Читать книгу Ecosystem Crises Interactions - Merrill Singer - Страница 31

The term “ecology” is derived from the ancient Greek oikos, meaning “house” or “environment.” The field of ecology, as a specified domain or discipline of academic research, was defined in 1906 by Ernest Hackel, a German biologist, naturalist, and artist. He used the term “ecology” to label the rigorous science that seeks to comprehend the relations of organism to their surrounding environment, which includes “all conditions for existence” (quoted in Schulze et al. 2002, p. 1). As this meaning indicates, living organisms—even semi‐living entities like viruses, and certainly all plants and animals, including humans—cannot live without resources provided by the physical world immediately around them. The deeper roots of ecological study trace back to the natural history observations of revered ancient Greek philosophers like Herodotus, Aristotle, and Hippocrates, and even further back to the need of all indigenous people to know their environment, as life itself depended upon it.