For Ramon Margalef, in the centenary of his birth.
Why do not we find ecosystems in the atmosphere, as in oceans and continents? In the atmosphere, spores, pollen grains and micro-organisms float, most of them expelled from soils. But trophic networks are not established, nor are there large flows of energy and matter controlled by living beings.
Jaume Terradas explains in this post how the discipline began in our country, and the capital role that some people played on it, such as Ramon Margalef and a group of young Catalan ecologists.
In this post-Sant Jordi commentary, I should like to refer to just a few books of great quality and interest on some perhaps less well-known traveler scientists.
In 1966, the USA’s President is Lyndon Johnson, in the USSR it is Brezhnev, in France de Gaulle, in India Indira Gandhi. There is an increasing US involvement in Vietnam’s war (and an increasing refuse of war inside the US).
When I studied the subject of ecology at the University of Barcelona, about the years 1964-65 (fifty years ago!), Margalef was our teacher. Even though he was still not a university professor but the director of the Fisheries Research Institute of the CSIC (now Institute of Marine Sciences) where he concentrated his research. The ecology classes were at the building of the University Square, the practices at the Institute. There was by then only a book on ecology, by G.L.
