T.J. Demos, Decolonizing nature

Of course, ecology has not always been so defined. In 1866, German biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term, which designated “the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its organic and inorganic environment.” Ecology’s disciplinary formation coincided with the height of European colonialism, a regime not limited to the governing of peoples but also the structuring of nature. The colonization of nature, emerging from the Enlightenment principles of Cartesian dualism between human and nonhuman worlds, situated the nonhuman world as objectified, passive, and separate, and “elaborated a rationalizing, extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional experiential relations among people, plants and animals.” Destructive and utilitarian, idealized and exoticized nature has been colonized in concept as well as in practice. It entailed a multifarious, complex, and at times contradictory pattern of bureaucratic rationalization, scientific and technological mastery, military domination, integration within the expanding capitalist economy, and legal systematization in order to manage and maximize the possibilities of resource exploitation. In this vein, ecology was far from the innocent discipline Haeckel named; rather, it comprised “the science of empire.”