ABSTRACT
The term 'ecology' was first used by the German evolutionary naturalist, Ernst Haeckel, in his General Morphology of Organisms. Although the public profile of political-ecological thinking developed in the history of ecological discourse is much older, dating back to the evolutionary theories of the late nineteenth century that situated humans within and not outside of a natural schema, and arguably to ancient metaphysical notions of the relative scale of human participation within a greater terrestrial and cosmic dynamic. Surrealist vigilance against such a reduction in values aligns the movement with an ecological critique of the current global order of market fundamentalism, which is sustained by the highly divisive principles of consumption and accumulation, and the exploitation of individuals, communities, and nature at large. Jonathan Bate traces the roots of modern ecological thought to Rousseau's account of the agony experienced by social humanity at the loss of a mythical, originary state of nature, one corrupted by social convention and municipal displacement.
