The Man Who Invented Modern Ecology

Given four minutes, this film by Patrick Lynch at Yale says a great deal about G. Evelyn Hutchinson, who founded the science of modern ecology, largely by studying a lake just outside New Haven:

Among his many other influences, other writers made Hutchinson’s work the basis for the Gaia Theory, the popular idea of the Earth as a “single giant living system,” in which organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form a synergistic self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

You can read more about Hutchinson in my book House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth (Yale, 2016).