Saving the Prairies

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 succession. From the sod-busting 1890s through the Dust Bowl and New Deal, Tobey shows how their theory migrated from botany into policy, shaping forest reserves, game management, agricultural programs, and, later, the language of environmental impact. Lyrical evocations of tallgrass resilience sit alongside debates over measurement, experiment, and utility, revealing how the prairies functioned simultaneously as object of study, moral touchstone, and political symbol.

Rejecting a simple history of ideas, Tobey offers a case study in scientific change—what he calls a microparadigm—guided by Kuhn and informed by the sociology of science. He reconstructs how the Nebraska-centered network secured intellectual authority through graduate training, institutional placement, coauthorship, and citation, and how the same social bonds constrained critical testing of cherished assumptions. The book’s pivot comes in the 1930s, when drought and economic crisis exposed the limits of an “inevitably progressive” succession and redirected the field toward active management; even allies like A. G. Tansley peeled away as philosophical and political winds shifted. Through meticulous archival work and innovative quantitative analysis, Saving the Prairies demonstrates that ecological knowledge is inseparable from institutional settings and civic purposes. It is both an intimate group biography and a bracing account of how a science that once promised to “approach the eternal” learned instead to live with contingency—and, in doing so, helped invent modern environmentalism.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.