In 1869, Ernest Haeckel coined the term "ecology" which is derived from two Greek words: "oikos," and "logos," roughly translating into the study of habitats. Ecology can be defined as the study of how organisms interact with their environment and how organisms adapt to their environments through effective resource utilisation.
Ecology helps in understanding the life's processes of organisms in relation to its environment and how organisms adapt to their changing habitat. It also helps in understanding the distribution of organisms and the movement of energy and materials within living communities.
Ecology has its origins in Natural History that dates all the way back to the dawn of human civilisation. In early societies, each individual was required to have a thorough understanding of his surroundings, which included both natural forces and the plants and animals that surrounded him.
Ecological themes are prevalent in our ancient Indian literature. Numerous references to environmental issues may be found in Vedic texts such as the Vedas, Samhitas, Brahmanas, and Aranyakas Upanishads.
The Charaka-Samhita, an Indian medical treatise, and the Susruta-Samhita, a surgical manual, both suggest that humans in this age had an acute grasp of plant and animal ecology.
What are the laws of ecology?
The laws of ecology are a broad set of guidelines defined by ecologist Barry Commoner in his book 'The Closing Circle, Nature, Man & Technology', which outline the interaction between the environment and the organisms. Commoner looked at the environmental crisis and the human-nature interaction from a multitude of angles, including population growth, consumer demand, politics, capitalism, and selfishness, to name a few.
The First Law of Ecology
"Everything is connected (directly or indirectly) to everything else, and we are all in this together." It is a term that alludes to a natural system's interconnectedness of all its components.
Due to nature's interdependence, ecological systems are susceptible to unexpected, shocking catastrophes when placed under tremendous stress. The environment, in that case, triggers the self-stabilizing processes to return to normalcy.
This complex interconnection is not found in the individual organism, whose numerous organs originated and were selected for their contribution to the organism's survival and reproduction. However, nature is substantially more complicated, changeable, and robust than the paradigm of individual organism evolution.
The Second Law of Ecology
"Everything must go somewhere." This suggests that waste does not exist in nature and essentially restates a fundamental law of thermodynamics: in nature, matter and energy are conserved, and trash generated by one ecological process is recycled in another.
Everything has a multitude of applications. What one creature excretes as trash is absorbed by another as nutrients. For instance, animals exhale carbon dioxide as a waste product, despite the fact that it is an essential component for green development.
The Third Law of Ecology
"There is no such thing as a free lunch." According to this concept, everything in an ecological system (ecosystem) has a corresponding cost that cannot be avoided but can be deferred. It highlights that that any significant modification to a natural system caused by humans is likely to be damaging to the system by transforming energy it into unusable or unsustainable forms.
The Fourth Law of Ecology
"Nature knows best". This implies that any large change to a natural system brought about by people is likely to be destructive to it. Over time, the ecosystem evolves, and as a result, it shapes itself to operate most efficiently.
For example, the contemporary petrochemical industry developed thousands of novel com
pounds that did not exist in nature. These novel chemicals, which follow the same basic carbon chemistry patterns as natural compounds, quickly integrate into existing metabolic systems. However, they frequently do so at the expense of life, resulting in mutations, cancer, and a variety of other types of death and disease.
Organizational Levels of Ecology
It emphasises the hierarchy of complex biological structures and processes that form life through a reductionist viewpoint. Each level of the hierarchy represents an increase in organisational complexity, with each object being essentially composed of the fundamental unit of the preceding level.