Everything about Human Ecology totally explained
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
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.
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.
Human ecology is variously a sub-discipline of anthropology, psychology, sociology, or ecology. 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's seen as something completely separate. 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
Human Ecology is an [[interdisciplinarity |
Human ecology explores not only the influence of humans on their environment but also the influence of the environment on human behaviour, and their adaptive strategies as they come to understand those influences better. [...] For us, human ecology is a methodology as much as an area of research. It is a way of thinking about the world, and a context in which we define our questions and ways to answer those questions [...] |
