"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

value. Julia Martin repeatedly stresses the need for “compassion and wisdom” (1999:
162, 172, 177, 208) and deep ecology offers a path towards the attainment of this.
A brief history of ecology
A historical perspective is essential to an understanding of both the principles behind
ecology and why it is a necessary discipline. I rely heavily on William Howarth’s article
“Some Principles of Ecocriticism” in the following summary.
Ernest Haeckel is today seen as a founder of biogenetics and is the author of the
theorem “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (one organism’s life repeats a species’
history) (in Glotfelty 73). From this Howarth concludes: “Ecology thus absorbed
Linnaean taxonomy, quantified Darwinian evolution, and revolutionized Mendelian
genetics, creating what amounts to a vernacular and democratic science” (73).
The first scientific ecological research was done between 1887 and 1899 in
America when scientists examined the lost biodiversity of prairie grasslands by studying
the recovering zones of glacial lakes and dunes. Ecology was then widely adopted as a
vernacular science by many disciplines through which to read, interpret and narrate land
history. Howarth writes: “Several ecologists wrote histories of regional land-use, linking
biogeography to agronomy and sociology to examine natural and cultural interaction...
This work enlarged the research community, leading to the founding of the Ecological
Society of America in 1920” (74); and adds:
Not all scientists greeted the new trend warmly. Marston Bates objected to
‘ecology’ replacing natural history because ecologists were too literary, using
rhetoric and symbols instead of precise data. Behind these complaints lay a
century of lexical growth, as the early languages of biology generated the broader
discourse of [the] ecological story. (ibid.)
This shows an early awareness of the double-strand of the biological and the cultural
within ecology. The years of The Depression and World War II turned ecology even
more toward the cultural, or what Howarth calls “public narrative” (74). Ecology was
invoked by wilderness preservationists and protestors against military-industrial research
and so came to be seen, by some, as subversive:
To radical ecofeminists, science became an oppressive, male-authored enemy that
insisted on the biological necessity of sexual reproduction... These voices
reflected how much ecology had become a medicine sung by modern shamans to
heal a sick world. (in Glotfelty 74)
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