How was environment in ancient Greece? Did people care to protect their surroundings? How did Homer described the environment ? Were ancient Greek aware of ecology?

Ecology stands for “the relationships between the air, land, water, animals, plants, etc., usually of a particular area, or the scientific study of this”. It is a branch of biology and its origins can be found in ancient Greece. Hippocrates wrote that, in order to investigate medicine, it was necessary to consider the seasons and the characteristics of the climate, laying out how vital the environment is to the health of the living beings that inhabit it. Aristotle, meanwhile, observed and recorded the characteristics of the flora and fauna around him and speculated about the relationship between them. 

However, modern ecology did not first emerge until the 19th century. It was during the 19th century that the word “ecology” was coined by the German naturalist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). Haeckel formed the word from the Greek “oîkos” (house) and “logógos” (knowledge, reason) — and with good reason, since this is, in a broad sense, the study of our home. Known for disseminating Darwin’s work, in his General Morphology of Organisms, Haeckel describes ecology as the science that studies the relationships of organisms with the world around them. In 1895, the Danish Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming wrote “Oecology of Plants,” a seminal text for this science, in which he describes the world’s main biomes, i.e. the regions into which the planet can be divided based on shared climatic and geological factors and, thus, shared flora and fauna.