Hunter-Gatherers and Human Ecology

Abstract

A SIGNIFICANT PROBLEM in environmental education is how to devise workable strategies for teaching about human-land interrelationships of almost overwhelming complexity. In the quest for relevance, the most frequent approach has been to proceed with a frontal assault on such obvious national problems as air and water pollution, waste disposal, and population increases-problems that have a direct and visible impact on our students' lives. In fact, within most environmental education units, or chapters, or textbooks, this has been the usual strategy: a relatively brief presentation of the basic conceptual structure of population ecology, followed by an extended consideration of the immediate and intricate dilemmas of industrialized society. From the ecological primer, we proceed immediately to the task of unraveling the Gordian Knot! This obvious approach is not necessarily the most effective. The problem is complexity. How do we teach about the cultural nature of human behavior as that culture influences natural systems in terms of ecosystems that are themselves so intricately affected? How do we examine culture as the human adaptive dimension to environmental circumstances from within (and in the context of) a cultural system so enormously elaborated, and where human dependence on environment is so obscured? If as Walt Kelly's opossum has told We have met the enemy and he is us, then where do we go from there? How do we attain a functional perspective on environmental difficulties that are so complex, so all-encompassing, and so self-created?