From U-M Graduate Student to Theoretical Ecologist 

Over more than fifty years connected to the University of Michigan, Dr. John H. Vandermeer’s research has traced a distinctive arc—one that begins in theoretical ecology and expands into a long-term commitment to agroecology, tropical fieldwork, and the social consequences of how science is practiced. His work demonstrates an uncommon ability to move between abstract models and grounded field ecology, bringing together “writing a bunch of equations” with the patient work of observing organisms in farms and forests. The unifying theme is pragmatic and ambitious: “This is the ecology that we have to understand so that we can transform agriculture, make agriculture into a more ecologically sound way of producing… producing food.”

Dr. Vandermeer arrived at U-M in 1966 as a graduate student, drawn especially to theoretical ecology. “I’m kind of a lover of mathematics,” he explains, “and so I like to formulate equations that I think relate to things that are happening in the outside world.” He completed his PhD in 1969, when the department was then shifting from Zoology to Biology. That early training helped define a career-long habit: to look for the structure in ecological systems—how interactions among organisms scale up into patterns, stability, and change. 

 

A Postdoc That Reframed Science in Society  

A pivotal influence came immediately after the PhD, during a postdoctoral year at the University of Chicago’s Committee for Mathematical Biology with Richard Levins. Levins was known for foundational work in ecological theory and for a scientific worldview shaped by lived political engagement. Dr. Vandermeer recalls how Levins’ political philosophy intersected with his scientific philosophy, and how their conversations reshaped Dr. Vandermeer’s understanding of what science is doing in the world. Levins argued that, “whether they realize it or not… the political ideologies that they have in the back of their head influence the kind of science that they do.”

For Dr. Vandermeer, that insight opened a broader frame for research: acknowledging that science has repercussions and that it is worth explicitly asking what those repercussions might be. As he puts it, “whatever science we do is going to have some repercussions,” and if that is true, “it seemed reasonable to sort of take control over it and ask what are the repercussions of what I’m going to do?” 

 

Building Agroecology: NWAG and the Turn Toward Agriculture 

Those reflections shaped Dr. Vandermeer’s long-running interest in agriculture as an ecological problem and a societal hinge point. Along with colleagues and graduate students, he became active in Science for the People, an organization that debated the relationship between science and society. In parallel, and in close collaboration with Levins and their lab groups, Dr. Vandermeer helped form the New World Agriculture Group, later renamed the New World Agriculture and Ecology Group (NWAEG). The purpose was direct: to ask, “how can we make ecology relevant for agriculture?”

Dr. Vandermeer is careful to emphasize how collective that work was: “I don’t want to take full credit for this,” he says. “Many of the ideas were not mine, but they were ideas of graduate students who happened to be associated with me at the time.” Early agroecology work took Dr. Vandermeer and students into southern Mexico, where colleague Steve Gliessman was studying “the ecological foundations of traditional agriculture,” including the “Three Sisters” intercropping of corn, beans, and squash. For Dr. Vandermeer, these years were a sustained lesson in the ecological logic embedded in smallholder systems. 

 

Nicaragua: Science, Teaching, and Solidarity 

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Vandermeer’s trajectory became deeply entwined with Nicaragua during and after the Sandinista revolution. NWAG was invited to help develop “a new revolutionary ecological agriculture for the new country,” and Dr. Vandermeer and his partner and research collaborator, Dr. Ivette Perfecto, lived in Nicaragua for an extended period. They taught at the National Agricultural University, and NWAG organized brigades—hundreds of students and supporters, many from Michigan—who worked “shoulder to shoulder with Nicaraguan students,” including building a soils lab and a plant pathology lab.

Dr. Vandermeer situates this work in a turbulent geopolitical moment, when the United States was threatening invasion. Part of the broader international effort, he recalls, was to send civilians to Nicaragua—“we’re putting our bodies on the line politically”—with the logic that “if you invade Nicaragua, you’re gonna have to… you’re gonna have to deal with us.” 

 

After Hurricane Joan: A 17-Year Tropical Forest Project 

A second major chapter in Nicaragua began after Hurricane Joan devastated the Atlantic coast forests. Dr. Vandermeer joined a small team that traveled across damaged areas, established permanent plots, and launched a long-term study of forest recovery. The project became a 17-year effort supported by three successive NSF grants. The scientific goal was to document post-hurricane trajectories—“sort of documenting what happens to a forest after a hurricane hits it, and how it grows back”—but the project also became a durable educational partnership.

Each year, the team returned for weeks of fieldwork, structured as a course involving primarily Nicaraguan students, with occasional University of Michigan students joining. The logistics reflected the setting: “There are no roads in the area. Everything we did was by boat,” and “we slept in tents that whole two weeks.” Over time, the research and teaching were also grounded in relationships with local farmers, often “very, very poor peasant farmers,” shaping Dr. Vandermeer’s ongoing thinking about what agriculture can and should be. 

 

Coffee Agroecosystems and the Politics of “Development”  

As the hurricane-recovery work reached its natural endpoint, Dr. Vandermeer and Dr. Perfecto’s attention increasingly focused on coffee agroecosystems. Their entry point was Costa Rica, where they taught an applied ecology course for Latin American students through the Organization for Tropical Studies. Coffee farms became obvious field sites, and Dr. Vandermeer and Dr. Perfecto began to see coffee as “an interesting system… from an ecological point of view.”

They also confronted, firsthand, development programs pushing farmers from shade coffee systems toward sun coffee. Dr. Vandermeer describes the modernization logic with sharp clarity: agencies encouraged growers to eliminate shade and make farms “look as much as possible like Central Iowa,” and when problems followed—new weeds, lost soil nitrogen—the solution was chemical inputs: “no problem, right? Because we now have herbicides,” and “no problem… you can buy these fertilizers.” The political-economic outcome, he argues, was a hollowing out of smallholder livelihoods—“as a part of that process of development, the elimination of small-scale farmers”—even as shade coffee systems, “loaded with shade trees,” produced food crops alongside coffee, and could be “a beautiful agricultural system,” producing food for people while sustaining substantial amounts of tropical biodiversity. 

 

Puerto Rico: A Field Station, Ant Ecology, and Biological Control  

In recent years, the integrated program of ecological research and agricultural transformation has been evident in Puerto Rico, where Dr. Vandermeer and Dr. Perfecto have established a research base on a coffee farm. “We created a field station out of it,” he says, describing a large house converted to host students and visitors, with “the whole basement… into a laboratory.” Their aim is to help convert a more conventional, input-dependent farm into an agroecological one, “based on ecological principles.”

A central focus of the Puerto Rico work is ant ecology in coffee and its implications for biological control. “Unlike in temperate zone agriculture, in the tropics, ants are exceedingly important in the whole dynamical structure of the insects in the system,” Dr. Vandermeer explains. In Puerto Rico, coffee is attacked by two major pests—the coffee leaf miner and the coffee berry borer—and, he notes, “the two major enemies that these… pests have are ants.” But, he adds, “the plot really thickens” once you look closely: different ant species play different roles, from intercepting adult borers as they attempt to enter the coffee fruit to entering the fruit and consuming the borer’s “larvae and the pupae and the eggs.” That is why the research is not only about pests, but about the broader community: “to understand the overall ant community and how the interactions amongst the ants can be understood so as to promote biological control of the pests so that farmers don’t have to use pesticides.” 

 

Why Agroecology Matters Now  

Across these chapters—mathematical ecology, long-term tropical forest monitoring, and the intricate food webs of coffee farms— Dr. Vandermeer’s work is anchored by a consistent claim: ecology is not just a way of seeing nature, but a way of redesigning agriculture. He frames that goal as both scientific and urgent, linking it directly to climate change: “If we don’t transform agriculture the way I’m suggesting we should… we are never going to solve the climate crisis.”