Historians of science have attributed the emergence of ecology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century to the synthesis of Humboldtian botanical geography and Darwinian evolution. In this essay, I begin to explore another, largely neglected but very important dimension of this history. Using Sergei Vinogradskii’s career and scientific research trajectory as a point of entry, I illustrate the manner in which microbiologists, chemists, botanists, and plant physiologists inscribed the concept of a “cycle of life” into their investigations. Their (...) research transformed a longstanding notion into the fundamental approaches and concepts that underlay the new ecological disciplines that emerged in the 1920s. Pasteur thus joins Humboldt as a foundational figure in ecological thinking, and the broader picture that emerges of the history of ecology explains some otherwise puzzling features of that discipline – such as its fusion of experimental and natural historical methodologies. Vinogradskii’s personal “cycle of life” is also interesting as an example of the interplay between Russian and Western European scientific networks and intellectual traditions. Trained in Russia to investigate nature as a super-organism comprised of circulating energy, matter, and life; over the course of five decades – in contact with scientists and scientific discourses in France, Germany, and Switzerland – he developed a series of research methods that translated the concept of a “cycle of life” into an ecologically conceived soil science and microbiology in the 1920s and 1930s. These methods, bolstered by his authority as a founding father of microbiology, captured the attention of an international network of scientists. Vinogradskii’s conceptualization of the “cycle of life” as chemosynthesis, autotrophy, and global nutrient cycles attracted the attention of ecosystem ecologists; and his methods appealed to practitioners at agricultural experiment stations and microbiological institutes in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union. (shrink)

In this article, the author examines an exemplary part of the Soviet media discussion following the Chernobyl disaster. She traces transformations in this discourse affecting the concepts of risk and uncertainty and indicates their relevance for the reconfiguration of the relationships between the state, scientific experts, and the public. Chernobyl occurred during a period of unprecedented potential for change: in the wake of Gorbachev’s perestroika, newly emerging environmental groups gradually managed to gain access to a previously closed forum, the national (...) print media. During the ensuing public debates between environmentalists and energy officials, nuclear risks or uncertainties were used as powerful, yet flexible, rhetorical tools for articulating political positions, for assigning or denying authority and legitimacy, and for reconceptualizing “the public.” The shorthand “Chernobyl” came to be deployed strategically to solicit change, to challenge old practices, and to legitimize the continuation and extension of these practices. (shrink)

In 1890, Sergei Nikolaevich Vinogradskii (Winogradsky) proposed a novel life process called chemosynthesis. His discovery that some microbes could live solely on inorganic matter emerged during his physiological research in 1880s in Strassburg and Zurich on sulfur, iron, and nitrogen bacteria. In his nitrification research, Vinogradskii first embraced the idea that microbiology could have great bearing on agricultural problems. His critique of agricultural chemists and Kochian-style bacteriologists brought this message to the broader agricultural community, resulting in an heightened interest in (...) biological, rather than chemical methods to investigate soil processes. From 1891 to 1910, he directed the microbiological laboratory at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he expanded his chemosynthesis research to a broad investigation of the manifold significance of autotrophic organisms in soil processes. This work and that of his students attracted the serious attention of agricultural chemists and soil scientists in Russia and abroad, changing essentially the way they understood and investigated the role of microbes in the soil. His student, Vasilii Omelianskii, effectively integrated Vinogradskii’s approach into Russian and Soviet, and international agricultural microbiology. Vinogradskii’s activities in the late 19th century reflect the changes occurring more broadly in science. At that time, microbiologists such as Louis Pasteur, Eugenius Warming, and Martianus Beijerinck were contributing new laboratory methods and theoretical perspectives to incipient disciplines closely related to agriculture: ecology, soil science, and soil microbiology. (shrink)

Between 1917 and 1945, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) housed a Committee for the Preservation of Natural Conditions specifically charged with identifying and taking political action toward the preservation of wilderness sites for scientific study. While several historians have analyzed the social and political contexts of the Preservation Committee, none has addressed the scientific context that gave rise to the Committee and to political activism by ESA members. Among the Preservation Committee's lobbying efforts, the naming of Glacier Bay, Alaska, (...) as a national monument in 1925 stands out as a unique success. I argue that the campaign for the preservation of Glacier Bay reveals the methodological ambitions ecologists had for their science in the 1920s and 1930s and demonstrates how ecologists understood the role of place in biological field studies. It represented preservation for science. Most of the political activities undertaken by the ESA in the interwar years, however, turned out to be science for conservation, which rarely involved lobbying for the protection of active research sites. In conjunction with changes in ecological methodology in the 1940s, the Committee's unclear scientific mission contributed to its being disbanded in 1945. (shrink)

During the mid-twentieth century, Soviet scientists developed the “natural focus” theory–practice framework to explain outbreaks of diseases endemic to wild animals and transmitted to humans. Focusing on parasitologist-physician Evgeny N. Pavlovsky and other field scientists’ work in the Soviet borderlands, this article explores how the natural focus framework’s concepts and practices were entangled in political as well as material ecologies of knowledge and practice. We argue that the very definition of endemic plague incorporated both hands-on materialist experience and ideological concepts (...) that supported Soviet colonization. Theorizing and fighting plague assisted with the goals of controlling and improving landscapes and peoples in southern Russia and Central Asia. The history of the natural focus framework illustrates how Soviet disease ecology co-developed with the needs of local and central political powers in the Soviet borderlands. (shrink)

The progress towards mathematization or, in a broader context, towards an increased “objectivity” is one of the main trends in the development of biological systematics in the past century. It is commonplace to start the history of numerical taxonomy with the works of R. R. Sokal and P. H. A. Sneath that in the 1960s laid the foundations of this school of taxonomy. In this article, I discuss the earliest research program in this field, developed in the 1920s by the (...) Russian entomologist and biometrician Eugen (Evgeniy Sergeevich) Smirnov. The theoretical and methodological grounds of this program are considered based on the published works of Smirnov as well as some archival sources. The influence of Smirnov’s evolutionary (mechano-Lamarckian) convictions on the development of this project of “exact systematics” is analyzed as well as the author’s attempts to establish a novel concept of “mathematical essentialism” in animal taxonomy. The probable causes of the failure of Smirnov’s project are viewed from both externalist and internalist perspectives, including the opposition to the use of quantitative methods in biology by some of the Lysenkoist ideologists in the USSR. A brief comparison of Smirnov’s research program with that developed 40 years later by Sokal and Sneath is provided. (shrink)