ABSTRACT
Ecology, like most other branches of science and social science, can be seen as having one long-term aim: that of control. It has become one of the ways in which western and western-influenced societies have sought to dominate their natural environment, largely in order to gain resources from it and to re-make it in this image. The most obvious candidate is Geography but since the 1950s many of its practitioners have been more concerned with making it more like the other social sciences with which it shares a phenomenology though the introduction of scientific method has been a priority. Anthropology has had its excursions into cultural ecology but they do not seem to have gained the centre of the stage. Economics likewise has its branches much concerned with the economics of resources and the environment but its poor record of producing temporally accurate predictions has diminished its claim to be a science.
