Origins of human ecology / edited by Gerald L. Young

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Seminal Statements -- Mid-Line Assessments -- Discovery in Additional Discipline -- Recent Perspective.

This book developed from my belief that one of the central problems facing human beings-always, at any stage in history and at any place on earth — is a better understanding of how to adapt to constantly changing and always restrictive environments (environment in its etymological sense). Part of this understanding must emerge from a realization of the complexity of the human element in changing environmental conditions, while recognizing the history of humankind-the neolithic, scientific, and industrial revolutions, the great urban transformations. There must be increasingly sophisticated attempts to adapt (not merely adopt or uncritically attempt to apply) ecological concepts to contemporary industrial and urbanized societies, rather than continuing to oversimplify by recognizing only the fundamental biological and tribal characteristics of human populations in ahistorical settings. A sophisticated human ecology cannot be content with the one-dimensional distributional studies of those ecologists (if they are such) who have recognized the existence of cities and space-age techniques of survival and threat, but who tend to reduce their complexity to one or a few quantified factors. This book is intended to explicitly remind readers that a human ecology cannot be contained in one discipline, that scholars in every discipline can learn from workers in all the others, and that their efforts must increasingly be coordinated - interdisciplinary-if humans are to achieve any significant level of ecological understanding. The diversity of its contents should remind scholars interested in human ecology that they do not labor alone, that the literature is rich and varied and the history long, a history full of mistakes but also full of learning. Another intent is to discourage readers from the eureka complex so common in human ecology (since the "first" earth day), a complex derived from the sudden "look what I found" belief that "human" ecology was invented in 1970 and has no history, or at least not a history that has anything to teach.