GLOSSARY

Seeing natural objects and phenomena as "animated" by personal spirits. Natural forces like thunder and lightning, streams, trees, the ocean, are given personal existence and treated as gods or demi-gods.

Seeing animals or the world itself as having human characteristics, particularly as having feelings and motives like those of human beings. Everything is like us. See Pathetic fallacy.

Seeing the universe as centering on humankind, so that everything in the universe is for human beings. Everything is for us.

The idea that nature, undisturbed by human beings, achieves an ideal balance of different species, that, until it is disturbed, it remains in balance, and that it returns to that state after the disturbance. This is connected to the notion, left over from the time of belief in The Great Chain of Being, that every creature has its place in the harmo [..]

An ecossystem usually identified in terms of characteristic forms of vegetation.

The global realm of all living things.

The constant number that, left to itself, a natural population will achieve in a given ecosystem. The idea there is a constant number is, according to some ecologists, an unwarranted assumption. See Balance of Nature.

One side of a nineteenth-century geological argument about the forces that have shaped the earth. Catastrophism proposes that the earth was shaped by sudden, cataclysmic upheavals (such as the "Flood" or "Deluge" of Noah in the Bible) and that the laws of nature in the periods between these cataclysms are not the same, that is, [..]

An assumed final state of stability in the reconstitution of a destroyed ecosystem.