On Repairing Our Broken Home • by Daniel Coleman 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters economy (n.): 1530s, "household management," from Latin oeconomia (source of French économie, Spanish economia, German Ökonomie, etc.), from Greek oikonomia "household management, thrift," from oikonomos "manager, steward," from oikos "house, abode, dwelling" (cognate with Latin vicus "district," vicinus "near;" Old English wic "dwelling, village," from PIE [Proto-Indo-European] root *weik- (1) "clan") + nomos "managing," from nemein "manage" (from PIE root *nem- "assign, allot; take"). Meaning "frugality, judicious use of resources" is from 1660s. The sense of "wealth and resources of a country" (short for political economy) is from 1650s. ecology (n.): 1873, oecology, "branch of science dealing with the relationship of living things to their environments," coined in German by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel as Ökologie, from Greek oikos "house, dwelling place, habitation" (from PIE root *weik- (1) "clan") + -logia "study of" (see -logy). In use with reference to anti-pollution activities from 1960s. We live in a broken home. Since the rise of Industrial Growth Society1 in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what had been one home, one clan—oikos and weik—got divided into separate, conflicting allegiances to “household management or thrift,” on the one hand, and “the relationship of living things to their environments,” on the other. Ever since, like children from a broken home, we are pressured to give our devotion to one of our divorced parents: Father Finance or Mother Earth, the competitive side usually gendered masculine, the nurturing side, feminine. Because their separation was not, is not, never has been amicable, allegiance to one always seems like betrayal of the other.  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ] 1 See Sigmund Kvaløy’s development of this term in “Norwegian Ecophilosophy and Ecopolitics and Their Influence from Buddhism.” Buddhist Perspectives on the Ecocrisis, With a Declaration on Environmental Ethics by H. H. the Dalai Lama. Edited by Klas Sandell. Buddhist Publication Society, The Wheel Publication No. 346/348, 1987. https://www.bps.lk/olib/wh/wh346_Sandell-etal_Buddhist-Perspectives-on-the-Ecocrisis.pdf   + [Distillate © HA&L + Daniel Coleman   I  Artwork: Geoffrey Skirrow Photography {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]