As a science with truly global ambitions, ecology remains an intriguingly fragmented discipline, wedded to distinctive national research traditions. Ideas about what wilderness is, what is natural and how humans fit into the natural order are notoriously embedded in webs of local cultural and political discourses. In the current international debates on sustainability, climate change, the biodiversity crisis and the regulation of agricultural biotechnology, the long view which only history provides could well help to ease some of the disagreements by mapping their sources. This is a magnificent task for the history of science, but there has always been a regrettable lack of interest in the history of ecology by professional historians of science. Only a handful of practitioners, among them Sharon Kingsland, Robert Kohler, Gregg Mitman and Peder Anker, have applied the methodological arsenal of modern history of science to ecology. Kingsland's new book on the American tradition in ecology is therefore a welcome addition to this small corpus.

The birth of American ecology is usually depicted as taking place at the land-grant universities in the Midwest and their agricultural research stations. Kingsland, however, takes the unusual stance of giving the New York Botanical Garden, founded in 1891, a pre-eminent position in this story. And she manages to make a convincing case. Under the leadership of Nathaniel Lord Britton (1859–1934), the New York Botanical Garden energetically pursued three activities around which the embryonic field of ecology could develop and acquire respectability: exploration and collecting, experimental work and public education. Kingsland traces in fascinating detail the establishment of an institution that could establish and sustain such ‘big science’. The garden fostered world-class research on its own grounds in the Bronx, but also acquired a number of ‘satellite’ institutions, driven by the ethos of the garden but not controlled by it. Kingsland stresses especially the role of the Desert Botanical Laboratory near Tucson. Founded by the Carnegie Institution in 1903 and run by Daniel MacDougal, formerly head of the research laboratories at the garden, the Desert Laboratory became a mecca for scientists who wanted to pursue their research unhampered. Where scientists at the agricultural research stations in the Midwest were often overwhelmed by the need to work on practical problems, the researchers in Tucson could work on turning the disparate traditions in botany into a more coherent whole and thus define the new subject of ecology. Members of the Desert Laboratory were instrumental in founding the Ecological Society of America (ESA), and the laboratory's journal Plant World was turned over to the nascent society and continued under the name Ecology, still one of the leading journals in the field.

Kingsland next turns to describing how ecologists attempted to convince the American public that the new science deserved a place in society. In order to achieve this goal ecologists had to relate their science to human goals and needs. An early advocate of bringing humans into ecology's purview was Ellsworth Huntington, second president of the ESA, who researched the links between disease, climate and weather. Huntington's vision was bold – he wanted to define the optimum environment that favoured humans – but less ambitious ideas prevailed. Control of the environment would be gained by developing ecology along experimental and quantitative lines. Nevertheless, at the margins of the discipline, efforts continued to connect human ecology with general ecology. The geographer Carl Sauer, in particular, created long-term accounts of how places came to look the way they do. Sauer's cultural ecology inverted the usual patterns of explanations in ecology; physical patterns in the land were explained in terms of human culture, not the other way round. In the post-war period, however, Sauer had few influential supporters. Ecosystem ecology with its promise of rigorous measurement and control became paradigmatic instead. The systems perspective it offered allowed links not only to the physical but also to the social sciences.

The grand ambitions of ecosystem ecology for understanding and controlling natural–social systems did not, however, bear fruit, and its engagement with the human part of the ecosystem, fraught with difficulties, has remained secondary. Kingsland regrets that modern academic ecology is seemingly ill-equipped to present a comprehensive picture of environmental problems and possible solutions. As she demonstrates for her hometown of Baltimore, even so-called urban ecologists are prone to ignoring the human perspective in their supposedly interdisciplinary work. The picture, however, may not be quite as bleak as she paints it. In the postcolonial context of developing countries a controversial political ecology has recently emerged that is interdisciplinary, challenging fundamental concepts of the dominating ecological/environmental discourse (deforestation, desertification or erosion) and taking the human perspective seriously. Unfortunately, the controversial insights of political ecology are not yet applied with equal force to the environmental discourse in the industrialized West, where academic ecology with its various subdivisions has become a respectable member of the academic community. Kingsland does not chart the post-war history of this outcome and chooses to focus instead on attempts to make ecology relevant to humans. Again, this is an important though largely marginal aspect of the work of most ecologists. Perusal of a current copy of Ecology, still the proud flagship of American ecology, demonstrates that urban ecology, human ecology and even ecosystem ecology are of minor concern to the majority of academic ecologists. One can, however, hope that Kingsland's efforts at least contribute to raising awareness that ecology again needs to escape the ivory tower and become more relevant to everyday human life.

The volume edited by Cuddington and Beisner is of a completely different ilk than Kingsland's book. It is representative of the kind of ‘internal’ history and philosophy of science written by scientists for scientists. The focus is on key papers, and Thomas Kuhn's philosophy – apparently the only historico-philosophical framework that many active scientists can intuitively relate to – frames the entire volume. The contributions to the volume, written by an impressive line-up of leading practitioners, cover the ecological subdisciplines of population, community, ecosystem and evolutionary ecology, epidemiology and ecosystem management. The chapters by Kim Sterelny, T. F. H. Allen and his co-workers and Kevin de Laplante will likely be of the greatest interest for historians and philosophers of science. Sterelny tackles the problem of the so-far elusive synthesis of evolutionary biology and ecology, and Allen and co-authors defend narrative devices as tools in holistic, non-reductionist ecosystem ecology. De Laplante puts these attempts into a philosophical and historical context.

The volume succeeds in giving an excellent summary of the theoretical diversity of ecology throughout its history. However, since ecology is seen in isolation from endeavours of the sort masterfully presented by Kingsland, such as economic development and institution-building, the shifts in the concepts tracked often remain unexplained.