ABSTRACT
On December 2, 1968, the Citizen Natural Resources Association Inc. filed a petition with the Wisconsin Department of the Natural Resources requesting a declaratory ruling that the widely used and oft praised DDT was indeed a pollutant under the law. Thus began one of the first efforts to use the science of ecology in a legal forum to promote environmental protection. The Wisconsin DDT hearings rested upon a scientific ecological vision which had been synthesized a decade earlier by Eugene P. Odum. In the 1950s and 1960s, studies of whole ecosystems began to flourish, partly funded by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Ecosystem studies first expanded in the 1950s and 1960s once the Atomic Energy Commission became interested in the effects of radiation on the environment. This progression of increasing scale, complexity and expense of ecosystem study reached a peak in the late 1960s with the first wave of "Big Biology" projects – the International Biological Programme (IBP).
