ECOLOGY NOUN (ENVIRONMENT)

Conservation of the environment (see environment°); green politics. Often used attributively, in Ecology Party etc., in much the same sense as the adjectives environmental and green. Etymology: A sense development of the noun ecology, which is formed on the Greek word oikos 'house', and originally referred only to the branch of biology which has to do with the 'household' or community of organisms and how they relate to their surroundings. Since it was the potential destruction of habitats (including the human one) that first focused political attention on green issues, ecology came to be used popularly to refer to the protection of the natural world from the effects of pollution. History and Usage: The transformation of ecology from scientific study to political cause was foreseen by the writer Aldous Huxley in his paper The Politics of Ecology (1963), in which he wrote: Ecology is the science of the mutual relations of organisms with their environment and with one another. Only when we get it into our collective head that the basic problem confronting twentieth-century man is an ecological problem will our politics become realistic...Do we propose to live on this planet in symbiotic harmony with our environment? The word ecology was popular throughout the seventies as the ecology movement gained momentum. In the eighties, though, ecology has tended to be replaced in its attributive use by green--the Ecology Party in the UK officially changed its name to the Green Party in 1985, for example--and by the environment elsewhere. The strongest organised hesitation before socialism is perhaps the diverse movement variously identified as 'ecology' or 'the greens'. New Socialist Sept. 1986, p. 36 The Polish Ecology Club was the second independent organisation to be established after Solidarity, and has several thousand members. EuroBusiness June 1990, p. 14