ECOLOGY

Ecology, as defined by Eugene P. Odum , emerged from the study of biology and now is its own discipline that integrates the study of organisms, the physical environment, and human society. The word ecology derives from the Greek root oikos, meaning “the study of the household,” which has come to represent the entire environment in which we live. The word ecology thus links the entire range of scales that we consider home: our bodies, our houses, our cities, ecosystems, and finally earth.

As the millenium draws to a close, environmental concerns have become crucially important. Humanity’s rapid and reckless consumption of billions of years of stored solar energy (fossil fuels) has thrown off our planet’s ecological balance. We have overrun the earth’s digestive capacity for waste, and its toxic effects are building up in our environment. We are faced with a whole series of interconnected global problems that are harming the biosphere and human life in alarming ways that soon may be irreversible. Environmental trends are showing that our current manner of living is compromising the quality of life of future generations.

Could our current state of environmental crisis stem from a lack of understanding natural systems, and even more fundamentally, a lack of understanding ourselves? Can ecological understanding inform us on how to live sustainable lives?

Steve Gliessman, founder of the sustainable agriculture program at UCSC, defines sustainability in relation to agriculture: “Sustainability means different things to different people, but there is a general agreement that it has an ecological basis. In the most general sense, sustainability is a version of the concept of sustained yield—the condition of being able to harvest biomass from a system perpetually because of the system’s ability to renew itself or be renewed is not compromised. …Natural ecosystems provide an important reference point for understanding the ecological basis for sustainability.”

Thus, an acute awareness of ecology provides a coherent framework for making health-promoting choices in our life: Does it heal and enhance life, or diminish it? Does it preserve ecosystem structure and function or degrade it?