Ecology

The term ‘ecology’ was coined by the biologist Ernest Haeckel in 1869. It has come to mean the study of all aspects of the interaction between organisms and their environments. The latter include the physical (abiotic) environment and other species (the biotic environment). In the broadest sense, ecology includes interactions with the environment involving all biological processes, including physiology, development, demography, social interaction, and evolution. It includes these at all levels, including individuals, populations of a single species, pairs of interacting species, and communities/ecosystems of multiple species. Historically, the most emphasis was placed on ecology as a pure science, on the effect of the ecological environment on organisms rather than vice versa, and on particular processes at particular levels. These latter included demographic processes (births, deaths, dispersal, and population growth rates and sizes) both at the level of single populations and pairs of

Populations interacting competitively (--), mutualisti-

Cally (+ +), or antagonistically (H—), as well as the flow of energy and materials through, and the degree of species richness in ecosystems. In recent decades these have been supplemented with more emphasis on applied problems of environmental management, on the effects of organisms on the ecological environment (niche construction), and on other processes such as the physiology of individuals (physiological ecology) and the evolution of populations (evolutionary ecology).

Because people are animals too, the relationship with their ecological environment can and has been studied from a biological perspective, much like that of any other species. On the other hand, people are not just another kind of animal. Admittedly, this human ‘exceptionalism’ we now know is quantitative rather than qualitative. The members of many species of birds and mammals particularly are known to communicate, fashion and use simple tools, learn socially by observation from each other, and more rarely to be capable of communicating employing simple rules - in short, to have culture. The extensiveness of social learning, of the use of language to instruct and be instructed, particularly in their application to technology is so great, however, in the human species, that the quantitative has become qualitative. Any human ecology which did not take significantly into account, not simply our great flexibility in learning individually by trial and error for example, but the extensiveness of our second (cultural) inheritance and evolutionary system which has transformed the face of the planet would be seriously deficient.