Ecology is the study of organisms and how they interact with each other. These do not have to be organisms, they could be abiotic components (Non-living things that interact with organisms) as well. It is a field which consists of many different branches of science. These include biology, Earth science, and geography. It is a science that helps us learn more about our surroundings, and covers a wide variety of topics, as well as having many subsections.

Ecology's origins date back to the time of Ancient Greece, with Hippocrates and Aristotle. They would lay down the ground work for ecology. However, the word ecology would not come around until 1866, when German scientist Ernst Haeckel first made the term. Various other forms of ecology sprouted out, and would affect many different aspects of study, such as ecological philosophy, ethics, and politics.

Ecology is more closely related to biology than it is environmentalism. This is because ecology focuses on the science and study of a certain community. Environmentalism focuses mostly on preserving the environment and uses data collected from ecology to assist in it.

Ecologists will look to focus on explaining living communities and what happens in them. They want to figure out how life works, the interaction between life, and how they adapt. Ecologists also are looking at the movement of resources and how energy disperses through organisms in a community, as well as when an ecosystem becomes fully developed. The final thing that they're focused on is how many of each species there are, as well as the distribution of them and how diverse the population is in a certain community.

Ecology isn't just focused on animals and microorganisms, it also focuses on humans. There are many aspects to ecology that assist in the day to day lives of humanity. This can include maintaining resources humans need to survive, how a community can stay healthy, and anything to do with the conservation of humanity. An example of this would be the ecologist book Circles of Sustainability, which states that there is more than just the environment in world, and that it is not separate from humans.

Ecology's scale is vast and wide, going from small micro-organisms to a planetary scale. Within ecosystems, every organism and abiotic chemical influences the community. For example, a Tyrannosaurus Rex may have been a king of the food chain, but he could die from a deadly bacterium infecting him.

Ecology influences our day to day lives. It can affect city planning, housing developments, and what we can do with our land. Because of the measures ecology studies, we're able to know what the maximum and minimum amount of resources and space needed to keep living communities alive. This is in turn with ours, and without ecology, our planet may be in much worse shape than it is today.

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