Special Topics In History World History

In 1866 zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined Oecologie to refer to the relationship between organisms and their environment. The current discipline of ecology developed in the first half of the twentieth century. We will study the founding of the discipline, its relationship to pre-ecological thinking such as natural history, how "ecology" came to be used in societies around the world, beginning in the twentieth century as a rapidly expanding and industrialising society had to grapple with environmental problems.