Grassland Management and the Early Development of British Ecology

Abstract

Worster depicted ecology as ‘a stranger who has just blown into town’ — it had ‘a presence without a past’. In seeking to remedy this deficiency, historians have drawn attention to the fact that an interest in the relationship of wild species to their environment, and to one another, can be discerned well before the theory of evolution by natural selection was enunciated by Charles Darwin in theOrigin of Species.