Hutchinson and his graduate students intellectualized American ecology by "forcing its practitioners to confront all of the processes that maintain to change ecological systems, whether these processes were biological, physical or geological". He built on Charles Elton's idea of an ecological niche. He defined it as "a highly abstract multi-dimensional hyperspace in which the organism's needs and properties were defined as dimensions." Hutchinson created the idea of "Circular Causal Systems", the tight link between biological and physical processes, and that the activity of organisms balanced the effects on the cycles of chemicals through organisms. He said that the changes in biological productivity were related to the changes of available nutrients. He stated that the condition in which organisms existed were systems of feedback loops. In his systems view, there were both living and non-living feedback systems which followed the same mechanical principles. This led to the development of systems ecology by his student H.T. Odum. Legacy Due to Hutchinson, the European attitudes towards ecology entered America. Before Hutchinson, ecology and natural history were considered identical. After Hutchinson it became legitimate to study the physical and chemical properties of ecosystems in their own right. Hutchinson also raised the idea of climate change 30 years before the problem became popular. He taught his students as early as 1947 that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would lead to a global temperature increase. He considered the causes and preventatives for extinction, resource management, and the social anthropology of endangered cultures decades before they were attracting attention as crises. He influenced many different areas of ecology, contributing to his designation as the "Father of Modern Ecology". His many graduate students went on to careers in ecology. He was the first to describe and resolve the paradox of the plankton in 1961. Upon his death, Yvette H. Edmondson noted "The era that ended with G.E. Hutchinson's death was not only that of a thoughtful man and the growth of a science imprinted by his thinking. Even more sadly, we may be seeing the end of an intellectual climate in which the sparking mind of one individual can so illuminate a science. Science by committee casts a very different light." In 1982, the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography, now called the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, honored Hutchinson by creating the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award, one of the Society's major awards that