In the late 1950s Paul Sears, director of the nation’s first graduate program in conservation, was called upon to join a special committee of leading scientists and engineers to advise the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission on its Plowshare program. Project Plowshare, a creation of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, was designed to utilize nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes, such as excavating harbors and canals, releasing mineral and gas deposits, generating electrical power, and producing radionuclides. The early focus of the Plowshare Advisory Committee was to assess the feasibility of Project Chariot, a planned experiment to use several nuclear detonations to excavate a harbor on the far northwest coast of Alaska, for which the Atomic Energy Commission, under some pressure from Alaska-based scientists, had funded a large number of preliminary environmental investigations. Despite resistance from some of the scientists, local Native American groups, and a number of individuals and organizations in the continental United States, the committee recommended going ahead with Project Chariot as well as with other Plowshare projects conceived on an even larger scale. Sears, best known for his Dust Bowl classic Deserts on the March and later for his suggestion that ecology is a subversive subject, would seem an unlikely supporter of such a program. This article explores his role on the advisory committee within the context of his life and work, and within the framework of the science-government relationship in the United States during the fifties and early sixties, before the environmental movement fully developed.

The U.S. military first sponsored ecological research during World War II to monitor the release of radioactive effluent into waterways from plutonium production. The Atomic Energy Commission later expanded these investigations to include studies of radioactive fallout at the Nevada and Marshall Island test sites, particularly after the Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) accident in 1954. The public outcry against nuclear testing from this accident, which contaminated nearby inhabited islands with radioactive fallout, resulted in a considerable influx of funding for environmental science at the Atomic Energy Commission. Many biologists who conducted these studies on nuclear fallout and waste for the Atomic Energy Commission began to develop concerns about radioactive pollution in the environment from the long-term, cumulative effects of nuclear waste disposal, the use of atomic bombs for construction projects, and the potential ecological devastation wrought by nuclear war. Their new environmental awareness prompted many Atomic Energy Commission ecologists to try to draw congressional attention to the dangers that nuclear technology posed to the environment. It also spurred reforms in the education and training of ecologists to meet the challenges of the atomic age through the new subfield of “radioecology” as well as research into problems of environmental pollution more broadly.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act have been cornerstones of federal wildlife conservation policy in the United States since their enactment in the early 1970s. These laws prohibited the taking of members of protected populations without a permit, where “taking” was defined so broadly as to include harassment or disturbance, as well as capture or killing. Because most forms of biological research on protected species involved some sort of taking, and because such research was deemed vital to the achievement of conservation goals and the advancement of human knowledge, the laws established procedures under which proposed scientific takes could be permitted after review by federal regulators, scientists, the public, and, in some cases, the courts. Although there was relatively little controversy over the need for or nature of these permit procedures during the debates leading up to the enactment of the laws, they became the source of concern on the part of many zoologists, biologists, and ecologists as soon as federal agencies began to implement them. From these scientists’ perspective, certain forms of environmental regulation undermined their professional autonomy and threatened to hamper the production of the very knowledge necessary for effective environmental protection. Their efforts to block, weaken, or work around such regulation brought them into conflict with environmental and animal rights activists, regulators, and other members of the scientific community and resonated with a broader backlash against environmental regulation.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s field ecologists in the United States (and elsewhere) looked to classification to make their fledgling science an exacting and respectable one. Taking plant taxonomy as their model, ecologists expected that more comprehensive empirical knowledge of vegetation types would produce robust systems of classifications, as it did with species taxonomy. In the event, however, scaled-up data-gathering in the field led ecologists to conclude that vegetation types were not natural units, as species are. Most ecologists then abandoned classification for agendas borrowed from causal sciences such as chemistry or physiology. This cycle of expectation and despair is examined in the practical fieldwork of four ecologists: Henry Cowles, Frederic Clements, Henry Gleason, and Arthur Vestal. Their experiences reveal how perceptions of categories depend on the density and geographical scope of data. Cycles of optimism and disillusionment probably characterize all the classifying sciences in the modern period: because in the "Age of Progress" all sciences sought to advance by expanding and perfecting their empirical base. Comparative study of collecting and classifying practices across the sciences is in order.