OOS 42-6
Human ecology at ESA: An historical review
Ecology—for more than a century—has become an increasingly important interdisciplinary natural science. Throughout this long history, however, ecological scientists have encountered an inevitable quandary— of continually running into the ‘human problem’. This has been the case from the earliest days of ESA, when the founders themselves wrestled with questions of conservation, policy and management. Not long thereafter ‘the discovery of ecology’, within the social sciences and humanities, delivered additional ways of seeing humans in the broader context of the living world. Paul Sears brought these concerns home in the 1950s, in his ESA address about human ecology. With the advent of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, many other ecologists contributed their voices. ESA, across the decades, has always embraced these issues: sometimes invitingly, sometimes less so. More recently, the complex issues of urban systems, species loss, ecological policy and planning, interdisciplinary education, earth stewardship, human health, climate change and applied ecology have grown ever more central to ESA’s mission and programs. This paper reviews the contribution that human ecology has made, both formal and informally, to ESA’s approach to these issues.
Results/Conclusions
This paper reviews the chequered history of human ecology at ESA. It discusses some of the early pioneers in human ecology and some of the key concepts that they used to understand humans in an environmental context. The high point for human ecology was as a formally constituted ESA committee in the 1950s, charged with advising the United Nations on the ‘conservation of nature’. Although this committee ceased to exist from the 1960s, work in the name of human ecology continued to be associated with influential members of ESA across the intervening decades. However, for a range of reasons that are discussed in the paper, human ecology was not formally recognized as a section recognition until 2008. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the key orienting concepts that human ecology can bring to ESA’s current and future directions.