See also: Application of Ecological Informatics; Artificial
Neural Networks; Multilayer Perceptron.
Further Reading
Crick F and Mitchison G (1983) The function of dream sleep. Nature
304: 111–114.
Gordon DM, Goodwin BC, and Trainor LEH (1992) A parallel distributed
model of the behaviour of ant colonies. Journal of Theoretical Biology
156(3): 293–307.
Hebb DO (1949) The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley.
Hinton GE and Sejnowski TJ (1986) Learning and relearning in Boltzmann
machines. In: Rumelhart DE and McClelland JL (eds.)
Parallel Distributed Processing, ch. 7, pp. 45–76. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hopfield JJ (1982) Neural networks and physical systems with emergent
collective computational abilities. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
79: 2554–2558.
Hopfield JJ, Feinstein DI, and Palmer RG (1983) ‘Unlearning’
has a stabilizing effect in collective memories. Nature
304: 158–159.
Human Ecology: Overview
F Steiner, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
ª 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Brief Early History of Human Ecology
Toward a New Ecology
Ideas Contributing to a New Human Ecology
Nested Networks
Practical Applications of Applied Human Ecology
Summary
Further Reading
Introduction
We interact with each other and with our physical
environments. We are biological creatures who depend
upon the living landscape to sustain us. Plants and
animals are affected by our actions, and our existence is
impacted by plants and animals. We exist within complex
sets of interactions – that is, we live in an ecological
world.
Learning to perceive the world as a never-ending
system of interactions – that is, to think about our surroundings
and our relationships with our environments
and each other ecologically – is challenging. Such
thinking forces us to rethink our views of economics,
politics, and business. It suggests different ways to
plan and design. In economics, for example, an ecological
view suggests a much more complex set of relationships
than supply and demand: supply of what and where
from and at what cost, not only in dollars but to other
species and other generations. Ecological understanding
can also confront our values and religious beliefs,
although most faiths address human connections to the
natural world and stewardship responsibilities for future
generations.
Ecology is, by definition, the reciprocal relationship
among all organisms and their biological and physical
environments. People are organisms. As a result, we can
ask, Is the use of human as a modifier to ecology
necessary?
Human with ecology helps reinforce the reality of
our place in environments. Human ecology seeks to
understand the multiple interrelationships between
the human species and our environments. Human
ecology is broader than biology, but also is grounded
in biological concepts. The transdisciplinary field can
be defined as the study of the complex and varied
system of interactions between people and their
environments.
Brief Early History of Human Ecology
Many overlaps between the social and biological
sciences existed at the end of the nineteenth century
and during the early twentieth century. Ecological concepts
were prominent in both geography and sociology.
Human ecology was recognized as a unique field of
geography. Geographers went so far as declaring
‘‘geography as the science of human ecology.’’ Early
twentieth-century geographers sought to make clear
the relationships existing between natural environments
and the distribution and activities of people. However,
this approach unfortunately became linked with
1898 Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview
environmental determinism which suggested that our
surroundings shape everything from skin color to behavior.
These concepts led to rather simplistic, and even
racist, notions about how environments shaped cultures,
and environmental determinism was discredited in the
1920s.
Also during the 1920s, urban sociologists adapted ecological
concepts to explain settlement patterns and human
interactions in cities. Called the Chicago School, these
sociologists adapted observation methods from anthropology
to describe urban life and culture. They
described Chicago as a series of concentric rings from
the central business district to the commuter zone on
the periphery. They also used the ecological concept of
succession to describe how these zones build up one after
another as a city grows. These sociologists suggested how
various groups of people succeed others in the concentric
zones. This small group of sociologists used ecological
concepts more as metaphors than as a tool for scientific
analysis. As a result, the connections between the two
disciplines were not deep, in spite of promising beginnings.
Meanwhile, the advances in geography were
overshadowed by the environmental determinism criticisms.
As a result, human ecology faded to the margins of
geography and became a historical footnote in sociology
for several decades.
Increasingly, the social sciences became disconnected
from the physical sciences and, by extension, from the
material world. The focus of the social sciences shifted
from ecological models to the embrace of economic,
political, and demographic approaches where the role
of natural forces was more subtle. In order to bolster
the validity of their science, some researchers emphasized
quantitative analysis that favored data about
people over the observation of the human condition.
Meanwhile, ecologists, especially those in North
America, concentrated on the study of natural, nonhuman
environments. Some one-third of the land in the
United States is in public ownership, enabling wildlife
and vegetation research on vast expanses with little
human interruption.
There are many ironies in this disconnection. For
example, the Greek root for both ecology and economics
is the same: oikos. Both disciplines involve the study of the
household. Ecology is the study of the environmental
house, including all its inhabitants, in which we live and
in which we place our human-made structures and
domesticated plants and animals. Economics is the study
of the household of money. As we can track the flow of
money, we can also illuminate other movements in the
places where we live. But beyond their common Greek
root, economics and ecology diverged with few clear
connections persisting.
Beginning in the 1960s, the general public became
alarmed by population growth and the consequences of
pollution on water, air, and land quality. Biologists and
ecologists used human ecology to emphasize how people
are subject to the same environmental limitations as other
animals. Also during this time, anthropologists used the
term to help explain the impact of environment on culture.
Ecologically oriented anthropologists adapted
concepts like population regulation and energy flow to
explain community organization. In general, early use of
ecological concepts in human ecology depended on traditional
views of nature, such as the tendency of systems to
evolve toward a steady state.
This past suggests the ongoing utility of human ecology.
By understanding the interactions and interrelationships
between people and their environments, human ecology
can help to:
• consider and plan for the long-term consequences of
human actions;
• avoid disastrous surprises resulting from environmental
phenomena such as floods, earthquakes, tornadoes,
wildfires, and tsunamis;
• generate ideas for dealing with environmental challenges
and opportunities; and
• create a livable and sustainable relationship with the
environment.
However, to realize this utility, it is necessary to understand
changes in ecological thinking generally and how
human ecology fits within this ever-changing discipline.
Toward a New Ecology
Since the first Earth Day in April 1970 and the rise of the
modern environmental movement, social scientists have
rediscovered the environment while biologists have
probed social interactions. Meanwhile, several ecologists
have addressed human communities, and planners and
architects have attempted to provide syntheses to shape
human communities. In addition to the stimulus from
popular culture, as expressed in wide-ranging areas from
politics to music, advances in theory through computing
technologies, urban morphology (the study of how cities
are structured physically), landscape studies, and ideas
about complexity have contributed to this renewed interest
in the environment by social scientists. From within
the biological sciences, research has altered conventional
views about organism–environment interactions.
Increasingly, ecologists consider human influences on
their environments.
This new human ecology emphasizes complexity
over reductionism, focuses on changes over stable states,
and expands ecological concepts beyond the study of
plants and animals to include people. This view differs
from the environmental determinism of the early
Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview 1899
twentieth century. The new ecology addresses the complexity
of human interactions rather than how a specific
physical environment shapes human anatomic variations.
Because people form part of its scope, new ecology may
be viewed as human ecology, or the evolution of traditional
ecology to reconsider human systems.
New ecology represents a significant reorientation
that has occurred in the field of biological ecology.
For example, new ecology embraces disequilibria,
instability, and even chaotic fluctuations in natural and
human-impacted biophysical environments. Two primary
changes have occurred in new ecology,
differentiating it from its traditional progenitor. The
first shift is from an equilibrium perspective, where
local populations and ecosystems are viewed as in balance
with local resources and conditions, to a
disequilibrium perspective where history matters and
populations and ecosystems are continually being
influenced by disturbances. The second change is from
considering populations and ecosystems as relatively
closed or autonomous systems, independent of their
surroundings, to viewing both populations and ecosystems
as open that are strongly influenced by the input
and output, or flux, of material and individuals across
system borders.
Traditional ecology relied on the assumptions that
nature could achieve balance and that ecosystems functioned
as closed systems. Natural plant communities
evolved through several stages, climaxing in a steady
state, according to traditional theory. Since ecologists
studied plants and animals in forests, deserts, and other
environments relatively removed from human settlements,
their interactions could be isolated for study
within closed systems.
New ecology challenges both assumptions. Living systems
are viewed as changing and complex rather than
stable and balanced. In addition, the boundaries between
communities blur. Open systems possess fluid, overlapping
boundaries across several spatial scales from the local
to the global.
Ideas Contributing to a New Human
Ecology
Ecology lends itself to reinvention, to reinterpretation.
Relationships link things, and how we view connections
among elements changes. As early as the 1950s, anthropologists
called for a ‘new ecology’. The ideas leading
to the more recent, expanding view of ecology have
come from many sources and a variety of disciplines,
including anthropology. The catalysts for change
include advances in technologies, the study of urban
morphology and landscape ecology, a broader
understanding of chaos theory, and increased interest
in issues of sustainability. The emergence of urban
ecology exemplifies a beginning in the synthesis of
these sometimes divergent catalysts. Urban ecology
focuses on organism–environment interactions within
cities and other human settlements. By concentrating
on urban areas, the interests of the new ecological
perspective are woven closer together.
Fresh ways to observe nature, primarily as a result of
computer and remote-sensing technologies, have altered
our understanding of functions, structures, and patterns.
These new (and evolving) technologies are yielding a
deeper perspective, because many events can be considered
simultaneously in a connected network.
A computer technology especially valuable for
revealing complex, ecological relationships is geographical
information systems, known by its abbreviation
GIS. These computer software programs allow analysis
to study overlapping spatial data and map the results.
For example, the home range of a tiger beetle species
can be mapped then compared with a similar map for a
species of brown bear. In turn, both can be overlaid on
the migration routes of Canada geese and the extent
of a coniferous forest and so on. GIS emerged concurrently
with new ways to see and to record the surface
of the planet, such as remote-sensing technologies.
Whereas GIS programs map information, remote sensing
creates imagery of phenomena on the Earth’s
surface.
As the Apollo astronauts approached the moon, they
relayed images back to Earth unlike anything previously
seen. The hypnotic pictures of the moon riveted our
attention, of course, but the photographs of the bluegreen
orb of Earth were perhaps even more profound.
Continents and water bodies were clearly visible beneath
swirls of clouds, but borders had disappeared (Figure 1).
No longer would we see Earth in the manner of the little
globes in our classrooms. NASA continues to produce
images of the planet, as do other governmental and
private remote-sensing groups. In fact, NASA broadcasts
continual images of our planet on its own television
network.
Remote-sensed information is collected through satellites
or high-flying aircraft. The images can be enhanced
with computers to reveal specific phenomena, such as
land cover, land use, and fault lines. Climate patterns
can be tracked and future weather events forecasted.
Remote sensors can also be linked to on-the-ground
monitoring stations. Such connections allow phenomena
to be observed through time. For example, a drainage
basin can have several stream-monitoring gauges, which
may be linked to a central data collection center. In turn,
satellites may be able to collect rainfall and snowpack
information daily that can be combined with the field
data to predict future water supplies.
1900 Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview
The use of GIS and remote-sensing technologies has
spread rapidly among scientists during the past few
decades. A geologist can overlay a map of bedrock on
an aerial photograph to determine where a fault line
intersects with settlement. Additional technologies
likely will open more possibilities. For example, visualization
techniques present three-dimensional
representations of objects. Such visualization can be
combined with GIS to show places more holistically.
The maps of the geologist and the ecologist can be
rendered in three dimensions to illustrate the relationships
among phenomena such as aquifers, wildlife
corridors, and land use. The Internet opens opportunities,
too. For instance, a team of American students
can work with a group of Italians in a virtual studio,
and share GIS maps and photographs of a place, say, in
Africa. Furthermore, one can use websites such as
Google Earth for an aerial photograph and a map of
almost anywhere on the planet.
Information stored and communicated via computers
reveals more and more about our interactions, with each
other and with our worlds. GIS combined with real-time
satellite images and the Internet provides the equivalent
of a central nervous system for the planet. Humans can
aspire to provide the brain for that system. How we apply
our brains to use these technologies and this information
will transform how we live and, therefore, the patterns of
our settlements.
As the information landscape advances, we can gain a
better understanding of human ecology. For example,
satellite imagery can produce daily climate information
for settlements. GIS can be used to map these data over
time and enable the climate information to be overlaid on
land-use and land-cover maps. This process reveals
how we use the land and how what we plant on its
surface affects urban climate. In this way, GIS and
remote-sensing technologies enable us to visualize relationships.
Since human ecology is essentially about
relationships, our ecological understanding advances as
we reveal previously unseen connections.
We especially gain insights into urban places. Urban
morphology involves the study of human settlement
patterns. People create nonurban settlements as well,
ranging from farmsteads and rural villages to mines and
ski lodges. While suburbia might lack urbanity, it is often
classified as urban by geographers. Farmsteads and
suburbia have specific morphologies as well which are
important to understand. However, since we live in the
first urban century, the morphologies of cities and metropolitan
regions especially merit attention. Population
trends indicate that the world is becoming more
urban. For the first time in human history, over half the
world’s population lives in metropolitan regions. As the
planet has urbanized, the structure of urban areas has
attracted increased attention by scholars from many
disciplines.
Urban morphology evolved from both the disciplines
of geography and architecture in Europe, where a rigorous
and thorough mapping of the physical structure of
cities was promoted. Mapping revealed what the Italians
call tessuto, or the tissues of the city – that is, clusters of
structures, vegetation, and roadways that hold the
urban body together. The Dutch use a similar concept
and their word for tissue, weefsel, to describe urban tensegrity.
The influence of urban morphology has spread
among geographers, architects, and planners in Europe,
North America, and Asia. Urban morphologists advocate
reading the city as a text, or as a cultural palimpsest, to
reveal culture.
Landscapes possess power such as both a cultural and a
natural palimpsest. Landscapes offer a scale where
social and physical processes and pattern can become
evident. We see landscapes and all our senses react to
their well-being.
Landscape ecology focuses on the ecological relationships
at the landscape scale. Landscape ecology is a
study of the structure, function, and change in a heterogeneous
land area composed of interacting
ecosystems. European scientists advanced landscape
ecology before their American counterparts. The
Figure 1 Blue Marble. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center Image by Reto Sto¨ ckli (land surface, shallow water,
clouds). Enhancements by Robert Simmon (ocean color,
compositing, 3D globes, animation). Data and technical support:
MODIS Land Group; MODIS Science Data Support Team;
MODIS Atmosphere Group; MODIS Ocean Group. Additional
data: USGS EROS Data Center (topography); USGS Terrestrial
Remote Sensing Flagstaff Field Center (Antarctica); Defense
Meteorological Satellite Program (city lights).
Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview 1901
landscapes of Europe have been more densely settled
than in North America, and, as a result, the human
influence was recognized quickly by European scientists.
American ecologists are more accustomed to
studying relatively pristine landscapes. The refinement
of the landscape ecology discipline, coupled with
increased suburban sprawl nationwide, has changed
this situation as more American ecologists acknowledge
human interactions with natural systems. As landscape
ecology has evolved through multiple interactions
among European, American, and Australian contributors,
it has crystallized into something new and
powerful. Human settlements form mosaic-like patterns
on landscapes and this land mosaic vision makes the
landscape readily accessible to scientists, especially
ecologists.
We can see change and interactions in landscapes.
Edges – or interfaces – between land uses can be especially
sensitive and rich. In rapidly growing regions, edges
are unstable and conflicting. New homes replace farmland.
The land sells relatively cheaply. The open land
provides an attractive backdrop. Agriculture practices
create dust and noise. Farming often depends on chemicals
that have consequences for human health.
Suburbanites possess different lifestyles and expectations
that vary dramatically from those of their rural neighbors.
Such landscape change lends itself to scientific analysis.
For example, ecologists can ask, What interactions are
driving the change and what patterns are resulting?
A growing interest in the ecologies of urban areas
provides evidence of a coalescence of these catalysts
for change. In the United States, National Science
Foundation (NSF) established two urban Long Term
Ecological Research (LTER) projects in 1997. Before
setting up these projects in the Baltimore and Phoenix
metropolitan regions, NSF located LTERs in nonurban
places. Remote locations presented ideal places for
ecologists to explore the traditional concept of stable
states in relatively closed systems. Increasingly, influential
American ecologists began to urge NSF to
consider the ecology of metropolitan regions too in
order to pursue the study of more complex systems.
Urban ecological systems present multiple challenges to
ecologists, including pervasive human impact and
extreme heterogeneity of cities, and the need to integrate
social and ecological approaches, concepts, and
theories.
The Baltimore and Phoenix LTERs offer contrasting
urban conditions. Baltimore, located in the northeastern
region of the United States, is an older city than Phoenix
and has a more dense urban fabric. The Sun Belt location
of Phoenix offers a city developed as a result of automobile,
airplane, air conditioning, and refrigeration
technologies. Whereas growth in Baltimore is rather
slow, population expansion in the Phoenix metropolitan
region leads the nation. The humid Chesapeake Bay
contrasts the arid Sonoran Desert. As a result, the
Baltimore and Phoenix LTERs can help us understand
constants in urban conditions as well as specific variations
resulting from the natural surroundings and from the
period of settlement.
Thus far, there has been relatively little interaction
between the urban ecology camp dominated by scientists
and the urban morphologists led by architects and
planners. Geographers are present in both groups and
likely will form bridges. The substance of such spans
can be provided through better-understanding human
ecology.
Human ecology is important if we are serious about
sustainable development – that is, economic progress that
meets all of our needs without leaving future generations
with fewer resources than those we enjoy – a way of living
from nature’s income rather than mining its capital
account. Sustainability requires that human communities
are adaptable to change, that natural processes and landscape
functions are protected, and that resources are
conserved for future generations. To be adaptable, communities
need to be resilient. We must understand the
organization – the function, structure, and processes – of
the communities that we inhabit in order to lay the
foundations for the future.
Perhaps the growing interest in sustainable
development – in seeking to make communities more
livable – derives from a sense that we are living in
places where something is out of whack. Perhaps the
creative impulse derives always from a dread of
the future, the feeling that the world may not improve
for our children, and our desire to fend off doom
to improve things for those who follow. To sustain
things, we must keep them from falling apart, now
and in the future. All around us, things indeed appear
to be coming apart at the seams. Where once children
played in the park, now homeless people sleep. Where
there was once a vibrant downtown, there are now
vacant lots.
The farm field, the park, the downtown; the convenience
store, the homeless people, the vacant lots, all
form pieces in larger mosaics, larger processes. In itself,
the field or the convenience store is neither good nor
bad. Both, however, are part of larger systems that may
be either healthy or sick, that is, either capable of
sustaining themselves or not. The individual farm
field contributes to a regional agricultural system. The
crops produced in the field help sustain the regional
economy. The crops support not only the farm family
that produces them, but the local co-op that processes
the crop for the market and the tractor dealer as well.
The convenience store has an asphalt parking lot. Its
impervious surface contributes to regional drainage and
flooding problems because of increased runoff. Because
1902 Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview
the parking lot is black, it adds to the urban heat island
effect resulting in summer discomfort among nearby
residents. The understanding of how living systems
are organized from the local to the regional provides
a means for assessing their capabilities to adjust to
change.
Nested Networks
Living systems are organized hierarchically and communicate
through feedback networks. The elements
within a system may vary greatly in organization.
According to urban morphologists, urban form can be
understood at different levels of resolution. Commonly,
four are recognized, corresponding to the building/lot,
the street/block, the city, and the region. A building
may be tall or short, with a pitched roof or a flat one,
brick or wood or adobe. A lot, a street, or a block may
be narrow or wide, straight or curved. A city may be
densely settled or spread out. A region can be defined
by a river or a mountain or a coastline or all three and
by other factors.
Hierarchies help us understand how people are connected
with one another – the basic idea of community.
To understand human ecologies, the most relevant
levels of organization include habitat, community, landscape,
region, nation and state, and Earth or ecosphere.
These levels present different, yet interconnected,
scales of analysis. Each level possesses a history and a
literature of analysis and debate. The habitat includes
the building and lot. The community is comprised of
buildings, lots, streets, and blocks. Landscapes can be
urban, suburban, rural, and wild. Regions are hodgepodges
of landscapes, while the distinctions between
regions, and often those between states and nations, are
even more blurred. But there is less ambiguity about the
ends of the Earth.
Each level of human organization (nation, state, region,
county, and city) is an element in a larger system, but is
also comprised of smaller geographic units like neighborhoods
and communities, which are, in turn, collections of
single households. Home and work places form the habitats
for people and are further divided into cells we call
rooms. Hierarchy may be seen as a framework, a system of
nested networks.
A critical feature of these nested networks is an asymmetric
interaction in between levels. The larger, slower
levels maintain constraints within which faster levels
operate. There are, however, circumstances when slower
and larger levels in ecosystems become briefly vulnerable
to dramatic transformation because of small events and
fast processes. Large, slow levels tend to keep things in
place. Small, fast levels initiate changes when the larger
levels are not functioning effectively.
Viewing the world hierarchically does not necessarily
imply seeing it through a machine-like lens. Rather, it is
to suggest components of a vocabulary to read our surroundings,
our world.
Traditional ecology was commonly grounded in
the assumption that somehow nature is in balance. Even
the most casual observation of the human condition
indicates that we are seldom balanced in our affairs.
Nonequilibrium represents an important change in thinking.
An equally, or perhaps even more important change
derives from viewing environments at multiple, interacting
scales. Landscape-level ecology, in particular,
provides spatial form and function to nature’s flows and
human activities. New ecology, a deeper understanding of
interactions at various scales, holds the prospect for better,
although more complex, approaches to sustainable
resource management, nature conservation, and environmental
protection as well as the arts of environmental
design and planning.
Practical Applications of Applied Human
Ecology
Since the 1970s, natural and social scientists initiated
multidisciplinary research addressing practical problems
related to the environment. For example, the United
States and many other nations require an environmental
impact analysis of the consequences of larger projects.
Such analyses are often performed by multidisciplinary
teams, with human ecology providing a common set of
concepts among disciplines.
Human ecology can also assist community and regional
planning. For example, the Phoenix, Arizona (USA)
metropolitan region is well known for its rapid growth
and its suburban sprawl. Much of the post-World War II
development has occurred in a similar pattern of lowdensity,
single-family homes that is highly dependent on
the automobile.
Beginning in the 1990s, city officials sought to
encourage different patterns of development for North
Area which comprised 20% of the land within the city.
Using corridor, path, and matrix principles from landscape
ecology, 28% of the most environmentally
significant areas in the 110 square mile North Area
were preserved as open space. Through an analysis of
current and potential residents, three future settlement
patterns, instead of one, were suggested for the rest of
the North Area. In suitable places along transportation
corridors, greater urban density was recommended that
included green ribbons of natural drainage. In other
Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview 1903
locations, a very low-density, low-impact rural desert
settlement was suggested.
Since people in Phoenix are attracted to suburban
development, suitable areas for such settlement were
identified. However, a new form of desert suburban
development was designed. This settlement would be
aligned with natural drainage systems, preserve native
vegetation and wildlife habitat, encourage the planation
of native species, reduce the amount of impervious surfaces
for roadways, use natural building materials with a
local color palette, and keep building heights below the
tree line (Figures 2 and 3).
Desert character
Current suburban pattern
Single story, appropriate to landscape
Nonnative ornaments 32’ Street widths Two stories, block views Privacy wall, large yard, and no natural washes
Single story, appropriate to landscape Visual access to open space Natural washes and
outcrops
Small front yards, Reduced street
indigenous plants width
Figure 3 Comparison of current suburban pattern in North Phoenix to one integrated with the desert. From Steiner F (2000) The Living
Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Regional natural area
Trail connection to open space
Wash buffer
Reduced road
widths
Narrow front yards
Secondarywash
Primary wash
Trail
Trail
Figure 2 Open space systems. Based on desert washes used to create a new form of suburban development in North Phoenix. From
Steiner F (2000) The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
1904 Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview
Around the world from Arizona, Kenya is also experiencing
a growing population and declining natural
resources. A multidisciplinary team of Kenyan and
Dutch researchers conducted extensive landscape and
human ecology analyses which led the Green Town
program. The motto of the program was ‘make every
town a green town’. In all, some 29 small towns across
Kenya became involved in the effort which included
considerable ecological training of local officials.
The Green Town program emphasized locally
derived, sustainable designs. Shaded market areas were
suggested as well as agroforestry practices to produce
fuel and food. In addition to increasing fuel wood and
food products, the agroforestry techniques reduced soil
erosion and storm water runoff. The Green Town program
suggested strategies for urban tree plantation as
well as ways for individual homes to collect rainwater
(Figures 4 and 5).
Future situation
Figure 4 Before and after of Kenyan hillside integrating agroforestry systems to produce food and wood while controlling storm runoff
and soil erosion. From Duchhart I (2007) Designing Sustainable Landscapes: From Experience to Theory. Wageningen: Wageningen
University.
Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview 1905
Summary
Human ecology involves the interrelationships among
people, other organisms, and their environments. Human
ecology emphasizes complexity and change. Urban morphology
and landscape ecology offer two approaches to
study the structure, function, and processes of human settlements.
Hierarchy also aids in the understanding of how
people organize themselves spatially on various scales from
the individual room within a house, office, school, or
factory to the neighborhood and community on to the
region, state or province, and nation. Applied human ecology
presents many practical applications including the
analysis of the environmental impacts from specific, proposed
projects to the planning of communities and regions.
See also: Adaptive Management and Integrative
assessments; Ecological Footprint; Limits to Growth;
Monitoring, Observations, and Remote Sensing – Global
Dimensions; Precaution and Ecological Risk; Sustainable
Development.
Further Reading
Botkin DB (1990) Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the TwentyFirst
Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
Botkin DB and Beveridge CE (1997) Cities as environments. Urban
Ecosystems 1: 3–19.
Duchhart I (2007) Designing for Sustainable Landscapes – From
Experience to Theory. Wageningen: Wageningen University.
Forman RTT (1995) Land Mosaics: The Ecology of
Landscapes and Regions. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Marten GG (2001) Human Ecology: Basic Concepts for Sustainable
Development. Sterling, VA: Earthsean Publications.
Moudon AV (1997) Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary
field. Urban Morphology 1: 3–10.
Pickett ST, Burch WR, Jr., Dalton SE, et al. (1997) A conceptual
framework for the study of human ecosystems in urban areas. Urban
Ecosystems 1: 185–199.
Steiner F (2000) The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to
Landscape Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Steiner F (2002) Human Ecology: Following Nature’s Lead. Washington,
DC: Island Press.
Young GL (1989) A conceptual framework for an interdisciplinary
human ecology. Acta Oecologiae Hominis 1: 1–135.
Zimmerer KS (1994) Human geography and the ‘new
ecology’: The prospect and promise of integration.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
84(1): 108–125.
Rainwater accumulates on the roof and runs off in
large drops. These drops splash the ground and then
the wall. Mud walls will be damaged.
Gutters and a water tank
prevent raindrops from
falling onto the ground
Ground cover of trees
and shrubs
Grassthatched
A trench dug around
the house filled with
stones and pebbles
Watertank
Gutter
Iron
roof
Rain
Rain
Rain
Rain
Rain
Rain
Roof
Corrugated
Figure 5 Strategies for collecting rainwater in Kenya. From Duchhart I (2007) Designing Sustainable Landscapes: From Experience to
Theory. Wageningen: Wageningen University.
1906 Human Ecology | Human Ecology: Overview