ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the margins of academia and of academic Human Ecology. A scan through today's leading Human Ecology journals shows that much of our discipline has yet to make that leap beyond purely rational analysis. Human Ecology research today is to draw up an agenda that can take forward this reconstitution through the twenty-first century. Such research needs to link particular issues with the emerging big picture of what it means to be human beings living with other species. In Paulo Freire's sense, research must have as its objective conscientization as the raising of both consciousness and conscience in a praxis of iterative action and reflection. The Human Ecologist's work is shamanic, concerned with the alchemical transformation of base states of reality into that which can call back and feed the soul. The development of scholarship in Human Ecology as communities of practice; communities that kindle the resilience necessary to help reconstitute the world, come-what-may in the come-to-pass.
