Like many of England's early Freudians, Tansley was a man of the left...And his beliefs put him in conflict with a powerful school of thought in the emerging science of ecology. American ecologists had developed the idea that plant communities were themselves organisms, and had a natural "climax" state towards which they tended,...These ideas had fed into the new philosophy of "holism" propounded by Jan Smuts,...The idea of a natural whole into which people had to fit in an appropriate way appealed to various conservative mindsets, both in Oxford, where Smuts was feted, and in South Africa, where it justified the idea that native people should not be tempted by, or allowed, the industrial development natural to the more evolved races. (One of Smuts's Oxford supporters was J.R.R. Tolkien, also born a South African; the idea of the world having a proper, settled way of being that industrialisation, and lesser species, can but threaten would be a powerful part of "The Lord of the Rings".).
Tansley was having none of this; the ecosystem, a term he coined in 1935, was his alternative. Like the human mind, it was dynamic and shaped by circumstances. It was composed not only of plants and animals, but also of their mineral substrates and the energy they used. And unlike the communities of holism, which had a pre-ordained endpoint, ecosystems were the product of the forces and flows that made them up. While there were typical ecosystems, there could also be novel ones; wherever living things came together there had to be an ecosystem of some sort, whether nature had ever envisaged it or not. People powerful enough to reshape, destroy and create ecosystems, whether by design or not, were responsible for a great deal of novelty along these lines. With the ecosystem, Tansley wrote, "human activity finds its proper place in ecology."
The term stuck. The ideas, rather less so. The ecosystem is ecology's unit of analysis, and an approach which takes the flow of energy and nutrients as the essence of what is going onwhich looks at the system, not just the componentsis often the norm...[/unquote]
DREAMING UP NATURE | More Intelligent Life
http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1223&context=facpub
(snip of straw red herrings)
And as any complete reading of the passage would quickly reveal, Levin is speaking of the "superorganism" (conservative favorite mentioned above) definition of eco-system and the over-arching Gaian mythology in general, not the manner in which either Tansley or modern science tend to use the term.
p. 71 Fragile Dominion - (Levin 1999)
Which is hilarious in conjunction with the early statements regarding dynamic nature of ecosystems by Tegsley who coined the term, I can only presume that your argument is against how some individuals misuse and misunderstand the term rather than the way that the scientists, researchers, statute writers and epa enforcers understand and apply such terms? I'd have to see examples of exactly what you are referring to, and I'm sure their are instances of such just as there seems to be some confusion among some about decreasing tax rates and the resultant tax revenues,...but, I generally don't encounter those who engage in such practices.
c. Sixty years after the ecosystem idea surfaced in the scientific literature; after decades of dominance on university campuses; after thousands of books, articles, conferences, and monographs; scholars cannot agree on the most fundamental matters regarding ecosystems. They do not agree on what constitutes the core characteristics of ecosystems. They cannot say where ecosystems begin or end in space or time, or tell us when one ecosystem replaces another on the landscape. They cannot agree on how to locate ecosystems. They offer no generally accepted definitions or measures of health, integrity, or sustainability. The state of the science concerning the ecosystem notion and its attendant ideas provides little scientific justification for the radical change in public policy proposed by the Clinton administration.
Ecosystem Management: | PERC ? The Property and Environmental Research Center Fitzsimmons, Allan K. 1999. Defending Illusions: Federal Protection of Ecosystems. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
first you contrive an argument upon the botanist who coined the term and attempted to misrepresent him and his efforts, then you try to drive a wedge between the researchers and the advocacies by misrepresenting an author's intended position and statements, and then you end with a political rant against the science and how it is being used to the detriment who would prefer to leave the implications of the research and findings in this field of endeavor out of public policy debate and decisions.
sounds rather argumentum ad consequentiam to me.
