ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with using dialectical concepts to visualize and comprehend human behavior in multiple spatial-temporal contexts, then applying those insights to guide future decisions and endeavors. It argues that historical ecologists are especially well positioned to apply such multi-spatial, multi-temporal knowledge to effect humanizing transformations in the contemporary world and that this is most effectively accomplished as a collective endeavor. Historical Ecology is the multispatial, multitemporal study of the dynamic relations between people and their environment. Sociohistorical structures include the relations that people have with things that they themselves produce, such as monuments, buildings, earthworks, roads, canals, irrigation systems and the like. The axiom that reality is cognized by people means that both physical and sociohistorical structures are received as mental models, as mystifications. The chapter shows that social life emerges through the dynamic interaction of human agency and structures both physical and sociohistorical and is best studied by employing a dialectic of scale.
