The Ecosystem Hypothesis

Ecology is fundamentally different to the other sciences in that it describes a scope and an attitude of study, rather than a field. There is an ecology – and ecologists – of mathematics, behaviour, economics, physics, history, art, linguistics, psychology, warfare, and almost any other discipline that you can think of.

Enlightenment thinkers once disparaged animist ideas as backwards and unscientific. They considered them to be a barrier to capitalist expansion, and sought desperately to stamp them out. But today science is beginning to catch up. Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which