83. Passage I: Read the following passages carefully and answer questions 24-27.
The term ecology was coined by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Derived from the Greek word oikos, meaning household or habit, he uses it to refer to 'the investigations ofthe total relations of the animal both to its organic and its inorganic environment'. Since the early years of the twentieth century, ecology has been recognised as a branch of biology that studies the relationship among living organisms and their environment. It has, however, been converted increasingly into a political term by the use made of it, especially since the 1960s, by the growing green movement.
As a political ideology, ecologism is based on the beliefthat the nature is an interconnected whole,
embracing humans, non-humans, as well as the inanimate world. This has encouraged ecologists to question (but not necessarily reject) the anthropocentric, human-centered, thinking of conventional political ideologies, allowing them to come up with new ideas about, among other things, economics, morality and social organisation. Nevertheless, there are different strains and tendencies within ecologism. Some ecologists are committed to 'shallow' ecology (sometimes viewed as environmentalism, rather than ecologism), which attempts to harness the lessons of ecology to human ends and needs, and embraces a 'modernist' or reformist approach to environment change. 'Deep' ecologists, on the other hand, completely reject any lingering belief that human species is in some way superior to, or more important than, any other species. Moreover, ecologism has drawn from a variety of other ideologies, notably socialism, anarchism and feminism, thereby acknowledging that the relationship between humankind and nature has an important social dimension. Each of these approaches to the environment offers a different model of the ecologically viable society of the future.
(Source: Andrew Heywood, Political Ideologies, Palgrave Macmillan, NY, 2017: 251)
Q. What does ecologism deal with? (University of Hyderabad Ph.D 2022)
