front cover of Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia
Cultural Values and Human Ecology in Southeast Asia
Karl L. Hutterer, A. Terry Rambo, and George Lovelace, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1981
Ecologists have long based their conceptual frameworks in the natural sciences. Recently, however, they have acknowledged that ecosystems cannot be understood without taking into account human interventions that may have taken place for thousands of years. And for their part, social scientists have recognized that human behavior must be understood in the environment in which it is acted out. Researchers have thus begun to develop the area of “human ecology.” Yet human ecology needs suitable conceptual frameworks to tie the human and natural together.
In response, Cultural Values and Human Ecology uses the framework of cultural values to collect a set of highly diverse contributions to the field of human ecology. Values represent an important and essential aspect of the intellectual organization of a society, integrated into and ordained by the over-arching cosmological system, and constituting the meaningful basis for action, in terms of concreteness and abstraction of content as well as mutability and permanence. Because of this balance, values lend themselves to the kinds of analyses of ecological relationships conducted here, those that demand a reasonable amount of specificity as well as historical stability.
The contributions to Cultural Values and Human Ecology are exceedingly diverse. They include abstract theoretical discussions and specific case studies, ranging across the landscape of Southeast Asia from the islands to southern China. They deal with hunting-gathering populations as well as peasants operating within contemporary nation-states, and they are the work of natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists of Western and Asian origin. Diversity in the backgrounds of the authors contributes most to the varied approaches to the theme of this volume, because differences in cultural background and academic tradition will lead to different research interests and to differences in the empirical approaches chosen to pursue given problems.
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front cover of Human Ecology
Human Ecology
A Theoretical Essay
Amos H. Hawley
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay, by Amos Hawley, presents for the first time a unified theory of human ecology by a scholar whose name is virtually synonymous with the discipline.

Focused on the interaction between society and environment, human ecology is an attempt to deal holistically with the phenomenon of human organization. Beginning in the first quarter of the century, sociologists such as Park, Burgess, and McKenzie developed the study of human ecology to account for the dynamics of change in American cities. Over time, theorists have reached beyond the boundaries of sociology, drawing on the findings of economics, political science, anthropology, and bioecology, to understand the relationship of human beings to their environment. Hawley has successfully integrated the scattered theses of this wide-ranging discipline into a schematic whole.

The early human ecologists seized on the analogy of plant communities as a way of understanding urban communities. Hawley here maintains that the most important contribution to human ecology of the lexicons of plant and animal ecologies is the perspective of collective life as an adaptive process consisting in an interaction of environment, population, and organization. From the adaptive profess, he argues, emerges the ecosystem, a concept that serves as a common denominator for bioecology and human ecology.

Hawley has codified the theory of human ecology by a set of deductive hypotheses that establish its claims to coherence and comprehensiveness. His model charts a synthesis of ecological concepts ranging from adaptation and equilibrium through growth in temporal and spatial dimensions to convergence and openness. The essay underscores the critical importance of transportation and communication technology to the shaping of the human ecological system.
 
Human Ecology brings concision and elegance to this holistic perspective and will serve as a point of reference and orientation for anyone interested in the powers and scope of the ecological approach.
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Human Ecology
Following Nature's Lead
Frederick Steiner; Foreword by Richard T.T. Forman
Island Press, 2002

Human ecology is an emerging discipline that studies the interrelationships between humans and their environment, drawing on insights from biology, sociology, anthropology, geography, engineering, architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and conservation. A vast, multidisciplinary literature underscores this approach, and in Human Ecology, noted landscape planner Frederick Steiner synthesizes the work of diverse, sometimes divergent, scholars to illustrate how human interactions can be understood as ecological relationships, using hierarchy as an organizing device.

Steiner builds on the work of leading thinkers including Christopher Alexander, William Cronon, Clifford Geertz, James Lovelock, Eugene Odum, Paul Shepard, Anne Whiston Spirn, E. O. Wilson, Gerald Young, and many others to present a historical and analytical examination of how humans interact with each other as well as with other organisms and their surroundings.

The first two chapters summarize the development of this "new ecology" and the theory of human ecology. The remainder of the book provides an accessible introduction to the major elements of human ecological theory including language, culture, and technology; structure, function, and change; edges and boundaries; interaction, integration, and institution; diversity; and adaptation. The chapters are organized hierarchically from the smallest scale to the largest with each chapter addressing a specific level as an ecosystem. The final chapter probes some of the ethical implications of this new field.

Human Ecology brings together for the first time scholarship from the social and natural sciences as well as the environmental design arts to offer an overview of the field of human ecology and to show how the field may help us to envision our futures. While the approach is largely theoretical, it has broad policy and practical implications, and represents an important new work for anyone concerned with interactions between humans and the environment.

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Human Ecology
How Nature and Culture Shape Our World
Frederick Steiner; Foreword by Richard T.T. Forman
Island Press, 2002
Humans have always been influenced by natural landscapes, and always will be—even as we create ever-larger cities and our developments fundamentally change the nature of the earth around us. In Human Ecology, noted city planner and landscape architect Frederick Steiner encourages us to consider how human cultures have been shaped by natural forces, and how we might use this understanding to contribute to a future where both nature and people thrive.
 
Human ecology is the study of the interrelationships between humans and their environment, drawing on diverse fields from biology and geography to sociology, engineering, and architecture. Steiner admirably synthesizes these perspectives through the lens of landscape architecture, a discipline that requires its practitioners to consciously connect humans and their environments.  After laying out eight principles for understanding human ecology, the book’s chapters build from the smallest scale of connection—our homes—and expand to community scales, regions, nations, and, ultimately, examine global relationships between people and nature.
 
In this age of climate change, a new approach to planning and design is required to envision a livable future. Human Ecology provides architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners—and students in those fields— with timeless principles for new, creative thinking about how their work can shape a vibrant, resilient future for ourselves and our planet.
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Human Ecology in the Wadi al-Hasa
Land Use and Abandonment through the Holocene
J. Brett Hill
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Amid mounting concern over modern environmental degradation, archaeologists around the world are demonstrating the long history of such processes and the way they have shaped current landscapes. A growing body of evidence shows how humans have modified their environment for millennia, and contemporary problems cannot be understood without an adequate sense of this ecological past and the role of humans in it. The Wadi al-Hasa, a large canyon draining the Transjordan Plateau into the Dead Sea, has been the location of repeated cycles of settlement and land use for thousands of years.

This book focuses on changing land-use patterns and their relationship to socio-political organization. Using a combination of archaeological and environmental data, Brett Hill examines the human ecology of agriculture and pastoralism from the beginnings of domestication through the rise and collapse of complex societies. Models of land use often consider political complexity as an important factor affecting mismanagement. Together with GIS erosion modeling and settlement pattern analysis, Hill evaluates the archaeological, historical, and environmental record spanning the Holocene to show how land use was affected by the rise of centralized authority. Yet populations in the Hasa maintained the ability to resist authority and return to a nomadic life when it became advantageous. This process emphasizes the power of local groups to pursue alternative strategies when their interests diverged from those of elites, creating a dynamic that reshapes the landscape each generation.

Hill’s analysis contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of human ecology in the southern Levant, wherein current debates are complicated by research at different scales and by a lack of consensus on the importance of localized phenomena. It not only complements existing research but also seeks to refine models of processes in human ecology to demonstrate the effect of political organization on land mismanagement.
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Patagonian Prehistory
Human Ecology and Cultural Evolution in the Land of Giants
Raven Garvey
University of Utah Press, 2021
Generally portrayed as a windswept wasteland of marginal use for human habitation, Patagonia is an unmatched testing ground for some of the world’s most important questions about human ecology and cultural change. In this volume, archaeologist Raven Garvey presents a critical synthesis of Patagonian prehistory, bringing an evolutionary perspective and unconventional evidence to bear on enduringly contentious issues in New World archaeology, including initial human colonization of the Americas, widespread depopulation between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago, and the transition from foraging to farming.
 
Garvey’s novel hypotheses question common assumptions regarding Patagonia’s suitability for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. She makes four primary arguments: (1) the surprising lack of clothing in parts of prehistoric Patagonia supports a relatively slow initial colonization of the Americas; (2) the sparse record of human habitation during the middle Holocene may be due to prehistoric behavioral changes and archaeological sampling methods rather than population decline; (3) farming never took root in Patagonia because risks associated with farming likely outweighed potential benefits; and, finally, (4) the broad trajectory of cultural change in Patagonia owes as much to feedback between population size and technology as to conditions in the rugged Patagonian outback itself.
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front cover of The Pigs That Ate the Garden
The Pigs That Ate the Garden
A Human Ecology from Papua New Guinea
Peter D. Dwyer
University of Michigan Press, 1990
In The Pigs That Ate the Garden, Peter D. Dwyer examines the subsistence ecology of 109 Etolo people who live on the wet, forested mountain slopes of Papua New Guinea. Dwyer describes the community's practice of deliberately placing pigs in gardens so that the pigs depredate the vegetation there. He shows how this practice is actually the community's method of sending a message to itself that serves to resynchronize a switch from sweet potato gardening to sago starch processing. The interrelationships of the different food-producing activities of the Etolo—gardening, hunting, tree-crop cultivation, etc. —are shown to have seasonal rhythms, and these rhythms maximize the Etolo's use of food resources at appropriate times and areas. Dwyer argues that the "shape" of Etolo ecology is ultimately driven by sociocultural, rather than environmental, forces, and is set within a theoretical frame concerning processes of communication and change in open systems.
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front cover of Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain
Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Deh Luran Plain
An Early Village Sequence from Khuzistan, Iran
Frank Hole, Kent V. Flannery, and James A. Neely
University of Michigan Press, 1969
In the early 1960s, archaeologists Frank Hole, Kent V. Flannery, and James A. Neely surveyed the prehistoric mounds in Deh Luran and then excavated at two sites: Ali Kosh and Tepe Sabz. The researchers found evidence that the sites dated to between 7500 and 3500 BC, during which time the residents domesticated plants and animals. This volume, published in 1969, was the first in the Museum’s Memoir series—designed for data-rich, heavily illustrated archaeological monographs.
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The Territorial Experience
Human Ecology as Symbolic Interaction
By E. Gordon Ericksen
University of Texas Press, 1980

During the 1920s, the Chicago school of sociology developed an ecological orientation toward the study of the city. At the same time, other Chicago scholars developed the social psychological approach that was to be named symbolic interactionism. Over fifty years later, Gordon Ericksen examines the best of these two schools to present a revisionist human ecology. In The Territorial Experience, he gives us a fresh perspective on human ecology by reconstructing the discipline in a way that genuinely reflects the realities of our territorial life.
Ericksen's symbolic interactionist approach to the spatial world is based on the appreciation of humans as the creative artists they are, as designers and builders of their environment. Exploring the symbolic meanings attached to space and territory, he challenges the orthodox in human ecology by introducing hypotheses and conceptual tools of analysis which link spatial facts to human motivations and meanings. With people living in a habitat which they have largely shaped for themselves—a world of airports, shopping malls, retirement villages, where human spaces convey human messages—Ericksen demands that we examine what we have done with our environment in order to survive and prosper.

This major contribution to human ecology will be of importance to specialists and lay readers in the fields of sociology, social psychology, geography, city and regional planning, urban affairs, and economics. Showing how humankind speaks in and through its physical setting, The Territorial Experience is a bench mark in communications theory.

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front cover of Through Amazonian Eyes
Through Amazonian Eyes
The Human Ecology of Amazonian Populations
Emilio F. Moran
University of Iowa Press, 1993

In this well-written, comprehensive, reasonable yet passionate volume, Emilio Moran introduces us to the range of human and ecological diversity in the Amazon Basin. By describing the complex heterogeneity on the Amazon's ecological mosaic and its indigenous populations' conscious adaptations to this diversity, he leads us to realize that there are strategies of resource use which do not destroy the structure and function of ecosystems. Finally, and most important, he examines ways in which we might benefit from the study of human ecology to design and implement a balance between conservation and use.

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