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As a conceptual
framework for learning, cultural ecology is based on two sets of
ideas about the management of natural resources for human survival
and betterment. On the one hand exploitative management
systems are directed at a generation-on-generation process of human
betterment. On the other hand conservation management systems
are directed at maintaining natural resources for long term
survival. The principle that unifies the two behaviours
is that the natural environment which evolved before humankind, in
small scale. or subsistence societies, and modern industrialised
societies, is a major contributor to human social
organization.
Cultural ecology is
therefore the study of human adaptations, both biological and
cultural, to social and physical environments, that enable
populations to survive and reproduce within a given or changing
environment. There are many ways in which these interactions can be
depicted. In this presentation the emphasis is on
making conceptual mind maps by which individuals can assemble their
own body knowledge. The emphasis is that a person gathering
resources in a jungle or a supermarket is illustrating that
humankind is part of nature. Despite the differences their
conceptual organisation all those who write about cultural ecology
present the message that culture is a balancing act between the
mindset devoted to the exploitation of natural resources and that,
which conserves them.
Different theories
of place (attitudinal, relational, ethical, and political) tend
also to emphasize different kinds of meanings. Some are seen
as “inherent” in the human-nature connection, others
are seen as products of culture and experience. In other words,
meanings differ based on the degree to which we assume meaning is
biologically determined, objective, and generalized versus socially
constructed, subjective, and contextual.
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It was the
anthropologist Julian Steward (1902-1972) who coined the term,
envisioning cultural ecology as a methodology for understanding how
humans adapt to such a wide variety of environments.
Cultural ecology as
developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It
derives from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a
number of aspects of human society, in particular the distribution
of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such
behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the tradition of the
potlatch on the Northwest North American coast).
In his Theory of
Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955),
cultural ecology represents the "ways in which culture change is
induced by adaptation to the environment." A key point is that any
particular human adaptation is in part historically inherited and
involves the technologies, practices, and knowledge that allow
people to live in an environment. This means that while the
environment influences the character of human adaptation, it does
not determine it. In this way, Steward wisely separated the
vagaries of the environment from the inner workings of a culture
that occupied a given environment. Viewed over the long term, this
means that environment and culture are on more or less separate
evolutionary tracks and that the ability of one to influence the
other is dependent on how each is structured.
It is this assertion
- that the physical and biological environment affects culture -
that has proved controversial, because it implies an element of
environmental determinism over human actions, which some social
scientists find problematic, particularly those writing from a
Marxist perspective. Cultural ecology recognizes that ecological
locale plays a significant role in shaping the cultures of a
region.
Steward's method was
to:
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document the technologies &
methods used to exploit the environment - to get a living from it.
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look at patterns of human
behaviour/culture associated with using the
environment.
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assess how much these patterns of
behavior influenced other aspects of culture (e.g., how, in a
drought-prone region, great concern over rainfall patterns meant
this became central to everyday life, and led to the development of
a religious belief system in which rainfall and water figured very
strongly. This belief system may not appear in a society where good
rainfall for crops can be taken for granted, or where irrigation
was practiced).
Steward's concept of
cultural ecology became widespread among anthropologists and
archaeologists of the mid-20th century, though they would later be
critiqued for their environmental determinism. |
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The vital
interrelatedness between culture and nature has been a special
focus of literary culture from its archaic beginnings in myth,
ritual, and oral story-telling, in legends and fairy tales, in the
genres of pastoral literature, nature poetry. Important texts in
this tradition include the stories of mutual transformations
between human and nonhuman life, most famously collected in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which became a highly influential text
throughout literary history and across different cultures. This
attention to culture-nature interaction became especially prominent
in the era of romanticism, but continues to be characteristic of
literary stagings of human experience up to the present. The mutual
opening and symbolic reconnection of culture and nature, mind and
body, human and nonhuman life in a holistic and yet radically
pluralistic way seems to be one significant mode in which
literature functions and in which literary knowledge is
produced.
From this
perspective, literature can itself be described as the symbolic
medium of a particularly powerful form of "cultural ecology" (Zapf
2002). Literary texts have staged and explored, in ever new
scenarios, the complex feedback relationship of prevailing cultural
systems with the needs and manifestations of human and nonhuman
"nature." From this paradoxical act of creative regression they
have derived their specific power of innovation and cultural
self-renewal.
German ecocritic
Hubert Zapf argues that literature draws its cognitive and creative
potential from a threefold dynamics in its relationship to the
larger cultural system: as a "cultural-critical metadiscourse," an
"imaginative counterdiscourse," and a "reintegrative
interdiscourse" (Zapf 2001, 2002). It is a textual form which
breaks up ossified social structures and ideologies, symbolically
empowers the marginalized, and reconnects what is culturally
separated. In that way, literature counteracts economic, political
or pragmatic forms of interpreting and instrumentalizing human
life, and breaks up one-dimensional views of the world and the
self, opening them up towards their repressed or excluded other.
Literature is thus, on the one hand, a sensorium for what goes
wrong in a society, for the biophobic, life-paralyzing implications
of one-sided forms of consciousness and civilizational uniformity,
and it is, on the other hand, a medium of constant cultural
self-renewal, in which the neglected biophilic energies can find a
symbolic space of expression and of (re-)integration into the
larger ecology of cultural discourses. This approach has been
applied and widened in a recent volume of essays by scholars from
over the world (Zapf 2008). |
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Books about culture
and ecology began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the
first to be published in the United Kingdom was The Human Species
by a zoologist, Anthony Barnett. It came out in 1950-subtitled The
biology of man but was about a much narrower subset of topics. It
dealt with the cultural bearing of some outstanding areas of
environmental knowledge about health and disease, food, the sizes
and quality of human populations, and the diversity of human types
and their abilities. Barnett's view was that his selected areas of
information "....are all topics on which knowledge is not only
desirable, but for a twentieth-century adult, necessary". He went
on to point out some of the concepts underpinning human ecology
towards the social problems facing his readers in the 1950s as well
as the assertion that human nature cannot change, what this
statement could mean, and whether it is true. The third chapter
deals in more detail with some aspects of human
genetics.
Then come five
chapters on the evolution of man, and the differences between
groups of men (or races) and between individual men and women today
in relation to population growth (the topic of 'human diversity').
Finally, there is a series of chapters on various aspects of human
populations (the topic of "life and death"). Like other animals man
must, in order to survive, overcome the dangers of starvation and
infection; at the same time he must be fertile. Four chapters
therefore deal with food, disease and the growth and decline of
human populations.
Barnett anticipated
that his personal scheme might be criticised on the grounds that it
omits an account of those human characteristics, which distinguish
humankind most clearly, and sharply from other animals. That is to
say, the point might be expressed by saying that human behaviour is
ignored; or some might say that human psychology is left out, or
that no account is taken of the human mind. He justified his
limited view, not because little importance was attached to what
was left out, but because the omitted topics were so important that
each needed a book of similar size even for a summary account. In
other words, the author was embedded in a world of academic
specialists and therefore somewhat worried about taking a partial
conceptual, and idiosyncratic view of the zoology of Homo
sapiens.
Cultural ecology was
one of the central tenets and driving factors in the development of
processual archaeology in the 1960s, as archaeologists understood
cultural change through the framework of technology and its effects
on environmental adaptation.Moves to produce prescriptions for
adjusting human culture to ecological realities were also afoot in
North America. Paul Sears, in his 1957 Condon Lecture at the
University of Oregon, titled "The Ecology of Man," he mandated
"serious attention to the ecology of man" and demanded "its
skillful application to human affairs." Sears was one of the few
prominent ecologists to successfully write for popular audiences.
Sears documents the mistakes American farmers made in creating
conditions that led to the disastrous Dust Bowl. This book gave
momentum to the soil conservation movement in the United
States.
Starting in the
1980s, cultural ecology came under criticism from political
ecology. Political ecologists charged that cultural ecology ignored
the connections between the local-scale systems they studied and
the global political economy. Today few geographers self-identify
as cultural ecologists, but ideas from cultural ecology have been
adopted and built on by political ecology, land change science, and
sustainability science. |
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In geography,
cultural ecology developed in response to the "landscape
morphology" approach of Carl O. Sauer. Sauer's school was
criticized for being unscientific and later for holding a "reified"
or "superorganic" conception of culture. Cultural ecology applied
ideas from ecology and systems theory to understand the adaptation
of humans to their environment. These cultural ecologists focused
on flows of energy and materials, examining how beliefs and
institutions in a culture regulated its interchanges with the
natural ecology that surrounded it. In this perspective humans were
as much a part of the ecology as any other organism. Important
practitioners of this form of cultural ecology includeKarl Butzer
and David Stoddard. |
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J.A. Lauwery's Man's
Impact on Nature, which was part of a series on 'Interdependence in
Nature' published in 1969. Both Russel's and Lauwerys' books were
about cultural ecology, although not titled as such. People still
had difficulty in escaping from their labels. Even Beginnings and
Blunders, produced in 1970 by thepolymath zoologist Lancelot
Hogben, with the subtitle Before Science Began, clung to
anthropology as a traditional reference point. However, its slant
makes it clear that 'cultural ecology' would be a more apt title to
cover his wide-ranging description of how early societies adapted
to environment with tools, technologies and social groupings. In
1973 the physicist Jacob Bronowski produced The Ascent of Man,
which summarised a magnificent thirteen part BBC television series
about all the ways in which humans have moulded the Earth and its
future. |
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In the 1980s a human
ecological-functional view had prevailed. It had become a
conventional way to present scientific concepts in the ecological
perspective of human animals dominating an overpopulated world,
with the practical aim of producing a greener culture. This is
exemplified by I. G. Simmons' book Changing the Face of the Earth,
with its telling subtitle "Culture, Environment History" which was
published in 1989. Simmons was a geographer, and his book was a
tribute to the influence of W.L Thomas' edited collection, Man's
role in 'Changing the Face of the Earth that came out in
1956.
Simmons' book was
one of many interdisciplinary culture/environment publications of
the 1970s and 1980s, which triggered a crisis in geography with
regards its subject matter, academic sub-divisions, and boundaries.
This was resolved by officially adopting conceptual frameworks as
an approach to facilitate the organisation of research and teaching
that cuts cross old subject divisions. Cultural ecology is in fact
a conceptual arena that has, over the past six decades allowed
sociologists, physicists, zoologists and geographers to enter
common intellectual ground from the sidelines of their specialist
subjects. |
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One recent
conception of cultural ecology is as a general theory that regards
ecology as a paradigm not only for the sciences, but for cultural
studies as well.
Peter Finke in his
Die Ökologie des Wissens (The Ecology of Knowledge), explains
that this theory brings together the various cultures of knowledge
that have evolved in history, and that have been separated into
more and more specialized disciplines and subdisciplines in the
evolution of modern science (Finke 2005). In this view, cultural
ecology considers the sphere of human culture not as separate from
but as interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes
and natural energy cycles. At the same time, it recognizes the
relative independence and self-reflexive dynamics of cultural
processes. As the dependency of culture on nature, and the
ineradicable presence of nature in culture, are gaining
interdisciplinary attention, the difference between cultural
evolution and natural evolution is increasingly acknowledged by
cultural ecologists. Rather than genetic laws, information and
communication have become major driving forces of cultural
evolution. Thus, causal deterministic laws do not apply to culture
in a strict sense, but there are nevertheless productive analogies
that can be drawn between ecological and cultural
processes.
Gregory Bateson was
the first to draw such analogies in his project of an 'Ecology of
Mind', which was based on general principles of complex dynamic
life processes, e.g. the concept of feedback loops, which he saw as
operating both between the mind and the world and within the mind
itself. Bateson thinks of the mind neither as an autonomous
metaphysical force nor as a mere neurological function of the
brain, but as a "dehierarchized concept of a mutual dependency
between the (human) organism and its (natural) environment, subject
and object, culture and nature", and thus as "a synonym for a
cybernetic system of information circuits that are relevant for the
survival of the species.".
Finke fuses these
ideas with concepts from systems theory. He describes the various
sections and subsystems of society as 'cultural ecosystems' with
their own processes of production, consumption, and reduction of
energy (physical as well as psychic energy). This also applies to
the cultural ecosystems of art and of literature, which follow
their own internal forces of selection and self-renewal, but also
have an important function within the cultural system as a
whole. |
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The second form of
cultural ecology introduced decision theory from agricultural
economics, particularly inspired by the works of Alexander Chayanov
and Ester Boserup. These cultural ecologists were concerned with
how human groups made decisions about how they use their natural
environment. They were particularly concerned with the question
ofagricultural intensification, refining the competing models of
Thomas Malthus and Boserup. Notable cultural ecologists in this
second tradition include Harold Brookfield and Billie Lee Turner
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As a British idea
the concept of a national conservation management system may be
traced to an upsurge of sentiment after the Second World War that
the world should be made a better place. It was the botanist Arthur
Tansley who pleaded for organised nature conservation on the double
ground of scientific value and beauty. He had advanced the concept
of the ecosystem in 1935, and a number of key ideas of relevance to
nature conservation stem from this. In the immediate post-war
years, he hoped for an 'Ecological Research Council', and a
'National Wildlife Service'. In this context, the idea of national
standards of conservation management can be traced to the formation
of the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), and its great survey of
habitats and species, the Nature Conservation Review, published in
1977. From this time there was general agreement that the common
purpose of conservation management systems was to transform
situations of ecological confrontation between humans and
non-humans into a system of mutual accommodation. The NCC's first
guidelines for managing its national resource was a pro forma to
accommodate a description of the site, the goals of management, and
a prescriptive section, in which the objectives of management were
to be interpreted in a practical manner. Central to the latter
section were lists of codified jobs to help wardens abide by best
practice. The major shortcoming of the guidelines was the lack of a
business philosophy to track value for the inputs of effort and
resources.
Britain's first
proper conservation management system (CMS), which tied objectives
to practical interventions with feedback from monitoring outcomes,
coalesced around Mike Alexander (Warden of Skomer Island National
Nature Reserve), Tim Read (staff member of the Joint Nature
Conservation Committee) and James Perrins (an environmental/IT
graduate of York University). This initiative in the 1980s led to
the setting up of the CMS Consortium by the UK's main conservation
agencies, which produced a relational database for linking
management objectives with scheduled on-site operational inputs.
See the CMS website [2] for more information. The database recorded
all actions, particularly the results of monitoring against
performance indicators. Over the years the software has improved
greatly with respect to the user/screen interface, but the data
model is still very much the same as in the original programme,
which was produced with 'Advanced Revelation' (Arev). Although the
NCC has been replaced by four country agencies, in terms of the
widespread uptake of the CMS across the UK, the current version,
mounted on MS Access, is now, de facto, a national conservation
management system. As its use becomes more widespread CMS plans are
beginning to function as an evidence-based library of best practice
for exchanging practical know how between users.
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The core idea behind
thinking of resources as places is to recognize that people form
varied and complex relationships (uses, meanings, values) with
specific locales. These relationships often extend beyond the kinds
of relationships we normally imagine to be the core of a
consumer’s relationship with a commodity, to include
emotional, symbolic, and even spiritual meanings that have little
direct correspondence with the usefulness of the setting for some
kind of activity. In other words, places are not merely useful for
delivering specific recreation benefits. They also embody a sense
of meaning and identity for the user that is built up as the user
establishes experiences and memories in that place.
The challenge for
those who write and operate conservation management plans for
places is that they are unlikely to discover, let alone map, most
place meanings as if they are strewn about on the landscape waiting
for us to come by and “inventory” them. In contrast to
training for managing places for goods and services, it is
difficult to identify emotional, symbolic and spiritual meanings
through some “archeological” technique that looks for
evidence on the ground (e.g., physical properties) that would
reliably indicate specific meanings. Rather, the meanings of each
place are revealed and transmitted in the stories people tell about
it. Knowledge of place meanings requires delving into the human
history of use, settlement, or occupation of the
landscape.
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1. Writings
