published a detailed and respectful history of the ecosystem concept with
Yale University Press that appeared hardly a year after Hagen’s work. Gene
himself, by all accounts, never betrayed a moment of perturbation with
the young insurgents. He simply grinned, waved a hand, and incorporated
‘‘disturbance’’ into the system. As late as , Gene wrote that disturbance
was no more than individual competition within and between species; it
had ever existed and ever would—yetwithinsystems that, always greater
than their parts, naturally sought equilibrium.^55 What could society and
policy makers do, after all, with disturbance and chaos? Ecosystem ecology
was from the start, after all, aconcept, as Gene’s colleague Frank Golley
reminded us during the s, and one that served environmentalism ex-
ceedingly well.