ekologio

The gift is in the first two letters. Eko- here is Greek oikos, a house. Ecology is house-study: how the living things in one place keep house together. Ekonomio is house-law, the management of the same household. That those two words are siblings, and that we now spend our public argument setting one against the other, is either the best or the worst joke in the vocabulary of the last century. Note too that this eko- has nothing to do with the Esperanto prefix ek-, which marks the sudden start of an action: ekiri is to set off, ekvidi is to catch sight of. Ekologio is not the sudden beginning of a logio.

The -ologio shelf. Once you can see -log- (study, from logos) plus -io (a field or domain), a long row of words opens at once, and the course has been quietly stacking them: psikologio at 2,371, biologio, geologio, teologio, arkeologio, sociologio. Each has an -o for the discipline, an -a for the adjective and an -isto for the person: ekologio, ekologia, ekologiisto. The scientific Esperanto article covers why this whole layer of the language is borrowed whole rather than built, and what that costs a learner.

Ecology is not the environment. Ekologio is a science. Medio at 1,687 is the environment - the surroundings themselves - and the green movement's own word is medioprotektado, environmental protection, or the adjective medi- in compounds. Saying ekologio when you mean medio is the same slip as saying "ecology" for "the environment" in English: everybody understands you, and a biologist winces.