(since election in 2022), and is also affiliated with UCD's Science and Technology Studies (STS) Program and co-runs UCD's PhilBio Lab with Jim Griesemer.
Millstein applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book, The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, is a table (the only table in the book!) entitled, “Comparison of Leopold to contemporary ecologists with respect to topics related to biodiversity and stability.” The points of comparison in the table, elaborated in earlier text, include methodology, species studied, mechanisms, biodiversity, stability (in its broad meaning), and stability (how it manifests and is measured. The table shows in each case that Leopold’s approach is broader or more realistic (i.e., less idealized) than that of most contemporary ecologists. So, for example, with respect to methodology, instead of relying on field experiments or theoretical models, as most contemporary ecologists do, Leopold took a historical, observational, and comparative approach, including “natural experiments”; he was also a hands-on practitioner. And instead of primarily studying plant biodiversity, Leopold studied species at every trophic (i.e., feeding) level.Visit Roberta L. Millstein's website.
The Page 99 Test does not really work for my book. Page 99 does not express the main thesis of the book—it’s not directly about the land ethic—and given that it is a table, doesn’t even give a sense of the writing style used in the book. However, it is interesting that page 99 does provide an example of one of the main themes of the book. The theme is this: even though Aldo Leopold was a 20th century ecologist (among other hats he wore during his lifetime), his scientific views are not outdated and in many cases anticipated directions that ecology has—or could—go in. Previous authors criticized Leopold’s concepts of “community” and “stability” for being out of date. But they did so without really doing the legwork to figure out what Leopold meant by those terms. Instead, they assumed that he meant what other ecologists of his time meant. When you look at more of his writings, however, you realize that Leopold was an independent thinker who used scientific terms in distinctive ways.
The table on page 99 appears in Chapter 4 of 6, a chapter entitled “Land Health.” I show that Leopold used the terms “stability” and “land health” essentially interchangeably. A big chunk of the chapter is spent on figuring what Leopold meant by land health, an idea he was still working on at the time of his death in 1948. As the table indicates, Leopold’s understanding of stability/land health was the land’s capacity for self-renewal—its ability to support a diversity of life over time. In the chapter, I also discuss what Leopold thought the causes of land health were; these turn out to be soil health (he said the evidence for this connection is very strong) and what we would today call biodiversity (he thought the evidence here was not as strong, but that it was very suggestive). Contemporary ecologists have spent the last several decades disagreeing over whether biodiversity is a cause of stability, with the consensus having swung back and forth a few times. One of the things I suggest in the chapter is that ecologists might profitably consider studying his conceptions of biodiversity and stability and the underlying mechanism that he proposes for the connection between them, and indeed, a few ecologists are already doing that.
So there is a lot happening on page 99!
--Marshal Zeringue
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