Radical Human Ecology

Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches

Rose Roberts, Lewis Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754677680
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317071914
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Human ecology - the study and practice of relationships between the natural and the social environment - has gained prominence as scholars seek more effectively to engage with pressing global concerns. In the past seventy years most human ecology has skirted the fringes of geography, sociology and biology. This volume pioneers radical new directions. In particular, it explores the power of indigenous and traditional peoples' epistemologies both to critique and to complement insights from modernity and postmodernity. Aimed at an international readership, its contributors show that an inter-cultural and transdisciplinary approach is required. The demands of our era require a scholarship of ontological depth: an approach that can not just debate issues, but also address questions of practice and meaning. Organized into three sections - Head, Heart and Hand - this volume covers the following key research areas: Theories of Human Ecology Indigenous and Wisdom Traditions Eco-spiritual Epistemologies and Ontology Research practice in Human Ecology The researcher-researched relationship Research priorities for a holistic world With the study of human ecology becoming increasingly imperative, this comprehensive volume will be a valuable addition for classroom use.

PART I
Head: Theories of Human Ecology

Chapter 1
The Attitude of Human Ecology

Ulrich Loening

Human Ecology explores not only the influence of humans on their environment but also the influence of the environment on human behaviour, and their adaptive strategies as they come to understand those influences better. For us, Human Ecology is a methodology as much as an area of research. It is a way of thinking about the world, and a context in which we define our questions and ways to answer those questions. (“What is Human Ecology?,” Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University)

A Human Ecology perspective reminds us that we really are part of a complex living world. It seeks new relations – not instead of disciplinary ones, but in addition to them. Its interdisciplinary mandate invites crossing boundaries.

This requires a different kind of imagination, in pursuit of fresh combinations of ideas. Its aim, as Alfred North Whitehead (1951) once put it, is “wider points of view.”

Whenever someone leaves the comfort of a familiar world view, it is a first step towards Human Ecology. There may not be many who do so – but always enough, we trust, to carry its future. (Richard J. Borden, A Brief History of SHE, Human Ecology Review, 15(1), 2008)

Introduction

I remain deeply concerned that Human Ecology did not arise in the course of the last 200 years, alongside the general development of the sciences from the Renaissance onwards. There was a progression in scientific outlook. Copernicus put the planet in its place in the solar system and Kepler and Galileo the solar system into a large universe; and after Darwin and Wallace put humankind into place within all of life, one would have expected and hoped that the science of humans in their ecological position in life would also become a major study. But it didn’t.

As a result, people still ask: what is Human Ecology? Most people readily appreciate what gorilla or elephant ecology is about; but not when applied to humans.

If we think of the study of Human Ecology as essentially the same as for any other animal, we raise doubts: study humans as though they were animals? If Human Ecology is about How, Where and Whether humans live on the Earth (Wally N’Dow 1995), it answers the question but omits the ways in which humans are imaginative, creative, conscious, spiritual and questioning. To include these special attributes of humans, I suggest we might add to N’Dow’s questions an additional one, Why, because the human seeks answers to what life is about.

Beyond the basic needs of higher animals, for subsistence, protection, affection, participation and freedom, humans need time for idleness and creativity, understanding, and identity (Max-Neef 1989). To these, Max-Neef suggested adding transcendence. The big questions in life have to be understood somehow, and answers have had to be either discovered or invented.

Throughout history and prehistory, for at least 100,000 years, countless numbers of religions have provided answers to creation, birth and death and the future. Now the heritage of these instincts and myths, together with the attitude of modern science, shape How we live.

The Scope and Approach

Regardless whether the world is in trouble or not, it is important to understand these influences more deeply. This requires that we question every aspect of How and Where we live. In doing so we need to pose another more immediate and practical question: another Why in addition to the above one about the meaning of life: Why do we do things the way we do? That is a core question for Human Ecology.

The basic assumptions, dogmas, conventions and habits of any culture are opened for reassessment and rethinking. Analyses of the ways humans live must be as comprehensive and as ruthlessly honest and rigorous and as any other philosophical study. This requires new thinking and new methods suited to the task: C.H. Waddington’s Tools for Thought (1978) is one such work that makes us rethink our philosophical approaches and provides some means for doing this.

Waddington dubbed conventional dogma as COWDUNG, COnventional Wisdom of the DomiNant GroUp’. Dogmatic, religious and political pressures threaten Human Ecology just as conventional dogmas threatened Galileo. Indeed Garret Hardin (1985) called Human Ecology “the conservative, subversive science.” For both purposes of conservation and of change, Human Ecology stretches to become a prescriptive applied science as well as the descriptive one of human nature and its impacts. Ways to conserve life can only succeed by questioning some of the ways by which we live, and criticising those that have turned out to be unsustainable.

In this exercise of re-evaluation, the arts and humanities have as great a part to play as the sciences since they reflect human behaviour patterns that determine our environmental impacts. The humanities together with the sciences have to be encompassed within Human Ecology (Stewart 1981). This global vision could perhaps have been achieved during the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, when the much broader natural philosophy led to new understanding that expanded human appreciation of the miracles of nature.

Perhaps the natural philosophy of the eighteenth century could be joined with the scientific/technical knowledge we have gained, to bring this combined wisdom to guide How we live. E.O. Wilson (1998) described such a synthesis of the disciplines and filling of the gulfs between them as Concilience. Human Ecology then becomes an attitude for synthesis.

The Background

We can trace the historical emergence of Human Ecological attitudes alongside assessments of human relations to nature and environmental impacts.

Plato was well aware of the ecological impacts of deforestation. He wrote in the Critias:

Contemporary Attica may be described as a mere relic of the original country. There has been a constant movement of soil away from the high ground and what remains is like the skeleton of a body emaciated by disease. All the rich soil has melted away, leaving a country of skin and bone. Originally the mountains of Attica were heavily forested. Fine trees produced timber suitable for roofing the largest buildings; the roofs hewn from this timber are still in existence. The country produced boundless feed for cattle, there are some mountains which had trees not so very long ago, that now have nothing but bee pastures. The annual rainfall was not lost as it is now through being allowed to run over the denuded surface to the sea, it was absorbed by the ground and stored … the drainage from the high ground was collected in this way and discharged into the hollows as springs and rivers with abundant flow and a wide territorial distribution. Shrines remain at the sources of dried up water sources as witness to this. (Quoted in Thirgood 1981)

It might be amusing to note that goats must have been left to roam those mountains; in which case the country of skin and bone and nothing but bee pastures, would have produced just milk and honey. That biblical phrase might actually describe late stages of ecological degradation in the Promised Land, in which case Moses leading his people to the land of milk and honey would have been an early example of political spin!

We can compare Plato’s text with any modern environmental science text:

It is important to recognise, too, how tightly linked are the resources of soil, water and forest. Deforestation produces erosion and water pollution and makes run-off erratic, reducing the availability of water and causing more erosion. This process can become irreversible by altering the environment so drastically that reforestation is impossible. (Ehrlich et al.1977)

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a period of social, but not yet environmental concern. Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, gathered round him a group of people (The Lunar Society, Uglow 2002) to discuss all matters of natural philosophy. They saw that power (Watt’s steam engines) commerce (Bolton’s factories in Birmingham) and the arts (Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery) could lift people out of poverty and they stimulated the start of the industrial revolution, but they could not foresee the urban poverty that emerged later.

The growth of applied science and industry soon had its critics in the Romantic Movement and then in political/economic critiques. John Stuart Mill (1848) clearly appreciated the connections in a manner that remains relevant now:

If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it. (Mill 1848)

The quote clearly links population with economics and resources; it distinguishes quantity (large) from quality (happier) and fundamental human needs from assumptions about the need for growth. Then:

I cannot … regard the stationary state of capital and wealth with the unaffected aversion so generally manifested toward it by political economists of the old school. I am inclined to believe that it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement on our present condition … It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. (Mill 1848)

From the nineteenth century onwards a succession of now well-known thinkers expanded environmental awareness: those that moved our thinking in relation to nature and wilderness like John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, H.J. Massingham; those that highlighted the increasing impacts of industrial growth like Rachel Carson, Alvin Toffler, Kenneth Boulding, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Barry Commoner; those that critiqued Where humans live by putting ecology into city planning, like Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg.

Alongside these were ecologists of natural systems, who gradually brought humans into ecological study, like Eugene Odum (1997). A classic was Human Ecology (Stapledon 1964) written in 1946–1948. These are just a few of the people who opened up new ways of looking at our world and warned that we were facing trouble by degrading our environment.

The Scottish Ecologist Frank Fraser Darling recognised the deep roots of environmental degradation writing in 1951 in his American journal (in Boyd 1986):

The phenomenon of accelerating devastation and increasing population has, in effect, been inevitable from the moment man began to break ecological climaxes and upset equilibria without allowing them to rebuild … Most of us are not prepared to defer to this final logic, that the very achievement of humanness dooms us, and that civilisation is an ultimate contradiction.

The year 1972 then became an important one for ecological initiatives. Meadows et al. (1972) published the Limits to Growth, as a report to the Club of Rome, which had identified the interrelated global problems of development, environment and resources as The Problematique. Limits to Growth – followed by Beyond the Limits (Meadows et al. 1992) and the 30-year update, (Meadows et al. 2004) – modelled the resources and human activities that demonstrated the frontiers of the possible, it spelled out not doom but challenge. This was much misunderstood.

Although the idea of limits to growth seems recent, all four of the great economists (Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were aware of economic limits (Zweig 1979).

Edward Goldsmith, as editor and founder of The Ecologist, published the Blueprint for Survival (Goldsmith 1972) just before the Stockholm International Conference on Environment and Development, which linked conservation of environment with human development, after Maurice Strong had persuaded Third World nations that environmental conservation was essential for development. Strong also asked Barbara Ward (1972) to write Only One Earth as a lead into the conference. The United Nations Environment Program was founded as a result. In that year also, Waddington founded Edinburgh University’s School of the Man-made Future, whose function was to teach the Problematique, and the Centre for Human Ecology.

Yet as a subject, Human Ecology has still not become a generally accepted attitude or study. There are still very few university courses in Human Ecology; the Centre for Human Ecology was closed in 1996 and restarted two or three times; others have been closed, such as the Masters course in at the Free University of Brussels. Some Human Ecology courses are (surreptitiously!) tucked into other areas within a university. The College of the Atlantic had been founded in 1969 to give Human Ecology degree courses, there being no other universities that did that.

International efforts after 1972 were stimulated by the oil crisis of 1973 which at least created awareness of limitations of energy. Then the 1980s became a period of intense ecological reappraisal. The Brundtland Report, (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987) (only about 65 of the 900 acknowledgements gave their affiliations as universities) re-emphasised F. Fraser Darling’s prognosis by opening with “Humanity’s inability to fit its doings into this [nature’s] pattern is changing planetary systems, fundamentally.” And then: “The next few decades are crucial. The time has come to break out of past patterns. Attempts to maintain social and ecological stability through old approaches to development and environmental protection will increase instability. Security must be sought through change.”

Now, more than 20 years later, these challenges remain. Jared Diamond (2005) documented how humans have degraded their environments throughout history and prehistory and civilisations have moved or died out as a result. People have always exterminated whatever was eatable wherever they migrated, over thousands of years. This has not happened in Africa where humans first evolved, at least not to the same degree, until now with massive poaching activities. This raises old questions about Where as well as How. One needs to find ways to limit human aggressiveness towards nature.

The overall picture that emerges shows how the present is a unique period in the whole history of the planet (not just of human history). Never before have there been so many of any one large animal species to inhabit the Earth, never before has any one species had such a large impact. By any of the usual criteria that we apply to other animals and species, the human species can be said to have reached plague proportions. But also, never before has there been a species that could consciously control its own further development and evolution and been consciously aware of that position. Human responsibilities for the future are thus awesome.

Even if this were not so, even if human life on Earth was integrated in equilibrium with the biosphere, Human Ecology would still be a vital subject, to understand how it all worked.

Human Ecological behaviour is determined by the combination of our natural and cultural heritage, by science and its applied technologies and by the social structures like religions and economics.

I think I have found the missing link between animals and civilized man. It is us. (Konrad Lorenz, date unknown)

Heritage

The potential to multiply far beyond the capacity of their environments is universal among all species. This must include humans; the command to go forth and multiply probably has a deep-rooted biological basis, although White (1967) attributed our ecological ills to the Judeo-Christian heritage. Whether due to natural or cultural heritage, any discussion about population limits or controls evokes strong emotions – we find it hard to look at the situation dispassionately; our instincts tell us that it is unethical to question the values of having larger families. Other features of our behaviours may also have their roots in our natural heritage.

Many other animals that live in social groups like humans compete and often fight with other groups. War thus seems to be deeply naturally ingrained;...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Human Ecology: A Pedagogy of Hope?
• PART I HEAD: THEORIES OF HUMAN ECOLOGY
• PART II HEART: RADICAL EPISTEMOLOGIES OF RELATIONSHIP
• PART III HAND: HUMAN ECOLOGY IN PRACTICE
• Afterword
• Index