Human Ecology

The field of human ecology studies and analyzes patterns of interaction between variables of different kinds—physical, chemical, biotic, social, cultural, and economic—affecting people in relation to each other, other organisms, and their surroundings. Defined in this way, human ecology contributes significantly to the understanding of problems relating to the quality of life. It highlights the full range of human experience directly relating to the quality of life and advances understanding of the interrelationships between the elements of human experiences, including belief systems and cultural traditions, and local and global economic, technical, environmental, and societal conditions. Charles Thornthwaite referred to human ecology as an overall, integrating, and holistic field of study that may be even more all-encompassing than geography. This entry presents interpretations of human ecology from the fields of medicine, family and consumer sciences, anthropology, sociology, demography, urban analysis, geography, and biology.

The intellectual origins of human ecology lie in the emergence of plant and animal ecology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and in the application of ecological concepts to human populations. Ecology is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of life and the interactions between organisms and their environment. Ecologists usually either study the relationship between a particular species and the environment (such as the ecology of the rat or the bumblebee) or the characteristics of a particular ecosystem (such as the lowland tropical rain forest ecosystem). Human ecology in this sense is the study of the ecology of human beings, of their interaction with each other and with other organisms and the physical environment. Dieter Steiner and Markus Nauser argued that biology, sociology, anthropology, geography, and psychology form the five intradisciplinary “roots” of human ecology. They argued persuasively not only that human ecology should be centered in the social sciences and the humanities rather than in the natural sciences but also that it inevitably must embrace trans-scientific components of a philosophical and religious nature. Thus, in human ecology, the environment has dimensions beyond the environment of the ecosystems studies in the rest of ecology. These dimensions include culture, human attitudes and behavior, and belief systems and spirituality, as can be found in most anthropological literature concerned with human ecology.

Human ecology often focuses on how individuals and groups adapt to external circumstances, whether they are cultural, social, economic, or biophysical. The ideas and theories of human ecology should therefore be able to help increase our understanding of how groups adjust to public [Page 1456]policy actions. Adaptation in this context is the way in which a population develops or modifies social organization and technology to achieve a working relationship with its environment. Although the biological roots of human ecology would see adaptation as a selective process, analogous to the Darwinian natural selection process, human adaptation is usually discussed in terms of people making strategic choices among perceived options. However, the desirability and feasibility of some of those options are likely to be constrained by external conditions.