The strange irony of the concept of ecology in Western history is that while "nature" precedes all human activity by billions of years, the ecological concept is invented many millennia after economic thought. In other words, we perennial moderns have been thinking about the regulation of wealth vis-a-viz oikos (the household) since we first distorted our tongues to form words. But we only expanded this notion to include the earth and the cosmos, in an explicit and self conscious way, in the nineteenth century, with Haeckel's coining of the term. Of course, this is a very Eurocentric narrative. But it is precisely this narrative that both shapes and limits thinking ecologically today, in the corridors of power (as well as the living rooms of the disenfranchised). It is as if "we" invented the term the moment at which nature "itself" threatened to truly disappear from under our feet. We can only think "ecologically" as a consequence, when we let go of profoundly romantic notions of (mother) nature. Which is to say that the belated coining of the term ecology signals the realization that we in the so-called West were very late to think about the material and vital surrounds as anything other than the picturesque background of culturally foregrounded activity. Nevertheless, this very modern concept - describing the deep temporality of our given milieu - allows us to reorientate ourselves to the very same, hopefully with a less hubristic and narcissistic attitude.
Dominic Pettman Peak Libido (2021) p.15