The “House” that Nature Built

When I was in high-school, one area of curriculum being offered was called "home economics." Although the classes included household budget, they were primarily such things as cooking and sewing.  (Mostly girls attended.)  That recollection of the label "home economics" came back to me recently as I read about some of the history behind modern ecology -- history dating back 150 to 350 years.

illustration from
one of Haeckel's book

The key to understanding the matter is a single Greek word oikos, which means "house."  Although the fundamental ideas behind ecology developed over centuries as scientific knowledge grew, the term "ecology" was coined in 1866 by the prominent German biologist Ernst Haeckel.  To put what he did in English, a prefix derived from oikos was attached to the suffix "-logy" which means scientific study (as in bio-logy).  Thus, eco-logy looked at all of Nature as being a large "house" full of interrelationships that science was in the process of discovering.

That "-logy" suffix was a significant choice because it was a shift from a term scientists had been using in the preceding two centuries.  (Here's where those high-school classes about a woman's taking care of a home comes in.)  Before Haeckel, it was common for Europeans studying Nature to speak of the "economy" of the natural world.  We can see in "economy" the same "eco-" prefix as in "ecology." But "economy" has a different suffix, from nomos.  It is also from Greek, but means "management."  Thus, "eco-nomy" refers to the management of some type of "house" (à la "home economics" classes).

In the case of the "economy" of Nature, however, the "house" is not a building constituted by humans.  Nor are the humans the main managers.  In the worldview of scientists in the 1600's and 1700's, Nature by itself was seen as having an "economy," that is, a set of efficient, purposeful interrelationships.  This is why, for example, the 18th-century biologist Linnaeus was able to write:

"By the Oeconomy [i.e., Economy] of Nature,

 we understand the all-wise disposition of the Creator

 in relation to natural things,

 by which they are fitted to produce general ends [i.e., purposes]

 and reciprocal uses."

Over two-and-a-half centuries after Linnaeus -- who pioneered modern biological classification -- our current scientific knowledge and understanding of Nature's diversity and complexity has exploded.  Our increasing awareness of the wildness of Nature -- its resistance to being entirely domesticated or even subdued by our attempts at "management" -- has even raised questions about whether any "house" metaphor is accurate.

There is one thing our environmental problems have shown us, however:  As the 20th-century eco-theologian Sallie McFague puts it, in order for humankind to live sustainably in Nature, we need to learn this planet's "house rules."

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What is the world of Nature (the non-human world) like to you?

(The Linnaeus quote is from his "The Oeconomy of Nature," 1749,

as quoted in Nature's Economy by Donald Worseter, © 1994, p. 37.)

(The illustration from Haeckel's book is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)