Paul Sears

Paul Bigelow Sears (December 17, 1891 – April 30, 1990) was an American ecologist and writer. He was born in Bucyrus, Ohio. Sears attended Ohio Wesleyan University (B.Sc. in Zoology, 1913; B.A. in Economics, 1914), the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (A.M. in Botany, 1915), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. in Botany, 1922).

Sears married Marjorie Lea McCutcheon on June 22, 1917, and their first child, Paul McCutcheon Sears, was born December 8, 1921. Two daughters were also born to the couple. Marjorie died October 31, 1982. Paul McCutcheon Sears died October 31, 1984.

Early in his research career, he published an innovative series on the Natural Vegetation of Ohio (1925 to 1926) These papers delineated the original forest types by using “witness trees” from the original land surveys of Ohio and are still widely cited by plant ecologists working in Ohio today.

During the Dust Bowl and his tenure at the University of Oklahoma, Sears wrote Deserts on the March, one of the first books to communicate ecological principles to the general public. His best known book, Deserts has gone through eleven printings of its four editions, most published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The first edition was last republished by Island Press in 1988 as part of its Conservation Classics series.

Also during the late 1920s and 1930s, Sears pioneered the study of fossil pollen as a cue to past vegetation and climate in the United States. One of his early students, Phyllis Draper, published the first American contribution to this developing field. Sears was the first to publish reference drawings of Lake Erie basin fossil pollen types, and published extensively in this field and inspired many students between 1930 and about 1950, by which time his interest in conservation and land use dominated his time.

In 1943, Sears independently initiated a publication, the Pollen Analysis Circular (later the Pollen and Spore Circular), to answer the “need of a freer interchange of information among those who are interested in pollen analysis in this country” during the period of restricted travel and professional meetings before and during the Second World War. Eighteen issues were mimeographed and distributed, ultimately, to more than 200 pollen researchers and interested scientists in North America and Europe. In issue 8, Sears reported on a suggestion by H.A. Hyde and D.A. Williams that this new science be named “palynology,” a term for this new field which was ultimately adopted by his colleagues. After the end of the war, the circulars were discontinued. The final issue appeared in 1954. By 1967, researchers had formalized a new professional organization, the American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists.

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