Human Ecology Research Paper

1. Interpretations Of Ecology

Interpretations of the concept and substance of ecology differ according to the unique vantage points provided by independent scholarly traditions.

1.1 The Biological Interpretation

Ecology was originally given a biological interpretation in 1866 when Ernst Haeckel defined the science in accord with the work of Darwin, who had attempted to explain evolution in terms of the adaptations of organisms to the biotic and abiotic features of their environments. A generation later another foundation concept appeared: since evolutionary studies indicated there was an ecology of living organisms before humans evolved, and humans themselves are living organisms, there must therefore be a human ecology. On the biological interpretation, humans are part and parcel of the natural world, and are subject to the same biophysical dynamics that govern the organization of other living communities. For most of the twentieth century, however, although gradually shifting in the last couple of decades, biologists took only a passing interest in the scientific study of the ecology of humans per se.

1.2 The Metaphorical Interpretation

Social scientists, by contrast, were quick to seize on the idea of a human ecology with independent investigations begun in the 1920s, in India, by Radhakamal Mukerjee, who followed the biological interpretation, and in the USA by Robert Park, whose students did not. Aware of theories of community succession that their biological colleagues were then developing for natural communities, in which society was used as a metaphor to understand natural organization, some early US sociologists came to use nature as a metaphor to understand social organization. Setting aside the rhetorical uses of ‘ecology’ as a synonym for ‘contextual’ or ‘environmental,’ two variants of metaphorical interpretation can now be found in social science. The first applies bioecological concepts to the study of human communities per se, reasoning by analogy. Here, institutional or organizational settings are taken as contexts or environments for humans within their groups, populations, or societies, which are supposed to be organized parallel to natural communities. This variant generally overlooks the fact that natural communities contain multiple species and humans are a single species, preferring to finesse this by elaborating biological species and evolutionary analogies for societal divisions of labor. The second variant, discussed in Sect. 2.3, treats ecological knowledge as a social construct. Left unaccounted for in the metaphorical interpretation are biological connections between human societies and other natural systems. The metaphorical interpretation is a blueprint for the study of the internal workings of society through the adaptations of its populations or groups by means of their social organizations and shared cultural knowledge.

1.3 The Ideological Interpretation

With the reawakening of the modern environmental movement worldwide and its growth in the last decades of the twentieth century, an ideological interpretation of ecology has appeared. In this, the biological and metaphorical interpretations of ecology are freely interwoven and supplemented with value judgments gauged against standards supposedly congruent with ecological science. Some versions of the ideological interpretation use nature as an ideal to evaluate and reform social and political organization, economic practice, and personal conduct, while others try to frame environmental ethics so as to integrate ecological science with politics, economics, philosophy, education and various religions and cultures. The ideological interpretation is neither monolithic nor uniform, but its advocates generally fall to the left of ideological spectra. The common thread is that ecology is more than science or metaphor: It is a world view with ethical implications for personal, cultural, and institutional change (see, for example, Evernden 1992, Oelshlaeger 1994, Orr 1992).

2. Theory Frames For Human Ecology

The multifarious research traditions of human ecology may be understood in terms of the different theory frames they have employed, which reflect their re• spective interpretations of ecology. Different theory frames address different problematics.

2.1 The Evolutionary Theory Frame

The evolutionary theory frame assumes that ecological forces act on genetic and cultural variation among individuals and populations so as to effect a selective survival and reproduction. Using this assumption, neo-Darwinian principles of natural selection are applied to understand how individuals adapt to their natural environments, how different social species reflect common principles of social organization in response to ecological contingencies, and how populations and cultures are affected by pathogenic disease.

Individual behavior and social organization are classic problematics in social science. The application of evolutionary theory attempts to provide a fuller explanation of these. One strand of theory develops a human evolutionary ecology patterned on the be• havioral and evolutionary ecology of the biological sciences. In this, an adaptive design is assumed to be the product of the elemental behavior of individuals, such as foraging, territorial defense, time allocation and mate selection, all of which are presumed to satisfy economic cost-benefit principles (Smith and Winterhalder 1992). It has yet to be demonstrated whether neo-Darwinian evolutionary-economic models have application beyond the case of hunter-gatherers. Because organic traits (such as brain size, bipedalism, and vocal chords) underlie cultural capabilities, and culture is understood as a human adaptation, some evolutionary models assume the coevolution of biological and cultural traits in ecological context (Boyd and Richerson 1985, Durham 1991). Another strand of theory focuses on problematics of social organization among different species, with a view to discovering common principles but without presuming that the properties of social organization can be reduced to the summed behavior of individuals. In addition to comparisons with social primates, a research tradition oflong standing, Machalek’s (1999) transpecific sociology enables the comparison with humans of the demographic constraints, division of labor, and homeostatic mechanisms that appear in colonies of social insects, and of common strategies of environmental exploitation across social species.

Problematics of epidemiology, ancient, and contemporary, fall within an evolutionary theory frame inasmuch as most scholars consider pathogens to be the principle agents of natural selection operating on humans since sedentary lifestyles were adopted 10,000-12,000 years ago. The most startling and horrible example of the human ecology of disease is the cultural and demographic extirpation of untold millions of native Americans in times of post-Columbian exploration, due to epidemic pathogens imported by Europeans and their African slaves, and from which the tribes had no inherited or acquired immunities. In modern times, medical authorities are again sounding alarms about the development and spread of epidemic pathogens, old and new, because normal genetic mutations eventually produce drug-resistant variants of old as well as new, and now dangerous, variants of formerly benign organisms. Since microbic pathogens are part of the living environment of all humans, human culture and society have to adapt to ever-changing conditions of pathogenic disease just as pathogens adapt to humans-an inherently ecological condition. The incidence of pathogenic diseases is known to be affected by agricultural practices, dietary customs, migration pat• terns, population densities, climate alteration, cultural hygiene practices, lack of potable water, sexual mores, modern transportation that transcends normal en• vironmental barriers, and technological methods of intervention (see Ewald 1994, Kipple 1997).

Intervention methods typically disrupt population equilibria that might normally exist between pathogens and humans, thus preventing natural environmental controls from exerting themselves. Instead of stabilizing natural environments, technology implemented through the social organization of medicine and public health rather attempts to control pathogens so as to stabilize their relationship to humans. This method in itself, by intervening to change natural biota, provides a stimulus for microbic evolutionary adaptation. The general principle is that changed environments bring changed frequencies of microbic pathogens, human intentions notwithstanding. Some scholars (Mascie-Taylor 1993)have tended to conceive human ecology entirely in these epidemiological terms, however, this has not been predominant.

2.2 The Environmental Theory Frame

The environmental theory frame dominates modern research traditions of human ecology. It too presumes a biological interpretation of ecology, but in some cases substantially supplemented by considerations of social science targeted to problematics of subsistence and sustainability.

Anthropologists and geographers have a long tradition of investigating how human behavior, culture, traditions, settlements, built environments, spatial location, territory, and humans’ sense of place are affected by efforts to procure subsistence from natural-typically regional-environments. Research programs investigating cultural ecology, ecological anthropology, environmental geography, and environmental history consistently demonstrate how the development of culture and society vary with settlement patterns, technology and means of material resource acquisition, and how natural environments are modified by sociocultural variations in subsistence practices. A cultural materialism, which viewedculture and its symbolism as epiphenomenal, was implicit or explicit in many of these classic approaches, as was a dualistic construal of nature and culture. Modern approaches, especially political ecology, are different (see Biersack 1999, Scoones 1999).They focus on the interaction of spatial and temporal environmental dynamics with people situated in political, social, institutional, and cultural context, and emphasize the effects of human agency within the push-pull parameters of social, economic and political inequalities, on the one hand, and local or regional environmental transformations, on the other. Political ecology conceives human-environment interactions as mutual, thus linking human ecology to political economy and crossing from problematics of subsistence to those of sustainability.

No problematic has so dominated modern environ• mental discourse as the question of limits to growth, specifically,whether industrialism is sustainable into the indefinite future as it is adopted round the world. Biologists began the debate in the 1960sby importing from population ecologyconcepts of carrying capacity limits, and they averred that cascading world population growth augured for environmental catastrophe. Some social scientists amplified this neo-Malthusian argument, noting that industrialism is not a population but a way of life, one which produces too much consumption not just too many consumers.

Attentive to anthropogenic environmental degradation (aquifer depletion, biodiversity loss, deforestation, ozone depletion, global warming, etc.), the new social science tradition of examining environmental interfaces with human production and reproduction is now secure with the appearance of numerous textbooks and treatises on environmental sociology, environmental psychology, and ecological economics (see Costanza et al. 1997, Harper 1996). These specialties tend to conceive human-environment interactions within the existing theory traditions of their established disciplines. Recently, ominous neo-Malthusian analyses have been challenged by more optimistic theories of ecological modernization (Spaargaren and Mol 1992).

Theory aside, problematics of sustainability are routinely encountered as matters of practice in the concerted effort to promote sustainable development in economically less secure nations of the world. Specifically promoted by the United Nations, sustainable development is taken to mean eliminating world poverty while not compromising local environmental stabilities (Brundtland Commission 1987). In fact, sustainable development as practiced has promoted the transfer of industrial technology to promote economic growth. Where the ideal has succeeded, and by consensus it has not much, in effect sustainable development programs have promoted further industrialization-thus rekindling the question of the long term sustainability of human-environment interactions as local, regional, and global environ• mental degradation compounds, interactively cascading from industrialism’s increased energy capture and waste disposal. The concern over environmental degradation directs the problematic of sustainability, which currently is targeted more towards local than toward global applications.

2.3 The Analogic-Symbolic Theory Frame

The analogic-symbolic theory frame works with a metaphorical interpretation of ecology, with different variants selectively emphasizing analogies or symbolic constructs as central to theory development. Generally speaking, the theory frame takes biological ecology just seriously enough to borrow some of its content (sometimes merely its words) so that nature can serve as a metaphor to understand society, thus advancing social science. In the classic sociological tradition, ‘environment’ usually had no biological referent, and neither does ‘community’ or ‘ecosystem,’ which are favorite analogs in modern sociological human ecology. As noted earlier, US sociology provided the first sustained research tradition of human ecology, something of an urban geography, concerned as it was with spatial relations in cities, that beginning in mid-twentieth century the influential Amos Hawley gradually transformed into an ecological demography. In this, territorially circumscribed human populations are characterized by technologically based organizational adaptations in the sustenance producing activities of populations within their social, political, and economic environments. These orienting concepts have not changed in more than a generation (see Micklin and Posten 1998). They reflect a social and demographic, but not a biological, materialism in the conception of purely sociological problematics. Direct descendants, such as organizational ecology, and distant cousins, such as family ecology, likewise depend on theoretical analogies to biological phenomena in order to relate social entities to social environments.

A wholly independent and more recent set of problematics relating society and environment applies a social constructionist interpretation to environmental social science, counterweighting its biological interpretation. In this, natural environments become material for the analysis of symbolic meanings and understandings by which social groups perceive and define environmental events as real and respond to them collectively. One-to-one theory analogs with bioecology are not sought, but the metaphorical interpretation of ecology runs deep because symbolized realities are accorded primacy over biophysical realities. Natural environments are taken to have significanceonly as people socially construct, perceive, define, and negotiate them as real, and make con• testable claims about them. The problematics address social responses to natural environments insofar as environmental issues are defined through shared meanings (Hannigan 199 5).

Theory variants that are exclusively analogic or symbolic usually seek to separate not integrate human ecology and bioecology, so as to strengthen social science per se. Implicitly, sometimes explicitly, many variants reflect the species prejudice that nonhuman organisms represent ‘lower’ forms of life and the cultural prejudice that Western industrialism represents the ‘highest’ form of social progress. These two prejudices are explicitly criticized in many variants of the interactive theory frame.

2.4 The Interactive Theory Frame

The interactive theory frame for human ecology is the newest, most diverse and most numerous in its scholarly problematics. Its growing traditions may only be listed here. They include assorted environ• mental ethics, such as deep ecology, the land ethic, and animal rights; assorted spiritual ecologies, including native US land wisdom, Christian-based ecological process theology, and strains of Buddhist, Taoist, and Jainist thought; some applications of complexity theory for evolving interactive systems; Gaian ecology; politically grounded approaches, such as social ecology and green Marxism; ecofeminism; and more (see, for example, Bookchin 1995, Benton 1996, Callicott 1994, Tucker and Grim 1993, Warren 1996).

All of these assume some variant of the ideological interpretation of ecology, reflecting a wish to integrate ecological knowledge with selected priorities in human affairs. Some are based in science, while others are based in philosophy, politics, religion, or tradition, but almost none maintains a hard and fast distinction between objective and subjective knowledge. Almost all take a holistic rather than reductionistic approach to their problematics, in which the traditional boundaries of scientific disciplines, and even the classic boundaries between science and the humanities, are regarded as anachronistic. Most reject any natureculture dualism, and many disavow anthropocentrism. Multiple distinct problematics are defined, depending on the point of view. The overriding theme construes human ecology as knowledge of the complex interactive connections that integrate human activities with environmental contexts. The overall result is an eclectic combination of biological, environmental, moral, and even esthetic, approaches to human ecology.

3. Conclusion

Human ecological scholarship on the biological, environmental, and ideological interpretations, with their derivative problematics, is now being increasingly writ into the curricula of educational institutions. Calls for ‘green education’ are being implemented internationally, programs in environ• mental science that include a human component are expanding, and one US undergraduate institution of higher learning, the College of the Atlantic, devotes its curriculum entirely to human ecology. While still stymied by the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines, and sometimes by parochial scholarship, human ecology-the subject, not the name-is experiencing dynamic growth, as befits the coming century of the environment.

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