THE SCOPE OF HUMAN ECOLOGY

Abstract

Human ecology is commonly defined as a study of the relation between human beings and their environment. So long as human ecology is defined as such, a wide scope of this study must inevitably be needed. First of all, human ecology must be a learning not only of the relation between man and natural environment, but also of the relation between man and social environment. Secondly, it must be a learning not only of so-called “community”, but also of “society”. Some human ecologists have a tendency to limit the subject of this study to a narrower field of environmentalism, such as “community” study, urban ecology, or regionalism, but such trends of human ecology must be criticized, because, owing to the definition, human ecology is a general study of environment. This general study of environment has many relative sciences, such as geography, biology, sociology, pedagogy, and so on. The relation between man and environment has long been studied by geographers. Geography has a concern with environment, but geography and human ecology are not the same thing, because, from the point of geographers, geography has much more concern with the region than with the environment, the study of which is used by geograph ers as a tool to analyse a region, while, from the point of view of human ecologists, human ecology as a general study of environment cannot adhere to geographical environment only. A part of the geography is a part of the human ecology, but another part of the geography is not the human ecology. Human ecology is concerned with biology, sociology, or pedagogy, as well as with geography. In this paper, many other problems incidental to the definition are attempted to be discussed. For ex-ample, is human ecology a natural science or a social science? Or is it a autoecology or synecology ? What the writer is trying to point out in the present paper is that human ecology is not a special but a general study of environment.