Introduction

This chapter summarizes the strands of theory which have contributed to the development of what we are terming a "human systems ecology" perspective on socionatural regions. John W. Bennett's life work spans almost fifty years, and a human ecology perspective has been perhaps his chief but certainly not his only theoretical orientation. The concept "ecology" has existed for quite some time in biology, having been coined by Ernst Haeckel in the middle of the 19th century. Moreover, human ecology has usually taken aim at the means by which human groups adapt; adaptation referring to a process of coping with environmental uncertainty and change rather than an endstate of homeostatic perfection. Borrowing explanatory models from biological ecology and applying them indiscriminately to sociocultural systems, therefore, imposes a theory intended to explain energy systems upon an information system noted for its protean flexibility.