Ecology is a well established scientific discipline that either explicitly or implicitly distances itself from natural history, in the first place, and from purely applied disciplines such as forestry and gardening, and more spiritual currents such as deep ecology, in the second place. However, like a teenager who tries to shape its own personality separately from the one of its parents, ecology is in danger of losing the connection with and the awareness about its ancestry.  This is how among ecology’s ancestors we find natural history, Darwinism, outdoors physiology, biogeography, forestry, fisheries and wildlife management, gardening and agriculture, and of course theological, esoteric and spiritual currents too.

How did all these different domains of knowledge and experience merge into the scientific discipline we know today as ecology? Which are the imprints left by this heterogeneous past into the conceptual framework of contemporary ecology? Do we understand nature better nowadays than we did a century ago? Does the way we understand nature influences the way we relate to it? And, if our ways of understanding nature are socio and culturally contingent, how could ecology effectively advice society to cope with pressing environmental problems?

Currently we develop this project along two lines: history of gardening and history of community ecology in the 20 ^th century.

PhD-project: "Evolution of the ecological sciences".

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