ecosystem

In 1935, the British botanist Arthur George Tansley published a paper in the journal Ecology titled The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms. He was agitated. A rival school, led by South African ecologist Jan Smuts, had argued that nature operated through holistic, indivisible wholes that resisted quantitative analysis. Tansley disagreed and needed a word to say so.

He built ecosystem from two Greek roots. Oikos meant household or dwelling-place and had already given English ecology, coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, as well as economics. Systema meant an organized whole assembled from parts. Together, they described a concrete, analyzable unit of organisms plus the physical environment they inhabit, from soil chemistry to the air above.

The word spread slowly through academic biology during the 1940s and 1950s. Yale ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson and his student Howard Odum used it to build quantitative models of energy flow through ponds and forests. By the 1960s, ecosystem ecology was a recognized discipline. By the 1970s, the term appeared in American environmental law.

The popular career of the word followed its scientific one by about two decades. By the 1980s, journalists were writing about urban ecosystems and media ecosystems. Silicon Valley adopted the term in the 1990s to describe networks of companies, investors, and startups as if they were organisms in a forest. The word Tansley forged to assert hard materialism became the preferred metaphor for everything interconnected.