Ecology Beginning with the Botanists

摘要

Tucson, Arizona, was an isolated little city surrounded by granite mountains in 1903, when the recently founded Carnegie Institution chose a flat-topped hill outside of town for the location of its Desert Laboratory. The laboratory is a focal site in The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890-2000, and Sharon Kingsland quotes William Hor-naday's account of its origins: The Tucson Board of Trade took botanist Daniel MacDougal (the laboratory's future director) to the top of a mountain overlooking the site and told him, "All this shall be thine, and more, if thou wilt pitch thy tent herein, and become one of us".