Paul Sears
Paul Bigelow Sears (December 17, 1891 – April 30, 1990) was an American ecologist and writer. He was born in Bucyrus, Ohio. Sears attended Ohio Wesleyan University (B.Sc. in Zoology, 1913; B.A. in Economics, 1914), the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (A.M. in Botany, 1915), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. in Botany, 1922).
Sears married Marjorie Lea McCutcheon on June 22, 1917, and their first child, Paul McCutcheon Sears, was born December 8, 1921. Two daughters were also born to the couple. Marjorie died October 31, 1982. Paul McCutcheon Sears died October 31, 1984.
Early in his research career, he published an innovative series on the Natural Vegetation of Ohio (1925 to 1926) These papers delineated the original forest types by using “witness trees” from the original land surveys of Ohio and are still widely cited by plant ecologists working in Ohio today.
During the Dust Bowl and his tenure at the University of Oklahoma, Sears wrote Deserts on the March, one of the first books to communicate ecological principles to the general public. His best known book, Deserts has gone through eleven printings of its four editions, most published by the University of Oklahoma Press. The first edition was last republished by Island Press in 1988 as part of its Conservation Classics series.
