Download e-book for kindle: The Silwood Circle: A History of Ecology and the Making of by Hannah Gay

Environmental Studies

By Hannah Gay

ISBN-10: 1848169892

ISBN-13: 9781848169890

This is often an unique and wide-ranging account of the careers of a close-knit team of hugely influential ecologists operating in Britain from the past due Nineteen Sixties onwards. The booklet is also learn as a historical past of a few contemporary advancements in ecology. one of many staff, Robert may well, is a previous president of the Royal Society, and the writer of what many see because the most vital treatise in theoretical ecology of the later 20th century. That the crowd flourished was once due not just to May's highbrow management, but additionally to the guiding hand of T. R. E. Southwood. Southwood ended his profession as Linacre Professor of Zoology on the college of Oxford, the place he additionally served a time period as Vice-Chancellor. past, as a professor and director of the Silwood Park campus of Imperial university London, he introduced the crowd jointly. because it started to coalesce at Silwood it's been named the following the Silwood Circle. Southwood promoted the pursuits of its contributors with the bigger objective of elevating the profile of ecological and environmental technology in Britain. Given public nervousness over the surroundings and the lack of ecosystems, his activities have been well-timed.

Ecology, which have been at the medical margins within the first 1/2 the 20th century, got here to be seen as a technology crucial to trendy lifestyles. The publication illustrates its value to many components. contributors of the Silwood Circle have acted as govt advisors within the components of conservation and biodiversity, source administration, pest keep watch over, nutrition coverage, genetically converted vegetation, sustainable agriculture, overseas improvement, defence opposed to organic guns, and epidemiology and infectious sickness keep an eye on. In recounting the technology they conducted, and the way they made their careers, the booklet displays additionally at the function of the crowd, and the character of clinical luck.

Readership: educational libraries, historians of technology and overdue 20th-century Britain.

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Extra info for The Silwood Circle: A History of Ecology and the Making of Scientific Careers in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

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4. Linnaeus was not alone in thinking this way. (Glacken, 1967) plausibly claims that natural theology prompted a range of early work such as Linnaeus’s and that it anticipated much that came later. However, Linnaeus was forced by the evidence of seemingly new species to modify his views. In later editions of his Systema Naturae he claimed that God had fixed the higher taxa but that genera and species were the ‘offsprings of time’. Linnaeus shared some geological views with his compatriot Emanuel Swedenborg.

His ideas, to be discussed in chapter five, were to have a major influence on Robert May and others in the Silwood Circle. The earlier pioneers in mathematical ecology were people who approached the field from outside the discipline. Fisher was by no means alone in turning to biological problems. Other mathematicians as well as some people with backgrounds in demography, physics and chemistry did the same. The mathematical aspects of this work, work beginning roughly in the 1920s, is covered in a little more depth in appendix one.

In what follows I hope to give meaning to the work of members of the Silwood Circle. As will be shown, they were luckier in their place and time. But first we will look at some other early history, and at the discipline of entomology as practised at Imperial College. It was there that some of the foundations were laid for later work at Silwood. 42 The Silwood Circle Endnotes 1. Among the general histories I have used (Bramwell, 1989; Worster, 1994; McIntosh, 1985; Sheail, 2002). Good bibliographic sources, (Egerton, 1977 and 1983).

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The Silwood Circle: A History of Ecology and the Making of Scientific Careers in Late Twentieth-Century Britain by Hannah Gay


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