Any rapidly developing scientific discipline is bound to struggle with conceptual problems, and when there are conceptual problems around, historical studies will be helpful. Evolutionary ecology fits these statements. If you are in doubt, please resort to the summer 1986 issue of Journal of the History of Biology, which includes materials from a conference "Reflections on Ecology and Evolutionary Biology" held at Arizona State University in March 1985.
"Evolutionary ecology" was adopted around 20 years ago as a name for a developing research programme that aimed at studying ecological processes in an evolutionary setting. The programme reflected a growing conviction that Darwinian natural selection is an ecological process and, therefore, ecology can be understood only in the light of evolutionary biology. In the 1970s the term was nailed down into common usage in Anglo-American ecology by titles of several successful textbooks.
At the background of evolutionary ecology (as well as modern biology in general) lies the Modern Synthesis, the merging of Darwinism and quantitative population genetics in the 1930s and 1940s. Ecology had no immediate role in the ripening of the modern synthesis (in Anglo-American biology anyway). This is rather strange -the hindsight of today makes reading Darwin like reading the fundamentals of ecology. However, the modern synthesis inspired a number of ecologists in the English speaking countries (David Lack, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, .. .), who adopted more and more explicitly evolutionary problems in their research agenda. Concurrently a number of population geneticists began to work with ecological questions and laid foundations to a new research tradition of "ecological genetics" (E.