ABSTRACT
Historical Ecology, an idea waiting to happen by the early 1990s, surfaced independently in archaeology, forest management and ethnoecology. Historical Ecology is a cluster of concepts in a practical framework for studying the past and future of the human-environment relationship. There are renewed ties to the social sciences and the humanities and there is interest from ecologists in modeling and scenario building. Historical Ecology’s focus on landscapes and regions highlights the importance of human scales that can make a critical connection to the global scale. With scholarly roots in the study of the human mind, the concept of heterarchy has contributed to the study of artificial intelligence, social organization, management, education and politics. The heterarchy–hierarchy relation is a fundamental principle of human social organization and can carry social and political analysis across time and into the future. The framework of Historical Ecology can follow landscape change at scales that access the results of innovation, mitigation, migration, conflict and more.
