Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Introduction

Introduction The problem ofhow three editors might write an introduction to Steinbeck and the Environment together seemed insurmountable until we decided to adopt the useful evolutionary principle of niche partitioning. Here each ofus has contributed his or her own introductory perspective, approaching this volume's title subject from the respective points of view of biologist, Steinbeck specialist, and generalist in American literature. We are hopeful that the reader willfind the interdisciplinary approach helpfulfrom the start, using our points ofconvergence to locate the universals in the scientific and humanistic experience ofSteinbeck's writing and our points ofdeparture to gauge what our different disciplines can contribute to one another. A SCIENTIST'S PERSPECTIVE Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr. This volume presents papers by researchers of two basic types. The first group consists of people whose primary interest is in American literature and literary criticism. The second group comprises practicing scientists. This characterization of contributors does not mean that the literary cadre is not interested in science or that the scientists are not interested in literature-quite the opposite, as all the authors represented here have enthusiastically contributed to this interdisciplinary anthology. My background is essentially scientific, so I will seek to introduce this volume from a generally scientific standpoint. First I will attempt to provide some definitions and common ground for terms and concepts often used in the following essays. Then I will attempt to explain why I feel many of Steinbeck's works appeal strongly to scientists. Ecology, Environment, Environmentalists, and Environmental Science Ecology in the sense of man's awareness of interrelationships among organisms themselves and between organisms and their environ- 2 Tiffney, Shillinglaw, and Beegel ment is not new. One does not need formal training to recognize that without herbivores there would be no lions and that palm trees cannot grow at the North Pole. Ecology did not emerge as an intellectual concept and academic discipline, however, until the nineteenth century. Darwin's 1859 presentation of the evolutionary idea, with his and others' subsequent elaboration of it, is fundamental to the development of ecological thinking. Although there were glimmerings before 1859, it would be very difficult to form concepts of interrelationships among organisms and with the environment without the concept of change and adaptation that is the driving force in developing these relationships. The leading German proponent ofCharles Darwin's organic evolution concept, Ernst Haeckel, proposed the term Oekologie in 1866 and define4 it as the comprehensive science of the relationship of the organism to the environment. Even before this codification, people such as the German Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), and British investigators William MacGillivray (1796-1852) and John G. Baker (1834-1920), had accomplished serious research into plant distribution relative to physical environmental factors (SheaiI1987, 3). By 1900, a number of people were practicing the new "science" of ecology, although the results were often criticized for sloppiness and lack of standards. In England, Arthur G. Tansley (1871-1955) set out to improve this situation; he was abetted by Frederic E. Clements (1874-1945) in the United States. Tansley established a journal, the New Phytologist (literally "plant student"), in 1901 and then assisted in forming the British Ecological Society in 1913. Its carefully refereed journals continue to present the finest of ecological research today . Beginning in 1897, Clements published significant works on American plant ecology, establishing high standards for such work in the United States. The American Ecological Society formed in 1915 and began publishing its journal in 1920 (Sheail 1987, 16-42). By the late 1930s, the emphasis of ecological thought and research was on the relationship between organisms and the physical environment , following the early motto of the American Ecological Society : "All forms of life in relation to environment." By the time Ed Ricketts studied with Warder C. Allee (1885-1955) Introduction 3 at the University of Chicago and Steinbeck attended Stanford classes and worked at the Hopkins Marine Laboratory, ecology was a wellestablished and well-respected discipline. Allee was a pioneer of modern "population biology," an approach more concerned with interactions among organisms than simply with their environmental relations. From about 1920 until the 1950s, Allee published a series of papers on animal sociobiology and a book, Animal Aggregations: A Study in General Sociology (1931), that Ricketts and Steinbeck took with them on their trip to the Gulf of California (Astro 1973, 15). Allee noted that aggregations of animals could often withstand stresses, either...