Of Myths and Men; Ed Ricketts' Death, 50 Years Ago Last Week, Preceded That of Cannery Row by Only a Few Months.
Monterey County Weekly › August 05, 2009
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Summary
"Ricketts is like a cult figure," says environmental historian Joseph Taylor. Scientists at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island have erected a small shrine to Ricketts, a glass-enclosed cabinet crammed with pickled seashore specimens collected by him along with his portrait. I've met park wardens, biologists, oceanographers and many others who profess, with zeal, Ed Ricketts as their hero. Joseph Campbell, renowned mythologist and a close friend of Ricketts, once toyed with the idea of writing a novel based on Ricketts as the "hero" archetype.
"I've been an admirer of Ricketts for a long time," says Dr. John Pearse, professor emeritus, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz. "Ed Ricketts was way ahead of people. It wasn't until the 1980s that scientists started to look at the intertidal the way Ricketts did." As evidence, Pearse points out that most of the 437 scientific citations of Between Pacific Tides have been made in the past two decades."I don't think scientists are aware of Ricketts' research," says Dr. Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "That's probably due to the fact that his stuff isn't widely available."See the full content of this document
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Of Myths and Men; Ed Ricketts' Death, 50 Years Ago Last Week, Preceded That of Cannery Row by Only a Few Months.
He is the Jerry Garcia of American science--a bearded guru who ignored the social and scientific orthodoxies of his time; a progenitor of the counter-culture; an enigmatic ecologist whose pioneering work was initially rejected by the scientific establishment.
He's probably the only scientist in history to have 15 animal species and a nightclub named after him.Edward F. Ricketts was larger-than-life and died tragically, as legends usually do.On Oct. 8, his devotees (known as "Ed Heads") joined ...See the full content of this document
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