Project Summary: this proposal is for a SGER to examine the life and work of the marine biologist and ecologist Edward F. Ricketts. PI plans a workshop lasting three days with half a dozen scholars to re-examine Ricketts life and work. Three of the scholars are cultural and environmental historians who have emphasized Ricketts' relationship with his friend the novelist John Steinbeck, and Ricketts' inspirational literary role. The remaining three are historians of science with an interest in evolution, marine biology, and the history of ecology. The point of the conference is to re-examine the integration of literary, philosophical, and scientific work, characteristic of Ricketts and his circle in the 1930s and 40s in the Monterey, California area. The workshop will consist of a series of working sessions on a variety of themes, but not via prepared papers. The results of these working sessions will appear as a jointly authored monograph in the Journal of the History of Biology.
Intellectual merit: Ricketts pioneering and extraordinarily influential work on inter-tidal ecology, which he called" marine sociology", was part of his effort in the 1930s to bring the study of biological adaptation, environmental evolution, population explosion and collapse, to bear jointly on marine populations, and the human populations that exploited them. Further, Ricketts brought to bear philosophical and literary ideas creatively within the context of his work in biological systematics. The materials brought together and combined by Ricketts into a single intellectual enterprise, are today studied and pursued by a variety of different disciplines that rarely talk to one other. Bringing together historians, environmental scientists, literary scholars, and sociologists, the workshop will provide new and significant insight into Ricketts work, and attempt to bridge a sharp divide in the way that environmental questions are viewed today by scientists on the one hand, and by scholars from other disciplines on the other. This is not merely desirable, but a practical necessity, and a template for future work. The format of the conference avoids prepared papers precisely to encourage innovative and cooperative thinking, and to sidestep the literary habits and styles enforced by the disciplines severally on their members. The sciences have long recognized that the specialization of knowledge requires collaborative work and cooperative authorship. The humanities and social sciences have much to learn and much to benefit from in this model. On the other hand, scientific specialization almost requires avoidance of broad themes outside of exceptional circumstances, and yet such broad thinking is precisely what is required in environmental science today.
Broader impacts: the project has the potential to show the absolute necessity of not merely cross-disciplinary collaborative work, but "interdivisional cooperation" across the humanistic/scientific boundary, in order to understand the complexity of current environment of problems. It will demonstrate that what we now think of as "different voices" were once a single voice, and that rather than an improbable and idealistic proposal to try something that has never been done, this effort has a venerable historical pedigree. This sort of collaboration is historically well verified by Ricketts career, as is its creative and practical potential both within the humanities and the natural sciences.
