ABSTRACT
All the ecologies—human ecology, population ecology, community ecology,—are studies of differentiation and organization in arbitrarily bounded systems of organisms and environments. This chapter attempts to review some recent developments in some bio-ecologies and to suggest their relevance for several ecologies which might be called human. human ecology might take as its domain the ecosystem—“the interacting environmental and biotic system” —taking the point of view that man is an integrated, natural component of ecosystems and focusing on ecosystem processes, which surely include but are not coextensive with societal processes. Since learning, planning, evolution, and succession are all adaptive processes, it seems at least premature to conclude, as Bennett does, that the ecology of humans must differ fundamentally from that of other organisms because humans behave with purpose and motive. The development and evolution of human societies has often been characterized in terms of the quantity of energy flowing through it and the organization to which that flow gives rise.
