logical systems. Frederick Clements was the early giant who gave the world
the terms ‘‘succession’’ and ‘‘climax.’’ The first describes the orderly devel-
opment of small and large landscapes, in plant stages, from filled-in ponds,
say, with grassy cover, to dominant woody shrubs and finally to a mature
(climax) forest. ‘‘Succession’’ survives today, both in lay and professional
parlance. ‘‘Climax’’ may have seemed unnaturally permanent even during
the s. The great English biologist Arthur G. Tansley of Oxford University
grew troubled that Clementsian science took no account of human agency.
Clements seemed biased against ‘‘the human tribes,’’ Tansley wrote, and
civilization itself.^39 Tansley’s own immortal coinage, ‘‘ecosystem,’’ in ,
accounted for humanity as part of what is called nature.
Other Americans had anticipated Tansley, however. As far back as ,
the Illinois limnologist Stephen Alfred Forbes had described a ‘‘commu-
nity of interest’’—that is, a self-regulating system—in the natural world.
Chancey Juday analyzed a Wisconsin ‘‘lake as [a] system’’ in . The ulti-
mate midwestern limnologist was Raymond Lindeman (–), who pre-
sented in his University of Minnesota dissertation means to quantify simul-
taneous death and life in the shrinking Cedar Bog Lake, near Minneapolis.
Here and in two acclaimed papers he wrote principally at Yale, Lindeman
brilliantly set forth a ‘‘trophic-dynamic’’ conceptualization of the lake that
actually demonstrated Tansley’s notion of nature as working ‘‘system,’’ with
measurable energy flows representing both death and creation in the mu-
tuality of the lake’s chemicals, minerals, plants, and animals. Contempo-
rary studies in Germany also elaborated on the ecosystem concept.
In the broadest views of ideas about nature, Tansley, Lindeman, and
others seemed to validate an optimistic symmetry seen long before and
after, among otherwise disparate sources. The anti-Darwinian Russian
prince Peter Kropotkin, for instance, author ofMutual Aid: A Factor in Evo-
lution(), may have been wrongheaded about Darwin, but he is often
credited with the invention of what is still called ‘‘mutualism’’ in biology.
Mutualism, indeed, has become a demonstrated phenomenon in ecologi-
cal science as practiced by confirmed Darwinians. The classic example
is fungi on plant roots that provide nutrients for root growth, especially
in poor soil, while the roots provide supportive homes to fungi. Without
fungi, roots would die or remain much smaller than their potential, and
soil would remain impoverished. In turn, mutualism shadows the natural-
ist ‘‘holism’’ of the South African Jan Christian Smuts. And certainly the
mutual interdependency of organisms within systems informed the evolv-