Remembering the late Frank Golley who wrote about it.
This month is the 76th anniversary of the naming of the ecosystem concept. The paper in which the term first appeared is entitled, appropriately enough, “The use and abuse of vegetation concepts and terms”, (the ecosystem being offered, naturally enough, as a useful one) and appeared in Ecology, the flagship journal of the Ecological Society of America, in July 1935 . In it, the British ecologist Sir Arthur George Tansley takes a scythe to the conceptual crop that the infant discipline of ecology had produced since the early years of the 20th Century. He separated the terminological wheat from the chaff. The task was not, of course, simply to determine which were the more delicious ecological terms; ecologists have always loved their terminology: climax communities, subclimaxes, proclimax, seres, plagioseres, prisere, succession and so forth; little of it is euphonious. Rather, he determined the utility of terminology based upon his perception of the “naturalness” of the units of nature they entail. Terms are abused when they promote analogies which do not produce fruitful empirical research programs. Terms are also abused, as Tansley hinted, when they smuggle in a set of metaphysical assumptions (e.g. “an imagined future whole” to be realized in an ideal human society); assumptions Tansley believed had no business in the dispassionate contemplation of nature. Especially when ecology was struggling to assume a position among the other natural sciences it seemed not the time for the discipline to divert on philosophical tangents . 
