Abstract

When the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary went to press in 1971, it still recognized only one sense of ‘environmentalism’ – as the name of a particular sociological theory holding that the differences between human cultures were to be wholly explained in terms of such factors as soil, climate and food supplies. As for the now cognate term ‘ecological’, that too had a purely scientific significance. The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel had coined the word ‘ecology’ in its German form as early as 1870, to signify ‘the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its organic and its inorganic environment’. It was soon extended beyond animals to the study, in these terms, both of plant life and of human societies.