Cultural Ecology Zoology Geography

Introduction Cultural ecology and human ecology are closely related and represent a continuum of approaches and themes within the human-environment and nature-society subfields of geography, the cognate disciplines, and the expanding domains of interdisciplinary ideas and research. Specifically, cultural ecology denotes the habitually embedded adaptive practices and behaviors that have coevolved in the relations between humans and their nonhuman worlds; human ecology denotes systems of bidirectional interactions, mutual influences, and dynamics of change within human societies and their environments. In addition to the meanings associated with the traditional subfields, the terms cultural ecology and human ecology both are used more expansively. Their broader meanings, increasingly common, denote the range of activities, institutions, and ideas that are rooted in the interrelations of humans, their societies, and their environments. In the early 21st century, the influence of the concepts of cultural ecology and human ecology—such as adaptation, sustainability, and degradation—is integral to rapidly expanding interdisciplinary subfields such as political ecology, sustainability science, global-change science, land change science, environment-development and population-environment studies, agrobiodiversity analysis, political ecologies of health, resilience ecology, ecological-footprint analysis, and social-ecological systems (SESs).   General Overviews Cultural ecology and human ecology are traced through genealogies dating to the early 20th century and continuing through to the early 21st century. The genealogies of these concepts, along with their meanings, institutional centers, and practical applications, have been largely distinct and somewhat parallel, although they occasionally overlap and intersect. The term human ecology was coined in 1907 by J. P. Goode, the chair of the newly founded Department of Geography at the University of Chicago. The formulation of the concept was influenced by well-known ecologists, such as Frederic Clements and others, in the university’s botany and zoology departments; subsequently, human ecology was championed by social scientists at the university, ranging from Harlan H. Barrows (Barrows 1923) to urban sociologists (see Communities, the Commons, Governance, and Sustainability). Porter 1978 provided a useful landmark analysis several decades later. In the case of cultural ecology, a different early history was traced insofar as it arose as an environmentalist theory of cultural change based on the adaptations of cultural forms and social organization to a “culture core” that encompassed the material basis (economic and environmental) of the provisioning of basic needs, such as food. Nietschmann 1974, Turner 1989, and Butzer 1989 exemplify the significant broadening of this approach within geography, which, as advanced in Head and Atchison 2009 and Zimmerer 2010 (both cited under General Overviews: Recent Trajectories), continues to the subject of important contemporaneous concepts and overarching perspectives.