HUMAN ECOLOGY

'Human ecology' is an academic discipline that deals with the relationship between humans and their natural, social and created environments. Human ecology investigates how humans and human societies interact with nature and with their environment.

Establishing the field of human ecology

Quotes on human ecology

Establishing the field of human ecology

In the USA, human ecology was established as a sociological field in the 1920's, although geographers were using the term much earlier. Amos H. Hawley published ''Human Ecology -- A Theory of Community Structure'' in 1950. He dedicated the book to one of the pioneers in the field who had begun writing the work with Hawley, R.D. McKenzie. Hawley contributed other works to the development of the field. In 1961, an important reader, ''Studies in Human Ecology'', was published (edited by George A. Theodorson).
In the 1970's William R. Catton and Riley E. Dunlap built on earlier works by Chicago School's Robert E. Park and Hawley. One main idea of Catton and Dunlap was to go away from the Durkheimian paradigm of explaining social facts only with social facts. Instead, they included physical and biological facts as independent variables influencing social structure and other social phenomena. This change of paradigm can be described as a change from a classical sociological view of ''human exemptionalism'' to a new view (named ''new ecological paradigm'' by Catton and Dunlap). Humans are no longer seen as an exceptional species that uses culture to adapt to new environments and environmental change, influenced more by social than by biological variables, but rather as one species out of many that interacts with a bounded natural environment.
In contrast to the Chicago School of Human Ecology developed by Park, Burgess, and Mckenzie during the 1920s, contemporary research in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine goes beyond the biological and economic foundations of human ecology to provide a broader, cross-disciplinary perspective on the ways in which human-environment relations are jointly influenced by physical environmental, political, legal, psychological, cultural, and societal forces (http://www.seweb.uci.edu/index.uci; http://eee.uci.edu/05f/51000/index.html). This emphasis is shared by the Centre for Human Ecology, Scotland (http://www.che.ac.uk).
A line of conflict between this new paradigm and the classical sociological approach is the de-valuating of society and culture. Human ecology views human communities and human populations as part of the ecosystem of earth. In this view, sociology would be only a sub-discipline of ecology -- the special ecology of the species ''Homo sapiens sapiens''. Of course, this is seen as an affront by most sociologists.
It is disputed whether human ecology is properly seen as a sub-discipline of anthropology, sociology or ecology. A point that strengthens the latter position is the methodological approach of human ecology, that is orientation rather along the lines of natural science than the social sciences. Since the focus of Human Ecology is the way in which humans adapt, biologically and culturally, to their environment, Anthropology is clearly one of the parent disciplines. The inclusion or exclusion of human ecology in sociology proper varies between countries and schools of sociological thinking. Environmental sociology is a field of sociology which encompasses the interactions between humans and nature/natural environment, but is rooted in the methodological and theoretical canon of sociology. Sometimes human ecology is seen as part of environmental sociology, sometimes it is seen as something completely different. Influences can also be seen between human ecology and the field of political ecology.
Historically, University departments of Human Ecology have drawn, to some degree, on faculty from Women's and Gender Studies and other faculty specializing in child development and other studies of the family.

Quotes on human ecology

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Resources

★ Buttel, Frederick H. (1986): Sociology and the Environment: The Winding Road toward Human Ecology, ''International Social Science Journal'' 38: 337-356.

★ University of Alberta, Human Ecology Degree programs. http://www.hecol.ualberta.ca/

★ Ehrlich, Paul R; Anne H. Ehrlich; John P. Holdren. (1973): Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions. San Francisco: Freeman.

★ Glaeser, Bernhard (1996): Humanökologie: Der sozialwissenschaftliche Ansatz, in ''Naturwissenschaften,' 83: 145-152.

★ Gross, Matthias (2004): Human Geography and Ecological Sociology: The Unfolding of a Human Ecology, 1890 to 1930 – and Beyond. ''Social Science History'' 28 (4): 575-605.

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HUMAN ECOLOGY

Establishing the field of human ecology

Quotes on human ecology

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