This was the introductory lecture to the course I taught in 1969 and 1970 at the Miami Dade Junior College, called Man and His Environment (click here to see the brochure advertising the course). I think it is completely germane to our present day concerns!
ECOLOGY
Ecology: the study of the relationships between the different members of an environment to each other and their environment. It is concerned with the energy flow within the system. It shares the root Eco with Economics from the Greek oikos for house, household. It asks how an action makes a full circuit of the environmental system. You’ve heard the term the balance of nature. That is ecology. In this course we will be particularly concerned with Human Ecology, our relationship with our environment: economically, politically, socially and “naturally”.
We live in a system, so systems analysis is a useful tool to understand a system. One of its techniques is the Diagrammatic Flow Chart, symbolically tracing the ripples of actions through the environment.
(At this point I wrote on the board at the front of the classroom a flow chart. I no longer have it)
We are the “Man” of whose survival the subhead of the course refers to. Will we still be us at some future point in time, as we define it today, with our impact on the environmental system of which we are a part and have not yet been able to fully extricate ourselves from?
So let’s posit some questions to answer to understand and think through the core question:
- What is “Humankind”?
- What does s/he need to survive, without which we are no longer Humanity?
- What social institutions have been developed through which these needs are supplied?
- How viable are these social institutions in supplying those needs, in both the short and long term? What deficiencies have already occurred, or are we approaching, that must be dealt with to survive?
AND - Most importantly, how can we begin to effect the changes necessary to make this an effectively functioning social/economic/ environmental system? How can we improve the mechanisms of change and adaptation within that system as future problems develop, so it does not reach some of the critical levels we are already witnessing?
So to the first question, “What is Humankind?”. The field of anthropology provides some answers. Man (I’m now going to use this traditional masculine shorthand going forward, so please do not crucify me! This was written 53 years ago!) is a biological creature, a product of millions of years of evolutionary development (Sorry, Bishop Ussher!). At some point during that development, new forces were added to those shaping it, his own actions and the feedback from the environment caused by his being the most effective and extensively tool using animal. The first comprehensive discussion of these forces was the seminar in Chicago entitled “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth”.
The use of tools, having begun to free Man from being completely dependent upon what the environment presented him with, began to more efficiently, and with greater impact on the system, secure biological survival.
This freedom from the time it took to obtain calories held the beginning of the question, “Why?” With hunger not constantly gnawing at Man’s innards, there was time to just observe the world we found ourselves in: how it functioned, the interplay between a lizard and an insect, without the pressure to capture and eat them, as one stalked the other to obtain its calories! Perhaps Man began to see reflected in his observations his own relationship to the world he found himself in. Perception led to conception, of how things are, and what they meant.
We have cave drawings as examples of this observing, how occurrences began to be tied to causes, or what were thought to be the causes. Seeking protection for and help with the drawings of his hunts, Man sought to control his environment through a primitive science, what we might now call Magic. For him, it may very well have been successful.
Having developed from primates with already existing social orders, Man, with the advent of tools, was able to elaborate the social structure in entirely new ways. The most important of these early on was the sexual division of labor. And Oh what a legacy that gave us!
The first societies are assumed to have been hunters and gatherers, men hunting, women gathering. Age also became another basis for a division of labor due to the greater effect in our species of Neoteny (/niˈɒtəni/), also called juvenilization, which is the delaying or slowing of the physiological, or somatic, development of an organism. Extended childhood. This also enabled more of the cultural adaptations to control the environment to be passed on by learning, not instinct!
Another result of this became the value of age and experience. A man who could no longer hunt could be a skilled tool maker and teacher, AND storyteller, the guardian of the group’s memory and experiences! With time available, the tools began to be embellished with designs and decorations, perhaps the beginnings of symbolism in human culture, language and its written form!
This progression led to the two most important qualitative cultural evolutionary step changes, as Dobzhansky (see end notes) might have termed them: the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. These involved radical alterations in the political, economic, social and religious institutions of human culture. At the time I first wrote this, in 1969, I also listed the next step change as the nuclear/space revolution. Writing today, of course, we add the information revolution to these Dobzhanskian “step changes”! I wrote that we should expect the same changes to our institutional makeup. I would now say these step changes are accelerating with more unpredictable end points.
Back to the original lecture:
So now we come to present day Man, his needs and those attributes with which we identify a human civilization. Which brings me to our second question:
What does Man need to survive, without which he is not man?
He must eat, reproduce, have protection from the elements of the environment: in other words, secure biological survival. That never changed. But with the development of transgenerational culture came intellectual development. A whole new evolutionary step change, creating needs never seen before Us! The complexity of these needs have increased at such a surprisingly exponential rate over the last several thousand years, due to what my future intellectual mentor Lewis Mumford subsumed under his work “Technics”, that it became increasingly difficult to fulfill them. The most crucial: our need to Know; our need for Meaning, the sense of the mystery of our existence and the universe we find ourselves in! This last is what makes us Human.
Revisit those last four questions and you will note they particularly fit our American socio-cultural milieu, particularly those environmental limitations we are increasingly straining against to supply those needs. Next session we will focus on the concept of Ecology, making use of it in understanding the solutions to those four questions, in terms of answers and actions!
It has been many years since I gave this course and if I come across other lecture notes they will be added to this section.
End Note: Theodosius Dobzhansky, January 25, 1900 – December 18, 1975) was a prominent Ukrainian-American geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the modern synthesis. His 1937 work Genetics and the Origin of Species became a major influence on the modern synthesis.