As a result, most cultures changed their environment with little regard for future impacts, sometimes suffering as a result. For example, it is thought that the Mayan civilization fell, in part, because of food shortages due to poor land management.
The Industrial Revolution, technological and medical advances, and the concomitant increase in human life-span and population have resulted in a situation in which humanity can have a dramatic and long-lasting effect on large areas. While the disappearance of species and other ecological effects have been noted for at least a few centuries, it is only recently that humans have realized that each relatively minor change may cause far-reaching effects through anetwork of interconnections that we still see only dimly. The study of these interconnections between various forms of life, their environment, and each other is the study of ecology.
Ecological science became important in the 1960s with the explosive growth of the environmental movement. Sparked in part by atmospheric nuclear weapons testing and industrial emissions that became unbearable, the early environmentalists began to develop tools to study the interactions and interrelationships that comprise an ecology. What began as empirical observations led to conceptual models and, from there, to mathematical formulations and models.
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