The construction of a tropical country: a review of environmental historiography on Brazil. / A construção de um país tropical: uma apresentação da historiografia ambiental sobre o Brasil.

This article provides an overview of books published on Brazilian environmental history. Among the large variety of environmental themes seen in Brazilian historiography, we selected the authors who in some way identify themselves as explicitly related to the academic environmental history community. Although the emphasis was on authored books, we sought to at least mention the principal edited books produced in the field. With this mapping, we demonstrate the themes and spatial-temporal foci prioritized by environmental historians in their studies on Brazil. Additionally, we sought to show how the gaps still existing in the literature provide promising paths for future expansion of this field.

Este artigo apresenta uma visão geral da produção de livros sobre a história ambiental do Brasil. Da grande diversidade de temas ambientais presentes na historiografia brasileira, selecionamos os autores que de alguma forma se identificam como relacionados com a comunidade acadêmica da história ambiental. Embora a ênfase tenha sido dada aos livros autorais, buscamos ao menos mencionar as principais coletâneas produzidas no campo. Com esse mapeamento, demonstramos quais têm sido os temas e os recortes espaçotemporais priorizados pelos historiadores ambientais em seus estudos sobre o Brasil. Além disso, buscamos mostrar como as lacunas ainda presentes nessa produção oferecem caminhos promissores para a futura expansão desse campo.

A construção de um país tropical: uma apresentação da historiografia ambiental sobre o Brasil / The construction of a tropical country: a review of environmental historiography on Brazil

Resumo Este artigo apresenta uma visão geral da produção de livros sobre a história ambiental do Brasil. Da grande diversidade de temas ambientais presentes na historiografia brasileira, selecionamos os autores que de alguma forma se identificam como relacionados com a comunidade acadêmica da história ambiental. Embora a ênfase tenha sido dada aos livros autorais, buscamos ao menos mencionar as principais coletâneas produzidas no campo. Com esse mapeamento, demonstramos quais têm sido os temas e os recortes espaçotemporais priorizados pelos historiadores ambientais em seus estudos sobre o Brasil. Além disso, buscamos mostrar como as lacunas ainda presentes nessa produção oferecem caminhos promissores para a futura expansão desse campo.

Abstract This article provides an overview of books published on Brazilian environmental history. Among the large variety of environmental themes seen in Brazilian historiography, we selected the authors who in some way identify themselves as explicitly related to the academic environmental history community. Although the emphasis was on authored books, we sought to at least mention the principal edited books produced in the field. With this mapping, we demonstrate the themes and spatial-temporal foci prioritized by environmental historians in their studies on Brazil. Additionally, we sought to show how the gaps still existing in the literature provide promising paths for future expansion of this field.

"Organismic" positions in early German-speaking ecology and its (almost) forgotten dissidents.

In early German ecology, the key concept used to refer to a synecological unit was Biozönose (biocoenosis). Taken together with the concept of the Biotop (biotope), it was also understood as an integrated higher-order unit of life, sometimes called a "Holozön" (holocoen). These units were often perceived as having properties similar to those of individual organisms, and they informed the mainstream of German ecology until at least the late 1960s. Here I ask how "organismic" these concepts really were and what conceptual problems they entailed. To do so, I focus on some almost forgotten dissident positions, especially those of (German-born) Friedrich Simon Bodenheimer and Fritz Peus, which I contrast with the mainstream German ecology of the time. In a radical paper published in 1954 that postulated the "dissolution of the concepts of biocoenosis and biotope", Peus in particular elicited a forceful response from many prominent German ecologists. An analysis of the ensuing debate, including especially a colloquium held in 1959 that was partly inspired by Peus' paper, is helpful for sifting the various arguments proffered with respect to a quasi-organismic perception of the biocoenosis in German speaking ecology. Although German mainstream ecologists rejected the notion of the biocoenosis as a superorganism, ontological holism was quite common among them. Additionally, the mainstream concept of the biocoenosis was plagued by several methodological problems and much conceptual confusion, to which the "dissidents" rightly pointed. Some of these problems are still pertinent today, e.g. in connection with more modern concepts such as "ecosystem".

Species distribution models advance our knowledge of the Neanderthals' paleoecology on the Iranian Plateau.

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were distributed across a vast region from Europe to western and Central Asia. The Neanderthals' paleoecology and distribution has been extensively studied in Europe where the species originated. However, very little is known about their paleoecology in south-western Asia. Here, we employed species distribution modelling and 45 Middle Palaeolithic (c. 200,000-40,000 years BCE) sites location associated with fossil and/or lithic artefacts made by the Neanderthals to examine the expansion of the Neanderthals on the Iranian Plateau in south-western Asia. We estimated the niche overlap between Neanderthals and wild goat, wild sheep and Persian gazelle by modelling their past distribution using 200, 143 and 110 occurrence records respectively. The results show that Neanderthals had highest niche overlap with wild goat in the study area. This analysis revealed that the most suitable Neanderthals' habitats in south-western Asia were located in the Zagros Mountains stretches from north-western and western and some isolated patches in the central parts of the Iranian Plateau. The annual precipitation and maximum temperature of the warmest month were the most important predictor of the species' distribution. This finding shows that the southern edge of the Neanderthals distribution was limited by warm summer. Our results provide important information for future field investigations and excavations in the area.

Pre-colonial Amerindian legacies in forest composition of southern Brazil.

Past human societies have left persistent marks on forests worldwide. However, the degree to which pre-colonial Amerindian societies have affected forest structure is still not fully understood, especially in southern Brazil. This study investigated the influence of two distinct Amerindian groups (Southern-Jê and Guarani) over tree composition of forest fragments in the State of Santa Catarina. Vegetation data was obtained from the Santa Catarina Forest and Floristic Inventory (SCFFI): a statewide systematic vegetation sampling project. Archaeological data was collated from literature reviews as well as existing databases for archaeological sites occupied by Guarani and Southern-Jê groups. Using these sites of known Amerindian occupation, and corresponding environmental variables, ecological niche models were developed for each Amerindian group, predicting potential archaeological sites occupied by these groups across southern Brazil. Maps of these potential occupation sites of pre-colonial Amerindian groups were compared with 417 corresponding floristic inventory plots. Redundancy analysis (RDA) was used to identify floristic composition patterns linked to areas with a high probability of Southern-Jê or Guarani presence. Southern-Jê and Guarani pre-colonial occupations overlapped near main rivers; however, Southern-Jê groups generally occupied elevated areas whereas Guarani occupied mostly coastal areas. We observed differences in forest composition associated with the predicted occurrence of these pre-colonial Amerindian groups. Based on these results, we argue there is a relationship between tree species distribution and pre-colonial human occupation by these two Amerindian groups.

Neither superorganisms nor mere species aggregates: Charles Elton's sociological analogies and his moderate holism about ecological communities.

This paper analyzes community ecologist Charles Elton's ideas on animal communities, and situates them with respect to the classical opposition between organicist-holistic and individualistic-reductionist ecological views drawn by many historians of ecology. It is argued that Elton espoused a moderate ecological holism, which drew a middle way between the stricter ecological holism advocated by organicist ecologists and the merely aggregationist views advocated by some of their opponents. It is also argued that Elton's moderate ecological holism resonated with his preference for analogies between ecological communities and human societies over more common ones between communities and individual organisms. I discuss, on the one hand, how the functionalist-interactionist approach to community ecology introduced by Elton entailed a view of ecological communities as more or less self-maintaining functionally organized wholes, and how his ideas on this matter were incorporated into their views by organicist ecologists Frederic Clements, Victor Shelford, and Warder C. Allee et al. On the other hand, I identify some important divergences between Elton's ecological ideas and those of organicist ecologists. Specifically, I show (1) how Elton's ideas on species distribution, animal migrations, and ecological succession entailed a view of animal communities as exhibiting a weaker degree of part-whole integration than that attributed to them by Clements and Shelford; and (2) how Elton's mixed stance on the balance of nature idea and his associated views on community stability attributed to communities a weaker form of self-regulation than that attributed to them by Allee et al.

Kant, Linnaeus, and the economy of nature.

Ecology arguably has roots in eighteenth-century natural histories, such as Linnaeus's economy of nature, which pressed a case for holistic and final-causal explanations of organisms in terms of what we'd now call their environment. After sketching Kant's arguments for the indispensability of final-causal explanation merely in the case of individual organisms, and considering the Linnaean alternative, this paper examines Kant's critical response to Linnaean ideas. I argue that Kant does not explicitly reject Linnaeus's holism. But he maintains that the indispensability of final-causal explanation depends on robust modal connections between types of organism and their functional parts; relationships in Linnaeus's economy of nature, by contrast, are relatively contingent. Kant's framework avoids strong metaphysical assumptions, is responsive to empirical evidence, and can be fruitfully compared with some contemporary approaches to biological organization.

Human and climate global-scale imprint on sediment transfer during the Holocene.

Accelerated soil erosion has become a pervasive feature on landscapes around the world and is recognized to have substantial implications for land productivity, downstream water quality, and biogeochemical cycles. However, the scarcity of global syntheses that consider long-term processes has limited our understanding of the timing, the amplitude, and the extent of soil erosion over millennial time scales. As such, we lack the ability to make predictions about the responses of soil erosion to long-term climate and land cover changes. Here, we reconstruct sedimentation rates for 632 lakes based on chronologies constrained by 3,980 calibrated 14C ages to assess the relative changes in lake-watershed erosion rates over the last 12,000 y. Estimated soil erosion dynamics were then complemented with land cover reconstructions inferred from 43,669 pollen samples and with climate time series from the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model. Our results show that a significant portion of the Earth surface shifted to human-driven soil erosion rate already 4,000 y ago. In particular, inferred soil erosion rates increased in 35% of the watersheds, and most of these sites showed a decrease in the proportion of arboreal pollen, which would be expected with land clearance. Further analysis revealed that land cover change was the main driver of inferred soil erosion in 70% of all studied watersheds. This study suggests that soil erosion has been altering terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems for millennia, leading to carbon (C) losses that could have ultimately induced feedbacks on the climate system.

How the Modern Synthesis Came to Ecology.

Ecology in principle is tied to evolution, since communities and ecosystems result from evolution and ecological conditions determine fitness values (and ultimately evolution by natural selection). Yet the two disciplines of evolution and ecology were not unified in the twentieth-century. The architects of the Modern Synthesis, and especially Julian Huxley, constantly pushed for such integration, but the major ideas of the Synthesis-namely, the privileged role of selection and the key role of gene frequencies in evolution-did not directly or immediately translate into ecological science. In this paper I consider five stages through which the Synthesis was integrated into ecology and distinguish between various ways in which a possible integration was gained. I start with Elton's animal ecology (1927), then consider successively Ford's ecological genetics in the 1940s, the major textbook Principles of animal ecology edited by Allee et al. (1949), and the debates over the role of competition in population regulation in the 1950s, ending with Hutchinson's niche concept (1959) and McArthur and Wilson's Principles of Island Biogeography (1967) viewed as a formal transposition of Modern Synthesis explanatory schemes. I will emphasize the key role of founders of the Synthesis at each stage of this very nonlinear history.

Ernst Haeckel's "ecology" in Russia of the first half of the twentieth century.

The vast scientific heritage of Ernst Haeckel, evolutionist and thinker, comprises ecology as well. It is well known that it was he in 1866 introduced the term "ecology" for the science on interaction of the organisms and the environment. Haeckel built his system of the biological science (to be more precise, of the zoological science), including ecology, on the basis of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory (the theory of natural selection). Traditionally, it is supposed that Haeckel's merit in world ecology is just the introduction of its name. However, there are few works devoting to development of Russian ecology. Actually, analysis of the impact of Haeckel's ecological views on Russian biologists and development of ecology in the first half of the last century demonstrates that widely used opinion should be corrected. I hypothesise that Haeckel's influence on Russian biologists was somewhat more than commonly thought. In spite of a rather long oblivion of the term "ecology" in the Russian literature followed by confusion of ecology and some other sciences (physiology, biogeography), some biologists saw in the Haeckel's understanding of ecology the base for synthesis of ecology and the evolutionary theory. There are some specific traits of Haeckel's influence on Russian biologists. At first, some of them accepted his evolutionary approach. Secondly, they highly appreciated his definition of ecology. Biologists defended such understanding of ecology even in the period of Lysenkoism pressure. At the same time, it is evident that Haeckel's influence on development of ecology was somewhat limited.

'Birth, life, and death of infectious diseases': Charles Nicolle (1866-1936) and the invention of medical ecology in France.

In teasing out the diverse origins of our "modern, ecological understanding of epidemic disease" (Mendelsohn, in: Lawrence and Weisz (eds) Greater than the parts: holism in biomedicine, 1920-1950, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998), historians have downplayed the importance of parasitology in the development of a natural history perspective on disease. The present article reassesses the significance of parasitology for the "invention" of medical ecology in post-war France. Focussing on the works of microbiologist Charles Nicolle (1866-1936) and on that of physician and zoologist Hervé Harant (1901-1986), I argue that French "medical ecology" was not professionally (or cognitively) insulated from some major trends in parasitology, especially in Tunis where disciplinary borders in the medical sciences collapsed. This argument supports the claim that ecological perspectives of disease developed in colonial context (Anderson in Osiris 19: 39-61, 2004) but I show that parasitologists such as Harant built on the works of medical geographers who had called attention to the dynamic and complex biological relations between health and environment in fashioning the field of medical ecology in the mid-1950s. As the network of scientists who contributed to the global emergence of "disease ecology" is widening, both medical geography and parasitology stand out as relevant sites of inquiries for a broader historical understanding of the multiple "ecological visions" in twentieth-century biomedical sciences.