HUMAN ECOLOGY: BIOS 5445
Dr Stephen B. Malcolm
Department of Biological Sciences,
Western Michigan University.
INTRODUCTION
What is Human Ecology? It is the ecology of a single species – us! Since
we are the focus it is more challenging to be objective and to avoid our subjective
biases based on our own experience and cultural backgrounds. These experiences
BIOS 5445 Human Ecology
Dr. S.B. Malcolm
Page - 1
don’t invalidate our appreciation for our own ecology, but our appreciation for our world
and our immediate environments is so interwoven with our cultural biases, beliefs and
experience that we often lose sight of the realities that surround us. This course is
designed to make us think about these realities and how we fit within our environment at
scales that range from molecular to global.
Inevitably this course will benefit from a synergism among many different
disciplines and part of the excitement comes from making distinctions between ecology
and the other biological sciences, but also among philosophy, human geography,
sociology, anthropology, mathematics and economics. This generates a synergism that
benefits from the product of ecologists and others talking to each other and borrowing
ideas and methods to produce something that is greater than the sum of its
components. If you perform a literature search you’ll find that anthropology and
geography are the two disciplines that identify most readily with “human ecology.”
However, rather than focus just on Homo sapiens from an anthropological perspective,
or the distribution of humans from a geographical perspective, we will consider Homo
sapiens from an ecological perspective by considering intrinsic properties of human
populations and life history, but also our interactions with other species and with
populations within our species.
This sounds idealistic, but it should work given the will to succeed. Our
problem as humans is that much of what we do is governed by our genes acting
selfishly and like all other organisms we are programmed to maximize survivorship
within the confines of our environment. However, unlike other organisms we are the
first species on Earth that has evolved the ability to control resource availability at
landscape scales or even at a global scale. This makes our species unique, with
arguably an equally unique potential to control our population density, so that resource
availability is maximized on a per capita basis. Such an argument appears to invoke
altruism, but while there may be evolutionary arguments in favor of the benefits of
altruism, the argument may also be considered as being purely selfish.
So how do we resolve these issues? I don’t pretend that this course will fully
answer such questions. However, we will discuss these issues and consider possible
resolution of Jeremy Bentham’s early 19th century dilemma of maximizing two variables
simultaneously: population and resources.
BIOS 5445 Human Ecology
Dr. S.B. Malcolm
Page - 2