Ed Ricketts
Ed Ricketts was born in Chicago in 1897. He never got a university degree, but was a pioneering marine ecologist. He had 15 species named after him. John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell were close friends and were influenced by him during long conversations. Ricketts was the inspiration for "Doc" in Steinbeck's
Cannery Row, and
Sweet Thursday, Doc Burton in
In Dubious Battle, Doctor Winter in
The Moon is Down, and Jim Casy in
The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck financed a new building for Ricketts marine supply house after it burned down, and scientific collection expeditions. Ricketts and Steinbeck co-authored the
Sea of Cortez, a travel-scientific book about their journey.
In 1922, Ricketts moved to Pacific Grove, California, where he set up the Pacific Biological Laboratories, a marine biology supply house (later moved to Cannery Row, Monterey).
He described the annual harvests of sardines in Monterey, noting their ecology with plankton and water temperature. Harvests were declining in the 1940's even as fishing intensity was increasing. The industry crashed, leading quickly to a deserted Cannery Row. He tried to explain what was happening to the industry, but they wouldn't listen.
Ricketts saw marine life in their ecological context at a time when most scientists were focused on detailed descriptions of each species. He found it difficult to publish his Between Pacific Tides because of the novelty of the presentation. He didn't organize his book along taxonomic lines, but rather by habitat. Stanford University finally published his Between Pacific Tides in 1939, eight years after it was first submitted.
Ricketts covered the length of the northeast Pacific Ocean coast, from Alaska to Mexico, with his studies:
In 1932, Ricketts and Joseph Campbell followed the Inland Passage from Tacoma, Washington to Juneau, Alaska.
He had planned a return trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1947 and a trip to the Gulf of Alaska in 1948. He intended to assemble a manual of the vertebrates of the entire Pacific Coast as a culmination of a quarter century of research.
In May 1948, Ricketts drove from the Laboratories to buy some steaks and salad for dinner. While crossing the Southern Pacific Railway track, his car was hit by the Del Monte Express, traveling from San Francisco. He died three days later.
Eric Enno Tamm wrote in Beyond the Outer Shores: "Arguably more than any scientist of his time, Ed Ricketts saw the tide pool as the place where celestial and worldly forces interacted most vividly -- with the tides ebbing and flowing according to the moon's pull. It was in this truly cosmic niche, Ricketts reasoned, where one could see most clearly the relationships between all things, living and nonliving, earthly and interplanetary, aquatic and terrestrial, biological and spiritual."
His many followers today call themselves "Ed Heads".
Books by Ricketts
Between Pacific Tides. With Jack Calvin. Stanford University Press, 1939. Now in its fifth edition.
Sea of Cortez: A leisurely journal of travel and research, with a scientific appendix comprising materials for a source book on the marine animals of the Panamic faunal province. With John Steinbeck. Reprinted by Paul P Appel Pub. 1971.
Books about Ricketts
Eric Enno Tamm. Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell. Four Walls Eight Windows, New York. 2004.
http://www.beyondtheoutershores.com/
Ricketts, Edward Flanders, and Katharine A. Rodger. Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts. University of Alabama Press. 2003.
Links to stories about Ricketts
Story about Ricketts on NPR.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252560
Story by Eric Enno Tamm in the San Francisco Chronicle on latter day followers of Ed Ricketts.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/10/16/INGFTF7JLS1.DTL
Related Book
Andromeda Romano-Lax. Searching for Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez: A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja’s Desert Coast. Sasquatch Books, Seattle. 2002. Andromeda, with her husband and two young children, explored the Sea of Cortez in the wake of the Ricketts-Steinbeck expedition of 1940 along th coastline of the Sea of Cortez.