Pielou, E.C., After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. 1991, Univ. Chicago Press.
Review by Mike Dubrasich
The smartest woman in the world is a little old lady who lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Eighty-ish and now retired, Evelyn putters about her garden, does her shopping, and lives her life in relative obscurity. Her neighbors must know and love her, and they must find her to be very bright, but they may not realize just how smart she is.
Evelyn has described herself as a “naturalist,” but she is better known to the scientific world as Dr. E. C. Pielou, the inventor of mathematical ecology.
Mathematical ecology involves the quantification and statistical analysis of natural phenomena. Dr. Pielou’s book, Introduction to Mathematical Ecology (1969), is the bible of the field. It is not a light read. To get the most out of it requires a background in ecology and statistics at the post-graduate level. However, if you wish to measure something in the environment and do not follow Evelyn’s advice on the matter, you are doing it wrong.
Dr. Pielou holds Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees from the University of London. She has been a professor at the Yale School of Forestry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, and the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, as well as holding a variety of guest lectureship positions all over. In 1984 she was awarded the Lawson Medal of the Canadian Botanical Association and in 1986 she won the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America. The ESA has also established the E.C. Pielou Award, a competitive award made annually to a graduate student or recent Ph.D. graduate based on overall quality of the student’s scientific contribution to statistical ecology.
Dr. Pielou has written some popular science books, as well as dozens of technical scientific papers. Her books include:
Ecological Diversity (1975)
The Interpretation of Ecological Data: A Primer on Classification and Ordination (1984)
The World of Northern Evergreens (1988)
Biogeography (1992)
A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic (1995)
Fresh Water (1998)
The Energy of Nature (2005)
Her most famous (fame is subjective) “pop” book, and one that perhaps has more significance today than when she wrote it, is After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America (1991).
In After the Ice Age Dr. Pielou describes the ecological changes that have occurred in North America over the last 20,000 years.
We live in a glacial age, something rare in the history of the Earth. Our current glacial age (the Pleistocene) began two million years ago (roughly). The most recent previous glacial age was during the Permian Epoch, 250 million years ago.
December 1, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Holocene Climates, Holocene Botany
