Commentary: Charles S. Elton, "The Invaders" (1958)

Charles S. Elton, "The Invaders" (1958) libby robin "The invaders" began its life as a BBC radio broadcast in 1957."Balance and Barrier" was the title of the program, where Charles Elton, an elder statesman of science, refl ected on what it meant to "conserve" the animal kingdom in a global world.In 1949, Elton was (with Arthur Tansley, Max Nicholson, and Dudley Stamp) a founding father of the Nature Conservancy in Britain, which aimed to ensure that good science underpinned national conservation practice (Crowcroft 1991).The Ecology of Invasions goes beyond the national, taking a truly global view of conservation practice.Like many documents chosen for this book, Elton's "Invaders" is written by a scientist for a general public, grounded in material well beyond his own professional discipline.In another broadcast, Elton examined animal distributions through the work of nineteenth-century explorer Alfred Russel Wallace, arguing, "If we are to understand what is likely to happen to the ecological balance in the world, we need to examine the past as well as the future" (33).International conservation policy draws on history and biogeography, as well as ecology, Elton argues (by contrast with Paul Sears [Part 4], who sees ecology itself embracing the other disciplines as a meta-discipline).Elton's most important work was Animal Ecology (1927), a major textbook for most of the century, revised most recently in 2001.This book and his 1920s fi eldwork in the Arctic caught the attention of North American businessman Copley Amory, who was concerned about changes in animal numbers, particularly salmon, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.Amory sponsored a major international biological conference at Matamek, Quebec, Canada, in 1931 and asked Elton to be its secretary.As a result of this event the Bureau of Animal Population (BAP) was established at Oxford, its American-sounding name chosen by analogy with the Bureau of Biological Survey in Washington, D.C., something that appealed to its major sponsors, which included the New York Zoological Society.Elton was director of BAP, a hub for international collaborative research in animal ecology from 1932 until his retirement in 1967.Many of Elton's students found themselves "up against practical problems in the fi eld," as in this era the Colonial Offi ce was the biggest employer of British biologists, and BAP graduates were highly sought after throughout the British colonies and dominions.Francis Ratcliffe was one who came to Australia in 1929 to work on the ecology of fl ying foxes (fruit bats) and wrote Flying Fox and Drifting Sand (1938), a best-selling book about their Y6244.indb378 Y6244.

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