Ecocide is the slow or sudden killing of a place as a living system — not one tree, but a large area of land, with its plants, animals, soil and water, worn down or wiped out by what people do. Cutting a whole forest, spraying pesticides until little can live, dumping waste, or, in the first famous use of the word, spraying chemicals in war: that is the scale it points to. The ending -cide is the same piece you hear in suicide and homicide; it means “killing.” So the word is built to sound as serious as killing a person, but the “victim” is the living world. People who campaign for the earth use it on purpose, because they want destroying nature to be treated as a crime, not just “bad luck” or “development.” Lawyers and countries are still arguing about whether it should be an official crime with that name. It is a strong, formal, campaigning word, not a word for a messy bedroom or a small garden mistake.

生態滅絕（社運或法律場合也說生態滅絕罪。-cide 是「殺」，比「破壞環境」重得多）