The economic history of the world is the entire history of the world, but seen from a certain vantage point; that of the economy. The ecological history of the world is the history of the world seen from an environmental viewpoint. Increasingly, this environmental viewpoint takes in the place of Homo sapiens in the entire cosmos. To choose one or other vantage point, and no other, is of course to favour from the start a one-sided form of explanation. However, economists and historians have stopped thinking of economics as a self-contained discipline and of economic history as a neatly defined body of knowledge, which one could study in isolation from other subjects. Economists cannot properly grasp economic phenomena unless they go beyond the economy. With regard to political economy, which in the 19th century appeared to concern only material goods, it has turned out to embrace the social system as a whole, being related to everything in society. The same can be said of biologists with respect to ecology, with its history of evolution, which is no longer regarded as primarily science, but as a philosophy of inter-relatedness.
Political culture is an important variable in the analysis of the relationships between culture and ecology as it suggests underlying beliefs, values and opinions, which a group of people holds dear (such as shared ethnic and religious affinities). For example, Catholicism treats the individual as social and transcendent.
Economics and ecology come together at their common linguistic root, ‘oikos’, which in both cases signifies a space where a complex of activities is undertaken concerned with the consumption of natural resources and their transformation for production and distribution.
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