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We are delighted to announce the recipient of the 2023 Everett Mendelsohn Prize: R. Ashton Macfarlane, author of the essay, “Wild Laboratories of Climate Change: Plants, Phenology, and Global Warming, 1955–1980,” published in Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 54, no. 2 (June 2021), 311–340.

The Mendelsohn Prize, named for the founding editor of this journal, honors the best article published in JHB in the preceding three years. For the 2023 award, the prize committee (the current Co-Editors-in-Chief and the Associate Editors, Luis Campos and Nick Hopwood, shadowed by the new Co-Editors-in-Chief, Betty Smocovitis and Nicolas Rasmussen) considered all articles appearing in volumes 53 (2020), 54 (2021), and 55 (2022). The committee judged the entries based on an assessment of originality, scholarship, and significance for the history of biology.

Macfarlane’s article is an astute contribution linking the history of biology and environmental history through the lens of disciplinary history—specifically, the rise of phenology. It details how the flowering time of a common ornamental plant, the lilac (Syringa vulgaris), became the basis of a monitoring program that ultimately reframed the biological narrative of climate change. Bloom time complemented the previous dominance of physics and chemistry, which provides a gauge of climate change based on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, by offering a measure with the added benefit of providing the public a more tangible way to understand the effects of a warming Earth.

Macfarlane emphasizes the interstitial positioning of the new discipline in relation to existing areas of study. Phenology operated, as the author notes, “in the hinterlands between laboratory and field, biology and meteorology, ecological theory and agronomy practice.” In establishing an identity, phenologists “challenged prevailing notions of the model organism and what it meant to study biology in the field.” They also crossed methodological boundaries—between practices in agriculture, biology, and ecology—as well as social ones—such as between citizen scientists and professional scientists, and the “social valence” of a particular plant used as the object of study contrasted to “model organisms” in a lab. As Macfarlane argues, “Phenologists crossed, skirted, and ultimately reshaped many of these boundaries as they established and adapted the discipline to the landscape of twentieth-century biological science.”

The article explores the difficult trade-offs negotiated in this process, as phenologists attempted to establish legitimacy by aligning with ecology. “Rebranding the discipline as a component of ecosystem modeling, scientists successfully brought phenology within the purview of mainstream ecology. In so doing, however, they obscured its climate-relevant meteorological character and stymied the development of a biological narrative of climate change.” Ultimately, Macfarlane suggests, this is a story of how “theoretical frameworks and methodological practice have shaped scientific knowledge of environmental change,” and how “biological definitions, the strictures of ecology, and the epistemic preferences of ecologists hindered early biological accounts of anthropogenic global warming.… Ecology demanded certain theoretical and temporal framings during the 1960s and 1970s; for phenology to enter mainstream ecology, phenologists had to de-emphasize its meteorological and agricultural roots. In so doing, however, they concealed its identity as a science fundamentally concerned with climate.”

This complex narrative of disciplinary formation makes a significant contribution to the history of biology. It also offers an important and timely understanding of how biology can contribute to climate change monitoring and knowledge of environmental change. Fittingly, the essay marked the first contribution to JHB’s “Environment and the Life Sciences” Topical Collection edited by Jacob Darwin Hamblin.

Ashton Macfarlane is currently completing a JD/PhD in law and history of science at Harvard University, where his research focuses on the interactions between environmental science and law in the twentieth century. His more specific interests in the history of science include international carbon dioxide monitoring, phenology and biometeorology, and the evolution of data-intensive environmental litigation. His legal research has focused on administrative remedies, animal and environmental law, and procedure in the federal courts. Macfarlane is a Notes Editor on the Harvard Law Review and has worked on animal and environmental litigation projects in federal district and appellate courts in the United States. Before beginning his graduate program, he conducted biological fieldwork and archival research while on a fellowship in New Zealand.

On behalf of the 2023 Prize Committee and Springer-Nature International Publishing, we congratulate R. Ashton Macfarlane on receiving the 2023 Mendelsohn Prize. Macfarlane’s article will be freely available on the JHB website for eight weeks, March to April 2023, and he will receive an honorarium of $500.