Ideas in ecology

The word "ecology" means different things to different people. For example, during the last 25 years or so the word has been used to label attitudes, life-styles, consumer goods, political parties, and college courses. In the 1960s one university renamed its "Home Economics" course "Home Ecology." (But our own biology department reacted to the growing visibility of its conventional "Ecology" course by renaming it "Population Biology.") It is often said that Thoreau coined the word "ecology." He certainly ought to have done so, given the Rousseauesque yearnings that surround the word, and this may be why the myth lives on, even though it stems from a 1958 misreading of the word "geology" as "ecology" in one of his letters (James 1985). The German biologist Haeckel was actually the first to use the word "Oecologie," in 1866.