Brief history of Ecology

The word «ecology» comes from the Greek words (oikos, «house- hold») and (logos, «study»). The word «ecology» is often used as a synonym for the natural environment or environmentalism.

The Greek philosopher Theophrastus was one of the first people to discuss the relationship between living things and their environments. German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term oikologie, defined as the relationship of an animal to both its organic and inorganic environment, particularly those plants and animals with which it comes in contact.

Until the early 20th century, biologists concentrated on descriptive studies of plants and animals.

Throughout the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, the great maritime powers such as Britain, Spain, and Portugal launched many world exploratory expeditions to develop maritime commerce with other countries, and to discover new natural resources, as well as to catalog them. At the beginning of the 18th century, about twenty thousand plant species were known, versus forty thousand at the beginning of the 19th century, and almost 400,000 today. These expeditions were joined by many scientists, including botanists, such as the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt is often considered a father of ecology. He was the first to take on the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment. He exposed the existing relationships between observed plant species and climate, and described vegetation zones using latitude and altitude, a discipline now known as geobotany.

Towards 1850 there was a breakthrough in the ecology with the publishing of the work of Charles Darwin on The Origin of Species: Ecology passed from a repetitive, mechanical model to a biological, organic, and hence evolutionary model. Alfred Russel Wallace, contemporary and com­petitor to Darwin, was first to propose a «geography» of animal species. Several authors recognized at the time that species were not independent of each other, and grouped them into plant species, animal species, and later into communities of living beings or biocoenosis. This term was coined in 1877 by Karl Mobius.

By the 19th century, ecology blossomed due to new discoveries in chemistry by Lavoisier and de Saussure, notably the nitrogen cycle. After observing the fact that life developed only within strict limits of each compartment that makes up the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere, the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess proposed the term biosphere in 1875. Suess proposed the name biosphere for the conditions promoting life, such as those found on Earth, which includes flora, fauna, minerals, matter cycles, et cetera. In the 1920s Vladimir Vernadsky, a Russian geologist detailed the idea of the biosphere in his work «The biosphere» (1926), and described the fundamental principles of the biogeochemical cycles. He thus redefined the biosphere as the sum of all ecosystems.

First ecological damages were reported in the 18th century, as the multi­plication of colonies caused deforestation. Since the 19th century, with the industrial revolution, more and more pressing concerns have grown about the impact of human activity on the environment. The term ecologist has been in use since the end of the 19th century. Over the 19th century, botanical geography and zoogeography combined to form the basis of biogeography. This science, which deals with habitats of species, seeks to explain the rea­sons for the presence of certain species in a given location. It was in 1935 that Arthur Tansley, the British ecologist, coined the term ecosystem, the interactive system established between the biocoenosis (the group of living creatures), and their biotope, the environment in which they live. Ecology thus became the science of ecosystems.

By the 1930s, nature study became part of the curriculum of most schools, but organisms were still viewed in isolation rather than as communities.

Tansley's concept of the ecosystem was adopted by the energetic and influential biology educator Eugene Odum. Along with his brother, Howard Odum, Eugene P. Odum wrote a textbook on ecology.

Human development degraded the environment because people did not understand their relationship with it; that we have as much impact on our surroundings as they do on us. By the 1970s ecology, formerly an obscure science became a household word.