Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches

1. John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts

ONE John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts: Understanding Life in the Great Tide Pool James C. Kelley James Kelley draws on a wide range of philosophies to show how Steinbeck and Ricketts almost literally anticipated the New Age school of "deep ecology ." To the superorganism concept Steinbeck was exposed to at the Hopkins Marine Station and the idea ofgroup cooperation among organisms Ricketts received from w. c. or Warder Clyde Allee at the University of Chicago, Kelley adds the concepts oftranscendent and visceral thinking that contributed to Ricketts's goal of "breaking through" to a holistic concept of the world ecosystem. The essay also contrasts Ricketts's idea of the "deep smile" of primitive peoples living close to nature with the ethic ofnature subjugation practiced by "advanced" European cultures. Kelley concludes that Steinbeck and Ricketts viewed science based on ecological principles as a unoble human undertaking" and a rational means ofachieving global understanding. The philosophy ofSea of Cortez is increasingly relevant to our preparation for today's Ugreen revolution." One of the most important social changes in these last decades of the twentieth century is, surely, the "greening" of the world population. The widespread concern for the environment and the effect of this concern on the political process and on the amount of money we are devoting to understanding human environmental impacts and reversing their effects are unprecedented in human history. This concern may be a natural response by an organism to environmental change. The Gaia Hypothesis (Lovelock 1972,215) predicts this sort of response as organisms work to regulate their environment to make it more habitable (such a regulatory effort presumably occurs even if the uninhabitable features are of their own making). To some 28 Kelley degree, our environmental awareness must be due to the Apollo space program, which allowed us, for the first time, to see our little water planet from the outside. To some less obvious but no less profound degree, the awareness may have been conditioned by John Steinbeck, who gave expression to Ed Ricketts's philosophical thoughts. These thoughts contain all of the primary elements of what "New Age" writers, thinking they have found something new and revolutionary, call "deep ecology." In fact, the thinking by Steinbeck and Ricketts on the subject is considerably more sophisticated than much of the recent work. This chapter will explore some of these ideas and how they may condition environmental concern. Ecological Thinking, Rational Understanding Ricketts's mentor, W. C. Allee, traces the origins of ecology to Empedocles , Aristotle, and Theophrastus but recognizes the development of the field in its modern form as beginning with the use of the name (Oekologie, or oecology) by Haeckel in 1869 (Allee et al. 34). The field experienced a rapid expansion and sophistication in the first three decades of this century, during which both Allee himself and William Emerson Ritter were major contributors. The Gaia concept is, of course, more recent. The term was introduced by Lovelock in 1972 (579), but in 1989 (215) he traced its origins to the work of the remarkable Scottish geologist James Hutton in 1788 (Hutton 209-304). John Steinbeck was certainly interested in the subject we now call ecology at least from his Stanford years; in 1923, he and his sister Mary took summer session courses in marine biology at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. It was a short walk down from the Eleventh Street house to the tide pools between Lover's Point and Cabrillo Point (China Point), which they visited often as children. The instructor in his summerbiology course, Charles VincentTaylor, was a doctoral candidate at Berkeley, a student of Charles Kofoid, and heavily influenced by the work of William Emerson Ritter, former chairman of the Zoology Department and, in 1911, founding director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Benson 1984, 240). As chair, Ritter had taught the University of California's summer marine biology course on the Hopkins property in 1892 (Ritter 1912, 148). Ritter used the "superorganism" model for what we would The Great Tide Pool 29 today call an ecosystem. This model worked well for Steinbeck in the form of the "phalanx" concept for"group man," prominent in In Dubious Battle, "The Leader of the People," and The Grapes of Wrath (Astro 1973, 61). When John met Ed Ricketts in 1930, Ed was fresh from the powerful influence of Warder Clyde Allee at the University of Chicago. Allee wrote extensively...