Saving the Prairies: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895-1955

Ronald C. Tobey tells a new origin story for American ecology by relocating its birth from the campfire of nature romanticism to the laboratories, land-grant classrooms, and wind-scoured prairies of the Midwest. Saving the Prairies follows the founding school of plant ecologists—C. E. Bessey, Roscoe Pound, Frederic Clements, John E. Weaver, Paul Sears—whose shared apprenticeship and field experience forged a tightly knit research community and a powerful scientific paradigm: plant successio...