Foundations of Human Ecology Author(s): William R. Catton, Jr. Source: Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 37, No.

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Sociological Perspectives PacificSociologicalAssociation Copyright @1994

Vol. 37, No. 1, pp. 75-95 ISSN0731-1214

FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN ECOLOGY

ABSTRACT: As with other sciences, ecology's conceptualfoundations emerged long afterits origin.Clarification of thesefoundationsshould enable humanecologyto provide civilization understanding of thefact that industrial causes ecosystembreakdowns. Arthur Tansley'sreasonsfor superseding the need to be known. community conceptand coining the term "ecosystem" the term.Their "ecological Sociologistshave widely misunderstood complex" is not synonymouswith it. Tinkering with ensuing lists of variablescan be Human ecologyshouldbethe studyof whatever highly misleading. ecosystems involvehumans.Untilwe put behindus theunnervingimpact of inappropriate as invadercriticism, rejoinbioecology enoughtogetoverthinkingof succession seral stagesfor what they are, sociologistswill fail to driven,and recognize the ineluctabledifferencebetweenindustrialismand ecological comprehend climax.Availableliterature 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.,25307103rd Avenue East,Graham, WA98338.

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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 industrialcivilizationso systematicallyand so long poisoned its land,air,waterand people.None so loudly proclaiming its effortsto improve public health and protect nature so degradedboth. And no advanced society faced such a bleak politicaland economic reckoningwith so few resourcesto invest towardrecovery(Feshbachand Friendly1992:1). 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, in the USSR especially by human agency". In the context of the book about Ecocide (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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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 BESwho 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 systemsof 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 ecosystemsthat 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 reaffirmHawley'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 less to do with of organisms into distinct non-interbreeding types-has 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 behaveenough 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 than, say, aviator, using their respective technologies, any less different ecologically 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 would include combination and cooperation as well denote all life-sustaining effort, 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 webof 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 environment to separate believe it was quiteinappropriate conceptually from the populations life webs of it. in He to "together with the whole of organismsliving preferred regard 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 sociologiststo "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 Sociologywas a valiant attempt to reunite human ecology with bioecology, but Duncan (1959, 1961) had also developed "the ecological complex" as a humanoriented 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, PISTOLinstead 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 traditionalhubris in Americanculture-an attitudelargelysharedat that time by Americansociologists.Therewas an almost unquestioned belief that technologicaladvances were both inevitableand always ultimately beneficial.Those who followed after Burgess regarded succession in human communitiesnot as a product of adverse site-modification resultingfrom normal use (Freudenburg1985),but essentially as a process of aggression (by invaders).Renewed realizationthat organismsin an environmentmay reduce its suitabilityforthemselves by using it is sorelyneeded today forunderstandingsome very serious global problems. The various community types following each other on a particularsite in the process of succession were, for ecologists, seral stages-the stages in a sequence of the particular (orsere)shaped by such factorsas climateand othercharacteristics 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 environmentalimpacts of the interactingspecies populations reached mutually offsettingmagnitudes. Human ecology needs to recognize that an industrial civilization based on enormous inputs of fossil energy cannot be a climax(Catton1980;Milbrath1989). Industrial civilization necessarily undermines itself both by depleting nature's stocks of exhaustible resources (upon which industrial living depends) and by Continued sociologicalmisconceptionof the exuding autotoxic extrametabolites. succession process stifles sociological illumination of the increasingly serious predicamentof industrialsocieties and of a world they dominate. a modem industrialsociety is a society of colossalhunter-gatherers, Ecologically, forits way of living is as dependent as were the lives of pre-Neolithicpeoples 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-expertpublicto recognizethe factthat technologicaland organizational changes that advance a society's cultural power to extract nonrenewable sustenance materialsfroman environmentare not equivalentto "replenishing the earth."They do not increasethe rate of replacementof such sustenance materials into that environment.Industrialization has escalatednot only our use of, but also our dependence on, fuels and materialswhose availabilitywe 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 culturallag. Thatfamous concept fromsociologistWilliam F. Ogburn (1957)thus joins human ecology's conceptualfoundations. MISDIRECTION Fromthe 1920sonward,as humanecology seemed to be thrivingwithin sociology's expanding academic domain, sociologists were already predisposed to abandon its connections to bioecology.In addition to their alreadystrong anti-reductionist It was bias, sociologists had a special aversion to ideas frombiology in particular.

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too soon after their disastrous 19th-century flirtation with so-called "Social Darwinism." But to aggravatetheir biofugaltendencies, there appearedin 1938a critical volume that,in my judgment,camevery nearto destroyinghumanecology. Recoveryfromits impact is farfromcomplete even now. The book was MillaA Alihan's SocialEcology: A Critical the Columbia Analysis, University Press publicationof her Ph.D. dissertation.It attacked "the ecological school" of Americansociology, meaning the work of Parkand his colleagues and students. Shockwaves from this (and other) criticalassessments reverberatedfor morethana decadeamongthe participants in sociology'sversionof humanecology (Theodorson1982:5; Young 1983:94-101).Exceptfor the pro-mainstream writing of Hawley at this time (1944,1950),human ecology for years afterwardwas more than ever typified by work on urban spatial structure such as Schmid's (1950) mapping of various economic,social,and demographicvariablesto discover areal correlationswithin large American cities. Sophisticated as some of this work became, and with commendable internationalextension (see, e.g., Berry and Kasarda becameforsociologistsessentiallya synonym 1977),the word "ecological" for"spatial" (see Gibbsand Martin1959: 30,note 4).Sociologistsdeveloped a trained its to different very meaning in biological literature.Many were insensitivity astonished when the words "ecology" and "environment" loomed in the vocabularies of politicalagitationfromabout 1970onward,expressingthereinmore had come their biologicalmeanings.For most sociologists,"environment" nearly to mean the social and culturalsurroundingsof a person or group, not the land, water,air,vegetation, and associatedpopulationsof other species. Alihan'sbook was sternly reviewed in the AmericanJournalof Sociology by A. B.Hollingshead(1941). His review should have cut short her book'simpact.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 carefulreading of her book does show that she had noticed how the concepts of reaction and succession changed their meaning at the hands of sociologists (Alihan1938:120) but beyond that therewas in it surprisingly littlerealunderstandingof mainstream of the time. She condemned followersof Parkand Burgess ecology ambivalently 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 sociologytexts thatreplacedthe Parkand Burgesstext did not include even the names of Clements, Warming,or Wheeler,let alone the excerpts from their ecologicalwritings that were included on the once-influential Chicagobook. The locales in which human settlements exist were seen by sociologistsas a basic component of their form and a shaper of their functioning, but little further to sociologistsat large.They were unpreparedfor ecologicalthinkingwas familiar the advance from the concept of biotic community to the integralconcept 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 but yet accordingto various provided by capitalismand structural-functionalism One the of what was she "the ecological model," called "paradigms." paradigms ideas inherited than she seemed to realize)from Park (more meaning selectively and Burgess.Its main features, according to Bernard,were the development of hypotheses regarding spatial relationships among unplanned land allocations called "naturalareas,"together with the assumption that the patterns arise from "ecologicalprocesses"(competition,segregation,invasion,and succession). The tragicfact is that Alihan'sone criticalintrusioninto human ecology should not have so demoralized human ecologists. She was not an ecologist, and was scarcely qualifiedto offer such criticism.She subsequently published a book on (1970), wrote the dubbed English script for a Soviet movie, Corporate Etiquette translateda Russianplay, contributedto Good Housekeeping magazine,and became editor of a newsletter for the Society for Clinicaland Experimental Hypnosis, as well as working during WorldWar II for the U.S. government.9It is time at last to put her objectionsaway and get on with the task of perceptive scientificstudy of ecosystems in which humans are involved. WHEREDO WE GO FROMHERE? As anthropologist has suggested,ecosystem is now widely JohnBennett(1976:121) advocated as "the master concept for a unified science of human ecology, or a generalecology includingman."Whathe called"ecosystemicanalysis"is profitably applicableto any biologicalsystem that involves humans. For Bennett (1976:95), human ecology embraceselements frombiology andfromsocial science-as it did 68) when he regardedit as "a special applicationof the early on for Hawley (1950: class of living things." [of generalviewpoint ecology] to a particular There are numerous indications that that was really the intent of Park in the Considerthe factthat Parkand Burgessused materialsfromClements beginning.?1 and other ecologists in their textbook and called it Introduction to the Science of The materials were included not to make a case ([1921] 1924). Sociology ecological for a specializedsubdisciplinecalledhuman ecology. Parkhardlyexpected human ecology to become a distinct branch of sociology. The ecological materialswere meant to help introduce students to sociological subject matter and sociological The same conviction the of thoughtways. general sociological relevance of ecologicalconcepts and principlesis evident in Park'schapterin a book on Research in theSocialSciences (Gee 1929:3-49).There,he referredto "naturalareas"serving as an "ecological frameof reference," as a way of studying communityand society, and said these areas "becomeculturalareas."Ecology,in short, served Parkas 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'suse of the perspectivewas consistentwith his breadthof concern forall of sociology. His ecologicalreadinghelped him illuminatevarioussegments of social life, not just Chicago'sspatialstructure.

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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 socialfacts. 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" of the human affectingour future.Understandingthis monumentaltransformation condition has to be today's most fundamentalchallengefor sociologists. 2000Report, Carrying capacity,considereda vital concept by writersof TheGlobal (Council on EnvironmentalQuality and U.S. Department of State 1980) was foolishly scorned by Simon and Kahn (1984:45) as having "by now no useful meaning"-because increasingknowledge,they supposed,always had and always would increase the earth's carryingcapacity.That is an ecologicallynaive 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. Increasingknowledge, indeed, usedto enlarge human carryingcapacity (Catton 1980:17-28).Technologicaland organizational advances enabled human societies to use more and more of the opportunities availablein the world's ecosystems (Lenski and Lenski 1987).But the other side of that coin was this: by means of today's elaborateorganizationand with all the apparatusour 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 largerthan the per capita load imposed by our pre-industrialancestors (or by our contemporariesin so-called "underdeveloped" countries).For example,energy used by one Americanhas been reported to equal that used by two Germansor two Australians,by three Swiss or three Japanese,by 53 Indians,109 Sri Lankans,or more than a thousand Nepalese (see Independent Commissionon International Development Issues 1980:162).These numbersrepresentindustrialism's transformation of Homo sapiens into what I call Homo colossus. Citizens of an overdeveloped country today are effectivelycolossal in their ecologicalimpact in comparisonwith their human brothersand sisters in nonindustrialcountries.Just as it takes fewer buffalothan rabbitsto constitute a load that exceeds the carryingcapacityof a prairiebiome, so it takes fewer Homo colossus than pre-industrial Homo sapiens to overloadthe planet. The quest forecological-sociological understandingshould no morebe inhibited by the likes of Simon and Kahn than by the likes of Alihan. We needecological concepts. We need to know about ecosystems and their limits and the societal repercussionsthereof(Dickens1993).Carrying capacitysimply 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 Whenthe phraseis seen conceptis too rarelyencounteredin sociologicalliterature. (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). has doubtless served Heretofore,professional aversion to "overgeneralizing" sociologists well, but sometimes we actually err in the opposite direction.We because we are so habituated to perceiving human problems undergeneralize without benefit of ecologicalperspectives.Few Americansociologists,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 carryingcapacity 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: Introduction 1. Any edition of the Lenski and Lenski textbook, HumanSocieties:An 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 ModernSociology, to become acquainted with the human societal relevance of biogeochemical cycles, energy flows, and other fundamental ecological processes; 3. Eugene Odum's (1989) Ecologyand Our Endangered Systems, for Life-Support 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-widelyneglected portents and admonitions; Modern TheHumanAnimal Confronts 4. Kitahara's (1991) The Tragedy of Evolution: Society,and Maryanski and Turer's (1992) The SocialCage:Human Natureand the Evolution of Society, for stimulating (but different) views of biological evolutionary foundations for sociocultural adaptations; and 5. Volumes in the newly established series Advancesin 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 articlewas presented in a session were not the most newsworthyor memorable on 'Theoretical Advancesin HumanEcology" localand conferenceoccurring in that city (Portland, Oregon)at that time.Not surprisingly, at which PresidentClinton nationalmediapaid farmore attentionto the ForestConference and Vice PresidentGore heard testimony from diverse interest groups and sought some way "to strike the elusive balancebetween protectingjobs and the forests"of the Pacific Northwest. In our little session, however, it was suggested that human ecologists should follow with keen interest the effortby InteriorSecretaryBabbittto replacethe species-byspecies approachto environmentalprotectionwith "anecosystem approach." 2. For example, moder mathematicshas been characterizedas "a living, growing element of culture embodying concepts about abstractstructuresand relationsbetween these structures"(Wilder1965:291). It is said to have grown "not because a Newton, Riemann,or a Gauss happened to be born"but rather that these great mathematicians like any othercultural happenedbecauseculturalconditionswere conducive.Mathematics, of "foundation" element,grows by evolutionand diffusion.Similar emergence concepts when the time has ripened culturallycan be seen in the history of other sciences. For evidence on the foundationsof zoology,Lindsayand Margenau on this point,see Brooks(1915) ([1936] 1981)and Holton and Roller(1958)on the foundationsof physics, and Mercer(1981)on the foundationsof biologicaltheory. 3. The word "oecology"seems to occur only once in either of the two volumes of Haeckel1876(the Englishtranslationof the original1868publication), when he concluded those laws of the "series of all inductions, by naming general Biology, upon which this evolution]is firmlybased."Oecology was comprehensivelaw of development [Darwinian one of those inductions.Despite the brevity and unobtrusivenessof this first appearance of the word,Haeckelwas correctin discerningthe subsequentlywell-recognizedecological componentof Darwin'stheorizing. 4. Compare, forexample,Hughes (1993)and Derksenand Gartrell On the cover (1993). in which they appear,they are listed as "Two of the issue of the American Review Sociological between them areindicativeof the transitional Studies."Majordifferences status Ecological of sociologists'currentnotions regardingwhat is "ecological." 5. Gibbs and Martin(1959)had no intention of so drasticallynarrowingthe scope of human ecology. They wisely meant by "sustenance organization"all aspects of social

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a society and its culture-long before organization having to do in any way with sustaining in word became a fashionable politicaldiscourse.It is interestingto compare "sustainability" theirsustenanceorganization concept with the "external system"distinguishedby George Homans (1950: 90-94)froma group's"internal system" (pp. 109-110). Evidently,it can take decades for the full meaningof an innovative concept to be grasped. 6. It is possible that Hawley himself subsequently tended to reinterprethis own statementthat 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 fulfillmentof one organism'sneeds is antitheticalto maintenance of environmental conditions suitable for fulfilling the needs of another organism. Amonghumans,however,as populationincreaseintensifiescompetitionforfinite resourcesor space, the probabilitythat competitiveinteractionscan arouse animosityand turn into conflict may be increased.Further,among humans, the intensified competition for resourcesmay result fromtechnologicalprogress,apartfrompopulationgrowth.Is this behind today's disintegration of societies aroundthe world? 8. Evena maturebioticcommunityshould not, said Tansley,be seen as "anorganism." The process of developmentof a communitywas too imperfectlyanalogousto the process of growth and maturationof an organism.For sociologists,it may be of interest to realize that what we have called "the organismicanalogy"held some appeal for early ecologists as it did for early sociologists and had to be objected to and discardedby later theorists in both disciplines.AlthoughTansley(1947: 194)regardedFredericClementsas "byfarthe he stronglydissented from greatestindividualcreatorof the moder scienceof vegetation," the suggestion by Clementsthat a biome be consideredas an organism(Tansley1939: 517518).We in sociology associatethe idea of society as an organismwith 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 botanistto check the evidence.Tansleyhad not yet become the ecologist he would laterbe, so it seems improbablethat it was his influencethat caused Spencerto insertinto Volume2 the remarkably of the OrganicWorld." ecologicalchaptertitled "TheIntegration vi) said this new chapter"servesto roundoff the generaltheory of Evolution Spencer(1910: in its applicationto living things,"but Spencer's"generaltheory of Evolution"focused on a supposed cosmic tendency for "incoherenthomogeneity" to progress into "coherent heterogeneity,"not on natural selection, so it is unlikely that he could ever have fully developed the nascent ecologicalinsights today's readerscan recognize in that inserted chapter.But what if Spencerhad been ten years younger and Tansleyhad been ten years fartherinto his own developmentas an ecologist when theirpaths crossed?How different of sociology! might have been the subsequent trajectory 9. See the briefbiographic sketchaboutAlihanin ContemporaryAuthors-Permanent Series of her subsequent (vol. 2:19).Her choice of a dissertationtopic, so clearlyuncharacteristic of the Columbia career, may have been partlya reflection Universitysociologydepartment's rivalrywith the sociology departmentat the University of Chicago,where the work she criticizedwas centered. For indicationsof the plausibilityof such an inference,see Faris (1967:32, 119-120,126, 130).Apartfrom this, there is also the fact that in the front of her criticalbook,Alihanextended her deep gratitudeto "Professor MacIver whose wisdom and kindly criticismhave guided me in this work."MacIverwas never an expert on ecology. He had cometo Columbia Universityby way of Canada's Universityof Torontoafterstarting

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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 attitudesand interestsof 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 climate, soil, plants and original factors of his environment-geography, animals. For these reasons the human ecologist, if we liketo apply the wordto the studentof humansocietyin thewidestsense,must work with very different methods from those which we employ, though the basic principles are the same (emphasis added).

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Lestsome readerconstruephraseslike "radical difference between humanand non-human" and "very different methods" as authority for keeping human ecology separate from bioecology, consider the view of Tansley (1939:513) regardingbioecology's dependence: Its development depends on the applicationof various kinds of biological technique,as well as the techniquesof physics and chemistry,to the problems presented by animals and plants studied in their natural and semi-natural environments.To these borrowedand adapted techniquesare added those of the ecologist'sown devising. 11. Forindicationsof the tendencyof sociologiststo stay close to "conventional wisdom" on such matters,see two Symposiain the May and July1992issues of Contemporary Sociology, titled respectively:"The Great Transformation? Social Change in Eastern Europe"and "Diagnosesof Our Time." REFERENCES New York: to theStudy Macmillan. Adams,CharlesC. 1913.Guide ofAnimal Ecology. A Critical New York: ColumbiaUniversityPress. Alihan,MillaA. 1938.Social Analysis. Ecology: . 1970.Corporate New York: Etiquette. Weybrightand Talley. Allee, Warder,C., AE. Emerson,OrlandoPark,Thomas Park,and KarlP. Schmidt. 1949. W.B.Saunders. Philadelphia: Principles ofAnimal Ecology. D. 1990. "From POET to Kenneth PISTOL: Reflectionson the EcologicalComplex." Bailey, 386-394. 60(November): Sociological Inquiry Transition: Cultural andHuman Bennett,John W. 1976.TheEcological Anthropology Adaptation. New York: PergamonPress. Bernard, Glenview,IL:Scott,Foresman. Jessie.1973.TheSociology of Community. Urban New York: Macmillan. andJohnD. Kasarda. 1977.Contemporary Brian J.L., Ecology. Berry, in E. 1993. Human Advances Curtis and 93-132 in Beus, "Sociology, Ecology Ecology."Pp. CT: Press. Human edited Freese. Vol. Lee 2, Greenwich, JAI by Ecology, 2nd ed. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Brooks,WilliamK. 1915.TheFoundations of Zoology. Press. in the USSR,by MurrayFeshbach Brown,LesterR. 1992."Foreword." Pp. xi-xiiiin Ecocide BasicBooks. and AlbertFriendly,Jr.New York: in Brown,M. E. 1979."Sociologyas CriticalTheory."Pp. 251-275in Theoretical Perspectives McNall. New York: St. Martin's Press. edited S.G. by Sociology, WilliamR, Jr.1984."MuchAdo AboutNothing-Some Reflectionson the Widerand Burch, of SocialCarryingCapacity." Leisure Sciences WilderImplications 6(4):487-496. Annals of theAmerican Segregationin AmericanCities." Burgess,ErnestW. 1928."Residential Political and Social 105-115. Science 140(November): of Academy andSocial Research 1945."Contribution of RobertE. Parkto Sociology."Sociology 255-261. 29(March-April): TheEcological Basisof Revolutionary Urbana: Catton, WilliamR., Jr.1980. Overshoot: Change. Universityof IllinoisPress. . 1992."SociologyAs an EcologicalScience."Paperpresented at the Meetings of the Society for HumanEcology,Snowbird,Utah, October.

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