ABSTRACT:
What is ‘eco’ or ‘ecological?’ The German Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) coined the word ‘ecology’ in 1866 which related to what Darwin in ‘Origin of Species’ had called ‘the economy of nature’. Haeckel wrote: “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 its organic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which comes directly and indirectly into contact – in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of struggle for existence. This science of ecology, often inaccurately referred to as ‘biology’ in a narrow sense, has thus far formed the principal component of what is commonly referred to as ‘Natural History’. “(Foster, 2001) Man started as a savage animal and climbed the ladder of civilization slowly and steadily and is still evolving in his philosophical quest for perfection and peace in body and mind. Karl Marx the German philosopher whose thought has influenced the world over, also saw the complex interdependence between human beings and nature, in 1844 in his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ wrote: ‘The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature as his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, the object and tool of his activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say, nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature