Human Ecology

‘Humans have always been influenced by nature’ tacitly suggests we are not fully part of nature. Human Ecology makes the case for the need to explore how to (re-) assert humans’ relationship with nature, and studies the relationship between humans and the environment, drawing from a diverse range of disciplines including biology, geography, sociology, engineering and architecture. Here Steiner shows how human cultures have been shaped by natural forces, and how this understanding can contribute to both humans and nature thriving, and address societal challenges involving ecology and culture; nature and humans; and, land and people.

Posing important questions, often from small scale observations but with large scale significance, and offering principles and information to form insights and vision, the book is structured across eight chapters organised hierarchically from small to large scale: fundamental principles of human ecology; habitat; community; landscape; the ecological region; nation, state and nationstate; the green chaos of the planet; and, following nature’s lead. Whilst there are notes, bibliography and index, photos would have helped visualise examples of key observations and assertions.

This new ecology emerges out of a recognition that people engage in hierarchical ecological relationships and the nature of those exchanges can be studied in the urban and suburban environments where they occur. Concepts of resilience and regeneration cover ideas around an area sustaining itself by resisting damage, restoring and renewing sources of energy and materials, and mitigating and adapting to the consequences of climate change. It is a return to the notion of ‘community as a central building block of humanity’, one where resources of all types are maintained.

In the wider context, it highlights that if we continue only to focus on human issues of large urbanised areas, with the world population nudging 7,500 million, there are over 3,500 million people living in more rural areas whose situation is also important but less well understood. Consideration of these contexts in a more integrated manner could lead to a wider variety of ways to address the issues that we all face, in whatever type of living environment.

Accepting the world as a never ending system of interactions highlights the necessity to acknowledge the full implications of these interactions, including with other species and generations. But this is something we tend to ignore as it ‘endangers the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies’; ecology and economics have the same Greek root. Whilst we continue to focus on our differences rather than our similarities, we are destroying ourselves and much of the life on the planet along with us.