Ijee Soapbox: Cultural amnesia in the eCologiCal sCienCes

With the explosion of knowledge all around us, it is becoming increasingly difficult for any of us in science to keep up with the latest ideas and findings of our disciplines. Maybe more importantly, the incessant pressure of dealing with the “new” at times threatens to submerge any appreciation we may have of the broader historical intellectual context from which current concerns in our disciplines emerge. This issue is aggravated by the fact that intellectual history is seldom a straight run across a smooth and obvious landscape. Rather, it is more like a braided tangle of trails, with many intersecting and merging paths and byways. I was reminded of this dilemma of the modern condition recently when preparing a lecture for an advanced course in Fribourg, Switzerland, focused on the theme of metacommunities. The organizer, Professor Louis bersier, asked me to kick off the course with a lecture on the historical context of metacommunity ecology. In putting this lecture together, I came across some little-known quotes from one of the founding figures of ecology, Charles Elton, which resonated with the concerns of this course, more broadly with the increasing emphasis on spatial aspects of ecology (Levin, 1993), and to an uncanny extent, some themes in my own work. So as not to lose some readers, I should start with a few definitions. If a “community” is “a collection of species found in a particular place” (morin, 1999), a “metacommunity” is “a set of local communities linked by dispersal of multiple potentially interacting species” (Wilson, 1992). The metacommunity perspective is increasingly important in many different theoretical approaches in ecology, from neutral models (Hubbell, 2001) to nicheand patch-centered perspectives on community organization (Leibold et al.,