Human ecology - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Human ecology is the subdiscipline of ecology

Ecology

Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...

that focuses on human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

s. More broadly, it is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of the relationship between human

Human

Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

s and their natural

Natural environment

The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth or some region thereof. It is an environment that encompasses the interaction of all living species....

, social

Social environment

The social environment of an individual, also called social context or milieu, is the culture that s/he was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom the person interacts....

, and built environment

Built environment

The term built environment refers to the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from personal shelter and buildings to neighborhoods and cities that can often include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks.The built...

s. The term 'human ecology' first appeared in a sociological study in 1921 and at times has been equated with geography

Geography

Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

. The scientific philosophy of human ecology has a diffuse history with advancements in geography

Geography

, sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

, psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

, anthropology

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, zoology

Zoology

Zoology |zoölogy]]), is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct...

, and natural ecology

Ecology

Historical development

A less formal history of ecology can be traced to the Greeks and a lengthy list of developments in natural history science

Natural history

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...

. Ecology also has notably developed in other cultures. Traditional knowledge, as it is called, includes the human propensity for intuitive knowledge, intelligent relations, understanding, and for passing on information about the natural world and the human experience. The term ecology

Ecology

was coined by Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel

The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1920, in the book "The First World War 1914-1918" by Charles à Court Repington, that the term "First World War" was used as the official name for the conflict.-Research:...

in 1866 and defined by direct reference to the economy of nature. Like the contemporaries of his time, Haeckel adopted the terminology of Carl Linnaeus who published Specimen academicum de oeconomia naturae in 1749. Linnaeus presented his ideas on the balance of nature

Balance of nature

The balance of nature is a theory that says that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium , which is to say that a small change in some particular parameter will be corrected by some negative feedback that will bring the parameter back to its original "point of balance" with the rest...

which highlighted the importance of ecological functions (ecosystem services

Ecosystem services

Humankind benefits from a multitude of resources and processes that are supplied by natural ecosystems. Collectively, these benefits are known as ecosystem services and include products like clean drinking water and processes such as the decomposition of wastes...

or natural capital

Natural capital

Natural capital is the extension of the economic notion of capital to goods and services relating to the natural environment. Natural capital is thus the stock of natural ecosystems that yields a flow of valuable ecosystem goods or services into the future...

in modern terms): "In exchange for performing its function satisfactorily, nature provided a species with the necessaries of life" In his publication, Linnaeus developed the science that included the economy and polis of nature; polis is the Greek root for a political community (originally based on the city-states), but in Linnaeus' time (and prior) police referred to the promotion of growth and maintenance of good social order in a community. Linnaeus was also the first to write about the close affinity between humans and primates. The work of Linnaeus influenced Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

and other scientists of his time who used Linnaeus' terminology (i.e., the economy and polis of nature) with direct implications on matters of human affairs, ecology

Ecology

, and economics

Ecological economics

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. Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....

has an important place in the history of human ecology. Spencer was influenced by and reciprocated his influence onto the works of Charles Darwin. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase survival of the fittest
Survival of the fittest
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase originating in evolutionary theory, as an alternative description of Natural selection. The phrase is today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended by its first two proponents: British polymath philosopher Herbert...

, he was an early founder of sociology where he developed the idea of society as an organism, and he created an early precedent for the socio-ecological approach that was the subsequent aim and link between sociology and human ecology.
Ecology is not just biological, but a human science as well. "Human ecology" made its first formal appearance in a sociological study in 1921. However, the history of human ecology has its strongest roots in geography and sociobiology departments of the late 19th century. In this context a major historical development or landmark that stimulated research into the ecological relations between humans and their urban environments was founded in George Perkins Marsh

George Perkins Marsh

George Perkins Marsh , an American diplomat and philologist, is considered by some to be America's first environmentalist, although "conservationist" would be more accurate...

's book "Man and Nature; or, physical geography as modified by human action

Man and Nature

Man and nature; or, Physical geography as modified by human action is a book written by George Perkins Marsh in 1864.It is one of the first works to document the effects of human action on the environment and it helped to launch the modern conservation movement. Marsh argued that ancient...

", which was published in 1864. Marsh was interested in the active agency of human-nature interactions (an early precursor to urban ecology

Urban ecology

Urban ecology is a subfield of ecology which deals with the interaction between organisms in an urban or urbanized community, and their interaction with that community. Urban ecologists study the trees, rivers, wildlife and open spaces found in cities to understand the extent of those resources and...

or human niche construction

Niche construction

Niche construction is the process in which an organism alters its own environment, often but not always in a manner that increases its chances of survival...

) in frequent reference to the economy of nature.

In 1894, an influential sociologist at the University of Chicago

Chicago school (sociology)

In sociology and later criminology, the Chicago School was the first major body of works emerging during the 1920s and 1930s specialising in urban sociology, and the research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago, now applied elsewhere...

named Albion W. Small, collaborated with sociologist George E. Vincent and published a "‘‘laboratory guide’’ to studying people in their ‘‘every-day occupations.’’" This was a guidebook that trained students of sociology how they could study society

Society

A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...

in a way that a natural historian

Natural history

would study birds. Their publication "explicitly included the relation of the social world to the material environment." Robert E. Park

Robert E. Park

Robert Ezra Park was an American urban sociologist, one of the main founders of the original Chicago School of sociology.-Life:...

and Ernest W. Burgess (also from the sociology department at the University of Chicago) published a 1921 book on "Introduction to the Science of Sociology" where the term human ecology was first used. Their student, Roderick McKenzie

Roderick McKenzie

Roderick McKenzie was a New Zealand Member of Parliament for Buller and Motueka, in the South Island.-Member of Parliament:...

helped solidify human ecology as a sub-discipline within the Chicago school. These authors emphasized the difference between human ecology and ecology in general by highlighting cultural evolution in human societies.

Human ecology has a fragmented academic history with developments spread throughout the scientific disciplines, including: geography

Geography

, anthropology

Anthropology

, sociology

Sociology

, zoology

Zoology

, and psychology

Psychology

. Some authors have argued that geography is human ecology. Much historical debate has hinged on the placement of humanity as part or as separate from nature.
In light of the branching debate of what constitutes human ecology, recent interdisciplinary researchers have sought a unifying scientific field they have titled coupled human and natural systems

Coupled human-environment system

Much as space and time came to be linked a century ago, so today’s scientists are exploring a variety of ways in which Earth and its humans are linked...

that "builds on but moves beyond previous work (e.g., human ecology, ecological anthropology, environmental geography)." Other fields or branches related to the historical development of human ecology as a discipline include cultural ecology

Cultural ecology

Cultural ecology studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment as well as the life-forms and ecosystems that support its lifeways . This may be carried out diachronically , or synchronically...

, urban ecology

Urban ecology

, and anthropological ecology.

Biological ecologists have traditionally been reluctant to study human ecology gravitating instead to the allure of wild nature

Biophilia Hypothesis

The biophilia hypothesis suggests that there is an instinctive bond between human beings and other living systems. Edward O. Wilson introduced and popularized the hypothesis in his book entitled Biophilia.- Love of living systems :...

. Human ecology has a history of focusing attention on humans’ impact on the biotic world. Paul Sears

Paul Sears

Paul Bigelow Sears was an American ecologist and writer. He was born in Bucyrus, Ohio. Sears attended Ohio Wesleyan University , the University of Nebraska at Lincoln , and the University of Chicago Paul Bigelow Sears (December 17, 1891-April 30, 1990) was an American ecologist and writer. He was...

was an influential ecologist in this respect who addressed the population explosion of humanity, global resource limits, pollution, and published a comprehensive account on human ecology as a discipline in 1954. "When we as a profession learn to diagnose the total landscape, not only as the basis of our culture, but as an expression of it, and to share our special knowledge as widely as we can, we need not fear that our work will be ignored or that our efforts will be unappreciated."

Niche of the Anthropocene

Changes to the Earth by human activities have been so great that a new geological epoch named the Anthropocene

Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a recent and informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems...

has been proposed. The human niche or ecological polis of human society, as it was known historically, has created entirely new arrangements of ecosystems as we convert matter into technology. Human ecology has created anthropogenic biomes (called anthromes). The habitats within these anthromes reach out through our road networks to create what has been called technoecosystems containing technosols

Technosols

A Technosol in the FAO World Reference Base for Soil Resources is a new type of soil that combines soils whose properties and pedogenesis are dominated by their technical origin...

. Technodiversity exists within these technoecosystems. In direct parallel to the concept of the ecosphere

Ecosphere

Ecosphere has several different meanings:* In ecology the term ecosphere can refer to the Earth's spheres, a planetary ecosystem consisting of the atmosphere, the geosphere , the hydrosphere, and the biosphere....

, human civilization has also created a technosphere

TechnoSphere

TechnoSphere was an online digital environment launched on September 1, 1995 and hosted on a computer at a UK university. TechnoSphere, created by and Gordon Selley, was a place where users from around the globe could create creatures and release them into the 3D environment, described by the...

. The way that the human species engineers or constructs technodiversity into the environment, threads back into the processes of cultural and biological evolution, including the human economy.

Ecosystem services

The ecosystems of planet Earth are coupled to human environments. Ecosystems regulate the global geophysical cycles of energy, climate, soil nutrients, and water that in turn support and grow natural capital

Natural capital

(including the environmental, physiological, cognitive, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of life). Ultimately, every manufactured product in human environments comes from natural systems. Ecosystems are considered common-pool resources because ecosystems do not exclude beneficiaries and they can be depleted or degraded. For example, green space

Green infrastructure

Green Infrastructure is a concept originating in the United States in the mid-1990s that highlights the importance of the natural environment in decisions about land use planning. In particular there is an emphasis on the "life support" functions provided by a network of natural ecosystems, with an...

within communities provides sustainable health services that reduces mortality and regulates the spread of vector borne disease. Research shows that people who are more engaged with regular access to natural areas have lower rates of diabetes, heart disease and psychological disorders. These ecological health services are regularly depleted through urban development projects that do not factor in the common-pool value of ecosystems.

The ecological commons delivers a diverse supply of community services that sustains the well-being of human society. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, released in 2005, is an international synthesis by over 1000 of the world's leading biological scientists that analyses the state of the Earth’s ecosystems and provides summaries and guidelines for decision-makers...

, an international UN initiative involving more than 1,360 experts worldwide, identifies four main ecosystem service types having 30 sub-categories stemming from natural capital. The ecological commons includes provisioning (e.g., food, raw materials, medicine, water supplies), regulating (e.g., climate, water, soil retention, flood retention), cultural (e.g., science and education, artistic, spiritual), and supporting (e.g., soil formation, nutrient cycling, water cycling) services.

Sixth mass extinction

Global assessments of biodiversity indicate that the current epoch, the Holocene (or Anthropocene) is a sixth mass extinction. Species loss is accelerating at 100–1000 times faster than average background rates in the fossil record. The field of conservation biology

Conservation biology

Conservation biology is the scientific study of the nature and status of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction...

involves ecologists that are researching, confronting, and searching for solutions to sustain the planet's ecosystems for future generations.

"Human activities are associated directly or indirectly with nearly every aspect of the current extinction spasm."

Nature is a resilient

Resilience (ecology)

In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and recovering quickly. Such perturbations and disturbances can include stochastic events such as fires, flooding, windstorms, insect population explosions, and human activities...

system. Ecosystems regenerate, withstand, and are forever adapting to fluctuating environments. Ecological resilience is an important conceptual framework in conservation management and it is defined as the preservation of biological relations in ecosystems that persevere and regenerate in response to disturbance over time. However, persistent, systematic, large and nonrandom disturbance caused by the niche constructing behavior of human beings, habitat conversion and land development, has pushed many of the Earth's ecosystems to the extent of their resilient thresholds. Three planetary thresholds have already been crossed, including 1) biodiversity loss, 2) climate change

Climate change

Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...

, and 3) nitrogen cycle

Nitrogen cycle

The nitrogen cycle is the process by which nitrogen is converted between its various chemical forms. This transformation can be carried out by both biological and non-biological processes. Important processes in the nitrogen cycle include fixation, mineralization, nitrification, and denitrification...

s. These biophysical systems are ecologically interrelated and naturally resilient, but human civilization has transitioned the planet to an Anthropocene

Anthropocene

epoch, where the threshold for planetary scale resilience has been crossed and the ecological state of the Earth is deteriorating rapidly to the detriment of humanity. The world's fisheries and oceans, for example, are facing dire challenges as the threat of global collapse appears imminent, with serious ramifications for the well-being of humanity; while the Anthropocene is yet to be classified as an official epoch, current evidence suggest that "an epoch-scale boundary has been crossed within the last two centuries." The ecology of the planet is further threatened by global warming, but investments in nature conservation can provide a regulatory feedback to store and regulate carbon and other greenhouse gases.

Ecological footprint

In 1992, William Rees developed the ecological footprint

Ecological footprint

The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It is a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planet's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to...

concept. The ecological footprint and its close analog the water footprint

Water footprint

The water footprint of an individual, community or business is defined as the total volume of freshwater used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business. Water use is measured in water volume consumed and/or polluted per unit of time. A...

has become a popular way of accounting for the level of impact that human society is imparting on the Earth's ecosystems. All indications are that the human enterprise is unsustainable as the footprint of society is placing too much stress on the ecology of the planet. The WWF 2008 living planet report and other researchers report that human civilization has exceeded the bio-regenerative capacity of the planet. This means that the footprint of human consumption is extracting more natural resources than can be replenished by ecosystems around the world.

Ecological economics

is an economic science

Economics

Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...

that extends its methods of valuation onto nature in an effort to address the inequity between market growth and biodiversity loss. Natural capital is the stock of materials or information stored in biodiversity that generates services that can enhance the welfare of communities. Population losses are the more sensitive indicator of natural capital than are species extinction in the accounting of ecosystem services. The prospect for recovery in the economic crisis of nature is grim. Populations, such as local ponds and patches of forest are being cleared away and lost at rates that exceed species extinctions. The mainstream growth-based economic system adopted by governments worldwide does not include a price or markets for natural capital. This type of economic system places further ecological debt onto future generations.
Human societies are increasingly being placed under stress as the ecological commons

Common-pool resource

In economics, a common-pool resource , also called a common property resource, is a type of good consisting of a natural or human-made resource system , whose size or characteristics makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use...

is diminished through an accounting system that has incorrectly assumed "... that nature is a fixed, indestructible capital asset." The current wave of threats, including massive extinction rates and concurrent loss of natural capital to the detriment of human society, is happening rapidly. This is called a biodiversity crisis, because 50% of the worlds species are predicted to go extinct within the next 50 years. Conventional monetary analyses are unable to detect or deal with these sorts of ecological problems. Multiple global ecological economic initiatives are being promoted to solve this problem. For example, governments of the G8

The Group of Eight is a forum, created by France in 1975, for the governments of seven major economies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 1997, the group added Russia, thus becoming the G8...

met in 2007 and set forth The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) initiative:

In a global study we will initiate the process of analyzing the global economic benefit of biological diversity, the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the failure to take protective measures versus the costs of effective conservation.

The work of Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Ewart Boulding was an economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was...

is notable for building on the integration between ecology and its economic origins. Boulding drew parallels between ecology and economics, most generally in that they are both studies of individuals as members of a system, and indicated that the “household of man” and the “household of nature” could somehow be integrated to create a perspective of greater value.

Interdisciplinary approaches

Human ecology expands functionalism from ecology to the human mind. People's perception of a complex world is a function of their ability to be able to comprehend beyond the immediate, both in time and in space. This concept manifested in the popular slogan promoting sustainability: "think global, act local." Moreover, people's conception of community stems from not only their physical location but their mental and emotional connections and varies from "community as place, community as way of life, or community of collective action."

In these early years, human ecology was still deeply enmeshed in its respective disciplines: geography

Geography

, sociology

Sociology

, anthropology

Anthropology

, psychology

Psychology

, and economics

Economics

. Scholars through the 1970s until present have called for a greater integration between all of the scattered disciplines that has each established formal ecological research.

In art

While some of the early writers considered how art fit into a human ecology, it was Sears who posed the idea that in the long run human ecology will in fact look more like art. Bill Carpenter (1986) calls human ecology the "possibility of an aesthetic science," renewing dialogue about how art fits into a human ecological perspective. According to Carpenter, human ecology as an aesthetic science counters the disciplinary fragmentation of knowledge by examining human consciousness.

In education

While the reputation of human ecology in institutions of higher learning is growing, there is no human ecology at the primary and secondary education levels. Educational theorist Sir Ken Robinson has called for diversification of education to promote creativity in academic and non-academic (i.e.- educate their “whole being”) activities to implement a “new conception of human ecology”.

Bioregionalism and urban ecology

In the late 1960s, ecological concepts started to become integrated into the applied fields, namely architecture

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

, landscape architecture

Landscape architecture

Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor and public spaces to achieve environmental, socio-behavioral, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic investigation of existing social, ecological, and geological conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of interventions...

, and planning

Planning

Planning in organizations and public policy is both the organizational process of creating and maintaining a plan; and the psychological process of thinking about the activities required to create a desired goal on some scale. As such, it is a fundamental property of intelligent behavior...

. Ian McHarg

Ian McHarg

Ian L. McHarg was born in Clydebank, Scotland and became a landscape architect and a renowned writer on regional planning using natural systems. He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. His 1969 book Design with Nature...

called for a future when all planning would be “human ecological planning” by default, always bound up in humans’ relationships with their environments. He emphasized local, place-based planning that takes into consideration all the “layers” of information from geology

Geology

Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...

to botany

Botany

Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...

to zoology

Zoology

to cultural history

Cultural history

The term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural...

. Proponents of the new urbanism

New urbanism

New Urbanism is an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually continued to reform many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use...

movement, like James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere , a history of American suburbia and urban development, and the more recent The Long Emergency , where he argues that declining oil production is likely...

and Andres Duany

Andrés Duany

Andrés Duany is an American architect and urban planner.Duany was born in New York City but grew up in Cuba until 1960. He attended The Choate School and received his undergraduate degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton University...

, have embraced the term human ecology as way to describe the problem of—and prescribe the solutions for—the landscapes and lifestyles of an automobile oriented society. Duany has called the human ecology movement to be "the agenda for the years ahead." While McHargian planning is still widely respected, the landscape urbanism

Landscape urbanism

Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a theory in the last fifteen years...

movement seeks a new understanding between human and environment relations. Among these theorists is Frederich Steiner, who published Human Ecology: Following Nature's Lead in 2002 which focuses on the relationships among landscape, culture, and planning. The work highlights the beauty of scientific inquiry by revealing those purely human dimensions which underlie our concepts of ecology. While Steiner discusses specific ecological settings, such as cityscapes and waterscapes, and the relationships between socio-cultural and environmental regions, he also takes a diverse approach to ecology----considering even the unique synthesis between ecology and political geography. Deiter Steiner's 2003 Human Ecology: Fragments of Anti-fragmentary view of the world is an important expose of recent trends in human ecology. Part literature review, the book is divided into four sections: "human ecology", "the implicit and the explicit", "structuration", and "the regional dimension". Much of the work stresses the need for transciplinarity, antidualism, and wholeness of perspective.

Recent Trends

While theoretical discussions continue, research published in [Human Ecology Review] suggests that recent discourse has shifted toward applying principles of human ecology. Some of these applications focus instead on addressing problems that cross disciplinary boundaries or transcend those boundaries altogether. Scholarship has increasingly tended away from Young's idea of a "unified theory" of human ecological knowledge—that human ecology may emerge as its own discipline—and more toward the pluralism best espoused by Paul Shepard: that human ecology is healthiest when "running out in all directions.". But human ecology is neither anti-discipline nor anti-theory, rather it is the ongoing attempt to formulate, synthesize, and apply theory to bridge the widening schism between man and nature. This new human ecology emphasizes complexity over reductionism

Reductionism

Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...

, focuses on changes over stable states, and expands ecological concepts beyond plants and animals to include people.

There is wide agreement that human ecology seeks to integrate diverse perspectives. The growing popularity of liberal arts colleges have increased understanding and recognition of an interdisciplinary college education in the United States and thus human ecology—but mostly in academic circles. Paul Sears was an early proponent of applying human ecology. He saw the vast “explosion” of problems humans were creating for the environment and reminded us that “what is important is the work to be done rather than the label."

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Historical development

Niche of the Anthropocene

Ecosystem services

Sixth mass extinction

Ecological footprint

Ecological economics

Interdisciplinary approaches

In art

In education

Bioregionalism and urban ecology

Recent Trends

Further reading

External links