A subscriber to sci.bio.ecology recently complained about the dearth of science on the news group. Usually it is full of environmentalist calls to action.
"Does the use of a sci. news group for discussing socio-political issues bother anyone else?" Jason Hernandez asked. "Or am I just nitpicking? Should we get together a mob and hunt down whomever it was who first used the word ecology as a synonym for environmentalism?"
A holistic science
His concern drew some like-minded responses.
"Ecology is a holistic science and whilst I am uncomfortable with the hijacking of the word, all these subjects are often important to ecological understanding, and ecological understanding is often important to these other subjects," Graham Smith said. "Unfortunately I have often found that environmentalists aren't interested in developing any real ecological understanding as this would often destroy their politically driven arguments."
If science is the heart of the environmental movement, one would hope to find a wealth of relevant data, independently researched. A search of the internet draws a lengthy list of sites which reference ecology. But relatively few of them relate to pure science. Almost all concern conservation activities, and many support a political agenda.
The point of this article is not to discredit environmentalism, but to clarify its basis. It is an important social phenomenon with cultural, political and spiritual facets. Anyone can just as easily get caught up in the health movement, which makes various compelling claims, many of them valid. But health schemes must look to the scientific study of human nutrition for their veracity. And sound environmental action is rooted in the study of ecology.
Concerned with interrelationships
Merriam-Webster Online defines ecology as, "a branch of science concerned with the interrelationships of organisms and their environments." Fundamentally, it is not concerned with conservation. In fact, natural systems may be much more unstable than many conservationists would like to think.
Ecology studies interactions within and between living organisms and the non-living elements around them. It is a relatively new science. While its roots can be traced back to Greek scholar Theophrastus, it didn't become a widespread concept until the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The term was coined by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). It is multidisciplinary in that it draws from a wide range of scientific fields, such as botany, animal biology, inorganic and organic chemistry, physics, meteorology and toxicology, to name a few.
No one did more than ecologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) to draw attention to the threat human activity posed to life on Earth. Her book, Silent Spring (1962), brought ecology to the forefront of scientific thought.
