The exact translation of the Greek word "ecology" means the study of one's own home, that is, the biosphere in which we live and of which we are a part. In order to solve the problems of the survival of mankind, it is necessary, first of all, to know your own home and learn how to live in it! Live long, happily! And the concept of "ecology", which was born and entered the language of science in the last century, it referred to only one of the aspects of the life of the inhabitants of our common home. Classical (more precisely, biological) ecology is only a natural component of the discipline that we now call human ecology or modern ecology.

The original meaning of any knowledge, any scientific discipline is to comprehend the laws of one's own home, that is, that world, that environment on which our common destiny depends. From this point of view, the entire set of sciences born of the human mind is an integral part of a certain general science about how a person should live on Earth, how he should be guided in his behavior in order not only to preserve himself, but also to ensure the future of his children, grandchildren, their people and humanity as a whole. Ecology is a science directed to the future. And it is built on the principle that the values of the future are no less important than the values of the present. This is the science of how to pass on Nature, our common home to our children and grandchildren, so that they can live better and more conveniently in it than we do! To keep everything necessary for people's lives in it.

Our house is one - everything in it is interconnected, and we must be able to combine the knowledge accumulated in different disciplines into a single integral structure, which is the science of how a person should live on Earth, and which it is natural to call human ecology or simply ecology.

So, ecology is a systemic science, it relies on many other disciplines. But this is not its only difference from traditional sciences.

Physicists, chemists, biologists, economists study many different phenomena. They study in order to understand the nature of the phenomenon itself. If you like, out of interest, because a person, solving a particular problem, first simply seeks to understand how it is solved. And only then he begins to think about what to adapt the wheel he invented. Very rarely do they think in advance about the application of the acquired knowledge. Did anyone at the birth of nuclear physics think about the atomic bomb? Or did Faraday assume that his discovery would lead to the fact that the planet was covered with a network of power plants? And this detachment of the researcher from the goals of the study has the deepest meaning. It is laid down by evolution itself, if you like, by the mechanism of the market. The main thing is to know, and then life itself will select what a person needs. After all, the development of the living world takes place exactly in this way: each mutation exists on its own, it is only an opportunity for development, only "probing the ways" of possible development. And then selection does its job: out of countless mutations, it selects only those units that turn out to be useful for something. It is the same in science: how many unclaimed volumes of books and journals containing the thoughts and discoveries of researchers are gathering dust in libraries. And one day some of them may be needed.

Ecology in this is not at all like traditional disciplines. Unlike them, it has a well-defined and predetermined goal: such a study of one's own house and such a study of the possible behavior of a person in it that would allow a person to live in this house, that is, to survive on planet Earth.

Unlike many other sciences, ecology has a multi-tiered structure, and each of the floors of this "building" is based on a whole variety of traditional disciplines.