What is Ecology?
Ecology is all about the way nature works, what living things do and how they do it - the way they engage with their environment.
Ecology is much more than the study of different animals and plants - it’s about how groups of living creatures, in populations of the same species or communities of different species, respond to each other, to other species and to the world around them - how they breed, feed, live and die; it is about how dead materials decay and are recycled, how energy flows through natural systems and how air, water, carbon, nitrogen and other elements of the planet are stored, released and cycled. Ecological systems (“ecosystems”) act as a unit and comprise a community of organisms with its physical environment with which it interacts. So, an ecosystem might be a lake, an ocean, a field, the whole planet, or the gut of your best friend. Ecology is a science: it is not a political party or a green manifesto. Nor is it any kind of religion, belief or paradigm. This means that what we know about ecology has been established by investigation and observation. Our knowledge is based on evidence and experiment. By the way, “creationism” (the belief that the story of Genesis in the bible is a literal account of a god creating the earth and all things that live on it) is nonsense and, like “intelligent design”, which is a thinly disguised form of creationism invoking an illusory “intelligent designer”, has no scientific or intellectual credibility and has nothing at all to do with ecology. |
| Copyright Christopher Betts Environmental Biology 2006 |