Ecosystems and Human Actions

Abstract

A central purpose of this book is to provide a forum on the question of “how human influences can be better incorporated into ecological studies.” In this chapter, the answer that I want to give to the question is, very simply, that we need to make concrete human actions and their concrete environmental effects our primary objects of study, and that we need to proceed in our research by progressively relating these to factors that can explain them, without a priori constraints on the factors that may be included. In the latter part of the chapter, some studies, including Indonesian research in which I have been involved, will illustrate the kind of approach I am advocating. First, however, I want to discuss certain other approaches because, although I regard them as extremely problematic, those approaches may be closer to what many biologists expect from a social scientist and it may, therefore, be useful to indicate what is problematic about them.