging to the higher fac-ulties; as a matter of fact, the specific position of, say, forestrysciences in Finland is synonymous with the promise of relevance theyoffer. In disciplines belonging to the lower faculties a crediblepromise is a more difficult feat. One option is to claim relevance fora modern world view. This, as is well known, is successfully ex-ploited by the evolutionary side of biology through expositions inscience museums, popular journals, bestsellers, films and so on. Forecology, an excellent option is offered by environmental issues. Inthe following I make three observations on the connection betweenecology and environmental problems in the light of disciplinarypromise.13

One type of promise is to let everybody understand that academicecology per se offers assets for understanding environmental issues. Itis a symptomatic detail that almost every one of the more importantessay collections on modern ecology, published since Robert May'sTheoretical Ecology (1976), includes a chapter or two on urgentpractical issues.14 Some of these deal with traditional applied prob-lems such as the ecology of disease or pest management. There arealso explicitly environmental topics, for instance, bioeconomics.

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resource use, sociobiologically tinted ecological anthropology, andpollution problems (acid rain, freshwater management).

A shared characteristic among the applied essays is that environ-mental issues are addressed within an exclusively scientific frame-work, i.e. problem closure is built upon ecological disciplines andnothing else. An extreme example is presented by an essay entitled'Translating ecological science into practical policy' (Porritt, 1994).It opens with the following declaration: "In contrast to many areas ofeconomic and social policy-making (in which the notionally empiri-cal data of social scientists are ruthlessly adulterated by a variety ofheavy ideological inputs), environmental policy-making remainsmore or less genuinely science-based"—in other words, a firm dis-tinction is assumed between ordinary social problems and environ-mental problems, and this is justified by reference to the authority ofscience. This, however, is a pure illusion: environmental problemsare social through and through.

Another observation concerns the changing profile of the Malthu-sian tendency in ecological environmentalism. Neo-Malthusianismwas a major trend among ecologists in the days of the 'environmentalawakening' in the 1960s-1970s, and it is still going strong(e.g. Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1990). Pure declarations of doom have notworked well, however, first because specific predictions havenot born true, and second because it is unlikely that doom declara-tions could motivate people to act on behalf of the environment.Hence, the Malthusian doom prediction needs to be supplementedwith more practicable advice on what is to be done.

One option is citizen activism: people start bombarding local andnational politicians with declarations and letters, i.e. to give generaladvice on 'What you can do' (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1990, pp. 226-51). In addition, Paul Ehrlich (1993) has adopted a complementarystrategy, namely, reliance on professionalism within a new ecologicalsubdiscipline called restoration ecology. The task of restoration ecologyis to repair the damage caused to ecosystems by previous humanactivity. This requires special skills as well as a vision that can onlybe acquired by restoration ecologists: "...while they work on thetechnical problems of rehabilitation, restoration ecologists must be-come leaders in the struggle to limit and then reduce the scale ofhuman activities; for unless that is done, all their other efforts havebeen waste" (Ehrlich, 1993).

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I I Biodiversity: the latest promiseMy third observation is the attention given to the biodiversity issue;the story is told by David Takacs (1996). There is an irony in thebiodiversity issue: how has an extremely complicated and perhapsobscure scientific concept become a political slogan?

There are two mutually complementary answers to this question.First, the biologists who launched the concept of biodiversity intopublic consciousness in the mid-1980s adopted the formula thatbiodiversity preservation is a 'win-win deal'. In other words, econ-omic activity is not necessarily detrimental to biodiversity, radier,economic rationality supports biodiversity preservation (Takacs,1996, pp. 206-12). As is well known, the vision of an economicwin-win deal was quickly adopted by the governing circles. Thisdominates the implementation of the biodiversity convention madein Rio—to the great advantage of biotechnology corporations as wellas authoritarian regimes in the developing countries where the largestreservoirs of 'biodiversity resources' are supposed to be.

Anodier important feature is the expertise-dependence of the issue.Being a complicated notion in a purely scientific sense, biodiversityseems infinitely malleable to the wishes of the experts. Takacs writesas follows (p. 99): "Biodiversity shines with the gloss of scientificrespectability, while underneath it is kaleidoscopic and all-encompassing: we can find in it what we want, and can justify manycourses of action in its name. ...If biodiversity is a much morecomplex and dynamic focus for conservation efforts than endangeredspecies, it likewise offers a much more complex and dynamic role forbiologists in society at large."

But the situation is even weirder. Namely, biodiversity can bepresented as so complicated an issue that hardly anybody under-stands it. "The term biodiversity symbolizes biologists' lack of knowl-edge about the natural world" (p. 83, emphasis in the original).Consequently, hardly anybody can tell what biodiversity preservationactually demands. But then, who is to say what is useful and what isnot? "This is not a rhetorical question. The answer is: biologists willsay" (p. 86).

These features taken together suggest strongly that 'biodiversityscience' has aspirations to be elevated to die noble sphere of the'higher faculties'. Ehrlich clearly is hoping for a similar promotion forrestoration ecology. After reading Bourdieu we know that this would

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mean a concomitant loss of scientific autonomy—as well as loss ofsocial responsibility, one has to add. Overall, at an earlier stage of theunfolding of the 'biodiversity discourse' I was much more positivelyinclined toward the potential of the concept to instigate importantchanges in conservation thinking than since the latest development(Haila and Kouki, 1994; Haila, 1999).

These three observations are variations on a common theme:disciplinary promise. The promise requires the support of a well-bounded scientific discipline; otherwise it may lose credibility. Re-search traditions unified around a common core in basic researchseem to provide such 'discipline'. Hence the inevitable connection ofdisciplinary promise to the dynamics of unification in basic research.What we have here is a process of 'apolitical politicization': a firmbelief that, if disciplinary enough, basic research can simply widenoutwards and turn into an all-encompassing political program to savethe world. Biodiversity is a particularly clear case of this tendency.The inherent vagueness of the concept contributes to the tendencythat the increase of corporate profits is the hard core that remainswhen biodiversity politics are stripped bare of wishful declarations(Baumann et al., 1996).

One final reminder on the role of individual ecologists.Bourdieu's term for the strategies adopted by actors in their compe-tition for symbolic capital within particular fields is 'habitus'. Let usemphasize once again that habitus is not a psychological notion;rather "... an academic habitus ... causes the individual agents torealize the law of the social body without intentionally or consciouslyobeying it: in the absence even of any express regulation or anyexplicit warning, aspirations tend to adjust themselves to the modaltrajectory for a given category at a given moment..." (Bourdieu,1988, p. 143; emphasis in the original).

• THE MULTIPLICITY OF ECOLOGICAL PRACTICEApolitical politicization through disciplinary promise is counterpro-ductive in both directions, as it were, both politically andscientifically. It is clear that the political dynamics of environmentalproblems cannot be addressed on this basis at all. On the other hand,disciplinary promise tends to push stabilization within basic researchalong a misleading pathway. Important research initiatives may be

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pushed aside in the name of the accepted canon. The need ofmultiple approaches should, however, be obvious and rises from thesphere of basic research, too.

There are two final comments I want to make. First, it is, ofcourse, important to strive toward stabilization in applied researchsuch that basic ecological knowledge is included. Hacking's idea canbe applied as an iterative 'triangular' process connecting togetherbasic research, management, and constant monitoring of the resultsof previous measures in a self-vindicating and adaptable procedure(Haila and Margules, 1996). The approach has been successfully putinto practice in many parts of the world; a good example is theco-operation between ecologists and farmers to prevent soil degra-dation and restore damaged landscapes in the western Australianwheatbelt (Hobbs and Saunders, 1993). It should go without sayingthat practice-dependence, rather than expertise-dependence, would bea promising attitude both in restoration ecology and biodiversitypreservation. Practical and, hence, idiosyncratic experience shouldmatter: in both cases, success vs failure of management dependscritically on the ability of those who do the job to act creatively andapply their knowledge and skills in a context-specific fashion.

This is an equally challenging aim as basic research, if not moreso, although there is not much academic capital in store for ecolo-gists who dedicate their time to working together with local farmers.Let us recall the aphorism of Dick Levins (1995): the aim is to do"practical research in a fundamental way".

Ultimately, ecology as a specialized academic discipline cannotalone be a unifying core in the understanding of environmentalissues. This should be self-evident: one of the duties of ecologists isto develop their basic research staying true to the intellectual de-mands of their discipline among other 'lower faculties'. On the otherhand, basic ecology can, of course, help in acquiring such knowledgeabout natural processes which is needed for evaluating the magni-tude of the human impact. Equally important as detailed knowledgeof particular natural systems is general understanding of the princi-ples that characterize ecological dynamics, or the 'heuristics' ofecological interactions (Dyke, 1997). The challenge is to substitutecontext-specific socio-ecological analysis for an amorphous feeling ofan imminent crisis—but simultaneously to keep the whole picture inmind (Haila, 1998a).

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• NOTES1. My efforts to understand this problem in dynamic terms have been inspired byChuck Dyke.2. The concept was introduced by Alan Garfinkel who is duly acknowledged byDyke.3. Lotka's vocabulary was never adopted either. In contrast, the Lotka-Volterraequations of population growth and interaction are in modern textbooks presentedunder the heading of 'dynamics'. This is confusing and may be one source for theclaim often heard that ecosystems are 'mere epiphenomena' or 'do not reallyexist'—as if all that there is to 'dynamics' in ecological processes were interactionsamong individuals, and energetics did not matter.4. The distinction is really not this sharp because 'processes' are temporarilystabilised into 'entities', but I maintain it here for the sake of the argument.5. As a matter of fact, the heyday of mathematical ecology provides an excellentexample of a methodological conviction—or dogma—becoming a stabilizing coreof a research tradition, but this is too broad a theme to be discussed here; seeKingsland (1985).6. The notion of optimization is the stabilizing core of behavioural ecology; see theseries of essay collections entitled Behavioural Ecology, An Evolutionary Approach(John Krebs and Nicholas Davies, eds, Blackwell, 1978, 1984, 1991, 1997; eachsubsequent edition thoroughly revised). In the first collection, John Krebs (1978)spelled out the logic of optimal foraging models as follows: "In brief, the rationaleis this: animals will, as a result of evolutionary selection pressures, tend to harvesttheir food efficiently, so if we can work out in theory the decision rules whichwould maximise the animal's efficiency, these rules ought to predict how thepredator makes its choices. [Note that the words 'decision' and 'choice' are notintended to imply anything about conscious thought, they are short-hand ways ofsaying that an animal is designed to follow certain rules. . . ."]7. There are supposed to be two 'games' going on simultaneously in evolution,namely, one resulting from the game of individuals (or genes) against each otherto maximize their fitness here and now, and another one resulting from the gameof lineages against the environment to stay in the game, i.e. to avoid extinction.The contradictory relationship between these perspectives was analyzed bySlobodkin and Rapoport in their 'An optimal strategy of evolution' (1974;appended to Slobodkin, 1980). The former perspective, adopted explicitly byMaynard Smith (1982, p. 2) has been the dominant one by far. The teleologyinherent in optimization thinking is pointed out by Dyke (1988, pp. 43-46).8. A thought experiment invites itself at this stage. Let us accept that all three setsof assumptions of the models are fulfilled in a particular situation. The experimentis this: try to imagine what sort of a sub- or unoptimal decision could possibly beopen to a creature which 'is designed to follow' optimization rules (see note 6again).9. Let us note, however, that any thorough description of the behaviour of realindividuals in the course of an extended period of their real lives produces mostvariable observations that do not easily fit into optimization thinking; for ornitho-

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logical examples, see Hanski et al. (1992) and Haila (1998b). It is a commonexperience among people who try to do this kind of work that the results are notacceptable to learned journals because 'no clearly defined hypothesis was beingtested' (cf. note 5).10. As the artist Jimmie Durham once remarked (Durham, 1997): ". . . I read anarticle in an American magazine about how parrots are intelligent. Now they areteaching parrots to be stupid capitalists in a strange way, trying to prove they areintelligent by telling them: 'you say this word and I will give you a cookie'. Thisis their measure for being intelligent. But this is actually forcing the parrot to beas stupid as the researcher".11. The reference here is to Alistair Crombie's The Styles of Scientific Thinking inthe European Tradition (three volumes, Duckworth, 1994); see Hacking (1992b) foran introduction.12. A good indication is that A. K. Cajander, an ecological botanist by back-ground and internationally known for a classification of forest site types that hedeveloped in the 1910s, made a successful career shift in the 1930s and turned topolitics, later to become the prime minister. The strong position of the forestrysciences may be a Finnish idiosyncratic feature, although they have also had animportant position in the German speaking countries. In the mid-1980s, a friendof mine tried to do his master's thesis in the faculty of forestry at the Universityof Helsinki on how the professional prestige of foresters has been historicallyshaped, but a rather minimal critical attitude was sufficient to get his wings cut.13. Each one of these observations would deserve an essay-length analysis of itsown, which is impossible in this context. I want to have them seen as a part of abroader picture of the current dynamics of the ecological science. It would be alltoo easy to give a purportedly 'political' interpretation to phenomena whichactually follow broader dynamics. The observations are political, for sure, but inan apolitical guise.14. My survey covered collections based on the annual symposia of the BritishEcological Society, published by Blackwell, plus an important collection byPrinceton UP (1989). In addition, an avalanche of books on conservation biologyhas come out since the mid-1980s which are, by definition, focused on appliedproblems.

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political undercurrents of modern ecology

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