The Ecological Perspective and the Social Sciences

Abstract

In 1971 Harold and Margaret Sprout introduced an important new perspective into the study of international relations with publication of Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth. Building a bridge between their earlier work on man-milieu relationships and the growing field of ecology, the Sprouts advanced visionary ideas now recognized as offering a new unifying paradigm for twenty-first-century social science. They suggested an 'ecological' approach to the study of international relations built around four related concepts: environment, environed populations, environmental relationships and interrelated complexes (or communities) that compose, in the aggregate, an ecosystem coterminous with the earth's surface (Sprout and Sprout, 1971:30). An ecological framework was then developed for the analysis of relations among nations, a framework that can also be extended into other social and behavioral science disciplines. While the ecological approach does not make previous theory obsolete, it does put previous work in a different perspective and suggests a framework for future social and behavioral research. Building on Thomas Kuhn's observation of the dynamics of change in scientific inquiry, an ecological framework could be seen as a possible unifying paradigm offering an acceptable starting point for inquiry (Kuhn, 1962). The field of international relations, and its close relative, international political economy, have been shaped by numerous contending schools of thought. These fields have been modified and changed by almost continuous controversy among advocates of many different theoretical approaches. Thus, analysts have defined, over time, very different agendas of problems as worthy of study. Changing circumstances have given rise to Liberal, Marxist, Dependencia and many other approaches to agenda setting in international relations. And the search for an accepted explanatory framework has also faltered because of lack of an accepted empirical foundation or source of data with which to build a theory. Theorists have at various times advocated psychological, social, political, geographic, or legal factors as providing a proper foundation for inquiry. The ecological approach pioneered by the Sprouts offers a potentially powerful organizing framework for two reasons. First, this approach is anchored in an evolutionary perspective which stresses changes in environment-society relationships over time. Although present global environmental pressures certainly call attention to this perspective, these man-environment relationships have been and will continue to be crucial factors in shaping relations among people and nations. These environmental imperatives also offer an empirical foundation that is perhaps more powerful and enduring than theories anchored in ideological prescriptions, accepted first principles of 'rational' behavior or other socially conditioned observations. Second, the ecological