Bridging the GAPS between ecology and human security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 131

'Lonely ecologists': why do ecologists' research
findings have such little impact among the broader
public and in policy formation?
Ecology is 'the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organ-
isms' (Andrewartha 1961). Some variant of this definition, which was first
articulated in 1866 and 1869 by the theoretical morphologist Ernest Haeckel,
an admirer of Charles Darwin (Stauffer 1957), is to be found in all ecology
textbooks. Haeckel wrote, as translated from the German,
by ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of
nature - the investigation of the total relations of the animal to both its
organic and inorganic environment; including, above all, its friendly and
inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes
directly or indirectly into contact - in a word, ecology is the study of all
those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of
the struggle for existence.
(Stauffer 1957:141)
Andrewartha's (1961) definition implies 'relationships' and 'environment',
which are terms made explicit in other major ecology texts, such as Krebs
(1978:141, original emphasis), who defined ecology as 'the scientific study of
the interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms'.
In other words, all ecological research activity has, at its centre, an
attempt to understand whether population numbers of any particular spe-
cies are going up, going down or staying the same over time, and what is
causing these changes, or their absence, to occur. Interestingly, in the entry
for 'Ecology' in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Science (Odenbaugh 2005),
there is no mention at all of the most fundamental activity undertaken by
ecologists: namely, counting living things. Without this basic counting, an
ecologist could not fulfil the activities encompassed by the definitions of
ecology. In their comprehensive discussion of ecology's activities, and how it
must operate at multiple scales, Begon et al . (2006) make this central activity
of 'counting' explicit.
Much observational data have repeatedly confirmed that all populations are
eventually limited by the availability of a necessary resource, and these popu-
lations subsequently transition from an initial growth phase to a 'regulated'
phase in which their numbers level-off (Krebs 1988; Box 8.1) . This regulated
phase can vary in its appearance, but often includes high mortality. A strik-
ing example of this regulation is provided by the feral Soay sheep population
on the World Heritage Site of St Kilda, Scotland, in which up to 50 per cent
of the population dies over the winter every three to five years, despite the
absence of predators (Clutton-Brock and Pemberton 2004).