FIGURE 9. Victor Shelford. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives.

      The natural areas that Adams and Shelford wanted to create would serve several functions. They would provide classrooms for teaching, storehouses of native plants and animals, opportunities for scientific research, benchmarks for measuring changes in the surrounding landscapes, and demonstration sites for projects in wildlife management and ecological restoration. “We must know nature,” Shelford wrote, as a “whole, if we wish to treat the simplest everyday problem of our relations to animals intelligently and justly.” Natural areas would also enable ecologists to acquire a professional identity distinct from those of practitioners in other fields who worked in spaces dominated by farming, ranching, logging, or other resource industries. “A branch of biological science which obtains its inspiration in the natural order in original habitats,” Shelford concluded, “must depend upon the preservation of natural areas for the solution of many problems.”⁷

      If ecologists were going to build a new discipline based on the study of natural areas, they had to move fast. “Ecology,” Adams wrote, “has developed only at a late stage in civilization, after much of the environment has undergone great changes, so that in order to study the original conditions, which are of such great historic and genetic significance, he must make long journeys, or invade swamps or sterile uplands which man has not yet been able to reduce to the average conditions best suited to his needs.” Wild places were being destroyed, degraded, simplified, and transformed before scientists had a chance to study them—a lesson Grinnell had learned all too well in California. “One can but wonder,” Adams continued, “if the naturalists of the future will commend our foresight in studying with such great diligence certain aspects of biology which might be very well delayed, while ephemeral and vanishing records are allowed to be obliterated without the least concern.” These records included not only species but also habitats and ecological relationships.⁸

      Adams and Shelford had status in their young discipline, and they used their influence to promote an agenda of natural areas preservation. Both men had received their doctorates from the University of Chicago, and they were among the country’s first animal ecologists. In 1915 Shelford became the first president of the Ecological Society of America, and two years later he appointed himself head of a new Committee on the Preservation of Natural Conditions that oversaw the society’s most ambitious initiative. The committee sent out queries, conducted field surveys, and assembled a massive amount of geographical information. By 1921 it had identified about six hundred sites worthy of protection. Shelford’s committee published its study five years later as a 761-page tome, Naturalist’s Guide to the Americas.⁹

      The Naturalist’s Guide was more than just an inventory. Its main objective was to locate natural areas and make them more accessible for scientific research, but it also offered a professional agenda for the discipline of ecology that included a broad critique of the traditional biological sciences. According to Shelford, research specialization in particular objects and organisms was impeding crucial integrative studies on “the entire life of natural areas.” Ecologists rejected not only narrow specialization but also “fads” and “crude ideas,” such as “the survival of the fittest.” These notions had given biologists in most other fields a myopic view of nature better suited to sterile laboratories than to the landscapes where organisms actually lived. When he described those landscapes, Shelford used environment and habitat as synonyms. He argued that there could be “no adequate knowledge of fitness to environment without knowledge of environment” and insisted that “knowledge of habitats can be organized into science.” By studying species in their natural habitats, Shelford and his colleagues hoped to transform scientists’ understanding of evolutionary biology.¹⁰

      Over the next decade, Shelford continued to update the Naturalist’s Guide with additional assessments, reports, articles, and recommendations. These included a new framework for prioritizing and designing nature reserves. “First-class” sanctuaries would be “areas of natural vegetation containing as nearly as possible all the animal species known to have occurred in the areas within historical times.” Second- and third-class sanctuaries would encompass more modified landscapes, such as sites with altered vegetation and extinct or introduced species. All sanctuaries should have core natural areas that would remain unavailable for human uses other than scientific research. Core areas would be surrounded by buffer zones, which would provide additional habitat for the wide-ranging species that needed the most protection, particularly large carnivores.¹¹

      This focus on natural areas helped set ecology on a different path in the United States than in other parts of the world. In Britain, where the field had also taken root, ecologists were not nearly so interested in the types of places that American scientists and conservationists called wilderness. British ecologists, such as Arthur Tansley, regarded traditional land uses as components of the cultural landscape that were essential for the maintenance of many indigenous ecological communities. American ecologists came to view human land uses as disturbances—cattle grazing is a classic example. Yet for Tansley it was the removal of such activities that counted as the disturbance. Only when British ecologists traveled outside Europe to other regions of their empire did they adopt a more American-style approach, which embraced the idea of wilderness, dismissed customary indigenous practices, and provided a convenient scientistic justification for their seizure of lands and natural resources.¹²

      During the 1910s and 1920s, Shelford’s work gained support in the Ecological Society of America, which adopted his sanctuary protection plan and became one of the first national organizations to work for habitat protection. Yet by the 1930s, support began to wane. Most ecologists still backed efforts to establish nature reserves, but the society’s membership, which had grown to 653 people by 1930, was shifting toward the view that a national scientific organization should remain apolitical. As early as 1933, members debated whether scientific societies should endorse land preservation efforts or leave this task to the country’s growing collection of activist conservation organizations. The society’s constitution prohibited lobbying on “nonscientific” issues, so part of the question was whether preservation work was sufficiently scientific. This was just the first of several struggles in the society over the proper relationship between science and activism.¹³

      In 1937 Shelford threatened to leave the organization he had helped to found more than two decades earlier if it did not amend its constitution to permit his conservation projects. Seven years later he wrote a letter to Science complaining that the Ecological Society of America had made little progress in its preservation work. “With wartime and post-war pressure to destroy nature mounting,” he reflected, “it is well for those interested in its preservation for scientific purposes to look over the machinery by which some of it may possibly be saved.” Later that year he circulated a survey to the society’s members, and 85 percent of the respondents supported his committee’s efforts. The society’s governing board opposed the program, however, and in 1945 it blocked a petition to amend the constitution. The following year the board voted to abolish Shelford’s preservation committee.¹⁴

      Shelford did not follow through on his threat to leave the society, but he did partner with sympathetic colleagues to establish a new organization to continue the work of the preservation committee. In 1946 he and more than a dozen other senior ecologists, including four past Ecological Society of America presidents, founded the Ecologists Union. It advocated for the protection of primitive areas in the national forests, passed resolutions against the transfer of federal lands to state and private control, and shifted its focus from Washington, DC, to regions with important natural areas. Once the union established its independence, the Ecological Society of America’s board endorsed its work as a scientifically grounded conservation organization. In 1950 the union changed its name to the Nature Conservancy (TNC). TNC would become one of the world’s largest conservation organizations, and from the beginning it has dedicated its efforts to protecting biodiversity