Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
member of an animal association, to its complete environment.” However, this quote
is more typical of the belief that humans and human action should be ruled by the
laws of nature—a popular idea during the 1910s and 1920s, and even today—than of
desire to end the human-nature dualism.
The English ecologist Arthur Tansley, in a 1935 paper that not only challenged the
Clementsian model of plant succession and Clements's concept of the complex or-
ganism but offered a new ecological paradigm—the ecosystem—as an alternative
(Tansley 1935), provided an extremely important step in dissolving the human-nature
dualism concept within ecology. Tansley not only argued for including human-
caused vegetation types into the study of ecology (“We cannot confine ourselves to the
so-called “natural” entities and ignore the processes and expressions of vegetation now
so abundantly provided us by the activities of man” [p. 304]), he also placed humans
within the natural world as an “exceptionally powerful biotic factor”:
It is obvious that modern civilized man upsets the “natural” ecosystems or “bi-
otic communities” on a very large scale. But it would be difficult, not to say im-
possible, to draw a natural line between the activities of the human tribes
which presumably fitted into and formed parts of “biotic communities” and the
destructive activities of the modern world. Is man part of “nature” or not? Can
his existence be harmonized with the conception of the “complex organism”?
Regarded as an exceptionally powerful biotic factor which increasingly upsets
the equilibrium of preexisting ecosystems and eventually destroys them, at the
same time forming new ones of very different nature, human activity finds its
proper place in ecology. (303)
Responding to Tansley's critique, Clements and Shelford, in their 1939 treatise
Bio-
Ecology
, did recognize humans as the “outstanding dominant of a new order,” but
they deemed it premature to include the study of human ecology in any detail in their
topic.
Nevertheless, human ecologists (e.g., Robert E. Parks, etc.) proceeded on, using
the concepts of ecology to study humans, although most plant/animal ecologists paid
relatively little heed to their activities. Still, there were some connections. Indeed, the
Ecological Society of America held a symposium on human ecology in 1940 (McIn-
tosh 1986, 307). The idea of interdisciplinary work between plant/animal ecologists
and human ecologists continued to hang on by the barest of threads during and after
World War II, and through the early 1960s. The Ecological Society of America, for ex-
ample, made attempts during the mid-1950s to elevate the discussion of human ecol-
ogy and, in 1955, the National Science Foundation/Wenner-Gren Foundation for An-
thropological Research coproduced “Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth,”
a conference that brought together ecologists, anthropologists, geographers, and other
thinkers to discuss the past, present, and future relation between humans and na-
ture (Thomas Jr. 1956). However, these and other smaller efforts produced little last-
ing effect.
So little, in fact, that by 1967 the ecologist and philosopher Paul Shepard was ask-
ing: “Whatever happened to human ecology?” (Shepard 1967). McIntosh, reflecting
