Human Ecology - Overview

Overview

Human ecology has been defined as a type of analysis applied to the relations in human beings that was traditionally applied to plants and animals in ecology. Toward this aim, human ecologists (or sociologists) integrate diverse perspectives from a broad spectrum of disciplines covering "wider points of view". In its 1972 premier edition, the editors of Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal gave an introductory statement on the scope of topics in human ecology. Their statement provides a broad overview on the interdisciplinary nature of the topic:

• Genetic, physiological, and social adaptation to the environment and to environmental change;
• The role of social, cultural, and psychological factors in the maintenance or disruption of ecosystems;
• Effects of population density on health, social organization, or environmental quality;
• New adaptive problems in urban environments;
• Interrelations of technological and environmental changes;
• The development of unifying principles in the study of biological and cutlural adaptation;
• The genesis of maladaptations in human biological and cultural evolution;
• The relation of food quality and quantity to physical and intellectual performance and to demographic change;
• The application of computers, remote sensing devices, and other new tools and techniques

Forty years later in the same journal, Daniel G. Bates (2012) notes lines of continuity in the discipline and the way it has changed:

Today there is greater emphasis on the problems facing individuals and how actors deal with them with the consequence that there is much more attention to decision-making at the individual level as people strategize and optimize risk, costs and benefits within specific contexts. Rather than attempting to formulate a cultural ecology or even a specifically “human ecology” model, researchers more often draw on demographic, economic and evolutionary theory as well as upon models derived from field ecology.

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