ABSTRACT
Any discussion on the theme ‘human ecology as an integrative science’ immediately presents us with a problem, because ‘human ecology’ means quite different things to different people. Thus, when sociologists speak of human ecology, they often have in mind the ‘Chicago School of Human Ecology’ which came into being in the 1920s, and which was concerned essentially with the spatial distribution within cities of different social groups (Burgess 1925, Shevky and Williams 1949, Shevky and Bell 1955, Abu-Lughod 1969). To another group of workers, human ecology is concerned almost solely with the interaction between the human species and micro-organisms, and when used in this sense it would seem to be more or less synonymous with the epidemiology of infectious disease (Banks 1950). To other authors, human ecology can be synonymous with anything from home economics or the psychology of personal relationships to the study of patterns of energy flow in urban ecosystems.
