caust where otherwise a more modest, perhaps cleansing and rejuvenating
fire might have blazed. Fire was the one natural hazard that conservation-
ists believed they could tame and perhaps even eliminate—thus the early-
twentieth-century criminalization of forest arson and state and federal fire
prevention and protection programs. Well before , too, conservation-
ists also understood that healthy forests reduced damage from extraor-
dinary storms with rain. Likewise conservationists maintained that wind
erosion of exposed farming soils might be reduced by an agronomy that
included wise plowing techniques, crop selection, and layout. Such was
the confident, authoritative thinking of the twentieth century: The world is
lovely, opulent, but occasionally dangerous; practical science and prudent
management will prevent—at the least mitigate—imbalances, helping na-
ture maintain its own harmony.^37
tHarmony, or better, equilibrium—a natural, self-correcting system
(with or without human participation)—is a persistent characterization of
the natural world older than the twentieth century. Oddly, it coexisted with
the scary, chaotic Sturm und Drang of Darwinism and flourished, actually,
through much of the twentieth century’s successive scientific triumphs.
‘‘Home,’’ though, has been the dominant evocative metaphor, encompass-
ing the human domestic ideals of harmony, equilibrium, mutualism, and
interdependency. Ernst Haeckel, the best-known German admirer of Dar-
win, based his coinage, ‘‘Oecologie,’’ on the linkage of ‘‘economy’’ with
the Greekoikos, home. Almost three decades later, the International Bo-
tanical Congress adopted the more contemporary (and English) spelling,
ecology. In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, one of
the most important popularizers of early ecological science was a Bosto-
nian chemist named Ellen Swallow Richards. A homemaker as well as a
professional, Swallow Richards’s public rhetoric (which included a book,
Sanitation in Daily Life, published in ) sought to extend modern home
economics to public built environments and beyond, conjoining private
domestic duties (and joys) with the broader world. Hers was an entwined
human-natural universe in which humanity assumed responsibility for har-
mony.^38
Following the creation of the American Ecological Society in , how-
ever, a succession of midwestern botanists and limnologists (freshwater
biologists) defined ecological science and gradually, with many missteps,
moved the most precious, specialized research toward the concept of eco-