What Is Ecology?

Wed, Sep 06

“By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature — the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact — in a word ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.” 

— Ernst Haeckel, General morphology of organisms: general foundations of form-science, mechanically grounded by the descendance theory reformed by Charles Darwin (1866, Berlin)

Goals

• Assess the interplay between ecology and culture 
• Debate the scope of ecology. Is ecology a purely sceintific or biological concept? Or does it also include education, politics, social justice, and more? Should it?
• Reflect on Cronon’s statement that wilderness is “profoundly a human creation,” and how this conception of wilderness influences our responses to nature