Human Ecology PDF - Robert Ezra Park (1936)

“Human Ecology” from American Journal of Sociology (1936) Robert Ezra Park Editors’ Introduction...

“Human Ecology” from American Journal of Sociology (1936) Robert Ezra Park Editors’ Introduction Robert Park was born in Harveyville, Pennsylvania while his father was serving in the Civil War. They later settled in Minnesota and his father became a prosperous grocer. Park entered the University of Michigan in 1882 and was particularly drawn to the philosophy courses of John Dewey. He acquired ideas of evolution- ary naturalism from Dewey, coming to see society as set in the natural order, in a competitive arena, but also held together by cognitive and moral consensus. Upon graduation he began a career as a newspaper reporter, moving from Minneapolis, to Detroit, to Denver, to New York, and finally to Chicago. He wrote on the corruption of urban political machines, the immigrant areas of the city, crime, and other urban affairs. Journalism, particularly in Manhattan, satisfied his thirst for adventure and multifarious experience, but a persisting interest in the grand questions of life led him to return to academia to study philosophy at Harvard University in 1898. He subsequently grew interested in social thought and thus was impelled to move to Germany and the University of Berlin, which was then seen by many to be the intellectual center of Europe. While in Berlin, he came under the influence of Georg Simmel, then a Privatdozent lecturing in sociology. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1904. Park returned from Germany to Massachusetts in 1903 and became a teaching assistant at Harvard. Through a chance encounter with a missionary, however, he discovered the work of the Congo Reform Association, and soon accepted work as their secretary and chief publicity agent. Through his work lobbying Congress to take action on the state of brutality and exploitation in the Congo Free State, Park met Booker T. Washington, who in 1905 was at the height of his notoriety as an accommodationist spokesman for black causes among the political elites. He became Washington’s stenographer/ghostwriter, counselor, and press agent for the next seven years, working mainly at the Tuskegee Institute in Macon, Georgia, with regular visits to New England and occasional tours to Europe with Washington. This migratory lifestyle did not suit his family, however, and Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. he decided to return to academic life, at the invitation of W. I. Thomas, then a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. In the fall of 1913, at the age of 49, Robert Park began the quarter-century of teaching and research leadership during which the University of Chicago sociology department became a celebrated center of the discipline in America. Through the tremendous surge of field research that he supervised, he was instru- mental in drawing sociology away from a normative and reform-oriented focus of the Progressive era to a more scientific analysis that still accounted for the social importance of knowledge. His seminal essay titled, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City,” published in 1915 in the American Journal of Sociology, became a kind of manifesto for the use of city as a research laboratory. In it, he called for the study of urban life using the same ethnographic methods used by anthropologists to study the Native Americans. With Ernest W. Burgess, Park wrote and edited a textbook, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1921), which became the most influential reader in the early his- tory of American sociology. Park served as President of the American Sociological Society (later changed to Association) in 1925. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:33.  84 ROBERT EZRA PARK R. D. McKenzie provided the first exposition on human ecology in an essay titled “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1924. Robert Park codified his beliefs in the same journal in 1936, in a paper titled, “Human Ecology.” In this essay, Park applied the principles of Charles Darwin’s “web of life” and “struggle for existence” in plant and animal communities to the study of human communities. Through his explanation of concepts such as dominance, invasion- succession, and natural areas, Park provided a justification for urban inequality and free market competition that is often associated with the beliefs of Social Darwinists, from whom he drew some of his thinking. Social Darwinism was a body of late nineteenth-century philosophy and social thought expounded by the British Herbert Spencer and American William Sumner that applied Charles Darwin’s principles of “natural selection” to the analysis of human social evolution. While Darwin held a passive sense of the interplay between variation and heredity, the Social Darwinists were more akin to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who had a more active conception of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Spencer coined the concept “survival of the fittest” to express the concept that the rich and powerful are rewarded for their greater intelligence, talents, ambition, and industriousness, while the poor are doomed to failure for their lack of these characteristics. Free market liberalism was promoted in the economy, while charitable and state redistributional programs were opposed. Social Darwinism was eventually used to justify colonialism, racial eugenics, and policies of cultural assimilation. Park was inspired by Charles Darwin, but ultimately diverges from Social Darwinism through his recogni- tion that human societies participate in a social and moral order that has no counterpart on the nonhuman level. There is a dualism in human ecology in that there is competition as well as cooperation and symbiosis, especially at higher levels of the interactional pyramid. Park furthermore accounted for process, or social change, and was concerned that ecological equilibrium could commonly be disrupted by external changes. Robert Park was driven by the philosophy of pragmatism that he learned from John Dewey, who exhorted American educators to school their students to engage in active learning through direct service in commun- ities. He was influenced by the turn-of-the-century social reform and Progressive movements, as evidenced by his early passion for journalistic muckraking and devotion to anti-colonialist and black causes, distinguishing him from the conservative and racist Social Darwinists. Though liberal-minded, he did not buck the status quo, as attested by his association with the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington. Park died in 1944 in Nashville. For further writing on the legacy of Robert Park, see Fred H. Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977) and Edward Shils, “Robert E. Park, 1864–1944,” The American Scholar (Winter, 1991): 120–127. See also the section on Robert Park in Lewis A. Coser’s Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context (2nd Edition) (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. THE WEB OF LIFE The “web of life,” in which all living organisms, plants and animals alike, are bound together in a Naturalists of the last century were greatly vast system of interlinked and interdependent intrigued by their observation of the interrelations lives, is nevertheless, as J. Arthur Thompson puts and co-ordinations, within the realm of animate it, “one of the fundamental biological concepts” and nature, of the numerous, divergent, and widely is “as characteristically Darwinian as the struggle scattered species. Their successors, the botanists, for existence.” and zoologists of the present day, have turned Darwin’s famous instance of the cats and the their attention to more specific inquiries, and the clover is the classic illustration of this interdepend- “realm of nature,” like the concept of evolution, ence. He found, he explains, that bumblebees has come to be for them a notion remote and were almost indispensable to the fertilization of speculative. the heartsease, since other bees do not visit this The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:33.  “HUMAN ECOLOGY” 85 flower. The same thing is true with some kinds of The active principle in the ordering and regu- clover. Bumblebees alone visit red clover, as other lating of life within the realm of animate nature is, bees cannot reach the nectar. The inference is that as Darwin described it, “the struggle for existence.” if the bumblebees became extinct or very rare in By this means the numbers of living organisms England, the heartsease and red clover would are regulated, their distribution controlled, and the become very rare, or wholly disappear. However, balance of nature maintained. Finally, it is by the number of bumblebees in any district de- means of this elementary form of competition that pends in a great measure on the number of field the existing species, the survivors in the struggle, mice, which destroy their combs and nests. It is find their niches in the physical environment and estimated that more than two-thirds of them are in the existing correlation or division of labor T thus destroyed all over England. Near villages and between the different species. W small towns the nests of bumblebees are more [...] O numerous than elsewhere and this is attributed These manifestations of a living, changing, but to the number of cats that destroy the mice. Thus persistent order among competing organisms – next year’s crop of purple clover in certain parts organisms embodying “conflicting yet correlated of England depends on the number of bumble- interests” – seem to be the basis for the concep- bees in the district; the number of bumblebees tion of a social order transcending the individual depends upon the number of field mice, the num- species, and of a society based on a biotic rather ber of field mice upon the number and the enter- than a cultural basis, a conception later developed prise of the cats, and the number of cats – as by the plant and animal ecologists. someone has added – depends on the number of In recent years the plant geographers have old maids and others in neighboring villages who been the first to revive something of the earlier field keep cats. naturalists’ interest in the interrelations of species. These large food chains, as they are called, Haeckel, in 1878, was the first to give to these stud- each link of which eats the other, have as their ies a name, “ecology,” and by so doing gave them logical prototype the familiar nursery rhyme, “The the character of a distinct and separate science. House that Jack Built.” You recall: The interrelation and interdependence of the spe- cies are naturally more obvious and more intimate within the common habitat than elsewhere. Further- The cow with the crumpled horn, more, as correlations have multiplied and com- That tossed the dog, petition has decreased, in consequence of mutual That worried the cat, adaptations of the competing species, the habitat That killed the rat, and habitants have tended to assume the character That ate the malt of a more or less completely closed system. That lay in the house that Jack built. Within the limits of this system the individual units of the population are involved in a process Darwin and the naturalists of his day were parti- of competitive co-operation, which has given to their Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. cularly interested in observing and recording these interrelations the character of a natural economy. curious illustrations of the mutual adaptation and To such a habitat and its inhabitants – whether plant, correlation of plants and animals because they animal, or human – the ecologists have applied the seemed to throw light on the origin of the species. term “community.” Both the species and their mutual interdependence, The essential characteristics of a community, so within a common habitat, seem to be a product of conceived, are those of: (1) a population, territori- the same Darwinian struggle for existence. ally organized, (2) more or less completely rooted It is interesting to note that it was the applica- in the soil it occupies, (3) its individual units living tion to organic life of a sociological principle – the in a relationship of mutual interdependence that principle, namely, of “competitive co-operation” – is symbiotic rather than societal, in the sense in that gave Darwin the first clue to the formulation which that term applies to human beings. of his theory of evolution. These symbiotic societies are not merely [...] unorganized assemblages of plants and animals The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:33.  86 ROBERT EZRA PARK which happen to live together in the same habitat. catastrophic change occurs – it may be a war, a On the contrary, they are interrelated in the most famine, or pestilence – it upsets the biotic balance, complex manner. Every community has some- breaks “the cake of custom,” and releases energies thing of the character of an organic unit. It has up to that time held in check. A series of rapid and a more or less definite structure and it has a life even violent changes may ensue which profoundly history in which juvenile, adult, and senile phases alter the existing organization of communal life and can be observed. If it is an organism, it is one of give a new direction to the future course of events. the organisms which are other organisms. It is, to The advent of the boll weevil in the southern use Spencer’s phrase, a superorganism. cotton fields is a minor instance but illustrates the What more than anything else gives the symbi- principle. The boll weevil crossed the Rio Grande otic community the character of an organism is the at Brownsville in the summer of 1892. By 1894 the fact that it possesses a mechanism (competition) for pest had spread to a dozen counties in Texas, (1) regulating the numbers, and (2) preserving the bringing destruction to the cotton and great losses balance between the competing species of which to the planters. From that point it advanced, with it is composed. It is by maintaining this biotic every recurring season, until by 1928 it had balance that the community preserves its identity covered practically all the cotton producing area and integrity as an individual unit through the in the United States. Its progress took the form changes and the vicissitudes to which it is subject of a territorial succession. The consequences to in the course of its progress from the earlier to the agriculture were catastrophic but not wholly for the later phases of its existence. worse, since they served to give an impulse to changes in the organization of the industry long overdue. It also hastened the northward migration THE BALANCE OF NATURE of the Negro tenant farmer. The case of the boll weevil is typical. In this The balance of nature, as plant and animal ecolo- mobile modern world, where space and time have gists have conceived it, seems to be largely a been measurably abolished, not men only but all question of numbers. When the pressure of popu- the minor organisms (including the microbes) lation upon the natural resources of the habitat seem to be, as never before, in motion. Com- reaches a certain degree of intensity, something merce, in progressively destroying the isolation invariably happens. In the one case the population upon which the ancient order of nature rested, may swarm and relieve the pressure of population has intensified the struggle for existence over an by migration. In another, where the disequilibrium ever widening area of the habitable world. Out of between population and natural resources is the this struggle a new equilibrium and a new system result of some change, sudden or gradual, in the of animate nature, the new biotic basis of the new conditions of life, the pre-existing correlation of world society, is emerging. the species may be totally destroyed. [...] Change may be brought about by a famine, The conditions which affect and control the Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. an epidemic, or an invasion of the habitat by some movements and numbers of populations are alien species. Such an invasion may result in a rapid more complex in human societies than in plant increase of the invading population and a sudden and animal communities, but they exhibit extra- decline in the numbers if not the destruction of ordinary similarities. the original population. Change of some sort is The boll weevil, moving out of its ancient continuous, although the rate and pace of change habitat in the central Mexican plateau and into the sometimes vary greatly. virgin territory of the southern cotton plantations, [...] incidentally multiplying its population to the limit Under ordinary circumstances, such minor of the territories and resources, is not unlike the fluctuations in the biotic balance as occur are Boers of Cape Colony, South Africa, trekking out mediated and absorbed without profoundly dis- into the high veldt of the central South African turbing the existing equilibrium and routine of life. plateau and filling it, within a period of one hundred When, on the other hand, some sudden and years, with a population of their own descendants. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:33.  “HUMAN ECOLOGY” 87 Competition operates in the human (as it does distribution of population, as well as the location in the plant and animal) community to bring about and limits of the residential areas which they and restore the communal equilibrium, when, occupy, are determined by another similar but either by the advent of some intrusive factor from subordinate system of forces. without or in the normal course of its life-history, The area of dominance in any community that equilibrium is disturbed. is usually the area of highest land values. Thus every crisis that initiates a period of rapid Ordinarily there are in every large city two such change, during which competition is intensified, positions of highest land value – one in the central moves over finally into a period of more or less shopping district, the other in the central banking stable equilibrium and a new division of labor. In area. From these points land values decline at first T this manner competition brings about a condition precipitantly and then more gradually toward the W in which competition is superseded by co-operation. periphery of the urban community. It is these O It is when, and to the extent that, competition land values that determine the location of social declines that the kind of order which we call soci- institutions and business enterprises. Both the one ety may be said to exist. In short, society, from the and the other are bound up in a kind of territorial ecological point of view, and in so far as it is a ter- complex within which they are at once competing ritorial unit, is just the area within which biotic com- and interdependent units. petition has declined and the struggle for existence As the metropolitan community expands into has assumed higher and more sublimated forms. the suburbs the pressure of professions, business enterprises, and social institutions of various sorts destined to serve the whole metropolitan region COMPETITION, DOMINANCE AND steadily increases the demand for space at the SUCCESSION center. Thus not merely the growth of the sub- urban area, but any change in the method of trans- There are other and less obvious ways in which portation which makes the central business area of competition exercises control over the relations the city more accessible, tends to increase the of individuals and species within the communal pressure at the center. From thence this pressure habitat. The two ecological principles, dominance is transmitted and diffused, as the profile of land and succession, which operate to establish and values discloses, to every other part of the city. maintain such communal order as here described Thus the principle of dominance, operating are functions of, and dependent upon, competition. within the limits imposed by the terrain and other In every life-community there is always one natural features of the location, tends to determine or more dominant species. In a plant community the general ecological pattern of the city and the this dominance is ordinarily the result of struggle functional relation of each of the different areas of among the different species for light. In a climate the city to all others. which supports a forest the dominant species will Dominance is, furthermore, in so far as it tends invariably be trees. On the prairie and steppes to stabilize either the biotic or the cultural com- Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. they will be grasses. munity, indirectly responsible for the phenomenon [...] of succession. But the principle of dominance operates in the The term “succession” is used by ecologists to human as well as in the plant and animal com- describe and designate that orderly sequence of munities. The so-called natural or functional areas changes through which a biotic community passes of a metropolitan community – for example, the in the course of its development from a primary slum, the rooming-house area, the central shopping and relatively unstable to a relatively permanent or section and the banking center – each and all owe climax stage. The main point is that not merely their existence directly to the factor of dominance, do the individual plants and animals within the and indirectly to competition. communal habitat grow but the community itself, The struggle of industries and commercial insti- i.e., the system of relations between the species, is tutions for a strategic location determines in the long likewise involved in an orderly process of change run the main outlines of the urban community. The and development. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:33.  88 ROBERT EZRA PARK The fact that, in the course of this development, intensify competition. In so doing it functions, the community moves through a series of more or indirectly, to bring about a new, more minute and, less clearly defined stages is the fact that gives this at the same time, territorially extensive division development the serial character which the term of labor. “succession” suggests. Under the influence of an intensified competi- The explanation of the serial character of the tion, and the increased activity which competition changes involved in succession is the fact that at involves, every individual and every species, each every stage in the process a more or less stable for itself, tends to discover the particular niche equilibrium is achieved, and as a result of progressive in the physical and living environment where it changes in life-conditions, possibly due to growth can survive and flourish with the greatest possible and decay, the equilibrium achieved in the earlier expansiveness consistent with its necessary stages is eventually undermined. In this case dependence upon its neighbors. the energies previously held in balance will be It is in this way that a territorial organization released, competition will be intensified, and and a biological division of labor, within the change will continue at a relatively rapid rate until communal habitat, is established and maintained. a new equilibrium is achieved. This explains, in part at least, the fact that the biotic The climax phase of community development community has been conceived at one time as a corresponds with the adult phase of an indi- kind of superorganism and at another as a kind of vidual’s life. economic organization for the exploitation of the [...] natural resources of its habitat. The cultural community develops in com- In their interesting survey, The Science of Life, parable ways to that of the biotic, but the process H. G. Wells and his collaborators, Julian Huxley and is more complicated. Inventions, as well as sudden G. P. Wells, have described ecology as “biological or catastrophic changes, seem to play a more economics,” and as such very largely concerned with important part in bringing about serial changes in “the balances and mutual pressures of species the cultural than in the biotic community. But living in the same habitat.” the principle involved seems to be substantially the “Ecology,” as they put it, is “an extension of same. In any case, all or most of the fundamental Economics to the whole of life.” On the other processes seem to be functionally related and hand the science of economics as traditionally dependent upon competition. conceived, though it is a whole century older, Competition, which on the biotic level func- is merely a branch of a more general science of tions to control and regulate the interrelations of ecology which includes man with all other organisms, tends to assume on the social level the living creatures. Under the circumstances what form of conflict. The intimate relation between has been traditionally described as economics and competition and conflict is indicated by the fact that conceived as restricted to human affairs, might wars frequently, if not always, have, or seem to have, very properly be described as Barrows some their source and origin in economic competition years ago described geography, namely as human Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. which, in that case, assumes the more sublimated ecology. It is in this sense that Wells and his form of a struggle for power and prestige. The social collaborators would use the term. function of war, on the other hand, seems to be Since human ecology cannot be at the same time to extend the area over which it is possible to both geography and economics, one may adopt, as maintain peace. a working hypothesis, the notion that it is neither one nor the other but something independent of both. Even so the motives for identifying ecology BIOLOGICAL ECONOMICS with geography on the one hand, and economics on the other, are fairly obvious. If population pressure, on the one hand, co- From the point of view of geography, the plant, operates with changes in local and environmental animal, and human population, including their conditions to disturb at once the biotic balance habitations and other evidence of man’s occupa- and social equilibrium, it tends at the same time to tion of the soil, are merely part of the landscape, The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:33.  “HUMAN ECOLOGY” 89 of which the geographer is seeking a detailed world. Finally, man has erected upon the basis of description and picture. the biotic community an institutional structure On the other hand ecology (biologic eco- rooted in custom and tradition. nomics), even when it involves some sort of Structure, where it exists, tends to resist unconscious co-operation and a natural, spontan- change, at least change coming from without; eous, and non-rational division of labor, is some- while it possibly facilitates the cumulation of thing different from the economics of commerce; change within. In plant and animal communities something quite apart from the bargaining of the structure is biologically determined, and so far as market place. Commerce, as Simmel somewhere any division of labor exists at all it has a physio- remarks, is one of the latest and most complicated logical and instinctive basis. The social insects T of all the social relationships into which human afford a conspicuous example of this fact, and one W beings have entered. Man is the only animal that interest in studying their habits is that they show O trades and traffics. the extent to which social organization can be Ecology, and human ecology, if it is not developed on a purely physiological and instinctive identical with economics on the distinctively basis, as is the case among human beings in human and cultural level is, nevertheless, something the natural as distinguished from the institutional more than and different from the static order family. which the human geographer discovers when he In a society of human beings, however, this surveys the cultural landscape. communal structure is reinforced by custom and The community of the geographer is not, for one assumes an institutional character. In human as thing, like that of the ecologist, a closed system, contrasted with animal societies, competition and and the web of communication which man has the freedom of the individual is limited on every spread over the earth is something different from level above the biotic by custom and consensus. the “web of life” which binds living creatures all over The incidence of this more or less arbitrary the world in a vital nexus. control which custom and consensus imposes upon the natural social order complicates the social process but does not fundamentally alter it – or, if SYMBIOSIS AND SOCIETY it does, the effects of biotic competition will still be manifest in the succeeding social order and the Human ecology, if it is neither economics on one subsequent course of events. hand nor geography on the other, but just ecology, The fact seems to be, then, that human society, differs, nevertheless, in important respects from as distinguished from plant and animal society, is plant and animal ecology. The interrelations of organized on two levels, the biotic and the cultural. human beings and interactions of man and his There is a symbiotic society based on competition habitat are comparable but not identical with and a cultural society based on communication and interrelations of other forms of life that live consensus. As a matter of fact the two societies are together and carry on a kind of “biological merely different aspects of one society, which, in Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. economy” within the limits of a common habitat. the vicissitudes and changes to which they are For one thing man is not so immediately subject remain, nevertheless, in some sort of dependent upon his physical environment as other mutual dependence each upon the other. The animals. As a result of the existing world-wide cultural superstructure rests on the basis of the division of labor, man’s relation to his physical symbiotic substructure, and the emergent energies environment has been mediated through the that manifest themselves on the biotic level in intervention of other men. The exchange of goods movements and actions reveal themselves on the and services have co-operated to emancipate him higher social level in more subtle and sublimated from dependence upon his local habitat. forms. Furthermore man has, by means of inventions However, the interrelations of human beings and technical devices of the most diverse sorts, are more diverse and complicated than this enormously increased his capacity for reacting dichotomy, symbiotic and cultural, indicates. This upon and remaking, not only his habitat but his fact is attested by the divergent systems of human The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:33.  90 ROBERT EZRA PARK interrelations which have been the subject of the which plant and animal ecology have been tradi- special social sciences. Thus human society, cer- tionally concerned are fundamentally population tainly in its mature and more rational expression, problems. Society, as ecologists have conceived it, exhibits not merely an ecological, but an economic, is a population settled and limited to its habitat. The a political, and a moral order. The social sciences ties that unite its individual units are those of a free include not merely human geography and ecology, and natural economy, based on a natural division but economics, political science, and cultural of labor. Such a society is territorially organized and anthropology. the ties which hold it together are physical and vital It is interesting also that these divergent social rather than customary and moral. orders seem to arrange themselves in a kind of hier- Human ecology has, however, to reckon with the archy. In fact they may be said to form a pyramid fact that in human society competition is limited of which the ecological order constitutes the base by custom and culture. The cultural superstructure and the moral order the apex. Upon each succeeding imposes itself as an instrument of direction and one of these levels, the ecological, economic, control upon the biotic substructure. political, and moral, the individual finds himself more Reduced to its elements the human community, completely incorporated into and subordinated to so conceived, may be said to consist of a popula- the social order of which he is a part than upon the tion and a culture, including in the term culture preceding. (1) a body of customs and beliefs and (2) a Society is everywhere a control organization. corresponding body of artifacts and technological Its function is to organize, integrate, and direct the devices. energies resident in the individuals of which it To these three elements or factors – (1) is composed. One might, perhaps, say that the population, (2) artifact (technological culture), function of society was everywhere to restrict (3) custom and beliefs (non-material culture) – competition and by so doing bring about a more into which the social complex resolves itself, one effective co-operation of the organic units of which should, perhaps, add a fourth, namely, the natural society is composed. resources of the habitat. Competition, on the biotic level, as we observe It is the interaction of these four factors – it in the plant and animal communities, seems to (1) population, (2) artifacts (technological culture), be relatively unrestricted. Society, so far as it (3) custom and beliefs (non-material culture), and exists, is anarchic and free. On the cultural level, (4) the natural resources that maintain at once the this freedom of the individual to compete is biotic balance and the social equilibrium, when restricted by conventions, understandings, and and where they exist. law. The individual is more free upon the economic The changes in which ecology is interested are level than upon the political, more free on the the movements of population and of artifacts political than the moral. (commodities) and changes in location and As society matures control is extended and occupation – any sort of change, in fact, which intensified and free commerce of individuals affects an existing division of labor or the relation Copyright © 2012. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. restricted, if not by law then by what Gilbert of the population to the soil. Murray refers to as “the normal expectation of Human ecology is, fundamentally, an attempt mankind.” The mores are merely what men, in a to investigate the processes by which the biotic situation that is defined, have come to expect. balance and the social equilibrium (1) are maintained Human ecology, in so far as it is concerned with once they are achieved and (2) the processes by a social order that is based on competition rather which, when the biotic balance and the social than consensus, is identical, in principle at least, with equilibrium are disturbed, the transition is made from plant and animal ecology. The problems with one relatively stable order to another. The Urban Sociology Reader, edited by Jan Lin, and Christopher Mele, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bostoncollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1075388. Created from bostoncollege-ebooks on 2025-01-13 02:55:33.