A Brief History of Human Ecology within the Ecological Society of America and Speculation on Future Direction

The relationship of knowledge, including scientific knowledge, to improved policy and decision-making is a vexed one (Fischer et al., 2012, p. 8). Like any other organization of significance in its field, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) has, throughout its history, hoped both to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge and to influence policy and public opinion. In a recent editorial in the society’s premier journal, Frontiers in Ecology, Jane Lubchenco (2017) argued for the need to make “scientific information understandable, credible, relevant, and accessible to help inform (not dictate) decisions” (p. 3). Yet, there is an unavoidable tension between the ambition to be a “proper science” whose object of study is all things ecological and the goal of influencing change to make the world a better place. Human ecology has long existed as a subfield within ESA. Its ability to contribute, or not, to ESA’s ambitions to influence policy in relation to the pressing problems of the day has been constrained by two related issues: how these problems have been framed, and the role and best mode of science for informing policy directed at resolving these problems. For as long as these problems have been interpreted as the consequence of humans’ “interference in nature,” and for as long as the mode of science deemed most appropriate for informing policy change has been quantitative data-based “objective” descriptions of change in ecological processes, the ability of human ecology to contribute to resolving these problems has been constrained. A brief history of this tension is laid out here, with some speculation on how recent moves to reinterpret both the nature of today’s problems and the most appropriate mode of science for informing policy to help manage those problems may allow human ecology to contribute in new ways.