1866
"German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) coined the neologism ecology in a textbook (1866) on the morphology, taxonomy, and evolution of animals. Ecology is a combination of the ancient Greek words oikos and logos. Oikos means 'house, not only of built houses, but of any dwelling place,' 'domicile of a plant' (Liddell and Scott 1968: 1204, 1205). ... Hence ecology means 'the scientific study of the earthly dwelling place' or 'home.' A synonymous term used by Russian scientists is biogeocoenosis, which means 'life and earth functioning together' (E.P. Odum 1993: 27). A social reformer and interpreter of Darwin, Haeckel's motivation for coining this new word was to draw attention to the inclusive study of organisms in the environment, in contradistinction to the narrower study of organisms in the laboratory (the province of physiology). To emphasize the investigation of organisms in their natural setting and the operations of natural selection, Haeckel wanted to distinguish ecology from biology in the narrow sense of dealing with the structure and classification of organisms themselves." - Keller and Golley 2000: 7-9, see also Odom and Barrett 2005: 2-3
1869
"In January 1869, Haeckel gave his most eloquent definition of ecology in an inaugural lecture at the University of Jena (Stauffer 1957: 141): '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. 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."' (Haeckel 1879)" - Keller and Golley 2000: 9
1885
"1885, Hanns Reiter used ecology in the title of a book for the first time (Egerton 1977: 195), and interest in ecology developed rapidly." - Keller and Golley 2000: 9
1893
"1893, John Burden-Sanderson, president of the Royal Society of Great Britain, commented that the future of ecology was especially bright because it dealt with organisms in their environments (Burden-Sanderson 1893)." - Keller and Golley 2000: 9
1904
"Burdon-Sanderson (1893), the Madison Botanical Congress of 1893, and the Congress of Arts and Sciences meeting at St. Louis in 1904 recognized ecology as of equal rank with morphology and physiology [in forming the components of biology]. ... Burdon-Sanderson considered physiology as dealing with the internal actions of the organism and its parts, using the methods of physics and chemistry; ecology, he said, explored the external relations of animals and plants under natural conditions." - McIntosh 1985: 39
1913
"Universities began to offer ecology courses, and in 1913 the first professional society, the British Ecological Society, was established (Sheail 1987)." - Keller and Golley 2000: 9
1935
"Sir Arthur C. Tansley first proposed the term 'ecosystem' in 1935 ..." - Barrett 2005: 3
1945
"The concept of integrative levels of organization is a general description of the evolution of matter through successive and higher orders of complexity and integration. It views the development of matter, from the cosmological changes resulting in the formation of the earth to the social changes in society, as continuous because it is never-ending, and as discontinuous because it passes through a series of different levels of organization — physical, chemical, biological and sociological.
"In the continual evolution of matter, new levels of complexity are superimposed on the individual units by the organization and integration of those units into a single system. What were wholes on one level become parts on a higher one. Each level of organization possesses unique properties of structure and behavior which, though dependent on the properties of the constituent elements, appear only when these elements are combined in the new system. ... The laws describing the unique properties of each level are qualitatively distinct, and their discovery requires methods of research and analysis appropriate to the particular level." - Novikoff 1945: 209
"In the continual evolution of matter, new levels of complexity are superimposed on the individual units by the organization and integration of those units into a single system. What were wholes on one level become parts on a higher one. Each level of organization possesses unique properties of structure and behavior which, though dependent on the properties of the constituent elements, appear only when these elements are combined in the new system. ... The laws describing the unique properties of each level are qualitatively distinct, and their discovery requires methods of research and analysis appropriate to the particular level." - Novikoff 1945: 209
1968
"What can best be described as a worldwide environmental awareness movement burst upon the scene during two years, 1968-1970, as astronauts took the first photographs of Earth as seen from outer space. For the first time in human history, we were able to see Earth as a whole and to realize how alone and fragile Earth hovers in space." - Odom and Barrett 2005: 3
1977
"Before the 1970s, ecology was viewed largely as a subdiscipline of biology. ... Although ecology remains strongly rooted in biology, it has emerged from biology as an essentially new, integrative discipline that links physical and biological processes and forms a bridge between the natural sciences and the social sciences (E. P. Odum 1977)." - Odom and Barrett 2005: 4
1987
"[Political ecology] combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. Together this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself." - Blaikie and Brookfield 1987:17
1992
"[T]here is no 'original' state in nature, no nature-in-itself in the sense that a fixed set of characteristics holds true, like the law of gravity, always and everywhere. Nature resembles less a law than a story. And the story is not over. Thus to inquire of nature is to inquire of time, of circumstance and of contingency." - Dobb 1992: 47
2000
"Ecological science, like other modern sciences, aspired to identify general laws that would explain its observations. However, as generalizations have been proposed and even applied, inevitably exceptions have been found. The specific replaces the general. ... increasingly ecology has become a science of case studies. ... [E]cology is grounded in several fundamental principles, including the principles of system and evolution. System is concerned with the question: How does it work? Evolution is concerned with the question: How did this system come to be this way? ... An ecosystem has at least two parts: organisms and an environment." - Keller and Golley 2000: 10
2005
"To understand ecology thoroughly would be to understand all of biology, and to be a complete biologist is to be an ecologist. ... the pursuit of public health is largely an application of ecology." - Wilson 2005: xiii
2005
"The problem of world-earth opens up contemporary concerns with the environment and globalisation, which Heidegger was grappling with. If his credentials as a foundational theorist of certain types of ecological thinking are well known, through an engagement with his writings on technology and poetic dwelling (Foltz, 1995; Zimmerman, 1993), what is less understood is how such themes emerged in his work of the 1930s, within this particular political context, most notably in the Beiträge. Heidegger's argument is complicated, and hinges on the reduction of the Greek physis to the Latin natura, the root for our term 'nature'. For Heidegger, even in 1936-38, in technology (die Technik) nature is destroyed because it is separated from human beings, it is seen as a separate realm from human existence. In part, this is the argument against Descartes found in Being and Time, where Descartes's separation of the mind and body is challenged with the idea of being-in-the-world. Heidegger argues that the originary, more rooted sense of physis is lost as nature is seen as a being itself, 'and, after this demoting [Absetzung], ultimately reduced to the full force of calculating machination and economy' (1989, page 277). Nature becomes res extensa, an extended material resource. The natural no longer has any 'immediate relation to physis, but rather is fully set-up [gestellt] according to the machinational' (page 133). ... Heidegger's argument here is that nature is never pure but is always already social, but also that the very idea of nature in some supposedly pure state is already a reductive understanding." Elden 2005a: 819-20
2006
"[U]rban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together form highly uneven urban sociophysical landscapes." - Heynen et al. 2006: 15
2014
"Instead of seeing cities as social rather than natural, or urban injustice and inequality as natural rather than social, UPE [urban political ecology] made cities visible as political worlds, the politics of which are constitutively socionatural." - Angelo and Wachsmuth forthcoming)
