Looking back 150 years the founder of ecology, Ernst Haeckel, could not have envisioned to what degree “Oecologie”, i.e. ecology, the term he coined in 1866, has had and will continue to have on man’s life and the planet’s survival. He was born in Potsdam in 1834 and died in Jena in 1919. What he did was quite very simple: he put two words together – the Greek word for oiko = habitat – environment and logo = word or thought and out came ecology.
It is a unque word, one that enables us to understand the ‘building blocks’ our and nature’s environment is made of: mine, yours and everyone else’s. it reveals how interconnected life is.
Habitat Games© help to unveil the interconnectedness of life. They also demonstrate how we humans impact our environment, both in a negative as well in a positive way. Global warming and habitat degradation have reached a frightening dimension, a dimension that no nation can continue to overlook. The United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) in Paris from November 30 to December 11, 2015 brought more than 190 countries together. Will national governments take the necessary action?
Participating in Habitat Games© means learning what an ecosytem is, how it adapts to man-made as well as seasonal change. Habitat Games© encourage us to reflect on which actions each of us can take starting today or tomorrow at the latest. Be it our personal ecological footprint or that of the town I live in. When was the last time you went to a meeting of the City Council?
>See also: http://esapubs.org/bulletin/current/history_list/history47.pdf