Introduction

The book is an attempt to characterise the domain of human agency–environment interaction (i.e., the domain of human ecology) from a multidimensional point of view. The emergence of innumerable environmental problems due to human interaction with nature has made it imperative to understand this domain. The domain of human ecology can be defined as one which human ecology as a science purports to explain. In other words, this domain provides a representation of a world of interconnected events, for example, real situations of environmental changes created by humans that take place in the ecosystem or have the possibility of happening in the future. This domain can also be represented in terms of the features that limit the possibilities of the events that may occur there. The nature of these events is largely determined by the kinds of intersection formed by the relation between human agency and environment. The notion of human agency mentioned here is to be understood in terms of the capacity of human actions to produce adverse or beneficial effects in the domain. As effective human actions are largely bound to the structures of the social systemic life of human beings, human agency is a complex notion. Thus, when human actors function as government officials, corporate bodies, legislators, members of communities and so on, they become part of those institutions, and such institutional roles and positions form human agency. What influences human actors as individuals or as social agents is not directly evident in many cases. These questions can be explored only through a characterisation of the domain under investigation. However, since human ecology as a science would limit the notion within the boundaries of explanation, it will not be able to fulfil the purpose of this inquiry, that is, to characterise the domain in the sense just detailed. The meaning of human actions, the value humans attribute to their environment, the relations of power in which the actions and their consequences are implicated – all make the domain so complex as to demand a more comprehensive approach to understanding it. Thus, the book proposes imagining the domain 4of human–environment interaction from a multidimensional perspective. In this attempt, the ethical (value questions) and the political find equal emphasis alongside the scientific in the characterisation of this domain.