“Human Ecology is the study of interactions between human society and nature. Despite a rocky start in the 1920s, when it got muddled up with some dodgy sociology, it now enjoys a common syllabus at a network of universities in Europe, Scandinavia and USA.
Even Australia has, at last, come on board, with the Australian National University offering a course in Human Ecology.
Trying to ‘save nature’ by ignoring human needs is plain silly, and won’t work. Humans are at the core of the problem, and are also the solution.
Despite pretentious claims by some biologists, hoping to be eco-gurus, ecology is not a branch of biology. Biology is a root discipline of ecology, together with meteorology, climatology, chemistry, mathematics, sociology, politics, law, psychology, history etc.
How about calling those who want to find real solutions, involving both nature and society, Human Ecologists? I think H.G. Wells made that suggestion many years ago.
I would vote for a political party which made Human Ecology a main plank in its policy.“
This comment was made by a regular commentator at this blog who uses the pen name ‘Davey Gam Esq’. I think it is correct to note that he is an ecologist from WA? The comment was originally made at the long thread following my recent blog post titled ‘Join the Revolution’ which is about the first Australian Environment Foundation Conference in Brisbane on 23rd September.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Sorry foresters, I note from the ANU website that you have not been subsumed. I thought you were a few years ago. It’s time somebody subsumed you. Any’ow, you are in the same school as the Human Ecologists. That alone should raise your game.
Davey,
I was trained as a biologist come botanist/entomologist. That training began with lots of dissecting and drawing. It was very reductionist with an emphasis on observation and correct recording of what was observed. I loved it.
But it doesn’t seem to have much in common with what ‘environmental scientists’ now learn?
Your thoughts on ‘environmental science’? Where does it fit in?
The prefix eco is from the Latin word ecos meaning home and the suffix logy denotes a field of study so when they say “human eco logy” just what the heck do they mean?
Pull apart “environmentalism” and you have “environ” (surround) and “mentalism” (pertaining to mind and mental state of the individual)…does make you wonder
Human ecologists they’d be the ones responsible for the oh so successful lock it up and throw away the key conservation that has been sooo successful in preserving our national parks from wildfires, feral animals and weed invasion………
Given the way the terms “human” and “ecology” are currently defined, isn’t “human ecology” an oxymoron? If something is sufficiently humanized to be called “human,” then it’s obviously too completely wrecked and un-natural to be called an “ecology.” Conversely, anything natural enough to be called an “ecology” has nothing to do with humans, except perhaps in a role as observers or fund-raisers.
Barrows, H.H. 1923. ‘Geography as human ecology’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 12 (1): 1-14
This might clear up some of the confusion. Those of you who hope to hang some political agenda on it (whichever way you swing) might be disappointed.
Rog,
Human Ecology means study of the human ‘home’, or ‘milieu’ as it is known in Europe. The milieu is both natural and social. So Human Ecologists study how we humans survive and thrive, or not, as the case may be. Isn’t that fairly useful?
Sorry to differ, ABC, but the people who lock up National Parks are those who think only nature matters. They are wrong, of course, because humans do have a big effect on those areas, by management, or withdrawal of management. I agree absolutely that current National Park fire policy is stupid. By excluding human management, such as track maintenance and controlled burning, the parks will inevitably be ravaged by uncontrollable big fires every decade or so. I don’t know the figures for the eastern states, but from lightning frequency West Australian National Parks are likely to burn fiercely every decade or so. That’s ignoring vandalism and accidental ignitions. Human Ecologists, considering both history and anthropology, would say that human intervention is essential, given that Aborigines intervened in natural systems by fire-stick farming for thousands of years.
Schiller, I have always enjoyed your contributions. However, in my lexicon an ecosystem is simply a set of interacting organisms and processes. It can be natural, or created by humans, or a bit of each. Law, politics and markets are systems, and form important parts of the human milieu, or ecosystem. Look up Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of a ‘noosphere’. I agree the Greek ‘oikos’ is often superfluous, as is the Greek prefix ‘bios’, and the suffix ‘logy’. It annoys the hell out of me when people say ‘methodology’, meaning simply ‘method’.
Finally, Rog, the word ‘environmentalism’ perturbs me too. It has become an ugly mixture of dogma, dodgy science, half truths, religious mythology, and political opportunism, all whilst laying claim to the moral high ground. Yeggggh! Wait a mo’, didn’t Walter Starck say something like that?
P.S. Kruger National Park, on the advice of ‘ecologists’ (botanists?) tried leaving it to lightning. They found out the hard way in 2001, with twenty people killed, plus elephants, rhino etc. They have gone back to human intervention by controlled burning. The local African villagers could have told them that.
Jen,
I think ‘environmental science’ could just as well be simply ‘science’. Curtin University has a school of ‘Environmental Biology’. Is there any other kind of biology?
Hi Davey,
I enjoy your post. ” Is there any other kind of biology?”.
I have studied cellular biology in med school. Don’t recall so much, think it was much about genetics.
Davey, Re Kruger National Park – how the wheel turns and then turns again!
When I visited researchers at Kruger National Park about 1987 the aim was to burn the park about every 3 years, with some argument that this may have been a bit too often. As an aside, the fire research program then included about 1500ha of about 5ha plots in 3 reps. They must have got a very different set of advisers to have gone for “leave it to nature.”
Davey – we can argue about definitions or worthiness of the “science” involved but I think the concept of environmental science probably tries to focus on concepts of sustainability, ecological indicators, pollution indicators and the like. So like cellular biology you would expect a different degree of specialisation on the subject matter. Or paeleo-biology for that matter.
In any case if I did a general biology course I would expect to see some differences.
I note the Information Technologists are now using the word “ecosystem” in describing complex IT environments. I’m not sure I like it but ..
And optimisation mathematics uses “genetic algorithms” etc.
And what happened to the term agroecosystem??
For my part the word ecology starts to be out of place when you have human systems that require huge amounts of generated energy or the products of generated energy to sustain them. Without inputs of fossil fuels cropped lands start to revert to weeds, grasses and then natural plants etc. Cities don’t function well without engineered water supplies, sewerage, waste disposal, transport etc. So is this an “ecology” – I call it a “technology”.
Does this acknowledgment, mean that the meaning of fauna, under Victorias Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act, which states that fauna means ‘any animal-life which is indigenous to Victoria whether vertebrate or invertebrate and in any stage of biological development and includes fish and any other living thing generally classified as fauna but does not include humans’, is discriminatory and wrong. Should humans be included as fauna?
If not, why not or if they got in wrong, how?
This ‘Human Ecology’ term is a fairly global in meaning and could encompass economics, sociology, meteorology – any and all of the sciences.
Wiki (as usual) has a view
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_ecology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalism
You can explain any rational, consistent discipline in terms of another rational, consistent discipline. Mathematics can be reduced to ethics. Hence the notion of the “right” answer. Information can be explained with thermodynamics. Hence the notion of “noise.”
Human? Ecology? It’s all semantics and semiotics; it’s mythopoesis. If a human sees it and evaluates it, it’s anthropocentric. The probabilities of biodiversity collapse with human observation–as Heisenberg would likely admit, with some enthusiasm from Jung.
“Human ecology” is an oxymoron, just like “ecotourism.” An “untouched wilderness” is just that–it is the post-modern, unknowable god of mythology remade.
Schiller,
I don’t think mathematics is ethics. Most would, by logical thinking, agree it is a branch of logic. I believe philosophers generally agree that ethics and logic are quite distinct branches of philosophy. In Kantian terms, logic is phenomenal, and ethics noumenal. Some terrible muddles occur when people try to be logical about right and wrong. Who is strictly logically right or wrong in the Middle East at the moment? Should stem cell research go ahead? All we can rely on is our gut feeling of right and wrong. The light within, perhaps. Noumenal? God only knows…
P.S. I am not a philosopher. Perhaps we have one or two amongst our readers who may give some insights. No logical positivists please!
Ian,
There is web information on fire history at Kruger NP. Good article by Govender, amongst others. In general, the ‘back to nature’ brigade came a gutser, as they have, and will continue to do here. You can deceive some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but not all of the people all the time (A. Hitler, well known Human Ecologist?).
Luke and Ann, you both make good points. I won’t be dogmatic. It is worth debating. But I wonder how much money Curtin Uni could save in printer’s ink by simply using ‘biology’ instead of ‘environmental biology’. And what about the currently popular ‘biodiversity conservation’? Would not the older, and shorter, ‘nature study’ be more frugal on ink, and more inclusive, since ‘nature’, to me, includes landscape beauty too. But then, as Herr Professor Doktor Kant might have said (in German of course) beauty is a noumenon, not a phenomenon. It is not amenable to logic.
Not so, Davey!
It is good to conclude that 4 results from adding 2 and 2, and bad to conclude that 5 is the result. The former is useful, the latter is counterproductive.
As Kant pointed out in the categorical moral imperative, there is a moral duty to be rational, and doing math right is a duty. This analysis is intuitively sound; humans do math to achieve their purposes, and purposeful, goal-oriented activity is the province of ethics. Le voila, math is a branch of ethics.
Making distinctions between human, nature, ecology, environment and biology all eventually founder on similar considerations. None of these terms refer to discrete, exclusive entities; the real question is what phrasing makes the best advertising copy.
Well I still don’t understand, despite Schiller’s attempts to raise my level of awareness, why we can’t regard humans as fauna (following on from Stewie’s comment from the 19th). Setting humans aside, as being “not part of nature”, appears to fall either side of a very fine line: anthropocentrics regard our species as above nature, while the others use the prefix anthropo- as the greatest of insults.
To do either of these things seems to me to be extraordinary arrogance. What is it that sets us apart from the beasts of the field? Not much it seems to me, just some subtle shades of gray. This is not to suggest I loath my own kind (and by so doing, demonstrate what a superior human I am), I actually hold many animals in very high regard. For practical reasons, I do place my own species as a whole a small notch above all the others. That is what a dingo does when it kills and eats its prey and it’s also why most successful species don’t eat their own young. I am but a dingo on an omnivorous diet, which some would argue makes me a bush pig (but without the ticks).
I see “human ecology” as a tautology. The fact that Davey and others argue in favour of the concept of human ecology demonstrates to me that they are attempting to correct a long-held, commonly accepted but quite irrational belief that humans stand apart from the rest of nature. What twaddle!
To one side, I suggest we are merely primates who, because of our opposing thumbs and a few thousand years of experimentation have managed to consciously unleash nuclear fusion but not control it. Ooh ahh, that’s clever.
On the other hand, our species is hardly the first component of the natural world to have had a significant environmental impact and the next major asteroid to hit our little spaceship will demonstrate that we are not the worst. This “mea culpa” stuff is just the anthropocentric belief turned on its head. Either way you look at it, it’s still nonsense.
It’s fine to theorise on issues of ecology but to force environmental legislation through it is wrong. There are simply to many gaps in knowledge and while we wait for explanations, fauna is being eaten by feral dogs, etc. (leading to potential extinction[s], forest has become over-vegetated causing serious issues with forest succession (leading to potential extinction[s], over-vegetation is seriously affecting hydrology uptake and feral wildfires have developed into monstrous conflagurations that are catastrophic (leading to potential extinctions).
Many scientists may like pondering such issues, who doesn’t but Schiller is right, it’s currently semantics.
Local knowledge, especially when ecology was introduced to management, was ignored, yet locals have often profound knowledge of their environments, to the point that I would call it intuitive knowledge. The aborigines I am sure had buckets of it.
How does intuitive knowledge translate in ecological terms?
Also events can occur which are random, non-linear causing mass disruption to ecosystems. In fact, disruption equates to ecological evolution. No disruption means no survival instinct means to comfortable means lazy means fade away.
We now have a new expert on the scene. A combination of a politician and an ecologist. I call them ecoticians.
Go deep into the mountains one day and yell,”ecotician”and feel the mountains tremble.
Boxer,
The fact that humans are fauna is precisely what confounds everything, what wrecks all attempts at distinguishing between humanity and ecology. The distinctions are completely artificial, though many profit by claiming otherwise.
Boxer, you are incontestably, completely on the mark.
Schiller.
Boxer – species are more likely to be altruistic towards their own genetic lineages (and ethnic/religious groups) than to their own species in general. New lions of a pride kill the male offspring from their predecessor; wild horses, otherwise highly social, will kick to death a lone foal or injured that could attract predators. (I know I’m not telling you anything new here). Cannibalism and headhunting was fine until moral principles interfered.
Human ecology and ‘modern thinking’ in biodiversity conservation and sustainable development will place mankind as an integral and distinctive part of the environment. Any efforts to ‘preserve’ nature by isolating people are doomed to failure. Efforts to help poor people by ignoring the environment have also resulted in spectacular failures, hence the important ‘holistic’ ecological lesson for all. In many cases narrowly focused efforts to save the environment or the people cause rebound effects and in poor countries, increased suffering for the marginalised poor and more environmental degradation. As I see it, Human Ecology simply places a stronger emphasis on thinking through the human aspects of ecology, ie the specialism because students can’t study everything within a field and get their degree before the age of 45 these days. Some of those European Human Ecology courses though get very alternative though – deep ecology meditative reflection & the like – loaded values to boot.
Davey – biodiversity conservation (active goal) is entirely different in motivation to ‘nature study’ (passive goal).
I think we’re introducing unnecessary semantics above. Human progress and technology repeatedly chellenges the limits of vocabularly and conceptual distinctions.
Observe the continuous cycle: A new field emerges from various roots, it gets a new name. The new lexicon and nomenclature spreads – into other hard and soft sciences, business and society in general. Then increasing specialisations emerge, and new language and phrases emerge to support them. Experts protest over the general adoption and dilution of previously specialised terms, so seek to make distinctions or new learning causes them to redefine their field.
Environmental science, Information Science, Human Ecology, Molecular biology, Nuclear Physics, Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Software Engineering, etc have names that emphasise the nature of their focus, ie their targeted specialism within their burgeoning fields. If you want to get yr collective knickers in a knot over something, perhaps your real beef is the tendency for increasing specialisation and accompanying reductionism, but to winge about that is to deny inevitable progress, the ongoing process from day dot. I reckon we need more specialised generalists, or generalised specialists, to mediate between the otherwise unintelligible subject matter experts – think of the fancy names you could come up for this new breed!
And who is to pay for these ‘specialised generalists’ Pixie, the ones that we need to unravel the secrets held by the ‘human ecologists’ et al?
I cant believe that ‘Information Science’ is unsustainable without another Science to inform the others..
..too much time hanging around the campus bar methinks.
I worked for the Catchment Management Authority back in 1998 cleaning up after that huge ‘1 in 100 year flood’. We did everything from stacking and burning debris, willow removal through to plant propagation and planting of the seedlings.
One day an expert private consultant was brought in to instruct us on a particular plant we had to find and propagate. When he arrived it soon became apparent he looked a bit lost. We soon found out he didn’t really know about this plant or even where it was. I asked the expert if he had a picture of it. He said yes and showed it to me. Oh, I says. I think I know where you will find this. I took him to a spot in the bush where I thought it was and bingo, there it was.
While standing there he notices a plant on the other side of the track and exclaims that this was the endangered Tassel Cord Rush. We exclaimed something when he said the seed is worth $750 a kg. I said but mate this plant is all up there, over there and is common in this area. He obviously had no idea. Your taxes at work?!?!
Now this bloke, 10 years prior to this, worked for the Department of Sus. and Env. And his job was to work out what the load carrying capacity was in the mountains, with regards to human activity, ie, campers, fisherman, tour operators, logging, etc. The guy at that point had little/no bush experience. His claim to fame was the ‘rediscovery’ of a butterfly or something in India. Of course, while there, he had the locals guiding him and carrying his gear around. I think he had little experience there too, but looks good on a resume.
Anyhow, this guy now runs an environmental consultancy firm and one of his contracts is to ‘save’ the Brush Tailed Rock Wallaby from extinction. It was not until around 1999, that he was forced to admit in our local newspaper that wildfire was by far the greater threat to the wallabies’ existence, along with introduced predators. Up until then little talk of the wildfire threat and virtually nothing on the impact of the 1939, Black Friday fires which caused extensive crowning through catchments where the wallaby more than likely existed prior to that wildfire. How have these people got into such positions of authority over human kind?
Furthermore, this person is well acquainted (friends of) people within flora and fauna disciplines that are in charge of baseline data production and I must stress the word production here because since the arrival of ecology as a ‘management’ tool the lack of baseline data is obvious. Often there is none. And these people are the ones producing the baseline data. These people he knows within flora and fauna departments are greenies and write highly influential reports. Collusion? Rigged? I think so.
Now, if you provide baseline data that is worded a certain way, such things as the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act or the Endangered Species Act become a powerful tool to what really is their hidden agenda of removing humans from ‘natural’ environments.
Having further discovered over the years that the ring of friendship widens to include people at the Arthur Rylah Institute who are also in charge of endangered species. Coincidently, the species dealt with by these people are in remote terrain and difficult to find. Data seems to be missing from species descriptions. Example, a frog which is nomadic, has not had this unique feature highlighted. So when the ‘expert’ goes back to see if the frog is where he found it last and it is not, he describes it as a possible local extinction.
We really do need a large public forum(s) so that people like myself and the thousands like me can have accusations and concerns thrashed out, under legally quantifiable scenarios. I can only come up with choppy writings like this piece but I tell ya, I have learnt a lot in the last 20 years that needs to be spoken about and that the urbanites need to here. And compared to people I have now met along the way, I know so little in comparison and yet no one will listen to them either.
Hey Luke, do you know anything about the Brushed Tailed Rock Wallaby as a matter of interest?
Phew! That old Human Ecology seems controversial. May I try once more. Ecosystems are very complex – agreed? No one person can understand every organism and every interaction – right? So botanists may find their way into the maze through plants, and zoologists through animals. Some of us prefer to start with humans, and their society, and find our way from there to the plants, animals, climate, soil etc. I don’t suggest everyone must be a Human Ecologist. I happen to enjoy that approach, and think it can lead to workable solutions.
Schiller,
There are many ethical dilemmas in the world today. If mathematics is ethics, can you please demonstrate how you would solve, say, the Lebanon crisis by mathematics? Send your proof to Kofi Annan.
Phew! but… It is clear that theories of ecology has positive contributions to make to understanding of environments but within the vacuum of knowledge that exists how do you stop politics usurping the authority that the vacuum provides. What mechanisms would be adequate to cope with this obvious area of potential corruption(s)? Clearly many disbeleive the proprietory of ‘independent’ scientific panels (for good reason), private consultancies (for good reason) and many I would say are greatly alarmed by the structure of legislative processes (for good reason). Even parlimentary inquiries seem public stunts (if neccessary). It would seem a judicial input or option is needed here. I believ I have personelly seen activity that would indicate collusion to distort scientific procedure and ultimately findings. There is possibly a high level of collusion and distorting of the facts, including distortion of ecological processes that if this level of behaviour were to occur in the financial sectors or even sporting entities, people would end up in jail or at least community orders of some sort and struck off the ‘list’. Please don’t say go to the police or your local MP.
In the academic world we speak of the “natural,” the “mathematical,” the “social,” the “engineering,” and the other sciences. The natural sciences deal mostly with the humanly dicovered laws/rules of nature while the mathematical sciences are associated with “human” made laws/rules and their applications. Engineering science deals mainly with how knowledge gained from the mathematical and natural sciences can be applied with judgment to devise ways to utilize, economically, the materials and forces of nature for the benefit of human kind (ABET 1980). Engineering science courses usually lead to engineering design in which we make use of the laws of nature and avoid their negative consequences.
Historically, the natural sciences branched to physics, chemistry, biology, first, later, biology and natural geography gave birth to ecology. Presently, at the basic level we have the natural sciences branching into physics, chemistry, biology and ecology with all their known sub-branches.
Ecology, very briefly, is the natural science that treats the relationships of the living (biota)among themselves and among the non-biotic environment. Thanks to pioneers like Eugene Odum, Edward Kormondy, and Fikret Berkes we can use the “system” approach to study and quantify ecosystems, especially in terms of energy requirements. Thanks to discoveries in genetics and the evolutionary processes alonside with the latest findings in ecology, we can predict natural human behavioral patterns as well as future requirements. We can also predict environmental damage although it is a relatively slow process.In contemporary ecology humans are classified as within the top “omnivore” subclass of the consumer class of biota (producer>consumer>decomposer)
Human ecology should be the subject belonging to the natural sciences under the division of ecology. The fact that human habitats are mainly outside the natural forest areas does not mean that the laws of the jungles do not apply within the cities. Finally, a clear distinction should be made between ecology and enviromental sciences. The former, as discussed above, is a natural science while the latter is very close to an engineering science.
Originally ecology was a branch of geography and the pioneering work was done by geographers. The term ecology was coined by a German geographer, Ernst Hackel. Important contributions to ecology’s geographical twin, biogeography, were made by the co-disoverer of evolution Alfred Russell Wallace. One of these was the discovery of Wallaces’s Line, dividing the fauna of Australia from that of Asia. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Alexander von Humboldt did a lot of work during his exploration of South America that we would now consider ecological. This in turn inspired the work of Charles Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle which led to his discovery of the principle of evolution by natural selection. Humbolts work was similarly an inspiration for Wallace and Hackel. Hackel was self-consciously emulating Humboldt. Yet if all these men had been asked what they were doing they would have answer “geography” and they would have called themselves geographers. This leads me to question the point of multiplying terms for supposed disciplines and subdisciplines. Do we really need “Human ecology”, “Historical Ecology” and “Cultural Ecology” as terms marking off ever smaller pieces of academic turf when the perfectly adequate term geography is already to hand?
Hi there!! iam a student from the philippines iam searching on the 4 main branches of science and i notice this site that ecology is not a real branch of science is this true? reply A.S.A.P thank you and goodbye!