Human ecology

Human ecology may be defined as the branch of knowledge concerned with relationships between human beings and their environments. Among the disciplines contributing seminal work in this field are sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, psychology, political science, philosophy, and the arts. Applied human ecology emerges in engineering, planning, architecture, landscape architecture, conservation , and public health. Human ecology, then, is an interdisciplinary study which applies the principles and concepts of ecology to human problems and the human condition. The notion of interaction—between human beings and the environment and between human beings—is fundamental to human ecology, as it is to biological ecology.

Human ecology as an academic inquiry has disciplinary roots extending back as far as the 1920s. However, much work in the decades prior to the 1970s was narrowly drawn and was often carried out by a few individuals whose intellectual legacy remained isolated from the mainstream of their disciplines. The work done in sociology offers an exception to the latter (but not the former) rule; sociological human ecology is traced to the Chicago school and the intellectual lineage of Robert Ezra Park, his student Roderick D. Mackenzie, and Mackenzie's student Amos Hawley. Through the influence of these men and their school, human ecology, for a time, was narrowly identified with a sociological analysis of spatial patterns in urban settings (although broader questions were sometimes contemplated).

Comprehensive treatment of human ecology is first found in the work of Gerald L. Young, who pioneered the study of human ecology as an interdisciplinary field and as a conceptual framework. Young's definitive framework is founded upon four central themes. The first of these is interaction, and the other three are developed from it: levels of organization, functionalism (part-whole relationships), and holism. These four basic concepts form the foundation for a series of field derivatives (niche , community, and ecosystem ) and consequent notions (institutions, proxemics, alienation, ethics, world community, and stress/capacitance). Young's emphasis on linkages and process set his approach apart from other synthetic attempts in human ecology, which were largely cumbersome classificatory schemata. These were subject to harsh criticism because they tended to embrace virtually all knowledge, resolve themselves into superficial lists and mnemonic "building blocks," and had little applicability to real-world problems.

Generally, comprehensive treatment of human ecology is more advanced in Europe than it is in the United States. A comprehensive approach to human ecology as an interdisciplinary field and conceptual framework gathered momentum in several independent centers during the 1970s and 1980s. Among these have been several college and university programs and research centers, including those at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, and, in the United States, at Rutgers University and the University of California at Davis. Interdisciplinary programs at the undergraduate level were first offered in 1972 by the College of the Atlantic (Maine) and The Evergreen State College (Washington). The Commonwealth Human Ecology Council in the United Kingdom, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences' Commission on Human Ecology, the Centre for Human Ecology at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Human Ecology in California, and professional societies and organizations in Europe and the United States have been other centers of development for the field.

Dr. Thomas Dietz, President of the Society for Human Ecology, defined some of the priority research problems which human ecology addresses in recent testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Environment and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Environmental Research. Among these, Dietz listed global change, values, post-hoc evaluation, and science and conflict in environmental policy . Other human ecologists would include in the list such items as commons problems, carrying capacity , sustainable development , human health, ecological economics, problems of resource use and distribution, and family systems. Problems of epistemology or cognition such as environmental perception, consciousness, or paradigm change also receive attention.

Our Common Future, the report of the United Nation's World Commission on Environment and Development of 1987, has stimulated a new phase in the development of human ecology. A host of new programs, plans, conferences and agendas have been put forth, primarily to address phenomena of global change and the challenge of sustainable development. These include the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative published by the Ecological Society of America in 1991 and extended internationally; the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development; the proposed new United States National Institutes for the Environment; the Man and the Biosphere Program's Human-Dominated Systems Program; the report of the National Research Council Committee on Human Dimensions of Global Change and the associated National Science Foundation's Human Dimensions of Global Change Program; and green plans published by the governments of Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Austria. All of these programs call for an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to complex problems of human-environmental relationships. The next challenge for human ecology will be to digest and steer these new efforts and to identify the perspectives and tools they supply.

[Jeremy Pratt ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Jungen, B. "Integration of Knowledge in Human Ecology." In Human Ecology: A Gathering of Perspectives, edited by R. J. Borden, et al., Selected papers from the First International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology, 1986.
———. Origins of Human Ecology. Stroudsberg, PA: Hutchinson & Ross, 1983.

PERIODICALS

Young, G. L. "Human Ecology As An Interdisciplinary Concept: A Critical Inquiry." Advances in Ecological Research 8 (1974): 1–105.
———. "Conceptual Framework For An Interdisciplinary Human Ecology." Acta Oecologiae Hominis 1 (1989): 1–136.