foundations of human ecology

Foundations of Human EcologyAuthor(s): William R. Catton, Jr.Source: Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 75-95Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1389410Accessed: 24/08/2010 18:07

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Sociological Perspectives Copyright @1994 Pacific Sociological Association

Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 75-95 ISSN 0731-1214

FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN ECOLOGY WILLIAM R. CATTON, JR.* Washington State University

ABSTRACT: As with other sciences, ecology's conceptual foundations emerged long after its origin. Clarification of these foundations should enable human ecology to provide understanding of the fact that industrial civilization causes ecosystem breakdowns. Arthur Tansley's reasons for superseding the

community concept and coining the term "ecosystem" need to be known.

Sociologists have widely misunderstood the term. Their "ecological complex" is not synonymous with it. Tinkering with ensuing lists of variables can be

highly misleading. Human ecology should be the study of whatever ecosystems involve humans. Until we put behind us the unnerving impact of inappropriate criticism, rejoin bioecology enough to get over thinking of succession as invader- driven, and recognize seral stages for what they are, sociologists will fail to

comprehend the ineluctable difference between industrialism and ecological climax. Available literature can facilitate sociologists' necessary retooling.

ANTHROPOGENIC ECOSYSTEM BREAKDOWN

There is a spectre haunting our time. The foundations of human societies around the world are subject these days to increasingly conspicuous self-destruction, but sociologists are providing too little explanation and understanding. They are disabled by the fact that the foundations of their version of human ecology remain too dimly discerned. An aim of this article is to reexamine what we have done to the ecosystem concept and reconsider its importance as a foundation for a truly incisive human ecology. The concept is an essential tool for comprehending what is happening today and why it matters very much.

"Each year," wrote the Worldwatch Institute's Lester Brown (1992: xi), "the world's forests are smaller, the deserts are larger, the topsoil on cropland is thinner, the stratosphere ozone is more depleted, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rises and the number of plant and animal species with which we share the earth diminishes." Already, he added, human health is being damaged by this physical degradation of the earth. Growth of world food output is slowed by the degradation, and in dozens of Third World countries it is contributing to a reversal of economic progress.'

*Direct all correspondence to: William R. Catton, Jr., 25307 103rd Avenue East, Graham, WA 98338.

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES Volume 37, Number 1, 1994

How and why are these things happening? To equip ourselves to understand and answer such questions, we need to clarify the nature of human ecology. To understand what ought to be the foundations of human ecology, we can begin by contemplating the following remarks:

No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, water and people. None so loudly proclaiming its efforts to improve public health and protect nature so degraded both. And no advanced society faced such a bleak political and economic reckoning with so few resources to invest toward recovery (Feshbach and Friendly 1992: 1).

If these sentences seem descriptive of American circumstances just months after a change of national administration, in a time of lingering economic stagnation following a dozen years in which the U.S. national debt was quadrupled, in the book from which they are quoted they are preceded by this announcement of the actual topic of that book: "When historians fully conduct an autopsy on the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism, they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide." The authors go on to describe in horrendous detail the environmental damage inflicted by Soviet efforts to pursue economic growth as a paramount goal.

In an excellent Australian dictionary I happen to own, that word "ecocide" is defined too strongly-as "total destruction of an area of the natural environment, especially by human agency". In the context of the book about Ecocide in the USSR (Feshbach and Friendly 1992), as in ecological thinking generally, ecocide means

damage sufficient to break down the functioning of an ecosystem. That defines an idea that has become in our time fundamentally important. Ecosystem breakdown can lead to ecosystem death. Anthropogenic ecosystem breakdown is the spectre haunting the world today. It is shaping up to be the ultimate problem for humankind. Sociologists, especially those who think of themselves as human

ecologists, can ill afford to disregard it.

ECOSYSTEM AND ECOLOGY

Underlying the notion of ecocide, then, is the ecosystem concept itself. This article is meant to proclaim ecosystem as the foundation concept for modem ecology and, therefore, basic for human ecology.

Like other sciences, ecology has grown and evolved. No science is preplanned or deliberately engineered from the time of its origin. Science is crescive. The foundations of a science are not its earliest ideas nor the ideas of its earliest

proponents; they are what it discovers later on in its evolutionary development to be its fundamental or basic ideas.2 Auguste Comte coined the name "sociology" in 1830 and expounded some sociological ideas, most of which have long since lost interest for sociologists. It was 75 years later that EA. Ross (1905) published a book on The Foundations of Sociology (dealing mainly with ideas other than those of Comte). After a further 34 years, George Lundberg's (1939) Foundations of Sociology

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Foundations of Human Ecology

differed from both Comte and Ross, dealing with postulates and frames of reference for a "natural science" sociology. Thus, the founding of a discipline can long antedate discernment of its significant conceptual foundations.

The word "ecosystem" first appeared in 1935, 67 years after Ernst Haeckel

provided the word "oecology" as a label for studies of relations of organisms to the organic and inorganic conditions of their existence.3I shall return later to the reasons for Arthur Tansley's 1935 invention of the word "ecosystem," and to some distortions inflicted upon the concept since then as it was adapted for inclusion in sociological literature, but at this point I want to support my contention that

ecosystem has become one of moder ecology's foundation concepts-indeed, perhaps its most central and incisive concept.

In preparation for celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the British

Ecological Society (BES), that organization distributed a questionnaire to its international membership, seeking to ascertain what ecological concepts they currently believed were of greatest significance (Cherrett 1989). The questionnaire was based on a pilot study among 148 ecologists in 24 countries who had been invited to submit lists of their 10 most important concepts. The 50 most frequently mentioned concepts were then listed in the questionnaires sent out to members of the BES who were asked to choose and rank the 10 they deemed most important.

Ecosystem was the concept attaining the conspicuously highest mean rank. It was chosen as one of the top ten concepts by 69 percent of all respondents. So now, after the science of ecology had gestated for more than a century, it is at last possible to define ecology quite succinctly as the study of ecosystems. That means ecologists study systems of interactions among differentiated organisms and between them and the nonliving components of their environment. These studies

necessarily consider the flows of energy and the cycling of materials through such

systems. It seems to me that human ecology then, ought to mean simply and

straightforwardly the study of ecosystems that involve humans, even though in most

sociological literature this has clearly not been the common usage of the term.4 But human ecology is far more than spatial distributions of social indicators plotted on city maps. It is more, too, than what is usually too narrowly taken to have been meant by the redefinition of it by Gibbs and Martin (1959) as the study of "sustenance organization." Those words are too easily misunderstood as making human ecology the sociology of food production and distribution.5

Sociologists are inclined to suppose that Park and Burgess ([1921] 1924: 559) coined the phrase "human ecology" (see, e.g., Faris 1944), But, in an earlier book cited by Park and Burgess ([1921] 1924: 218), Charles C. Adams had eight years earlier noted recent recognition that "human ecology is a part of general animal

ecology" (Adams 1913: 11). The following year, at the first Summer Meeting of the British Ecological Society, the phrase "human ecology" showed up again as members discussed "extension of the fundamental principles of ecology into human affairs" (McIntosh 1985:302). That was in 1914, seven years before the Park and Burgess textbook came out. We sociologists ought not, therefore, to let

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mistaken proprietary claims of priority of conception continue blinding us to human ecology's bioscience foundations.

Ecosystems that involve humans may be tremendously diverse. We can think of their diversity as spanning at least three broad categories. First, there are

ecosystems in which humans are a very dependent part; the study of environmental influences on human behavior and social institutions in such

ecosystems has been a concern of ecological anthropology, yielding a body of

knowledge sometimes labeled cultural ecology (Steward 1968). Second, there are

ecosystems dominated by humans in varying degrees. Human ecology (even as

pursued by sociologists) ought to concern itself with the full range of this variation in human dominance. It should seek to ascertain both the causes and consequences of different degrees of human dominance in ecosystems (Catton 1980; cf. Hawley 1950: 55-63). Third, there may be ecosystems (or fragments of ecosystems, such as cities) so strongly human dominated that they can easily be misperceived as instances of outright human autonomy and self-sufficiency. Sociological human

ecology has damaged itself by indulging this illusion and concentrating almost

exclusively on this third category-industrial societies (Gibbs and Martin 1959: 30; Beus 1933: 112-114). By focusing its studies so largely on urban complexes and

substantially disregarding nonhuman and nonartificial ecosystem components (aside from topography), sociological human ecology has seemed to support the notion that humans (collectively if not individually) are exempt from ecological principles that apply to other types of organisms (see Dunlap and Catton 1993).

ECOLOGY AND HUMAN ECOLOGY

There is a continuing need to reiterate the statement made half a century ago by Amos Hawley (1944: 399) that "the only conceivable justification for a human

ecology must derive from the intrinsic utility of ecological theory as such." In other words, to amount to anything human ecology must truly be ecological.

Human ecology cannot be an autonomous science, ecological in name only. Nor should it be merely a specialty contained entirely within sociology. Elsewhere, I have argued for regarding sociology, in fact, as a specialty within ecology (Catton 1992). No science is altogether autonomous. Every science has relevance for every other science. Hawley (1950:66) was right when he viewed human ecology as part of general ecology, not apart from it. I have come to believe more strongly than ever that he was also on to something profoundly important when he suggested human ecology "might well be regarded as the basic social science" (Hawley 1944: 405). In its original context, I do not think that statement was meant at the time (as some have since construed it) to divorce human ecology from biology and claim it for sociology.6

In the ensuing half-century, worldwide social and ecological changes have brought about an urgent need to reaffirm Hawley's (1944:399) view that difficulties besetting human ecology are due to its isolation from "the mainstream of ecological thought" (cf. Beus 1993: 118-127). It is time at last to recognize symptoms of that

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isolation, understand the subtlety of the isolating mechanisms, and become aware that human ecology pursued as part of general ecology will contribute more to our understanding of human social organization and human societal prospects for

surviving and prospering than it can ever do as a parochial specialty of urban

sociologists. Following that premise, let us consider some ideas from mainstream ecology that

ought to be foundations for human ecology. First: sociologists ought to be especially receptive to the idea that the ecological significance of speciation-the separation of organisms into distinct non-interbreeding types-has less to do with differentiation of form than with "occupational" differentiation. Further, we should find it especially interesting that among higher species, there are increasingly elaborate symbiotic relationships emerging within a species population. Conspecifics can sometimes behave enough differently from each other (and use

sufficiently different culturally developed equipment) that they make appreciably different demands on the environment. There are, in short, multi-niche species. Humans seem to be the most multi-niche of any species, because our species is

especially able to subject its members to sociocultural differentiation and is

emphatically capable of equipping different individuals with different exosomatic organs (tools). It is as if we were thus divided into many species-even though we remain biologically one. Interactions between human roles, or between various labor-force occupations, may be functionally equivalent to the interactions between different species (Stephan 1970; Olsen 1993). Are the submariner and the aviator, using their respective technologies, any less different ecologically than, say, a dolphin and a bat, or a penguin and a hawk? Each role has a distinctive

configuration of symbiotic and competitive relationships to organisms in other roles. Because of the ramification of material culture and the enormous capacity of Homo sapiens for behavioral differentiation, many ecological principles that describe relationships between species should be expected to have special case

counterparts as principles of sociology. They should be what human ecology seeks to discover.

As was pointed out by Sumner ([1896] 1913), the ratio between a population and the available quantity of an essential resource is an important determinant of the intensity of competition among members of that population. Insofar as the members of the population make identical demands on their environment, they relate to each other competitively. As their number increases, competition intensifies among them, unless they become further differentiated (Durkheim [1893] 1984). These insights of Sumner and Durkheim are accepted as principles of sociology, but they are no less truly principles of ecology.

Competition may apply not only to resource acquisition but also to disposal of life's products. Every organism not only must take substances from its environment to live, it also has to put substances transformed by its metabolism back into the environment. Humans are no exception (Sorokin 1975: 3-4). The life processes of

many organisms put into their surroundings certain chemical compounds whose presence affects the life processes of these and other organisms sharing the same

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environment. Depending on their chemical properties, such "extrametabolites" may either inhibit or promote growth. When these chemical by-products of the life processes of one species (or occupational group) are harmful to another species, the relationship between the two species is "antagonistic." Increased population density increases the probability of antagonistic interactions.7

For humans, the antagonistic impact of one group upon another is by no means

merely chemical. All instances of what has come to be known as the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome should be understood by human ecologists as special cases of an interactive pattern widely characteristic of organisms competing to live in a finite world.

Hawley (1944: 401) was right, however, to declare that "competition is not the

pivotal conception of ecology," and to note that what Darwin had meant by the

"struggle for existence," a phrase he used in "a large and metaphorical sense" to denote all life-sustaining effort, would include combination and cooperation as well as competition. Instead of assuming all ecological phenomena arise from

competitive relationships, then, human ecologists should permit themselves to

study competition (and its varying intensity) as dependent variables. It was recognized early by ecologists that differentiated organisms which

influence each other achieve collective adaptation to the conditions of their shared habitat, forming thereby a more or less self-sufficient and localized web of life. With the assorted roles in it performed by many different species (of plants and animals), ecologists appropriately termed it a biotic community. Today, human ecologists must recognize that human communities do not consist exclusively of humans; they are biotic communities in which humans are among the species involved. Nonhuman components remain indispensable even when they may be almost

inconspicuous in a community with high human dominance. But the introduction of the ecosystem concept into ecology's vocabulary came

in response to ways in which the community concept was seen to be misleading.8 Well along in his career by 1935, Arthur G. Tansley, who had been the first president of the British Ecology Society, grew dissatisfied with the common biological usage of the term "community." For one thing, he felt that calling such an association of differentiated organisms a community implied too much similarity among its "members," as if the differences between the various plants and animals in it were

unimportant, and as if interaction with abiotic components of its environment was

by the community as a unit. After several decades of participating effectively in the advancement of ecological thinking among botanists, Tansley had come to believe it was quite inappropriate to separate environment conceptually from the populations of organisms living in it. He preferred to regard webs of life "together with the whole of the effective physical factors involved, simply as 'systems"' (Tansley 1935: 97). Ecosystems, he said (1935: 299), include "not only the organism-complex, but also the whole complex of physical factors" and they "are the basic units of nature on the face of the earth."

Further explicating Tansley's reasoning, we must realize it would be misleading to continue thinking of an ecosystem "containing" or merely "including" a plant

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community upon which may be superimposed a separate and distinguishable animal community. It would be similarly misleading to imagine that there is then sometimes further superimposed an even more separate and distinct human

community. In an ecosystem, there are always material substances and climatic circumstances interacting with plant populations which interact with each other and with various animal populations. The topographic and meterological conditions are, according to Tansley, as truly parts of the ecosystem as are the organism populations. Locally, humans may or may not be among the animal

species so involved. When humans are involved, their "quasi-speciation" by sociocultural (including technological) differentiation is a typical aspect of "human

ecosystems" (cf. Hawley 1950: 7). Today, human impacts are so globally pervasive that any formerly plausible boundaries separating plant ecology from animal ecology from human ecology have become as disembodied as the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

The thrust of Tansley's conceptual innovation was to emphasize the unity of an ecosystem. Previous concepts, he felt, did not sufficiently convey the integral nature of the interactive system comprising assorted biotic and abiotic parts. Unfortunately, textbooks of bioecology persisted for decades in restating his definition of an ecosystem in a way that weakened his emphasis on its integral nature. The restated version missed his point; the textbooks tended to say that an ecosystem consists of a biotic community together with its inorganic environment (see, e.g., Allee et al. 1949: 695; Odum 1953: 9; Krebs 1972: 634, but see, on the other hand, Ricklefs 1983: 474.), implying the dichotomy anew.

This too-long-conventional way of defining ecosystem revives community as a separate concept. But worse yet, the attempts by sociologists to "adapt" the ecosystem concept to render it useful in human ecology have further violated Tansley's effort to unify our perceptions of nature's units. Otis Dudley Duncan's "Social Organization and the Ecosystem" chapter in the 1964 Handbook of Modem Sociology was a valiant attempt to reunite human ecology with bioecology, but Duncan (1959, 1961) had also developed "the ecological complex" as a human- oriented version of ecosystem. In it, the categories population, organization, environment, technology-P, 0, E, T-were meant by Duncan to facilitate the task of identifying clusters of relationships in human ecology. He acknowledged the anthropocentric bias implicit in this list of categories of variables. But he could hardly have anticipated the fact that many sociological human ecologists now think POET is what the word ecosystem means. Sociologists seldom read Tansley. When the word ecosystem is occasionally seen in sociological literature, it refers not to Tansley's concept but to some instance of Duncan's ecological complex. Energy flows and biogeochemical cycles have been conspicuously absent from consideration in many sociological papers citing Duncan (1959, 1961) despite the prominence of these topics in Duncan (1964). Olsen (1993) is a rare exception.

The problem with seeming to reduce the important ecosystem concept to a list of variables, in addition to weakening its emphasis on the integral nature of real ecosystems, is the obvious provocation for tinkering with the list, adding and

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subtracting variables. All such tinkering further erodes the essence of Tansley's system emphasis. For example, Kenneth Bailey (1990) offered an alternative acronym, PISTOL instead of Duncan's POET, as if the pertinent variables we must study are population, information, space, technology, organization, and level of living. Whatever merit (if any) there may be in separating the information category from the technology category, it is not ecologically enlightening to reduce environment to mere space. This could nudge human ecology once again back toward confining itself to the study of locational phenomena. It has to be much more than that.

Even if we made no effort to advance from the old community concept to Tansley's ecosystem concept, it would be essential to recognize that an environment is more than just the space in which a community exists. It is also the physical source of its sustenance materials and of the energy it requires, and it is also the repository for the end products of the organisms' life processes. In a world used by more than five billion human inhabitants, there are increasing clashes between these three functions of the environment. The clashes have increasingly serious ramifications. If this contingency was less than vividly apparent even in Duncan's POET scheme, it is nigh impossible even to contemplate in the PISTOL scheme. So, that revision of the ecological complex list of variables is not the way to go.

REACTION, SUCCESSION, AND CULTURAL LAG

The ecological concept that ranked a not-very-close second according to questionnaire responses in the BES study (Cherrett 1989: 6) was succession. The basis for understanding this important process of ecosystem change goes back to Frederic Clements (1916); see also Tansley ([1926] 1929). Cited by Park and Burgess ([1921] 1924: 17, 525-527) but largely disregarded by subsequent sociologists, Clements saw that an environment's characteristics act upon the organisms that make up a community in it. But he also saw that the community's organisms, in the process of living, must react upon the environment. Soils are changed by the plants that grow in them. Sites are made suitable for shade-tolerant species by an overstory of shade-giving species. Plants that require stable conditions of moisture cannot become established on some sites until other plants have provided a moisture-retaining ground cover. Clements realized that the reaction of a

community upon its habitat was central to the process of ecological succession. An environment's associated users alter it in using it and, thereby, foster their own replacement by a changed community of other users more suited to the changed conditions.

When sociologists such as Park and Burgess began to work with ideas from

ecology, this key insight into the autogenic nature of succession was easily lost. Invaders were imagined to be succession's driving force, not just the beneficiaries of environmental change wrought by prior inhabitants (Burgess 1928). The idea that use of a site could change it in ways that would be deleterious to its users

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was hardly thinkable because of the traditional hubris in American culture-an attitude largely shared at that time by American sociologists. There was an almost unquestioned belief that technological advances were both inevitable and always ultimately beneficial. Those who followed after Burgess regarded succession in human communities not as a product of adverse site-modification resulting from normal use (Freudenburg 1985), but essentially as a process of aggression (by invaders). Renewed realization that organisms in an environment may reduce its suitability for themselves by using it is sorely needed today for understanding some very serious global problems.

The various community types following each other on a particular site in the process of succession were, for ecologists, seral stages-the stages in a sequence (or sere) shaped by such factors as climate and other characteristics of the particular site. The final stage of a sere was termed a climax, meaning that (theoretically) successional change eventually would come to an end when the various environmental impacts of the interacting species populations reached mutually offsetting magnitudes.

Human ecology needs to recognize that an industrial civilization based on enormous inputs of fossil energy cannot be a climax (Catton 1980; Milbrath 1989). Industrial civilization necessarily undermines itself both by depleting nature's stocks of exhaustible resources (upon which industrial living depends) and by exuding autotoxic extrametabolites. Continued sociological misconception of the succession process stifles sociological illumination of the increasingly serious predicament of industrial societies and of a world they dominate.

Ecologically, a modem industrial society is a society of colossal hunter-gatherers, for its way of living is as dependent as were the lives of pre-Neolithic peoples upon finding stocks of needed resources that were put in place by unmanaged (prehistoric) processes of nature. Human ecologists ought at least to be better able than a non-expert public to recognize the fact that technological and organizational changes that advance a society's cultural power to extract nonrenewable sustenance materials from an environment are not equivalent to "replenishing the earth." They do not increase the rate of replacement of such sustenance materials into that environment. Industrialization has escalated not only our use of, but also our dependence on, fuels and materials whose availability we ultimately cannot ensure. As the finite stocks put in place by nature are depleted by industrial societies, persistence of industrial appetites for these resources constitutes a momentous instance of cultural lag. That famous concept from sociologist William F. Ogburn (1957) thus joins human ecology's conceptual foundations.

MISDIRECTION

From the 1920s onward, as human ecology seemed to be thriving within sociology's expanding academic domain, sociologists were already predisposed to abandon its connections to bioecology. In addition to their already strong anti-reductionist bias, sociologists had a special aversion to ideas from biology in particular. It was

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too soon after their disastrous 19th-century flirtation with so-called "Social Darwinism." But to aggravate their biofugal tendencies, there appeared in 1938 a critical volume that, in my judgment, came very near to destroying human ecology. Recovery from its impact is far from complete even now.

The book was Milla A Alihan's Social Ecology: A Critical Analysis, the Columbia University Press publication of her Ph.D. dissertation. It attacked "the ecological school" of American sociology, meaning the work of Park and his colleagues and students. Shockwaves from this (and other) critical assessments reverberated for more than a decade among the participants in sociology's version of human ecology (Theodorson 1982: 5; Young 1983: 94-101). Except for the pro-mainstream writing of Hawley at this time (1944, 1950), human ecology for years afterward was more than ever typified by work on urban spatial structure such as Schmid's (1950) mapping of various economic, social, and demographic variables to discover areal correlations within large American cities. Sophisticated as some of this work became, and with commendable international extension (see, e.g., Berry and Kasarda 1977), the word "ecological" became for sociologists essentially a synonym for "spatial" (see Gibbs and Martin 1959: 30, note 4). Sociologists developed a trained insensitivity to its very different meaning in biological literature. Many were astonished when the words "ecology" and "environment" loomed in the vocabularies of political agitation from about 1970 onward, expressing therein more nearly their biological meanings. For most sociologists, "environment" had come to mean the social and cultural surroundings of a person or group, not the land, water, air, vegetation, and associated populations of other species.

Alihan's book was sternly reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology by A. B. Hollingshead (1941). His review should have cut short her book's impact. Alihan contended there is an ecological subject matter and criticized "the ecological school" for not dealing with it, but never quite said what it was. A careful reading of her book does show that she had noticed how the concepts of reaction and succession changed their meaning at the hands of sociologists (Alihan 1938: 120) but beyond that there was in it surprisingly little real understanding of mainstream ecology of the time. She ambivalently condemned followers of Park and Burgess for misusing ecological terms and for using them at all. Few of the sources she cited were in bioecology literature.

The devastation wrought by Alihan was immense. Sociologists construed the word "communities" to mean human settlements, and paid little or no attention to the nonhuman components of biotic communities studied by ecologists. Introductory sociology texts that replaced the Park and Burgess text did not include even the names of Clements, Warming, or Wheeler, let alone the excerpts from their ecological writings that were included on the once-influential Chicago book. The locales in which human settlements exist were seen by sociologists as a basic component of their form and a shaper of their functioning, but little further ecological thinking was familiar to sociologists at large. They were unprepared for the advance from the concept of biotic community to the integral concept of an ecosystem urged upon bioecologists by Tansley. Jessie Berard (1973: 15, 35-50),

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for example, wrote about sociologists studying communities under an ambience provided by capitalism and structural-functionalism but yet according to various "paradigms." One of the paradigms was what she called "the ecological model," meaning ideas inherited (more selectively than she seemed to realize) from Park and Burgess. Its main features, according to Bernard, were the development of hypotheses regarding spatial relationships among unplanned land allocations called "natural areas," together with the assumption that the patterns arise from "ecological processes" (competition, segregation, invasion, and succession).

The tragic fact is that Alihan's one critical intrusion into human ecology should not have so demoralized human ecologists. She was not an ecologist, and was scarcely qualified to offer such criticism. She subsequently published a book on Corporate Etiquette (1970), wrote the dubbed English script for a Soviet movie, translated a Russian play, contributed to Good Housekeeping magazine, and became editor of a newsletter for the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, as well as working during World War II for the U.S. government.9 It is time at last to put her objections away and get on with the task of perceptive scientific study of ecosystems in which humans are involved.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

As anthropologist John Bennett (1976:121) has suggested, ecosystem is now widely advocated as "the master concept for a unified science of human ecology, or a general ecology including man." What he called "ecosystemic analysis" is profitably applicable to any biological system that involves humans. For Bennett (1976: 95), human ecology embraces elements from biology and from social science-as it did early on for Hawley (1950: 68) when he regarded it as "a special application of the general viewpoint [of ecology] to a particular class of living things."

There are numerous indications that that was really the intent of Park in the beginning.?1 Consider the fact that Park and Burgess used materials from Clements and other ecologists in their textbook and called it Introduction to the Science of Sociology ([1921] 1924). The ecological materials were included not to make a case for a specialized subdiscipline called human ecology. Park hardly expected human ecology to become a distinct branch of sociology. The ecological materials were meant to help introduce students to sociological subject matter and sociological thoughtways. The same conviction of the general sociological relevance of ecological concepts and principles is evident in Park's chapter in a book on Research in the Social Sciences (Gee 1929: 3-49). There, he referred to "natural areas" serving as an "ecological frame of reference," as a way of studying community and society, and said these areas "become cultural areas." Ecology, in short, served Park as a perspective. It was neither a specialty nor a method. Early applications of that perspective did involve use of mapping methods, but that was neither its essence nor its goal. Park's use of the perspective was consistent with his breadth of concern for all of sociology. His ecological reading helped him illuminate various segments of social life, not just Chicago's spatial structure.

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It is important at this point, therefore, to point out a second meaning of this article's title. It can refer not only to the conceptual foundations vital for building human ecology; it can also mean that sociology should stand upon foundations "of" (i.e., provided by) human ecology, properly conceived. Those foundations include the ecosystem concept. Its full implications must at last be fully grasped by sociologists. We must lear to see human social life ineluctably intertwined with other components of ecosystems. Sociologists, to protect their discipline from mounting irrelevance, need to retool for the increasingly urgent task Bennett aptly called "ecosystemic analysis." We must overcome our traditional tunnel vision. By defining relationships between human social variables and nonhuman variables as peripheral to our discipline's interests, we have lost sight of such connections (as if they were nonexistent). Once useful for establishing sociology in the academic spectrum, such professional tunnel vision now threatens disciplinary suicide by ensuring sociology's diminishing power to explain many things that will happen in and to human societies.

Even though the irruptive expansion of European populations into a second

hemisphere during the past five centuries and the 200-year growth of industrialism were very special events ecologically, they have been misperceived as unbiased

samples of human destiny. Until shocks and frustrations characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s overwhelmed us, the corporate slogan "Progress is our most important product" not only expressed a once-enthusiastic premise of American life but also seemed a feasible professional aspiration for the sociologist. We could confidently believe the accumulation of sociological findings (even if flagrantly unecological) would nurture the expected societal progress.

With the real world as it now is, sociology can avoid becoming hopelessly obsolete only if we become sensitized to the ecological concept of carrying capacity-which expresses the fact that ecosystems have limits and are vulnerable. Breakdowns resulting from overloads are the spectre haunting our time. Accurate

comprehension of the meaning of carrying capacity is an indispensable antidote to traditional hubris. Such comprehension can overcome professional-cultural predispositions that otherwise cause sociologists to misconstrue changing patterns of human aspiration and activity. Human cooperation, competition, and class struggle, as well as racial, sexual, ethnic, regional, and international conflict will all be affected by changed ecological conditions. If we want to understand the effects, we must study the causes-even when they happen to fall outside the span of our previous tunnel vision, Durkheim's restrictive category of social facts. Human beings are, as Paul Sears (1956: 22) insisted, "part of the web of life" no matter how

"obstreperous and independent we have imagined ourselves to be." Ecosystem (and other ecological concepts) formerly seemed to have no place

in sociology because the paradigmatic assumptions of our discipline arose in an

atypical era in human and biospheric history-a time when the cultures that were

poised to become industrial were guiding and serving populations still small enough, in a world still sufficiently large and virgin enough, that there was a surplus of human carrying capacity so significant it seemed inexhaustible. The traditional

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assumptions now obstruct clear comprehension of the kind of "seachange" affecting our future. Understanding this monumental transformation of the human condition has to be today's most fundamental challenge for sociologists.

Carrying capacity, considered a vital concept by writers of The Global 2000 Report, (Council on Environmental Quality and U.S. Department of State 1980) was foolishly scorned by Simon and Kahn (1984: 45) as having "by now no useful meaning"-because increasing knowledge, they supposed, always had and always would increase the earth's carrying capacity. That is an ecologically naive faith. It can persist only by disregarding a reversal of the ecological significance of technology that has been an important factor in the "seachange" of our time. Increasing knowledge, indeed, used to enlarge human carrying capacity (Catton 1980: 17-28). Technological and organizational advances enabled human societies to use more and more of the opportunities available in the world's ecosystems (Lenski and Lenski 1987). But the other side of that coin was this: by means of today's elaborate organization and with all the apparatus our cultures have now put at our disposal, each one of us in the moder world imposes upon the planet's ecosystems a load that is many times larger than the per capita load imposed by our pre-industrial ancestors (or by our contemporaries in so-called "underdeve- loped" countries). For example, energy used by one American has been reported to equal that used by two Germans or two Australians, by three Swiss or three Japanese, by 53 Indians, 109 Sri Lankans, or more than a thousand Nepalese (see Independent Commission on International Development Issues 1980: 162). These numbers represent industrialism's transformation of Homo sapiens into what I call Homo colossus. Citizens of an overdeveloped country today are effectively colossal in their ecological impact in comparison with their human brothers and sisters in nonindustrial countries. Just as it takes fewer buffalo than rabbits to constitute a load that exceeds the carrying capacity of a prairie biome, so it takes fewer Homo colossus than pre-industrial Homo sapiens to overload the planet.

The quest for ecological-sociological understanding should no more be inhibited by the likes of Simon and Kahn than by the likes of Alihan. We need ecological concepts. We need to know about ecosystems and their limits and the societal repercussions thereof (Dickens 1993). Carrying capacity simply means the amount of use of a given kind that an environment can endure year after year without impairment of its future suitability for that use (Wisniewski 1980). Carrying capacities do get surpassed, with grievous consequences (Catton 1993). The concept is too rarely encountered in sociological literature. When the phrase is seen (e.g., in literature on outdoor recreation), it is often expressing a weakened, distorted, or biased version of the concept (see, e.g., Burch [1984]; Shelby and Heberlein [1986] and sources cited therein).

Heretofore, professional aversion to "overgeneralizing" has doubtless served sociologists well, but sometimes we actually err in the opposite direction. We undergeneralize because we are so habituated to perceiving human problems without benefit of ecological perspectives. Few American sociologists, for example, have dissented from the public definition of the Soviet Union's break-up as a

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Western "victory" in the Cold War." Similarly, Marxists have been fond of referring to troubles in Western countries as "the crisis of capitalism" (Brown 1979; Stretton 1976; Wright 1975). It is time to transcend these narrow assessments and recognize clusters of current difficulties as a crisis of industrialism.

Overcoming our discipline's tunnel vision can move us beyond explaining mere

"synchronic variance," as an anthropologist might call it. We pay little attention in most sociological studies to the way things differ across large time spans, although such "diachronic variance" was a focal concern of sociology's founders such as Comte and Spencer. In our Durkheimian search for causal linkages only between social facts, we tend to confine our studies to things that happen more or less concurrently. We have largely relegated the task of accounting for diachronic variance to historians (by default, not from mutual respect for boundaries between the two disciplines). "Longitudinal studies" in sociology are usually short-term; if research spans two consecutive censuses, we deem it longitudinal. But

"seachanges" in the human condition pertain to larger timeframes. Our world is now undergoing the transition from living in an era of carrying-

capacity surplus to living in an era of carrying-capacity deficit. So, sociologists must

expand their vision. Longer time perspectives are needed, as is openness to consideration of all the interdependences between human societal components of

ecosystems and the many nonhuman components. These are the main dimensions of the retooling required of sociology. The retooling can be expedited if sociologists will read, take seriously, and pursue ideas derived from such works as:

1. Any edition of the Lenski and Lenski textbook, Human Societies:An Introduction to Macrosociology (1987), reading especially its "Theoretical Foundations"

chapters to achieve enlargement of sociological horizons and become familiar with the theoretical perspective they call "ecological-evolutionary";

2. The heretofore insufficiently appreciated chapter on "Social Organization and the Ecosystem" by Duncan (1964) in Faris's Handbook of Modern Sociology, to become acquainted with the human societal relevance of biogeochemical cycles, energy flows, and other fundamental ecological processes;

3. Eugene Odum's (1989) Ecology and Our Endangered Life-Support Systems, for additional familiarity with ecology's conceptual vocabulary, broadening and

deepening of the awareness derived from reading and contemplating Duncan's essay, above, and for significant updating of its too-widely- neglected portents and admonitions;

4. Kitahara's (1991) The Tragedy of Evolution: The Human Animal Confronts Modern

Society, and Maryanski and Turer's (1992) The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society, for stimulating (but different) views of biological evolutionary foundations for sociocultural adaptations; and

5. Volumes in the newly established series Advances in Human Ecology (Freese 1992,1993) for indications of prospective influences ecosystemic analyses can have in advancing sociological knowledge.

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These readings will reveal that it is time to replace Durkheim's rule that we must explain social facts only by linking them to other social facts with a new precept: sociologists must be free to study relationships among any set of causally linked variables so long as at least one is a social variable. The social variable(s) may be either a cause or an effect of the others.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

An abbreviated version of this article was presented in the session on 'Theoretical Advances in Human Ecology" at the 64th annual meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association, Portland, Oregon, April 2,1993.

NOTES

1. The PSA meetings at which a first draft of this article was presented in a session on 'Theoretical Advances in Human Ecology" were not the most newsworthy or memorable conference occurring in that city (Portland, Oregon) at that time. Not surprisingly, local and national media paid far more attention to the Forest Conference at which President Clinton and Vice President Gore heard testimony from diverse interest groups and sought some way "to strike the elusive balance between protecting jobs and the forests" of the Pacific Northwest. In our little session, however, it was suggested that human ecologists should follow with keen interest the effort by Interior Secretary Babbitt to replace the species-by- species approach to environmental protection with "an ecosystem approach."

2. For example, moder mathematics has been characterized as "a living, growing element of culture embodying concepts about abstract structures and relations between these structures" (Wilder 1965: 291). It is said to have grown "not because a Newton, Riemann, or a Gauss happened to be born" but rather that these great mathematicians happened because cultural conditions were conducive. Mathematics, like any other cultural element, grows by evolution and diffusion. Similar emergence of "foundation" concepts when the time has ripened culturally can be seen in the history of other sciences. For evidence on this point, see Brooks (1915) on the foundations of zoology, Lindsay and Margenau ([1936] 1981) and Holton and Roller (1958) on the foundations of physics, and Mercer (1981) on the foundations of biological theory.

3. The word "oecology" seems to occur only once in either of the two volumes of Haeckel 1876 (the English translation of the original 1868 publication), when he concluded by naming the "series of inductions, all those general laws of Biology, upon which this comprehensive law of development [Darwinian evolution] is firmly based." Oecology was one of those inductions. Despite the brevity and unobtrusiveness of this first appearance of the word, Haeckel was correct in discerning the subsequently well-recognized ecological component of Darwin's theorizing.

4. Compare, for example, Hughes (1993) and Derksen and Gartrell (1993). On the cover of the issue of the American Sociological Review in which they appear, they are listed as "Two Ecological Studies." Major differences between them are indicative of the transitional status of sociologists' current notions regarding what is "ecological."

5. Gibbs and Martin (1959) had no intention of so drastically narrowing the scope of human ecology. They wisely meant by "sustenance organization" all aspects of social

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organization having to do in any way with sustaining a society and its culture-long before "sustainability" became a fashionable word in political discourse. It is interesting to compare their sustenance organization concept with the "external system" distinguished by George Homans (1950: 90-94) from a group's "internal system" (pp. 109-110). Evidently, it can take decades for the full meaning of an innovative concept to be grasped.

6. It is possible that Hawley himself subsequently tended to reinterpret his own statement that way (see Hawley 1986:125-126, 133).

7. In the language of ecology, the word antagonism is stripped of emotional connotations. It merely means that fulfillment of one organism's needs is antithetical to maintenance of environmental conditions suitable for fulfilling the needs of another organism. Among humans, however, as population increase intensifies competition for finite resources or space, the probability that competitive interactions can arouse animosity and turn into conflict may be increased. Further, among humans, the intensified competition for resources may result from technological progress, apart from population growth. Is this behind today's disintegration of societies around the world?

8. Even a mature biotic community should not, said Tansley, be seen as "an organism." The process of development of a community was too imperfectly analogous to the process of growth and maturation of an organism. For sociologists, it may be of interest to realize that what we have called "the organismic analogy" held some appeal for early ecologists as it did for early sociologists and had to be objected to and discarded by later theorists in both disciplines. Although Tansley (1947: 194) regarded Frederic Clements as "by far the greatest individual creator of the moder science of vegetation," he strongly dissented from the suggestion by Clements that a biome be considered as an organism (Tansley 1939: 517- 518). We in sociology associate the idea of society as an organism with Spencer ([1860] 189), so it is especially interesting (and a little ironic) to find that Tansley, as a newly minted academic, assisted Spencer when the latter, as an old man, was revising his Principles of Biology. Updating and augmenting various biological statements, Spencer relied on the young botanist to check the evidence. Tansley had not yet become the ecologist he would later be, so it seems improbable that it was his influence that caused Spencer to insert into Volume 2 the remarkably ecological chapter titled "The Integration of the Organic World." Spencer (1910: vi) said this new chapter "serves to round off the general theory of Evolution in its application to living things," but Spencer's "general theory of Evolution" focused on a supposed cosmic tendency for "incoherent homogeneity" to progress into "coherent heterogeneity," not on natural selection, so it is unlikely that he could ever have fully developed the nascent ecological insights today's readers can recognize in that inserted chapter. But what if Spencer had been ten years younger and Tansley had been ten years farther into his own development as an ecologist when their paths crossed? How different might have been the subsequent trajectory of sociology!

9. See the brief biographic sketch about Alihan in ContemporaryAuthors-Permanent Series (vol. 2:19). Her choice of a dissertation topic, so clearly uncharacteristic of her subsequent career, may have been partly a reflection of the Columbia University sociology department's rivalry with the sociology department at the University of Chicago, where the work she criticized was centered. For indications of the plausibility of such an inference, see Faris (1967: 32, 119-120, 126, 130). Apart from this, there is also the fact that in the front of her critical book, Alihan extended her deep gratitude to "Professor MacIver whose wisdom and kindly criticism have guided me in this work." MacIver was never an expert on ecology. He had come to Columbia University by way of Canada's University of Toronto after starting

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out as a lecturer in political science at the University of Aberdeen in his native Scotland. He moved into sociology from a background of intellectual interests unlikely to have nurtured pro-ecology predispositions. See, for example, MacIver (1928), in which the

chapters on 'The Elements of Community" and 'The Structure of Community" are devoid of any reference or allusion to biologists' usage of the term. For MacIver, the growth of a

society was so vastly unlike growth of a plant that Herbert Spencer's elaborate application of the idea of organism to society was the reason Spencer's sociology became obsolete. Maclver (1928: 72) wrote that "the conception of community as a kind of organism" had found "countless expressions from the days of Hobbes and his 'Great Leviathan' until

Spencer and Schaffle squandered upon it their power and ingenuity." For Maclver, "the

ecological approach" seemed to mean either the organic analogy or some kind of geographic determinism, neither being acceptable to him. "Geographic factors" he regarded as "limiting conditions" rather than "immediate determinants of the social situation" (MacIver 1937: 99). The sociologist's task, Maclver (1937: 95) insisted, was "to show their relation to the direct determinants of social phenomena, the attitudes and interests of men" (my emphasis). His

understanding of "the ecological approach" was stunted by his time as well as his political science origins (Maclver 1931: 59):

Particularly since the time of Le Play, with his insistence on the dependence of the family on its work and its work on the locality, sociologists have sought to relate social differences to regional differences. They have pointed out the

significance of such factors as the natural vegetation, the types of social cultivation and of animal domestication favored by the region, the climatic conditions. They have shown how in primitive life and to some extent in our own the areas of particular culture correspond with geographical areas. They have, especially in America, sought to find a parallel between the relation of variant plants and animals to their respective habitats and that of human groups to their local or regional conditions-terming this procedure the ecological approach.

10. See Burgess (1945) and Faris (1944). In this respect, Park was not unlike Tansley (1939), who insisted ecology was "not so much a special branch of biology-in the sense that genetics or the physiology of nutrition are special branches" but was, in his view, "a way of regarding animal and plant life." Principles of ecology are, wrote Tansley (1939: 529):

unquestionably applicable to mankind. But when we come to consider methods of study we are at once confronted with the radical difference between human and non-human ecosystems [resulting from] self-consciousness, will, reason, the moral sense, and the power of deliberate action directed towards a conscious goal. These, with the scientific knowledge and power man has acquired through their exercise, transcend and override the primitive adaptations he made to the original factors of his environment-geography, climate, soil, plants and animals. For these reasons the human ecologist, if we like to apply the word to the student of human society in the widest sense, must work with very different methods from those which we employ, though the basic principles are the same (emphasis added).

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Lest some reader construe phrases like "radical difference between human and non-human" and "very different methods" as authority for keeping human ecology separate from bioecology, consider the view of Tansley (1939: 513) regarding bioecology's dependence:

Its development depends on the application of various kinds of biological technique, as well as the techniques of physics and chemistry, to the problems presented by animals and plants studied in their natural and semi-natural environments. To these borrowed and adapted techniques are added those of the ecologist's own devising.

11. For indications of the tendency of sociologists to stay close to "conventional wisdom" on such matters, see two Symposia in the May and July 1992 issues of Contemporary Sociology, titled respectively: "The Great Transformation? Social Change in Eastern Europe" and "Diagnoses of Our Time."

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