Anita Guerrini

The changing role of history in restoration ecology

In the face of rapid environmental and cultural change, orthodox concepts in restoration ecology such as historical fidelity are being challenged. Here we re-examine the diverse roles played by historical knowledge in restoration, and argue that these roles remain vitally important. As such, historical knowledge will be critical in shaping restoration ecology in the future. Perhaps the most crucial role in shifting from the present version of restoration ecology (“v1.0”) to a newer formulation (“v2.0”) is the value of historical knowledge in guiding scientific interpretation, recognizing key ecological legacies, and influencing the choices available to practitioners of ecosystem intervention under conditions of open-ended and rapid change.

The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and Their Circle

In the late 1680s, Archibald Pitcairne and David Gregory became devotees of Newtons natural philosophy. In the next decade, they formed the nexus of a scientific circle composed of their students. These men emerge as a specific group from the wider circle of Newtons followers for several reasons, having to do with kinship and community relationships as well as with shared intellectual beliefs. Gregory and, through him, Pitcairne were among the first to recognize Newtons achievement in the Principia . From their base in Edinburgh, later extending to Oxford and Leiden, they inspired several young men, including John and James Keill, John Freind, George Cheyne, George Hepburn, and William Cockburn. Gregory has long been recognized as a central figure among Newtonians, in part owing to his copious memoranda, but Pitcairnes significance both as an intellectual and as a catalyst has been neglected by historians. When one focuses on Gregory and Pitcairne and their notebooks and correspondence, as well as their published works, a well-defined group emerges around them who shared several characteristics. Politically, they were Tories. In religion, they were High Church Anglicans who valued the episcopacy and those points of ritual and doctrine that distinguished the English church from nonconformity. With the exception of John Freind, these men were Scots and shared kinship ties as well as geographic origin in the east and northeast of Scotland. Finally, all the members of this group were at least nominally physicians. Only one of them, John Keill, probably did not practice medicine, but he too took a medical degree.

Duverney’s Skeletons

In 1730, shortly before his death, the Paris anatomist Joseph‐Guichard Duverney wrote his will, leaving his anatomical specimens to the Académie des Sciences, of which he was a member. But the will was disputed by Pierre Chirac, supervisor of the Jardin du Roi where Duverney, as professor of anatomy, had performed most of the dissections that produced the specimens. The ensuing debate between Chirac and René‐Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, arguing for the Académie, reveals the tensions surrounding both the concept of intellectual property in this period and the collective enterprise in natural philosophy. The differing roles and audiences of the Académie and the Jardin were central to this debate. In addition, this essay explores the origins and significance of the anatomical specimens themselves and their changing role in instruction and display, as well as the transition from the cabinet of curiosities to the natural history museum.

Chemistry Teaching at Oxford and Cambridge, Circa 1700

In his lectures from the first decades of the eighteenth century, Hermann Boerhaave defined chemistry as An Art that teaches us how to perform certain physical operations, by which bodies that are discernible by the senses, or that may be rendered so, and that are capable of being contained in vessels, may by suitable instruments be so changed, that particular determin’d effects may be thence produced, and the causes of those effects understood by the effects themselves, to the manifold improvement of various Arts.1

Toward principles of historical ecology

Rising temperatures and sea levels, biological homogenization and biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, and other environmental changes are dramatically reshaping landscapes across the globe. In this context, understanding the patterns, drivers, and consequences of these changes has become one of the central challenges facing environmental scientists and managers today. Yet to do so requires a long-term perspective on environmental systems that predates many of the accelerated anthropogenic impacts of the recent past. How, then, can we understand these changes in the context of decadeand century-scale ecosystem trajectories and human history? What was the structure, function, and dynamics of ecosystems like before these changes? And how have people shaped these systems over time? Th ese questions are the domain of historical ecology. Historical ecology is the study of nature over time, oft en (though not necessarily) with a focus on human–environment interactions and the causes and consequences of changes caused by human actions in the recent past ( Crumley, 2003 ; Rhemtulla and Mladenoff , 2007 ). Th e fi eld includes both researchers who wish to document ecological patterns and dynamics in the recent past using historical methods, as well as those interested in historicizing ecology— that is, understanding the relationships between nature and human culture over time (cf. Szabo [2014] for a detailed treatment). It draws on a broad range of qualitative and quantitative sources that vary in temporal and spatial coverage, require creative and thoughtful methods to synthesize and interpret, and are oft en integrated in ways that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries ( Fig. 1 ). Data include traditional archival sources such as written documents, maps, oral histories, land surveys, landscape views and photography, along with biological and physical data such as sediment and pollen records, tree rings, species lists, and habitat relationships ( Swetnam et al., 1999 ; Egan and Howell, 2001 ; Vellend et al., 2013 ). While relying on data from the past, historical ecology is an inherently future-oriented discipline given its emphasis on temporal dynamics and change trajectories ( Higgs et al., 2014 ). It provides vivid narratives of past landscapes and change that are of interest to specialists and nonspecialists alike (e.g., Sanderson, 2009 ; Grossinger, 2012 ). Historical ecology is part of a long tradition of understanding relationships between humans and environmental change and shares strong topical and methodological affinities with paleoecology, environmental history, and historical geography. It is similar to “temporal ecology” (sensu Wolkovich et al., 2014 ), though temporal ecology relies more on time series data, rather than integrating a broad array of data types within their historical context. Historical ecology has much in common with landscape and restoration ecology, ecological subfi elds that emphasize spatial patterns and processes, human–environment interactions, and temporal dynamism. As a fi eld, historical ecology largely operates at the intersection of ecology, history, anthropology, and geography, using tools and techniques from all four disciplines to help people conceive of what populations, communities, ecosystems, and landscapes existed in the past and how they have changed over time ( Szabó, 2014 ). It also relies heavily on the history of science, since interpretation of oft en fragmentary, qualitative, and idiosyncratic historical data requires an understanding of the historical, scientifi c, and cultural contexts in which past records and scientifi c data were produced ( Raby, 2015 ). Studies cast a broad net of topics of interest, from traditional ecological questions such as documenting population abundance and community composition, habitat distribution, and ecological processes and functions, to geographic questions such as changes in geophysical patterns and processes 1 Manuscript received 18 February 2017; revision accepted 7 April 2017. 2 Resilient Landscapes Program, San Francisco Estuary Institute, 4911 Central Avenue, Richmond, California 94804 USA; 3 Department of Geography, University of California Berkeley, 565 McCone Hall, Berkeley, California 94720 USA; 4 Environmental Studies, Colby College, 5351 Mayflower Hill, Waterville, Maine 04901 USA; 5 School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G; 6 Wildlife Conservation Society Global Conservation Programs, 2300 Southern Blvd, Bronx, New York 10460 USA; 7 Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia, 3609-2424 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4; 8 School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, Oregon State University, 322 Milam Hall, Corvallis, Oregon 97331 USA; and 9 School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Room 205, House 4, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada V8P 5C2 10 Author for correspondence (e-mail: erin@sfei.org) doi:10.3732/ajb.1700070 O N T H E N AT U R E O F T H I N G S : E S S AY S New Ideas and Directions in Botany

Experiments, causation, and the uses of vivisection in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Defining experiment was particularly vexed in the realm of anatomical dissection and vivisection. Was dissection merely descriptive, or something more? Harveys discovery of the circulation of the blood and Asellis discovery of the so-called lacteal veins shaped much anatomical research between the late 1620s and the 1650s. While the techniques of dissection and vivisection gained wide use, there was much debate on the validity of the circulation in particular, and its relationship to the lacteal veins. Critics, particularly the French anatomist Jean Riolan, but also the natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi, focused on the lack of causation in Harveys method and the lack of medical use and not on his use of vivisection. Jean Pecquets discovery of the thoracic duct in 1651 changed the terms of the debate by definitively connecting the circulation with the lacteals. Riolans critiques of Pecquet in the 1650s show profoundly differing notions of the purpose of dissection. While Gassendi eventually accepted Harveys concept of the circulation, Riolan never did.

Theatrical anatomy : Duverney in Paris, 1670-1720

During the reign of Louis XIV, anatomical demonstrations became a public attraction in Paris. At the Jardin du Roi, the star performer was Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who attracted hundreds to his anatomy lectures. Simultaneously, Duverney also instructed the Dauphin and his courtiers, lectured to medical students at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital (making off with corpses in the process) and dissected before the Paris Academy of Sciences. Duverneys dramatic, rhetorical and anatomical skills made him the best-known man of science in Louis XIVs Paris.

The Ghastly Kitchen

The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, said the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. In the seventeenth century, the kitchen, and particularly the scullery, was the site of the slaughter, butchery, and dismemberment by carving of a variety of animals. The tools and techniques employed in these activities overlapped considerably with those of animal and human dissection. Dissection often took place in residences and the kitchen was the most likely place for this activity. This challenges historians’ identification of the kitchen as an exclusively female realm. The preparation of food and medicines occurred in tandem with experimental natural philosophy, sharing tools as well as the sensory apparatus of cooking, including tasting and smelling.

The representation of animals in the early modern period

The five essays brought together in this special issue were originally delivered at a workshop organised in March 2009 by the Centre for the History of Medicine at Indiana University, Bloomington. The authors revised and expanded the essays in response to that day’s discussions and numerous subsequent exchanges. We wish to thank all participants for their help and suggestions in the discussions, and particularly to thank Trevor Levere for his enthusiasm for this project and his editorial acumen. The papers in this issue span the period from the Renaissance to the late seventeenth century and cover a number of topics ranging from the sources of the animals illustrated and the role of colour to the multiple functions of animal representation at the court of Louis XIV. The differing formats of illustrations, including manuscripts and varieties of print media, equally display a wide range. The development of printing and engraving techniques during this period allowed for the extensive use of illustrations in printed texts, and this new use of illustration had important consequences for the intellectual content and disciplinary scope of natural history and comparative anatomy. At the same time, manuscript illustrations served as models for print but also carried their own visual weight. Illustrations also served as templates for assigning names and identities to previously unknown animals. Sachiko Kusukawa’s detective work has identified a variety of sources for the illustrations in Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium (1551 1558), both declared and undeclared: they include live and dried specimens, as well as images from manuscripts and printed books. Kusukawa’s detailed analysis shows that while Gessner’s criteria for selecting his sources were not necessarily based on direct visual inspection, they were not arbitrary either, and need to be examined in a historically sensitive way. Her account complicates earlier historiographical discussions of Renaissance natural history illustration and expands our notion of just what constituted ‘experience’ in this era. In her study of Hieronimus Fabricius and William Harvey, Karin Ekholm has analysed three forms of representation of animal generation, namely printed engravings, colour plates, and verbal descriptions. Ekholm’s detailed analysis of images and texts offers a strikingly original iconographic and verbal triangulation which reveals contrasting views of the value of visual representation. Moreover, based on the peculiar features of the copy of Fabricius’s work in Philadelphia, Ekholm has suggested that the hand-coloured plates Fabricius deposited at the Marciana Library in Venice were the likely inspiration for the printed coloured plates in Gasparo Aselli’s De lactibus (1627). Her suggestion provides a novel context for grasping the origin of what is widely considered as the first anatomical book with printed coloured plates.

The Trouble with Plovers

This chapter concerns a little bird, the western snowy plover, and the impact it hashad on the public perception of the environment along the central coast of California,from Monterey in the north to Ventura in the south (Fig. 6.1).I will talk about the value of animals and how they contribute to the valueand meaning of a landscape. The relationships between the snowy plovers and thehumans who share California beaches with them are not simple or straightforward,although both conservationists and their opponents portray them in this way. Thisessay will address two questions in particular: does an environment constructed andmanaged by humans for the sake of conservation cease to be natural or authentic?Does conservation and restoration of non-human species require that humans beabsent from the scene? I will focus on one area, known by the unlovely name ofCoal Oil Point, but use other parts of the coast for illustration.This chapter springs from a larger collaborative project on the ecological historyof this coastal area, which will assemble the ecological and cultural history with thegoal of developing a model approach for informing restoration efforts. The coastlineoffers a wide variety of habitats including sandy beaches, dunes, rocky tidepools,cliffs, a saltwater slough, coastal mesas, and freshwater marshes and pools. Thesetting is on the edge of a highly urbanized and quickly developing area, a liminalspace that is a borderland both literally and symbolically.The human history of Coal Oil Point dates back at least 8500 years, and theecology of this dynamic coastal landscape has undergone many changes over time.The history of the area includes early human occupation, ranching by Spanishand American settlers and, in the twentieth century, a large estate and a privateschool. This area is part of a major land-use agreement that is being drawn upbetween Santa Barbara County, the University of California at Santa Barbara, theyoung city of Goleta, and private developers. Known as the Ellwood-Devereux plan,