ABSTRACT
Arthur Tansley was an influential botanist perhaps best known for coining the term ecosystem in the 1930s but who was also a significant pioneer of the science of ecology long before that. Tansley was born into a wealthy middle-class London family and privately educated. Tansley co-founded the British Vegetation Committee in 1904, and in 1913, this body transformed into the British Ecological Society, with Tansley as its first president. Tansley fought in and was injured in the Great War. It was at this time that he developed a secondary research interest in Freud and psychoanalysis. Science and politics combined in Tansley’s famous criticism of the South African botanist/statesman Jan Smuts and his popularization of holism as an alternative ecological concept of interconnectedness and self-regulation. Ecology is in some respects in a difficult position in this country today.
