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Social Applications of Ecology

6 May, 2015 - 09:39

Ecology deals with the interactions between species and the necessary conditions of existence in the environment to which they are adapted. These adaptations comprise webs of perception and action evolved to ensure resources are available to maintain growth and reproduction. Behavioural interactions are at the heart of the interactions where they function to unite individuals into more or less stable social structures. In particular, behaviour determines and regulates the relations of individuals to one another. It provides such external adaptations to the physical environment, and such internal adaptations between the component individuals or groups to make possible an ordered social life. Each species has a behaviour structure that is an evolved harmonious whole in order to maintain the sum of its parts in biochemical equilibrium with its environment. This structure survives and flourishes because it successfully maintains external social solidarity among its members, and chemical integrity amongst its internal organs and cells.

'Ecology' is used to define a particular type or branch of the relationship between living organisms and their environment e.g. aquatic ecology; avian ecology. Where the species is a community of Homo sapiens, sharing a common heritage of ideas, beliefs values and knowledge, the interrelationship is called cultural ecology. It includes an environmental complex of human activities undertaken for profit. The activities are concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services and the management of natural resources (land, forest, water), finances, income, and expenditure of a community, business enterprise, etc. This highlights the fact that the subject matter of both ecology and economics, which are themselves interrelated, cannot be isolated from all the other social, ideological and political problems. Evidence for this are the categories of ‘political ecology’ and ‘social ecology’, which have emerged from the social sciences, to highlight the relationships between political and social organisations and environmental issues.

Applied ecology, being an instrumental mode of systems thinking, has a role to play, as behavioural structures in stabilising the humankind-nature relationship. It is central to an educational system for sustainability, which presents exploitative management and conservation management as two sides of the coin of economic development. Applied ecology provides the operational tools for environmental organisations and institutions interacting within a society, and constituting it. It thereby contributes to group solidarity for planetary survival by providing practical solutions to the challenges of the industrialised environment. A full understanding requires placing applied ecology in the context of systems thinking about the organisation of natural resources and people for production. It is about providing tools for modifying human production by people who are organising for nature conservation. Ecology drives national, and global strategies by which these groups respond to ethical values in nature.