ABSTRACT
Although the term “ecology” was not coined until the nineteenth century-by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) in his General Morphology (1866)—it was fundamentally a substitute for the earlier and widespread designation “the economy of nature.” Haeckel himself spoke of ecology as “the theory of the economy of nature” while, more recently, Richard Hesse defined it as “the science of the ‘domestic economy’ of plants and animals” (Hesse et al. 1937, 6). This metaphorical association-thinking of nature as if it were a political economy-is particularly significant for religious reasons, because early proponents of the “economy of nature” or the “polity of nature” typically cast the Creator in the role of divine economist.
