Trepl, L.: Geschichte der Ökologie. Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. – Frankfurt am Main (Athenäum‐Verlag), 1987; 280 S.; DM 19,80. – ISBN 3‐610‐04070‐X

The rise and fall of biodiversity in literature: A comprehensive quantification of historical changes in the use of vernacular labels for biological taxa in Western creative literature

“…We speculate that industrialisation, urbanisation and land-use change initiated a disconnect between people and their natural environment, depriving them successively of their in-depth knowledge about, and awareness for, flora and fauna in their vicinity. Our rationale is that the daily lives of a large proportion of the population changed dramatically in the first half of the 19th century (Brown & Harrison, 1978), leading to a decrease in their exposure to nature, facilitated by factors like the physical distance between natural and urban areas, by the growing employment in factories and manufactures as opposed to nature-bound professions, the decreasing necessity of knowing how to work with nature or even to survive in the wild and by denaturalisation of formerly pristine landscapes (Trepl, 1987). In section 4.1, we argued for several synchronously acting drivers for the increase in the first half of the investigated period and we expect that the joint influence of these positive drivers extends well beyond the peak of BiL in the middle of the 19th century.…”

“…Alongside the description of temporal trends in components of BiL, we nevertheless put forward a hypothetical scenario to discuss our findings in a qualitative fashion: We expect that the growing disconnection from nature, induced by industrialisation, urbanisation and extensive land-use change at the onset of industrial agriculture and forestry in the 19th century (Brown & Harrison, 1978, Chapter 2;Grigg, 1987;Seppelt & Cumming, 2016), is temporally correlated with a decrease in BiL towards the end of the 19th century. With our time series starting in the early 1700s, we also hypothesise that the usage of taxon labels initially increases during the time of enlightenment, which promoted the natural sciences and the educational system, and romanticism, which has partly been interpreted as a proto-ecological countermovement opposing the industrialisation of life (Trepl, 1987), and which begins to understand nature as a complex system of interrelated and interdependent dynamic elements (Detering, 2020, pp. 307-370;Morton, 2007;Rigby, 2014Rigby, , 2020, reaching a peak in the 1830s.…”