"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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married? This chapter will explore this possibility. One avenue is the recent extension
of ecology into ecological literary criticism (literary ecocriticism), whereby texts are read
against the backdrop of a holistic or ecological worldview.
Ecology, towards a definition and an understanding of the concept
Interconnection or interaction is the key word in the various definitions of ecology.
Blackwell’s Concise Encyclopedia of Ecology explains the difficulty of pinpointing a
precise definition of ecology:
It began as a subject concerned predominantly with the ENVIRONMENT
(Haeckel’s ‘house’), i.e. the study of the way that organisms are influenced by
physiochemical conditions. However, as it has developed, it has become
increasingly concerned with interactions between individuals, so that it is now
probably best defined as that area of biology concerned with the study of
collective groups of organisms. (Calow 36)
Other dictionary definitions of ecology (with my italics) are:
• The branch of biology that deals with organisms’ relations to one another and to
the physical environment in which they live (OED)
• The study of the interrelationships between living organisms and their
environment (Lincoln 94)
• The scientific study of the interrelationships among organisms, and between them
and all aspects, living and non-living, of their environment (Allaby 136)
• The study of the interactions among organisms and between organisms, and
between them and all aspects of their environment, living (biotic) and non-living
(abiotic). (Irwin 4)
The term ecology was coined by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866. He defined it as:
The body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature – the investigation of
the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic
environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those
animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact – in a
word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by
Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence. (in Kroeber 22-3)
Karl Kroeber claims that Haeckel’s definition has since needed to be refined or
expanded but adds: “its two key features remain undisturbed: ecology treats of total
interrelationships of organisms and their environments, and ecology depends upon