From Social Darwinism to Human Ecology: Transforming the Disciplines of Sociology, History, and Cultural Geography in the United States, 1890-1955

In this dissertation, I examine how an important group of social scientists integrated ecology into their scholarship and fashioned novel perspectives about human-environment interactions. These thinkers who included sociologist Howard W. Odum, historian James C. Malin, and cultural geographer Carl Sauer carefully studied the reciprocal relationship between humans and their biophysical environments, and they hoped to transform social scientific inquiry through the use of ecology. I argue that this interdisciplinary discourse, that I am for convenience calling “human ecology,” was highly significant because it established that humans are intrinsic parts of the environments they inhabit and it inspired both life and human scientists to consider how humans both shaped, and were shaped by, the natural world. Human ecological scholarship also contributed to the intellectual foundations of postwar ecosystem ecology and to the field of environmental history. Human ecology additionally advanced dialogue about anthropogenic environmental change. I examine how this discourse on human ecology evolved between, roughly, 1889 and 1955. I argue that this area of scholarship emerged out of debates about the relationship between the environment, social evolution, and progress that were occurring throughout the biological and social sciences in the 1890s, following the publication of new theories of heredity and evolution. I trace how, beginning in the 1920s, scholars began to integrate the concepts and methodologies provided by the emerging science of ecology into their research to more precisely study and understand human-environment relationships. I then examine how, between the 1930s and 1950s, Odum, Sauer, and Malin developed research in response to the social and environmental crises of the period, including the Dust Bowl and neo-Malthusian overpopulation fears. While my focus is primarily on the work of Odum, Sauer, and Malin, I emphasize that these scholars were a part of a much broader discourse on human ecology during this period that included numerous social and biological scientists