The concept of ecology finds its immediate historical origins in Darwin’s ‘web of life’, although such a non-Aristotelian view of the relationship between entities had been increasingly common since the eighteenth century. The term itself (ökologie) we owe to Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). By the opening years of the twentieth century, crude generalizations and theory had been translated into empirical studies, beginning with the natural history of plants.
Ecology might briefly be described as the study of relations between living species, associations of different species, and their physical and biotic surroundings through the exchange of calories, material and information. As such it has been centrally concerned with the concept of adaptation and with all properties having a direct and measurable effect on the demography, development, behaviour and spatio-temporal position of an organism. Within this framework, the main preoccupations of contemporary biological ecology have been with population dynamics, energy transfer, systems modelling, nutrient cycles, environmental degradation and conservation; and, since the 1970s, especially with the application of neo-Darwinian thinking to socio-ecology
In the social sciences, the concept of ecology in the strict sense was introduced first into human geography, via biogeography, and many geographers soon came to redefine their subject in explicitly ecological terms. By the 1930s, the Chicago school of urban sociology under the tutelage of R.E.Park and E.W.Burgess was describing its conceptual baggage as human ecology. Such an epithet was claimed to be justified on the grounds that analogies were drawn directly from the biological lexicon to explain spatial relationships, such as ‘succession’ for the movement of different class groups through urban areas. For a short time Chicago ecology was extremely influential, but it finally floundered on its own naïve analogies, crude empiricism and functionalist inductivism.
A number of the most fruitful applications of ecological approaches in the human and social sciences have been associated with anthropology. This has been so despite the dual intellectual dominance of Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Franz Boas (1858–1942) during the first three decades of the twentieth century, which had thoroughly crushed a nineteenth-century concern with environmental determinism. But although environmental issues were considered for the most part peripheral, and the environment accorded a constraining rather than a determinant role, there have been a number of important studies dealing with environmental interactions in this tradition. Boas’s (1888) own work on the central Eskimo might be mentioned, as well as that of Mauss and Beuchat (1979) on the same subject. The general theoretical position is set out clearly in Daryll Forde’s (1934) Habitat, Economy and Society.
The first really explicit use of the concept of ecology in anthropology is found in the work of Julian Steward during the 1930s (Steward and Murphy 1977). In Steward’s theory the concept of cultural adaptation becomes paramount, and the key adaptive strategies of a particular culture are located in an infrastructural core of social institutions and technical arrangements directly concerned with food-getting activities. The recognition of distinctive adaptive strategies provided the basis for the delineation of cultural types, which Steward maintained evolved multilineally, rather than in the unilinear fashion subscribed to by many nineteenth-century thinkers. Steward’s work has been very influential (and has found admirers in other disciplines), but his theory of cultural ecology entailed an interpretation of the concept of adaptation, together with a fundamental division between organic and super-organic levels of explanation, and between a core of key adaptive traits and a neutral periphery, which more recent writers (Ellen 1982) have been inclined to reject.
Advances within biological ecology linked to the notion of ecosystem, the empirical measurement of energy flow and the employment of the language of cybernetics and systems theory, led during the 1960s to a new formulation of ecological problems in the social sciences: in archaeology, geography, and also in anthropology The prominence given by Steward to the superorganic level of organization was passed over in favour of a view of human behaviour in many respects functionally equivalent to that of other animals. The description of ecological interactions became more sophisticated, involving computations of carrying-capacity, estimates of energy intake, output and efficiency for different groups and activities. There also developed an interest in the way in which cultural institutions might serve to regulate certain systems of which human populations are part. All of these trends are demonstrated in the seminal work of Rappaport (1968), undertaken on a Maring clan from Highland New Guinea.
Sustained interest in the theoretical problems of systems approaches, plus an increasing number of detailed empirical analyses of particular cases, has, however, bred scepticism concerning simplistic notions of adaptation and system, and the more extreme proposition that certain kinds of small-scale society have built-in mechanisms for maintaining environmental balance through homeostasis (Ellen, 1982; Moran, 1990). Recent work has emphasised much more how people actually cope with environmental hazards (Vayda and McCay, 1975), employing the methods of economic individualism and, in the case of optimal foraging theory, evolutionary ecology (Winterhalder and Smith, 1981). This trend has been countered in the work of Ingold (1986) who has explicitly attempted to disaggregate post-Stewardian general ecology, and who speaks instead of humans being simultaneously involved in a field of ecological relations and a field of consciousness which cannot be reduced to adaptionist or other Darwinian explanations. There has been a general rekindling of interest in the evolution of social and ecological systems (Ingold, 1980), focusing on positive (rather than negative) feedback, and moving towards more explicitly historical approaches. Work in this latter area has drawn in particular on historical demography and on the French Annales school (Viazzo, 1989).
The other major impact of ecological concepts in the social sciences has been in relation to political environmentalism, and to environment and development. Under the guidance of figures such as Garrett Hardin and Kenneth Boulding, economic thinking has been placed in a broader biospheric context, and the ‘growth model’ rejected both in relation to advanced industrial and developing societies. Practical concern for environmental degradation, the profligate use of finite resources, the calculated advantages of ‘alternative’ technologies and worries for biodiversity conservation have spawned theories of sustainable development (Oldfield and Alcorn 1991; Redclift 1989). Some writing in this vein is distinctively Utopian, some is concerned with practical matters of implementing specific controls; some seeks to modify the existing world-system though retaining capitalist relations of production, others a rapprochement between Marxism and environmentalism (see Redclift 1984). Increasing attention is also being paid to the cultural construction of nature (Croll and Parkin 1992), indigenous technical knowledge (e.g. Richards 1986), the management of collectively owned resources (McCay and Acheson 1987), and environmental history (Crosby 1986).
R.F.Ellen
University of Kent
References
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——(1986) The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations, Manchester.
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